I wouldnt be surprised if he got a raise.. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. All told, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Most residents appear not to know this. Bilott waited. Some had been doing so for decades. has restricted only five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years. He didnt complain. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. After 3M shared this information, DuPont tested the children of pregnant employees in their Teflon division. Bilott decided right away to take the Tennant case. (Darlene asked that he not be named so that he wouldnt be involved in the local politics around the case.) Anyone can read what you share. The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. Bilott found the figure mind-blowing. The toxicologists he hired had settled upon a safety limit of 0.2 parts per billion. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. I dont think I had any clue of what that involved.. He became an expert on the Environmental Protection Agencys regulatory framework, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act. Joseph Kiger, a night-school teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. But the crucial discovery for the Tennant case was this: By the late 1980s, as DuPont became increasingly concerned about the health effects of PFOA waste, it decided it needed to find a landfill for the toxic sludge dumped on company property. They had always been like pets to the Tennants. We see a situation, Joe Kiger says, that has gone from Washington Works, to statewide, to the United States, and now its everywhere, its global. Given what Bilott had documented in his Famous Letter, Taft stood by its partner.
Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution. An interoffice memo sent in 1993 announced that for the first time, we have a viable candidate that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time.
PFOAs peculiar chemical structure made it uncannily resistant to degradation. As of October, 3,535 plaintiffs have filed personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont. What if the settlement money could be used to test them? A year earlier, West Virginia had become one of the first states to recognize what is called, in tort law, a medical-monitoring claim. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. In 2002, the agency released its initial findings: PFOA might pose human health risks not only to those drinking tainted water, but also to the general public anyone, for instance, who cooked with Teflon pans. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattles health problems. If the plaintiff wins, the defendant is required to fund regular medical tests. Hes much quieter. He mastered the chemistry of the pollutants, despite the fact that chemistry had been his worst subject in high school. The company dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into digestion ponds: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. We were able to deliver what we had promised to these folks seven years earlier. The Tennant case put Taft in a highly unusual position.
The company appeared not to realize what it had handed over. With the trial looming, Bilott stumbled upon a letter DuPont had sent to the E.P.A. But when DuPont learned that Bilott was preparing a new lawsuit, it announced that it would re-evaluate that figure. That trial begins in March. Dont take anything at face value. The camera zooms in, revealing a mound of soapy froth. They married in 1996. DuPont at last hastened to develop an alternative to PFOA. Meanwhile the E.P.A., drawing from Bilotts research, began its own investigation into the toxicity of PFOA. The attacks recurred periodically, bringing blurry vision, slurred speech and difficulty moving one side of his body. It was a great opportunity to use my background for people who really needed it.. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. Thats what we were supposed to do. For three years, Bilott had worked for nothing, costing his firm a fortune. In December 2011, after seven years, the scientists began to release their findings: there was a probable link between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis. How could the class prove it had been harmed by PFOA when the health effects were largely unknown? After that, DuPont may choose to settle with every afflicted class member, using the outcome of the bellwether cases to determine settlement awards. He demanded immediate action to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living near the factory. during those decades. The scientists, freed from the restraints of academic budgets and grants, had hit the epidemiological jackpot: an entire populations personal data and infinite resources available to study them. He was doing for the Tennants what he would have done for any of his corporate clients pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill but he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. It announced a new threshold: 150 parts per billion. This means that local water districts are under no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. When the strange letter from the water district arrived, Darlene says, I kept thinking back to his clothing, to my hysterectomy. The drinking water in Parkersburg itself, whose water district was not included in the original class-action suit and has failed to compel DuPont to pay for a filtration system, is currently tainted with high levels of PFOA. A federal court denied it. In the fall of 2000, Bilott requested a court order to force them.
Im pretty chatty. (In a statement, DuPont claimed that it did volunteer health information about PFOA to the E.P.A. For a corporation to seek a gag order to prevent somebody from speaking to the E.P.A.
Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. The companys internal health studies, as damning as they were, were limited to factory employees. DuPont, he said, had found out that PFOA was causing health problems for women and birth defects in children. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in low concentrations, but that it was not a health risk. I dont even like the looks of them, he says. A reasonable expectation, at this point, was that the lawyers would move on. In these cases, should a plaintiff later become ill, he or she can sue retroactively for damages. Two years passed without any findings. The scientists designed 12 studies, including one that, using sophisticated environmental modeling technology, determined exactly how much PFOA each individual class member had ingested. Bilott represented 70,000 people who had been drinking PFOA-laced drinking water for decades. Im not allowed to talk to you, they said, when confronted. The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long, Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects we told the agencies about this in 2001, and theyve essentially done nothing. He worked long hours and knew few people in Cincinnati. The obvious next step was to file a class-action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of everyone whose water was tainted by PFOA. After the settlement, the legal team pushed to make receipt of the cash award contingent on a full medical examination. Terp, his supervisor, recalls him as a real standout lawyer: incredibly bright, energetic, tenacious and very, very thorough. He was a model Taft lawyer. Taft continued to pay consultants to interpret the new findings and relay them to the epidemiologists. Bilotts strategy appeared to have worked. Bilott attended eight schools before graduating from Fairborn High, near Ohios Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. There were more than 110,000 pages in all, some half a century old. The footage, shot on a camcorder, was grainy and intercut with static. But Bilott was not satisfied. He asked DuPont to share all documentation related to the substance; DuPont refused.
We are confident that these alternative chemistries can be used safely they are well characterized, and the data has been used to register them with environmental agencies around the world., Every year Rob Bilott writes a letter to the E.P.A. In the last five years, however, a new wave of endocrinology research has found that even extremely low doses of such chemicals can create significant health problems. The best metric Bilott had to judge a safe exposure level was DuPonts own internal limit of one part per billion. set a provisional limit of 0.4 parts per billion for short-term exposure, but has never finalized that figure. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburgs lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. But he is still angry. was particularly alarmed to learn that PFOA had been detected in American blood banks, something 3M and DuPont had known as early as 1976. The doctors ultimately hit upon an effective medication. Surprising his professors, he chose to attend law school at Ohio State, where his favorite course was environmental law. Darlene says the men at the plant called it Teflon flu., In 1976, after Darlene gave birth to their second child, her husband told her that he was not allowed to bring his work clothes home anymore. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. The culprit, instead, was poor husbandry: poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control. In other words, the Tennants didnt know how to raise cattle; if the cows were dying, it was their own fault. It was stressful, Bilott says, not to know what the heck was going on.. For many years, Winter was a partner at Spilman, Thomas & Battle one of the firms that represented DuPont in West Virginia though he had left Spilman to start a practice specializing in personal-injury cases. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time, nor did it disclose the fact in the cattle report that it commissioned for the Tennant case a decade later the report that blamed poor husbandry for the deaths of their cows. ; Colorado Springs; and Nassau County on Long Island are among those whose water has a higher concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in Rob Bilotts class-action suit. Like PFOA, these new substances have not come under any regulation from the E.P.A. They must have known that there was a small chance of winning. is an extraordinary remedy. He was amazed that Bilott would sue DuPont while remaining at Taft. I started seeing a story, Bilott said.
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