what happens to ceo of company who knowingly poisons employees leading to fatalities?
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The Lawyer Who Became DuPont'southward Worst Nightmare
Rob Bilott was a corporate defence force attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and betrayal a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.
Rob Bilott on land owned by the Tennants near Parkersburg, W.Va. Credit... Bryan Schutmaat for The New York Times
Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his directly line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, Due west.Va., said that his cows were dying left and correct. He believed that the DuPont chemic company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont merely about owned the unabridged town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg's lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might take hung up had Tennant non blurted out the name of Bilott'southward grandmother, Alma Holland White.
White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and every bit a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants' neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams' farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.
When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White's grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not sympathise, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a house founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked near exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ''It but felt like the right thing to do,'' he says today. ''I felt a connection to those folks.''
The connection was non obvious at their first meeting. About a calendar week after his phone call, Tennant drove from Parkersburg with his wife to Taft's headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firm's glassed-in reception expanse on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of i of Taft'south founders. Tennant — burly and well-nigh six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap — did not resemble a typical Taft customer. ''He didn't show up at our offices looking like a bank vice president,'' says Thomas Terp, a partner who was Bilott's supervisor. ''Permit'south put it that way.''
Terp joined Bilott for the meeting. Wilbur Tennant explained that he and his four siblings had run the cattle farm since their father abandoned them every bit children. They had seven cows so. Over the decades they steadily acquired state and cattle, until 200 cows roamed more than 600 hilly acres. The property would have been even larger had his brother Jim and Jim's wife, Della, not sold 66 acres in the early '80s to DuPont. The company wanted to utilise the plot for a landfill for waste material from its factory near Parkersburg, called Washington Works, where Jim was employed every bit a laborer. Jim and Della did not want to sell, just Jim had been in poor health for years, mysterious ailments that doctors couldn't diagnose, and they needed the money.
DuPont rechristened the plot Dry Run Landfill, named subsequently the creek that ran through information technology. The same creek flowed downward to a pasture where the Tennants grazed their cows. Not long subsequently the sale, Wilbur told Bilott, the cattle began to act deranged. They had always been like pets to the Tennants. At the sight of a Tennant they would amble over, nuzzle and let themselves exist milked. No longer. Now when they saw the farmers, they charged.
Wilbur fed a videotape into the VCR. The footage, shot on a camcorder, was grainy and intercut with static. Images jumped and repeated. The audio accelerated and slowed down. It had the quality of a horror moving-picture show. In the opening shot the photographic camera pans across the creek. It takes in the surrounding wood, the white ash trees shedding their leaves and the rippling, shallow water, before pausing on what appears to be a snowbank at an elbow in the creek. The photographic camera zooms in, revealing a mound of soapy froth.
''I've taken 2 dead deer and two dead cattle off this ripple,'' Tennant says in vox-over. ''The blood run out of their noses and out their mouths. ... They're trying to cover this stuff up. But it'south not going to exist covered up, considering I'thousand going to bring it out in the open for people to see.''
The video shows a large pipe running into the creek, discharging green water with bubbles on the surface. ''This is what they expect a man's cows to drink on his ain property,'' Wilbur says. ''Information technology's about high fourth dimension that someone in the country department of something-or-some other got off their cans.''
At 1 indicate, the video cuts to a skinny red cow continuing in hay. Patches of its pilus are missing, and its dorsum is humped — a result, Wilbur speculates, of a kidney malfunction. Some other boom of static is followed by a close-upwards of a dead blackness calf lying in the snow, its center a brilliant, chemic blueish. ''One hundred fifty-iii of these animals I've lost on this farm,'' Wilbur says later in the video. ''Every veterinarian that I've called in Parkersburg, they will not render my phone calls or they don't want to get involved. Since they don't want to get involved, I'll have to dissect this thing myself. ... I'm going to start at this head.''
The video cuts to a calf's bisected caput. Close-ups follow of the dogie's blackened teeth (''They say that's due to high concentrations of fluoride in the h2o that they beverage''), its liver, center, stomachs, kidneys and gall bladder. Each organ is sliced open, and Wilbur points out unusual discolorations — some dark, some green — and textures. ''I don't even similar the looks of them,'' he says. ''It don't wait similar anything I've been into earlier.''
