Dark Waters tells a story that in many ways is still being written, and itwill likely take years for this latest lawsuit to be resolved. In 1998, cattle farmer Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, West Virginia, contacted Bilott and claimed that his livestock was dying because the runoff from a DuPont landfill had contaminated a creek on . Deer, birds, fish and other wildlife were turning up dead in and around Dry Run. The Teflon Toxin, Part 2: Wilbur Tennant vs. DuPont. DuPont detected PFOA in the drinking water of communities near the Teflon plant. DuPont's Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. During the years before DuPont settled the lawsuit paying the Tennants an undisclosed amount without assigning blame for the dead cows the company sent Bilott boxes of documents he requested through the normal court process. (Maddie McGarvey/for the Washington Post). On paper, Rob Bilott didnt appear to be one of those crusading lawyers in legal thrillers. "Mysterious wasting disease" and. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Wilbur Tennant passed away on May 15, 2009 at the age of 67 in Washington, West Virginia. Teflon came into prominence in the 1940s, and with it came DuPont's rise as a chemical giant. Did they think he would just sit by? "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," the New York Times wrote. In 2005, DuPont agreed to phase out its use of C8 (PFOA) by 2015, according to The Intercept. The US House of Representatives passed a bill in January 2020 that would require the EPA to deem per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) hazardous and establish a national drinking water standard. The use of these cookies is strictly limited to measuring the site's audience. That looks a little bit like cancer to me.. Patches of missing hair, discolorations in their . Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category . DuPont's own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers," according to the New York Times Magazine. These cookies help provide anonymized information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. His name is Wilbur Tennant. Something is the matter right there. And, based on Centers for Disease Control data, PFAS chemicals were found the blood of 98 percent of people studied. They just turn their back and walk on. Wilbur Tennant had become desperate. apples, bread, green beans and ground beef. But a single letter, sent by a DuPont scientist to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, began unraveling a more alarming story. 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. There is about a teacup or so full of itits a real dark yeller. And of course, he knew all about Dry Run Landfill, a DuPont waste site near his farm that largely served the company's chemical plant near Parkersburg. Initial data showed evidence that it did. New York, NY 10004. Thats the largest gall I ever saw in my life! This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. This cookie is set by Facebook to display advertisements when either on Facebook or on a digital platform powered by Facebook advertising, after visiting the website. Behind him, white-faced Herefords grazed in . I fed her at least a gallon of grain a day. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. DuPont initially refused, but a court order ultimately forced them to turn over what amounted to more than 100,000 pages, some dating back 50 years. In a statement to Time, DuPont said it does not produce PFAS but does use them and defended the company's environmental and safety record, noting it has "announced a series of commitments around our limited use of PFAS, including the [sic] eliminating the use of all PFAS-based firefighting foams from our facilities." 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.". The same year, DuPont found that water in one local district contained PFOA levels at three times that figure. This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. The edge in his voice was anger. The saga began for Bilott when Wilbur Tennant, a cattle farmer from Parkersburg, West Virginia, called Bilott a few months before he made partner at a white-shoe Cincinnati law firm. In April 2000, after 3M conducted tests and studies on a similar, sister chemical to C8 (PFOA) called PFOS, the company notified the Environmental Protection Agency it found that "even modest exposure could have devastating health effects" and started to phase out PFOS use, as well as PFOA, according to the Huffington Post. His pleas for help fell on deaf ears, according to the Huffington Post's article, "Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia." During manufacturing processes, PFAS chemicals are released into the air, soil, and water around industrial facilities, the EPA reports. On August 31st of 2017, E. I. Dupont de Nemours Company and the Dow Chemical Company merged as part of a $130 billion merger. Theres been fifty-six cows thats been burnt just like this.. As luck would have it, the company bought 66 acres from one of their employees, Wilbur Tennant. Born: March 6, 1942 . The local employer wanted to buy some of their property for a landfill for its Washington Works plant nearby, where it produces, among other things, Teflon, which contains the chemical C8. Records obtained by Bilott showed DuPont had determined in 1961 that PFOA is toxic in animals. Eight years later 3M paused one of its animal studies after every monkey fed PFOS died. Earl pulled on white gloves and pried open the cows mouth, probing her gums and teeth. Now, he was feeding them twice as much and watching them waste away. He was born at New England, a son of the late Blaine Tennant and Lydia (Wildman) Tennant. Photos by Focus Features and Mike Coppola/Getty Images. