Rob Bilott, a corporate defense attorney, ended up taking on an environmental suit against the DuPont chemical company after receiving a call from a farmer, Wilbur Tennant, who claimed his cows were dying left and right and it was all because of DuPont. Wilbur claims that it all started when his brother Jim and wife sold 66 acres of the family’s land to DuPont in the early 80s. The company wanted to use the land for a landfill for waste from its factory. It was later on called Dry Run Landfill named after the creek that ran through it, coincidentally it was in the same creek that flowed down the pasture where the Tennants gazed their cows. No longer after finalizing the sale, the cattle began acting deranged and not like themselves. Wilbur video taped and photographed what was going which included: green water with bubbles on the surface running into the creek, cows with stringly tails and malformed hooves wobbling like drunks, a dead black calf lying in the snow with one eye a brilliant chemical blue. He had lost one hundred fifty-three animals on his farm and there was no one around to help him. Veterinarians refused to return his calls in fear of getting involved with the case. It was absolutely brutal, inhumane and simply evil what was going on in that farm and Bilott realized it and decided to take on the case.
After filing the first federal suit against DuPont, their in-house lawyer informed that the E.P.A would commission a study of the property conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three by the E.P.A. The report simply blamed the Tennants for not knowing how to take care of their cattle and claimed that DuPont was not responsible whatsoever. However after digging in deeper, Bilott found a letter DuPont had sent the E.P.A mentioning a substance at the landfill called “PFOA” which after thorough research he found out is a soaplike agent used by the technology conglomerate in the fabrication of Scotchgard. He couldn’t find any more information about this substance however, so he requested a court order to force DuPont to hand in their files related to the substance which in despite of their efforts to protest against it, the order was granted.
It was found that the whole story began way back in the 50s when DuPont purchased PFOA for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. It was not classified as a hazardous substance but 3M, the company who sold them the substance, clearly sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose it which was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. Little by little DuPont started being less cautious and pumped hundreds of pounds of PFOA into the Ohio River. For more than four decades DuPont conducted secret medical studies on the substance, each different study showing a way in that PFOA was a deadly substance and how DuPont was actively letting it be exposed to hundreds of human beings and disclosing the information they had from the public.
DuPont basically forgot everything they knew about ethics, laws and doing the right thing and thought in terms of profit and revenue. They had the opportunity to switch from the PFOA to a less toxic substance instead but decided it was too much of a risk where they could lose the $1 billion in annual profit that they receive from products manufactured with PFOA. They made the mistake of thinking in the short-term losses and how changing substances would mean a step back in their business at that moment. But didn’t quite think through the amount of law suits and deaths that could come in the future and how it hurts their brand and image which could in fact cause the end of the company altogether.
Bilott faced a legal problem that prevented him from claiming that 70,000 people had being poisoned by PFOA when government regulations didn’t recognize it as a toxin. But in 2004, DuPont agreed to install filtration plants in the affected water districts and pay $70 million that would fund “a scientific study to determine whether there was a ‘‘probable link’’ between PFOA and any diseases. If they found any link, DuPont would pay for medical monitoring of the affected group in perpetuity but until then no one could file personal-injury suits against them.
Six years passed where Bilott got sick and there were still no findings. It wasn’t until the end of the 7th year that they found the “probable link” between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, pre-eclampsia, ulcerative colitis, and high cholesterol. It took them too long however; it wasn’t until 2013 that they ceased production of PFOA.
Those are years and years of drinking contaminated water. Chances are most of us in 2016, have PFOA in our blood and we get it all the way from the water we drink, to our parent or lover’s blood, to the food we eat etc. It is amazing how agencies did nothing for so many years and how DuPont got away with it for so long never admitting to what they were doing and fighting everyone they hurt along the way. It is a case that truly opens our eyes and show how greedy, close-minded, selfish people can be and how every decision we make affects not only ourselves but every single person on the planet. And to think that this is only one of thousands of barbaric cases that have occurred throughout the years.