Bilott watched the video and looked at photographs for several hours. He saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, behemothic lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks. Tennant always zoomed in on his cows' eyes. ''This cow'due south done a lot of suffering,'' he would say, as a blinking eye filled the screen.
''This is bad,'' Bilott said to himself. ''There's something actually bad going on here.''
Bilott decided right away to take the Tennant case. It was, he says once more, ''the right matter to do.'' Bilott might have had the practiced look of a corporate lawyer — soft-spoken, milk-complected, conservatively attired — but the job had non come naturally to him. He did not have a typical Taft résumé. He had not attended college or law schoolhouse in the Ivy League. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and Bilott spent most of his childhood moving among air bases near Albany; Flint, Mich.; Newport Beach, Calif.; and Wiesbaden, West Deutschland. Bilott attended eight schools before graduating from Fairborn High, near Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As a junior, he received a recruitment letter from a tiny liberal-arts school in Sarasota called the New College of Florida, which graded pass/fail and allowed students to design their own curriculums. Many of his friends in that location were idealistic, progressive — ideological misfits in Reagan's America. He met with professors individually and came to value critical thinking. ''I learned to question everything you lot read,'' he said. ''Don't take anything at face value. Don't care what other people say. I liked that philosophy.'' Bilott studied political science and wrote his thesis well-nigh the rising and autumn of Dayton. He hoped to become a metropolis manager.
But his father, who late in life enrolled in law school, encouraged Bilott to do the same. Surprising his professors, he chose to nourish law school at Ohio State, where his favorite course was environmental law. ''It seemed like information technology would have real-globe impact,'' he said. ''Information technology was something y'all could practice to make a difference.'' When, after graduation, Taft made him an offering, his mentors and friends from New College were aghast. They didn't sympathize how he could join a corporate firm. Bilott didn't run into it that way. He hadn't really idea about the ideals of it, to exist honest. ''My family said that a big house was where y'all'd get the nearly opportunities,'' he said. ''I knew nobody who had ever worked at a house, nobody who knew anything about it. I just tried to get the best task I could. I don't think I had whatsoever clue of what that involved.''
At Taft, he asked to bring together Thomas Terp'south environmental team. Ten years earlier, Congress passed the legislation known every bit Superfund, which financed the emergency cleanup of hazardous-waste dumps. Superfund was a lucrative development for firms similar Taft, creating an entire subfield within environmental law, one that required a deep agreement of the new regulations in order to guide negotiations amongst municipal agencies and numerous individual parties. Terp's squad at Taft was a leader in the field.
As an associate, Bilott was asked to decide which companies contributed which toxins and hazardous wastes in what quantities to which sites. He took depositions from plant employees, perused public records and organized huge amounts of historical information. He became an expert on the Environmental Protection Agency'south regulatory framework, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Human action, the Toxic Substances Control Human activity. He mastered the chemistry of the pollutants, despite the fact that chemical science had been his worst bailiwick in loftier school. ''I learned how these companies work, how the laws work, how you lot defend these claims,'' he said. He became the consummate insider.
Bilott was proud of the work he did. The main part of his job, as he understood it, was to help clients comply with the new regulations. Many of his clients, including Thiokol and Bee Chemical, disposed of chancy waste long before the practice became and then tightly regulated. He worked long hours and knew few people in Cincinnati. A colleague on Taft'due south ecology team, observing that he had piddling time for a social life, introduced him to a babyhood friend named Sarah Barlage. She was a lawyer, too, at another downtown Cincinnati house, where she defended corporations against worker's-compensation claims. Bilott joined the two friends for lunch. Sarah doesn't remember him speaking. ''My first impression was that he was non like other guys,'' she says. ''I'thou pretty chatty. He'south much quieter. We complemented each other.''
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They married in 1996. The first of their 3 sons was born two years later. He felt secure plenty at Taft for Barlage to quit her task and enhance their children full-time. Terp, his supervisor, recalls him as ''a existent standout lawyer: incredibly bright, energetic, tenacious and very, very thorough.'' He was a model Taft lawyer. Then Wilbur Tennant came along.
