November 25, 2019 12:03 PM EST. DuPont and the family settled the lawsuit soon after Bilott shared that information with one of the companys lawyers, who had referred to PFOA in an email as the material 3M sells us that we poop into the river and into drinking water.. It does not store any personal data. "Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. The olive green water had a greenish brown foam encrusting the grassy bank. DuPont's statement said the film "depict[s] wholly imagined events," calling implications of a cover up "inaccurate," and claimed that it "grossly misrepresents" what happened. New York, NY 10004. The cookie does not store any personally identifiable data. At fifty-four, Earl was an imposing figure, six feet tall, lean and oxshouldered, with sandpaper hands and a permanent squint. By the late 1990s, West Virginia farmer Wilbur Tennant was at his wits end. DuPont named this sight Dry Run Landfill after the creek that ran onto the Tennant farm. It dont do you any good to go to the DNR about it. The other companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to Time's requests for comment. After contacting the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, he felt stonewalled. Bilott is currently suing several makers and users of these chemicals on behalf of all Americans with PFAS in their blood. "The innards was bright green.". Wilbur Earl Tennant was a cattle farmer in Parkersburg, Virginia, who was known to his family and friends as Earl. There is something wrong with this water, Tennant says on the videotape. Earl had come to believe that its water was now poisonedwith what, he did not know. Details of what DuPont allegedly knew and when came to light in pages and pages of documents, initially as part of the lawsuit Bilott filed against the company on behalf of Wilbur Tennant and then in more than 3,000 subsequent personal injury suits that have followed in the past two decades. Joseph and Darlene Kiger in Park City, Utah, in 2018. There also are related substances called precursors that transform into PFOA and PFOS in the body or the environment. Tennant is convinced that a landfill operated by the DuPont company upstream from his farm is the cause of the continuing maladies suffered by his cattle and his family. Rob Bilott's Exposure is a real-life whodunit, a page-turning courtroom drama, a David-and-Goliath story of one man against an industrial colossus and a shocking expos of America's utterly broken environmental policy.You should also take this book personally - because the "exposure" of the title is yours. The Intercept notes that the legal process "uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company's workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.". Deer, birds, fish and other wildlife were turning up dead in and around Dry Run. The film seems to imply that the fire might have been an arson attempt that hit the wrong house, though it doesnt suggest who might have lit it. The TiPMix cookie is set by Azure to determine which web server the users must be directed to. Nor was it on the list of substances regulated by the EPA. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. The problem, he thought, was not what they were eating but what they were drinking. Much like many river cities, Parkersburg's history speaks of a working class, industrial heritage, which saw companies set up shop on the shores of the Ohio River, bringing jobs and economic stability. This cookie is used to detect and defend when a client attempt to replay a cookie.This cookie manages the interaction with online bots and takes the appropriate actions. DuPont appeared to be concerned enough about PFOA that the company tested employees at the Teflon plant and found the chemical in their blood, the letter to the EPA revealed. Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. Dark Waters is a 2019 American legal thriller film directed by Todd Haynes and written by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan.The story dramatizes Robert Bilott's case against the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont after they contaminated a town with unregulated chemicals. It is based on a shocking true story, where a series . Behind him, white-faced Herefords grazed in . One tooth had an abscess so large he reckoned he could stick an ice pick clear under it. As company scientists noted in internal documents, Nine out of ten people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever, and coughing.. I dont recall him drinking, Deitzler says. Maps, Driving Directions & Local Area Information She had spent the summer in the hollow, drinking out of Dry Run until shed started to act strangely. The first thing Im gonna do is cut this head open, check these teeth.. Mr. Tennant believed early on that something coming out of the plant and landfill was poisoning the water and the animals on his farm. Bilott is seeking class-action status in the case against several companies, including 3M and Chemours. Eight years later 3M paused one of its animal studies after every monkey fed PFOS died. However, the company didn't tell employees or regulators and ended the study, the Huffington Post reports. The JSESSIONID cookie is used by New Relic to store a session identifier so that New Relic can monitor session counts for an application. Parkersburg is also home to the Tennant family, who, for nearly a century, have worked land that eventually grew to 700-plus acres and raised more than 200 head of cattle. One person can't always cause a change, but one person can set off a chain of reactions to cause change. The suit, rather than seeking compensation, requests that the companies fund independent, scientific studies on the health effects of PFAS, according to Time Magazine. How would you like for your livestock to have to drink something like that? he asked his imagined audience. