#dry-run-creek

DuPont and PFOA

In October 1998, a West Virginia cattle farmer named Wilbur Tennant called a Cincinnati lawyer named Robert Bilott about 153 dead cows. The cows had been drinking from Dry Run Creek, three miles downstream from the DuPont Washington Works chemical plant. Tennant's home video showed cattle with bloody mouths, gum cancer, and stumbling gaits before they died. Bilott — a corporate-defense attorney at Taft Stettinius & Hollister who had spent his career representing chemical companies — agreed to look at the file as a personal favor to his grandmother, who knew the Tennant family. The look became a twenty-year case. By the time Bilott was finished, he had uncovered: that DuPont had been releasing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, code-named 'C8') into the Ohio River and into landfills for over forty years; that DuPont had known PFOA was toxic since at least 1961; that the company's own animal studies in 1981 had shown birth defects in offspring of exposed female workers; and that approximately 99% of the U.S. population, by 2007, had detectable levels of PFOA in their blood. The 2005 EPA fine ($16.5 million) was the largest in U.S. environmental enforcement history at the time. The 2017 multi-district settlement was $670.7 million. The C8 Science Panel — established as part of an earlier 2005 class-action settlement — confirmed by 2012 that PFOA is causally linked to six diseases including kidney and testicular cancer. PFOA was phased out of U.S. production by 2015. Its environmental persistence — half-life in human blood is approximately 3.8 years — means that, by 2025, every American adult has some PFOA exposure dating from the production era. The chemical that made non-stick cookware possible is, in this sense, still with us.