The Tennant case put Taft in a highly unusual position. The law house was in the business of representing chemical corporations, not suing them. The prospect of taking on DuPont ''did cause us interruption,'' Terp concedes. ''But information technology was not a terribly hard decision for usa. I'm a firm laic that our work on the plaintiff's side makes us better defense force lawyers.''
Bilott sought help with the Tennant case from a Westward Virginia lawyer named Larry Winter. For many years, Winter was a partner at Spilman, Thomas & Battle — 1 of the firms that represented DuPont in West Virginia — though he had left Spilman to start a practice specializing in personal-injury cases. He was amazed that Bilott would sue DuPont while remaining at Taft.
''His taking on the Tennant case,'' Winter says, ''given the type of do Taft had, I found to exist inconceivable.''
Bilott, for his part, is reluctant to talk over his motivations for taking the instance. The closest he came to elaborating was after being asked whether, having set out ''to make a departure'' in the world, he had any misgivings about the path his career had taken.
''At that place was a reason why I was interested in helping out the Tennants,'' he said afterward a interruption. ''It was a groovy opportunity to use my background for people who really needed it.''
Bilott filed a federal adjust against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont'due south in-business firm lawyer, Bernard Reilly, informed him that DuPont and the E.P.A. would committee a study of the property, conducted past 3 veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattle'due south wellness problems. The culprit, instead, was poor husbandry: ''poor diet, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.'' In other words, the Tennants didn't know how to raise cattle; if the cows were dying, information technology was their own fault.
This did not sit well with the Tennants, who began to endure the consequences of antagonizing Parkersburg'due south main employer. Lifelong friends ignored the Tennants on the streets of Parkersburg and walked out of restaurants when they entered. ''I'g non allowed to talk to you,'' they said, when confronted. Iv dissimilar times, the Tennants changed churches.
Wilbur chosen the part nearly every day, simply Bilott had little to tell him. He was doing for the Tennants what he would accept done for any of his corporate clients — pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill — just he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. ''Nosotros were getting frustrated,'' Bilott said. ''I couldn't arraign the Tennants for getting aroused.''
With the trial looming, Bilott stumbled upon a alphabetic character DuPont had sent to the E.P.A. that mentioned a substance at the landfill with a cryptic name: ''PFOA.'' In all his years working with chemical companies, Bilott had never heard of PFOA. It did non appear on whatever list of regulated materials, nor could he discover it in Taft's in-business firm library. The chemical science adept that he had retained for the example did, yet, vaguely call back an article in a trade periodical about a like-sounding compound: PFOS, a soaplike amanuensis used past the technology conglomerate 3M in the fabrication of Scotchgard.
Bilott hunted through his files for other references to PFOA, which he learned was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. But in that location was cypher. He asked DuPont to share all documentation related to the substance; DuPont refused. In the fall of 2000, Bilott requested a court order to force them. Against DuPont'south protests, the order was granted. Dozens of boxes containing thousands of unorganized documents began to arrive at Taft's headquarters: private internal correspondence, medical and health reports and confidential studies conducted past DuPont scientists. There were more than 110,000 pages in all, some half a century quondam. Bilott spent the side by side few months on the flooring of his office, poring over the documents and arranging them in chronological order. He stopped answering his office phone. When people chosen his secretary, she explained that he was in the part just had not been able to attain the phone in time, considering he was trapped on all sides past boxes.
''I started seeing a story,'' Bilott said. ''I may have been the outset i to actually get through them all. It became apparent what was going on: They had known for a long time that this stuff was bad.''
Bilott is given to understatement. (''To say that Rob Bilott is understated,'' his colleague Edison Colina says, ''is an understatement.'') The story that Bilott began to run into, cross-legged on his office floor, was astounding in its breadth, specificity and sheer brazenness. ''I was shocked,'' he said. That was another understatement. Bilott could not believe the scale of incriminating material that DuPont had sent him. The company appeared non to realize what it had handed over. ''It was one of those things where you lot can't believe you lot're reading what you lot're reading,'' he said. ''That it's really been put in writing. Information technology was the kind of stuff you always heard most happening but yous never thought you'd see written down.''