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance. Next door to Tennant's farm was a landfill owned by E.I. 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. Yet to this day the companies deny responsibility, Bilott said in an interview. DuPont's scientists understood that the landfill drained into the Tennants' remaining property, and they tested the water in Dry Run Creek. . The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". AWSALB is an application load balancer cookie set by Amazon Web Services to map the session to the target. In short, I was playing for the opposite team, Bilott recalled in his memoir about the lawsuit he ended up filing against DuPont and the explosive aftermath. As one of Bilotts colleagues told the New York Times, To say that Rob Bilott is understated is an understatement. Its also true that Bilott did not have the same Ivy League pedigree of many of his colleagues at Taft, having been raised on Air Force bases across the continental United States and West Germany, and it was through these working-class connections that he was introduced to the Tennant family farm case. Attached to it was a gallbladder that didnt. Bilott also discovered that years before he sued DuPont on behalf of the Tennants, company scientists had tested the creek running through the familys pasture. Dozens began dramatically losing weight, dying even after Tennant doubled their feed on the advice of veterinarians who couldnt determine what was killing the animals. . But that's just the start. Shorty after that, DuPont started to medically monitor female workers at the Washington Works plant to, as the company's medical director noted, "answer a single question does C8 cause abnormal children?" . 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. Company officials told one of Tennants brothers in person and in writing they planned to turn it into a landfill for office garbage nothing hazardous. The olive green water had a greenish brown foam encrusting the grassy bank. He made for an imposing figure at six feet tall, lean and broad shouldered, his . DuPont established a presence along the Ohio River in 1948 with the Washington Works plant near Parkersburg. LinkedIn sets this cookie for LinkedIn Ads ID syncing. He panned the camera a few degrees. Bilott tries to communicate to Tennant that he "isn't that kind of environmental lawyer," yet Tennant's exasperated resilience strikes a chord with the compassionate . Used to help protect the website against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks. Tennants Farm Pond Dam, Wood County, West Virginia. That's just some of the video footage Wilbur showed lawyer Robert Bilott, according to an excerpt from Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. One tooth had an abscess so large he reckoned he could stick an ice pick clear under it. Revelations by another chemical company gave Bilott leverage to go back into court and request more records from DuPont. The West Virginia-based . . Turns out his grandmother lived in the same town as the farmer and that's the connection that brought the underdog and the hero together. Jim still calls it "the home place," although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling into the field. . Seventy years later these chemicals are in our soil, our air, in wildlife. Recently, the cows had started charging, trying to kick him and butt him with their heads, as this one had before she died. 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 visit to the Grahams' farm was one of his happiest childhood memories. Thats very unusual. There is something wrong with this water, Tennant says on the videotape. For example, New Hampshire sued 3M and DuPont, along with a handful of companies that make firefighting foam containing PFAS. In the spring, he would run and catch the calves so his daughters could pet them. In real life as in the film, Bilotts earliest professional experiences after law school were working on behalf of chemical companies for his employer, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, providing the firms corporate clients with guidance on how best to comply with the so-called Superfund law passed by Congress in 1980 to regulate sites tainted with hazardous substances. The muscle looked fine, but a thin, yellow liquid gathered in the cavity where it once beat. It is a chemical used in the manufacturing process of Teflon. How accurately does Dark Waters depict the twists and turns of this maze? Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. He zoomed in. As a boy, he had cooled his bare feet in this creek. As he does in the film, the real Bilott did begin to experience strange symptoms in 2010 similar to the strokelike transient ischemic attack seen in the movie. Tennant told him that DuPont had bought land from his family that was adjacent to his farm, for what the company had assured him would be a non-hazardous landfill, according to a letter Bilott later filed with the Environmental Protection Agency. Studies have found potential links between PFOA exposure and high cholesterol, thyroid disorders, and testicular and kidney cancers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. LinkedIn sets this cookie from LinkedIn share buttons and ad tags to recognize browser ID. It wasnt just his cattle dying. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. Tennant had a problem. Mr. Tennant believed early on that something coming out of the plant and landfill was poisoning the water and the animals on his farm. . A key component of Teflon was C8, also known as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). DuPont bought C8 from 3M and used it to prevent Teflon from clumping during the manufacturing process. Sure, bitters make cocktails taste great. A month before DuPonts letter about PFOA, the Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M announced it would stop making a chemical with a similar sounding name: perfluorooctane sulfonic acid or PFOS. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. The cattle farmer stood at the edge of a creek that cut through a sun-dappled hollow. At 72, Jim is so slight that he nearly . Tennant Farm, December 1999, from DuPont Cattle Team Report. These included a polluted river . This is the hundred and seventh calf thats met this problem right here. Thats whats so scary about these chemicals, said Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University who studies PFAS. Wilbur Tennant and his family had recently sold part of their farmland to a company and had no idea what would end up coming of it. As Bilott details in Exposure, the April 23, 2001, incident was eventually confirmed between his legal team and DuPonts. Wilbur Tennant and his wife, Sandra, won a legal settlement from DuPont two years ago after they accused the company of sickening their family and killing their cattle by dumping C8 into a landfill near their farm. just a dukes mix of everything. Until lately, the cattle always fattened up nicely on that, plus the corn he grew to finish them and a grain mix he bought from the feed store. Join Facebook to connect with Wilbur Tennant and others you may know. Wilbur Tennant showed Bilott alarming video footage in which his previously docile animals had turned . LinkedIn sets the lidc cookie to facilitate data center selection. "We have always and will continue to work with those in the scientific, not-for-profit and policy communities who demonstrate a serious and sincere desire to improve our health, our communities, and our planet.". 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. Thats why they called it Dry Run. The unlikely hero was an Ohio-based corporate defense lawyer paid to protect chemical companies, just like the one the farmer suspected of foul play. He focuses on the froth-covered creek before the tape cuts to a dissected calf with blackened teeth and oddly colored organs. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. Its surface was matte with a crusty film that wrinkled against the shore. The problem had to be Dry Run, he thought. The other companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to Time's requests for comment. The primary coordinates for Tennants Farm Pond Dam places it within the WV 26184 ZIP Code delivery area. Michael Hawthorne is a Pulitzer-finalist investigative reporter who focuses on the environment and public health for the Chicago Tribune. Wilbur Tennant shot this video in the late 1990s on his property in West Virginia. As unbelievable as it may sound, DuPont really did, in the 1960s, offer some of its staff Teflon-laced cigarettes as a human experiment into the potential side effects of the PFOA-produced nonstick material, as the movie recounts. 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. A load balancing cookie set to ensure requests by a client are sent to the same origin server. It also helps in fraud preventions. Trial lawyer Harry Deitzler, whos played by Bill Pullman in the film, told Slate in a telephone interview that while Dark Waters captured Bilotts sense of commitment and general modesty, it was less accurate in its depiction on one particular issue: Robert Bilott has not been known to be an especially big fan of Mai Tais, either in general or on special occasions. song that goes bum bum bum 2020. wilbur tennant farm locationconservation international ceo. These emerging contaminants linger, breaking down only when incinerated at very high temperatures. The goal of the merger was to combine two businesses that dabbled in . SiteLock sets this cookie to provide cloud-based website security services. The chemical companies are appealing the decision. It turned out 3M also made PFOA and sold it to DuPont, which used the chemical cousin of Scotchgard to keep Teflon from clumping during production. A thicker foam gathered in eddies, trembling like egg whites whipped into stiff peaks so high they sometimes blew off on a breeze. As in the movie, he at first had a cozy relationship with DuPont, though some of the details of the relationship in the movie are invented. 