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. And the money came in handy, too, since Jim, a Washington Works employee, had for years suffered from flu-like symptoms and illnesses that baffled doctors, as outlined in a Delaware Online article from 2016. DuPont's response was they would settle with the Tennant's however Bilott was . Like the movie, Richs article portrays Bilott as an unassuming and understated man driven by an innate sense of decency. Edit Search New Search Filters (1) To get better results, add more information such as Birth Info, Death Info and Locationeven a guess will help. The June 23, 2000, letter listed something in the landfill that didnt appear in the other documents or in Tafts chemical dictionaries. In 1998, a farmer named Wilbur Earl Tennant knocked on the door of a lawyer named Robert Bi-lott on the grounds that the vegetation structure of the land he owned was impaired, the cattle he was breeding were affected and the only responsible was the factory located next to the river, ow-ning a wasteland adjacent to his property. Foam began appearing in a creek that meandered past the landfill before spilling into the Tennants pasture, he later testified in a court filing. Next door to Tennant's farm was a landfill owned by E.I. The Kiger family, teacher Joseph Kiger and his wife, Darlene, really did receive a cagey and curiously worded letter from the local Lubeck water district in October 2000 notifying them that an unregulated chemical named PFOA was present in their drinking water at low concentrations. And, as the film intimates, this letter, delivered on the public utilitys letterhead, was first reviewed by DuPont and started the clock on the statute of limitations. Much of the biographical information about the Kiger family, including Darlenes first marriage to a DuPont engineer who came home sick and called it the Teflon flu, also checks out. And in 2017, according to Reuters, DuPont and its spinoff, Chemours, agreed to pay more than $600 million to settle about 3,500 personal injury resulting from the alleged contamination of local water supplies in Parkersburg. Taking on the case of Wilbur Tennant (played by Bill Camp in the film), a West Virginian farmer whose land is contaminated from toxic run-off dumped near his premises by DuPont Company, Bilott (Ruffalo) quickly encounters the gargantuan machine of corporate disinformation, negligence, cover-up, and strong-arm tactics that allow the company to . DuPont then really did proceed to turn that plot into a dumping ground for sludge that it knew to be toxic, going so far as to quietly conduct tests for perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in the nearby river and expressing concern for the health of the Tennants livestock in internal documents nearly a decade before they would be denying culpability and blaming the Tennants in court. The Teflon Toxin, Part 2: Wilbur Tennant vs. DuPontNot Yet Rated. Initial data showed evidence that it did. DuPont bought 66 acres of the Tennant's farm land from Wilbur Tennant's brother Jim and his wife Della [1]. The document, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, called on global scientists, manufacturers, and retailers to work together to limit the use of PFASs and develop safer alternatives. . Tennant is convinced that a landfill operated by the DuPont company upstream from his farm is the cause of the continuing maladies suffered by his cattle and his family. DuPont's Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Wilbur Earl Tennant. The pipe flowed out of a collection pond at the low end of a landfill. It had paid for the 150 acres of land his great-grandfather had bought and for the two-story, four-room farmhouse pieced together from trees felled in the woods, dragged across fields, and raised by hand. This cookie is used to manage the interaction with the online bots. He panned again: a bonfire on a grassy slope, a pyre of logs as fat as garbage cans. The farmer Wilbur Tennant had suspected that the chemical company DuPont was responsible for the death of many of his cows. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These included a polluted river . After this sale, Tennant's cattle started to become sick and Tennant began to understand that . Washington, West Virginia. In less than two years he had lost at least one hundred calves and more than fifty cows. Cows that drank from the creek had been healthy. It wasnt his first. He started the legal process in 1999 against DuPont by filing motions compelling it to turn over documents pertaining to hazardous materials used at the Washington Works plant near Parkersburg. With Sue Bailey, Bucky Bailey, Ken Wamsley, Wilbur Tennant. emily in paris savoir office. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. At fifty-four, Earl was an . VigLink sets this cookie to track the user behaviour and also limit the ads displayed, in order to ensure relevant advertising. Hard labor was his birthright. Thing was, time was running out. By that point, 153 animals died had died grisly deaths on his property . He died of . But you just give me time. "I've been dealing with this for . The farmers name was Wilbur Earl Tennant. Revelations by another chemical company gave Bilott leverage to go back into court and request more records from DuPont. . It is cut from the same cloth as movies like 'Erin Brockovich' and 'A Civil Action'. Wilbur Tennants brother Jim really was a DuPont employee plagued with a serious ailment his doctors could not diagnose, and the chemical company did buy his 66 acres of the familys 600-some-acre property in the 1980s. No one believed him when he told them about the things he saw happening to his land. It dont do you any good to go to the DNR about it. . riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. Earl had sought help, but no one would step up. "If we can't get where we need to go to protect people through our regulatory channels, through our legislative process, then unfortunately what we have left is our legal process," Bilott told Time in November 2019. Bilott soon discovered that Dry Run Creek, the offshoot of the Ohio River that Tennant's livestock drank from, was full of C8, an industry name for perfluorooctanoic acid or PFOA, one of the . While the character of the hand-wringing Taft lawyer James Ross, portrayed by The Good Places William Jackson Harper, seems to have been invented, along with the scene where Ross suggests that Bilotts class-action suit might read to the public as nothing more than a shakedown of an iconic American company, Bilott did tell the New York Times that he perceived that there were some What the hell are you doing? responses within the firm. As in the movie, these events really did lead to a large class-action suit that triggered a massive epidemiological study that, after a yearslong wait, showed there really was a probable link between PFOA and certain conditions, including high cholesterol, kidney cancer, and testicular cancer, though the movie depicts one scientist going so far as to tell Bilott that the results are irrefutable. (DuPont has continued to deny that it did anything wrong.).
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