The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for apply in the manufacturing of Teflon. 3M invented PFOA merely four years earlier; it was used to keep coatings like Teflon from clumping during product. Though PFOA was non classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of information technology. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste material facilities. DuPont's own instructions specified that it was non to be flushed into surface water or sewers. But over the decades that followed, DuPont pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River. The company dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into ''digestion ponds'': open, unlined pits on the Washington Works holding, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water tabular array, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than than 100,000 people in all.
Bilott learned from the documents that 3M and DuPont had been conducting secret medical studies on PFOA for more than iv decades. In 1961, DuPont researchers found that the chemical could increase the size of the liver in rats and rabbits. A twelvemonth later, they replicated these results in studies with dogs. PFOA's peculiar chemical structure made it uncannily resistant to degradation. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that at that place were high concentrations of PFOA in the claret of manufacturing plant workers at Washington Works. They did not tell the Eastward.P.A. at the time. In 1981, 3M — which continued to serve every bit the supplier of PFOA to DuPont and other corporations — found that ingestion of the substance caused nascence defects in rats. Afterward 3M shared this information, DuPont tested the children of pregnant employees in their Teflon division. Of vii births, two had heart defects. DuPont did non make this data public.
In 1984, DuPont became aware that dust vented from factory chimneys settled well across the belongings line and, more disturbing, that PFOA was nowadays in the local water supply. DuPont declined to disclose this finding. In 1991, DuPont scientists adamant an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. The aforementioned year, DuPont institute that water in 1 local district contained PFOA levels at three times that effigy. Despite internal debate, it declined to brand the information public.
(In a statement, DuPont claimed that it did volunteer health information most PFOA to the E.P.A. during those decades. When asked for show, it forwarded ii letters written to Due west Virginian government agencies from 1982 and 1992, both of which cited internal studies that called into question links betwixt PFOA exposure and human health problems.)
Past the '90s, Bilott discovered, DuPont understood that PFOA caused cancerous testicular, pancreatic and liver tumors in lab animals. One laboratory study suggested possible DNA harm from PFOA exposure, and a study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer. DuPont at terminal hastened to develop an alternative to PFOA. An interoffice memo sent in 1993 appear that ''for the starting time time, we have a viable candidate'' that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the trunk for a much shorter duration of time. Discussions were held at DuPont's corporate headquarters to discuss switching to the new compound. DuPont decided against it. The chance was too great: Products manufactured with PFOA were an important function of DuPont'south business, worth $one billion in annual profit.
Merely 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 matter, information technology decided it needed to discover a landfill for the toxic sludge dumped on company holding. Fortunately they had recently bought 66 acres from a depression-level employee at the Washington Works facility that would do perfectly.
By 1990, DuPont had dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge into Dry Run Landfill. DuPont's scientists understood that the landfill drained into the Tennants' remaining property, and they tested the water in Dry Run Creek. Information technology contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the fourth dimension, nor did information technology disclose the fact in the cattle report that it commissioned for the Tennant instance a decade later on — the report that blamed poor husbandry for the deaths of their cows. Bilott had what he needed.
In August 2000, Bilott called DuPont's lawyer, Bernard Reilly, and explained that he knew what was going on. It was a brief conversation.
The Tennants settled. The firm would receive its contingency fee. The whole business might have concluded right there. But Bilott was not satisfied.
''I was irritated,'' he says.
DuPont was nothing like the corporations he had represented at Taft in the Superfund cases. ''This was a completely different scenario. DuPont had for decades been actively trying to conceal their actions. They knew this stuff was harmful, and they put it in the h2o anyhow. These were bad facts.'' He had seen what the PFOA-tainted drinking h2o had done to cattle. What was it doing to the tens of thousands of people in the areas around Parkersburg who drank it daily from their taps? What did the insides of their heads look like? Were their internal organs dark-green?
Bilott spent the following months drafting a public brief confronting DuPont. It was 972 pages long, including 136 fastened exhibits. His colleagues call it ''Rob's Famous Letter of the alphabet.'' ''Nosotros have confirmed that the chemicals and pollutants released into the environment by DuPont at its Dry Run Landfill and other nearby DuPont-owned facilities may pose an imminent and substantial threat to health or the environment,'' Bilott wrote. He demanded immediate activity to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living virtually the factory. On March 6, 2001, he sent the letter to the director of every relevant regulatory authority, including Christie Whitman, administrator of the E.P.A., and the United States attorney full general, John Ashcroft.