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. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Azure sets this cookie for routing production traffic by specifying the production slot. Of Bilotts Famous Letter to the EPA, Terp told the Times that he didnt recall if there was any particular reaction internally and that the partners at Taft were proud of the work that he has done.. 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. A videotape Tennant shot with a VHS camcorder shows emaciated cows with tumors on their hides. All rights reserved. . Bilott did marry a fellow lawyer, Sarah Barlage, who left her career defending corporations against workers compensation claims to raise their sons. Call him, they suggested. The sp_t cookie is set by Spotify to implement audio content from Spotify on the website and also registers information on user interaction related to the audio content. But the point I want to make, and make it real clear, he said, zooming in, thats the mouth of Dry Run.. Bilott later determined it was one of the forever chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid, commonly referred to today as PFOA. Sometimes it ran so dry hed find them glittering dead in the mud. 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. Maps, Driving Directions & Local Area Information He wasnt an expert, but the disease seemed clear enough that he bagged the physical evidence and left it in his freezer for the day he could get someone with credentials interested enough to take a look. "PFASs are extremely persistent in the environment primarily because the chemical bond between the carbon and fluorine atoms is extremely strong and stable," according to the Environmental Protection Agency. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Thats Hollywood, I guess. (Bilott has not yet responded to my email and telephone inquiries about whether he has ever enjoyed a celebratory Mai Tai or any other tropical, rum-based cocktail.). Ill do something about it.. NID cookie, set by Google, is used for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to mute unwanted ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads. Bilott tries to communicate to Tennant that he "isn't that kind of environmental lawyer," yet Tennant's exasperated resilience strikes a chord with the compassionate . (He later would be played by actor Mark Ruffalo in the 2019 film Dark Waters.). The symptoms shown in the movieincluding such discolorations as blackened teethare also similar to the ones that Tennant really did videotape before sending the tapes to Bilott. Per the article, "In March 1981, DuPont sent a pathologist and a birth defects expert to review the 3M data Bailey had read about in the locker room. Her calf, black and white, lay dead on its side in a circle of matted grass. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. By the late 1990s, West Virginia farmer Wilbur Tennant was at his wits end. This cookie is used for storing country code selected from country selector. 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 . Robert Bilott isn't done. Both companies denied any wrongdoing. Sue Bailey was pregnant when she worked in the Teflon division of the plant. It wasnt his first. They're in virtually everything we use, including stain-resistant fabric and carpets, nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing, and firefighting foam. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The C8 Science Study (named for DuPonts internal code for PFOA) found a probable link between the chemical and certain diseases in humans, some of which 3M and DuPont had found in animals years, if not decades, earlier. Earl had come to believe that its water was now poisonedwith what, he did not know. "In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. "Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. We lurched down a rutted dirt road past the old clapboard farmhouse where he grew up. He didnt believe it anymore. They are still in all of us.. . In Minnesota, 3M paid an $850 million settlement after the states attorney general used the industry documents in a lawsuit demanding clean drinking water for communities near one of its manufacturing plants outside Minneapolis. They would nuzzle him as he scratched their heads. (Ammonium perfluorooctanoate or C8) wastes near the farm. Two of seven babies born to Teflon plant employees in 1981 had facial deformities similar to what 3M had found in newborn rats. He toldThe Intercept in 2015 that it bubbled up out of glass containers and "was everywhere." Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. DuPont's response was they would settle with the Tennant's however Bilott was . PFOA (C8) and PFOS were the long-chain, more commonly used substances in a larger group of more than 4,000 man-made chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). They just turn their back and walk on, he told the camera. Foam began appearing in a creek that meandered past the landfill before spilling into the Tennants pasture, he later testified in a court filing. PFOA and PFOS are among more than 9,000 versions of synthetic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. Robert Bilott is a partner at Taft, Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Cincinnati, Ohio. This time he is seeking to force 3M and DuPont to pay for medical monitoring of every American exposed to PFAS. wilbur tennant farm location. When DuPont settled that lawsuit in 2004, the company agreed to finance a study of PFOAs health effects. And if it sounds familiar, it should. That calf had died miserable. These "forever chemicals" are an emerging global health and environmental issue. But you just give me time. I dont ever remember seeing that in there before., He cut out the heart and sliced it open. People who didn't know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. About 600 are in use today, according to the EPA. It was small and ephemeral, fed by the rains that gathered in the creases of the ancient mountains that rumpled West Virginia and gave it those misty blue, almost-heaven vistas. Copyright 2019 by Robert Bilott. Dark Waters tells the true story of American farmer Wilbur Tennant who calls on lawyer Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) to help him sue a chemical company Credit: Focus Features. The calf was engulfed in a black, humming mist. emily in paris savoir office. 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.). By the 1980s, DuPont had allegedly begun dumping PFOA waste into the Dry Creek Landfill, near the Tennant property. . And theyre going to find out one of these days that somebodys tired of it.. Back in the '90s, Tennant noticed something strange was happening to his cows. 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. Among the files, many mentions of the chemical PFOA, also known as C8, a slippery surfactant, that was first produced by DuPont in 1938, appeared. He knew the folks at the DNR, because they gave him a special permit to hunt on his land out of season. The stream looked like many other streams that flowed through his sprawling farm. He died of cancer in 2009; he was 67. DuPont named this sight Dry Run Landfill after the creek that ran onto the Tennant farm. Attorney Rob Bilott discusses the Fight Forever Chemicals campaign on Nov. 19, 2019. Created by Bluecadet. People who didnt know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. Deitzler suggests it would have been a historic first for no partners at a firm of Tafts size and corporate client base to express qualms about a class-action suit of this kind. You notice them dark place there, all down through? He was 7 years old. Wilbur Earl Tennant and his siblings took over the land when their father abandoned them in the 1950s, according to the Huffington Post. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public," the magazinenotes. LinkedIn sets this cookie to remember a user's language setting. In his memoir, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, published earlier this year, Bilott says that doctors could only really diagnose the issue as unusual brain activity after an MRI similar to the one he undergoes in the film. It all started with Wilbur Tennant's dying cows. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features. You could poke it with a stick and leave a hole. Tennants Farm Pond Dam is a cultural feature (dam) in Wood County. According to the New York Times Magazine, "By 1990, DuPont had dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge into Dry Run Landfill. Thats the water right there, underneath that foam, the farmer said. The West Virginia-based farmer was convinced a toxic river that ran into his farmland was to blame, since the animals' strange symptoms began when his brother sold some land to a chemical company to use as a landfill site a . Bilott, whose story was chronicled in an engrossing and detailed 2016 New York Times story by Nathaniel Rich, goes from a 1999 lawsuit on behalf of Tennant to a 2001 class action involving several . These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. The TiPMix cookie is set by Azure to determine which web server the users must be directed to. It's the messy, real story behind Focus Features' Dark Waters movie, starring Mark Ruffalo as Robert Bilott, the corporate lawyer turned environmental activist who led an epic legal fight against chemical titan DuPont. It is cut from the same cloth as movies like 'Erin Brockovich' and 'A Civil Action'. In the flames, a calf lay broadside, burning. 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. Wilbur Tennant is on Facebook. Attorney Rob Bilott discusses the Fight Forever Chemicals campaign on Nov. 19, 2019.