DuPont reacted chop-chop, requesting a gag club to block Bilott from providing the information he had discovered in the Tennant case to the regime. A federal courtroom denied information technology. Bilott sent his unabridged case file to the E.P.A.
''DuPont freaked out when they realized that this guy was onto them,'' says Ned McWilliams, a young trial lawyer who after joined Bilott's legal team. ''For a corporation to seek a gag society to forestall somebody from speaking to the E.P.A. is an extraordinary remedy. Yous could realize how bad that looks. They must have known that at that place was a small take chances of winning. Only they were so afraid that they were willing to ringlet the dice.''
With the Famous Letter, Bilott crossed a line. Though nominally representing the Tennants — their settlement had yet to be ended — Bilott spoke for the public, claiming all-encompassing fraud and wrongdoing. He had get a threat non merely to DuPont but also to, in the words of one internal memo, ''the entire fluoropolymers industry'' — an industry responsible for the high-performance plastics used in many modern devices, including kitchen products, computer cables, implantable medical devices and bearings and seals used in cars and airplanes. PFOA was merely one of more than threescore,000 constructed chemicals that companies produced and released into the earth without regulatory oversight.
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''Rob's letter lifted the curtain on a whole new theater,'' says Harry Deitzler, a plaintiff's lawyer in Due west Virginia who works with Bilott. ''Before that letter of the alphabet, corporations could rely upon the public misperception that if a chemical was dangerous, it was regulated.'' Nether the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Human action, the Due east.P.A. tin exam chemicals just when information technology has been provided evidence of harm. This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the East.P.A. has restricted but five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last twoscore years.
It was especially damning to encounter these allegations against DuPont nether the letterhead of one of the nation's most prestigious corporate defence firms. ''You tin can imagine what some of the other companies that Taft was representing — a Dow Chemical — might have idea of a Taft lawyer taking on DuPont,'' Larry Wintertime says. ''At that place was a threat that the firm would suffer financially.'' When I asked Thomas Terp about Taft'southward reaction to the Famous Letter, he replied, non quite convincingly, that he didn't recollect 1. ''Our partners,'' he said, ''are proud of the work that he has done.''
Bilott, however, worried that corporations doing business with Taft might see things differently. ''I'chiliad not stupid, and the people around me aren't stupid,'' he said. ''You can't ignore the economic realities of the ways that concern is run and the manner clients remember. I perceived that there were some 'What the hell are yous doing?' responses.''
The alphabetic character led, 4 years later on, in 2005, to DuPont's reaching a $xvi.5 million settlement with the E.P.A., which had accused the company of concealing its noesis of PFOA's toxicity and presence in the surround in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Deed. (DuPont was not required to admit liability.) At the time, it was the largest ceremonious administrative penalty the East.P.A. had obtained in its history, a statement that sounds more impressive than it is. The fine represented less than 2 percent of the profits earned by DuPont on PFOA that year.
Bilott never represented a corporate client again.
The obvious next pace was to file a grade-action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of anybody whose water was tainted by PFOA. In all ways simply one, Bilott himself was in the ideal position to file such a arrange. He understood PFOA's history also equally anyone inside DuPont did. He had the technical and regulatory expertise, as he had proved in the Tennant case. The only function that didn't make sense was his firm: No Taft lawyer, to anyone's recollection, had ever filed a class-action lawsuit.
It was one thing to pursue a sentimental example on behalf of a few W Virginia cattle farmers and fifty-fifty write a public alphabetic character to the E.P.A. But an industry-threatening course-action suit against 1 of the globe's largest chemical corporations was different. It might establish a precedent for suing corporations over unregulated substances and imperil Taft's lesser line. This point was made to Terp past Bernard Reilly, DuPont'south in-business firm lawyer, according to accounts from Bilott'south plaintiff's-lawyer colleagues; they say Reilly called to need that Bilott back off the example. (Terp confirms that Reilly called him just will not disembalm the content of the call; Bilott and Reilly decline to speak virtually it, citing continuing litigation.) Given what Bilott had documented in his Famous Letter, Taft stood by its partner.
A lead plaintiff shortly presented himself. Joseph Kiger, a dark-schoolhouse teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. About nine months before, he received a peculiar notation from the Lubeck water district. Information technology arrived on Halloween twenty-four hours, enclosed in the monthly water neb. The note explained that an unregulated chemic named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in ''depression concentrations,'' but that it was not a wellness risk. Kiger had underlined statements that he found specially baffling, like: ''DuPont reports that it has toxicological and epidemiological data to support confidence that exposure guidelines established by DuPont are protective of human health.'' The term ''back up confidence'' seemed baroque, as did ''protective of man wellness,'' non to mention the claim that DuPont's own data supported its conviction in its ain guidelines.
Still, Kiger might accept forgotten about it had his wife, Darlene, not already spent much of her adulthood thinking nigh PFOA. Darlene'south outset husband had been a chemist in DuPont's PFOA lab. (Darlene asked that he non be named so that he wouldn't be involved in the local politics around the case.) ''When you worked at DuPont in this boondocks,'' Darlene says today, ''y'all could have everything you wanted.'' DuPont paid for his didactics, it secured him a mortgage and it paid him a generous bacon. DuPont even gave him a costless supply of PFOA, which, Darlene says, she used every bit soap in the family's dishwasher and to make clean the car. Sometimes her husband came abode from work ill — fever, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting — afterward working in one of the PFOA storage tanks. It was a common occurrence at Washington Works. Darlene says the men at the plant called it ''Teflon flu.''
In 1976, after Darlene gave nascence to their second child, her husband told her that he was not allowed to bring his work clothes home anymore. DuPont, he said, had found out that PFOA was causing wellness problems for women and birth defects in children. Darlene would remember this six years subsequently when, at 36, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy and once more viii years later, when she had a second surgery. When the foreign letter from the water district arrived, Darlene says, ''I kept thinking back to his clothing, to my hysterectomy. I asked myself, what does DuPont have to practise with our drinking h2o?''
Joe called the Due west Virginia Department of Natural Resource (''They treated me like I had the plague''), the Parkersburg part of the state's Section of Environmental Protection (''nothing to worry nearly''), the water partition (''I got shut down''), the local health section (''just plainly rude''), even DuPont (''I was fed the biggest line of [expletive] anybody could accept been fed''), before a scientist in the regional E.P.A. office finally took his call.
''Good God, Joe,'' the scientist said. ''What the hell is that stuff doing in your water?'' He sent Kiger information nigh the Tennant lawsuit. On the court papers Kiger kept seeing the same name: Robert Bilott, of Taft Stettinius & Hollister, in Cincinnati.
Bilott had predictable suing on behalf of the 1 or two water districts closest to Washington Works. Merely tests revealed that 6 districts, equally well equally dozens of individual wells, were tainted with levels of PFOA higher than DuPont'south ain internal safety standard. In Picayune Hocking, the water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. All told, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.
But Bilott faced a vexing legal trouble. PFOA was not a regulated substance. It appeared on no federal or state listing of contaminants. How could Bilott claim that 70,000 people had been poisoned if the authorities didn't recognize PFOA as a toxin — if PFOA, legally speaking, was no different than h2o itself? In 2001, it could not even exist proved that exposure to PFOA in public drinking h2o caused health problems. There was scant information available about its impact on big populations. How could the class prove information technology had been harmed by PFOA when the health furnishings were largely unknown?
The best metric Bilott had to judge a rubber exposure level was DuPont'southward own internal limit of one function per billion. But when DuPont learned that Bilott was preparing a new lawsuit, information technology announced that it would re-evaluate that effigy. As in the Tennant instance, DuPont formed a squad equanimous of its own scientists and scientists from the Due west Virginia Section of Environmental Protection. It appear a new threshold: 150 parts per billion.
Bilott found the effigy ''mind-blowing.'' The toxicologists he hired had settled upon a safety limit of 0.2 parts per billion. But West Virginia endorsed the new standard. Within 2 years, three lawyers regularly used by DuPont were hired by the state D.E.P. in leadership positions. One of them was placed in charge of the entire bureau. ''The way that transpired was just amazing to me,'' Bilott says. ''I suppose information technology wasn't so amazing to my fellow counsel in West Virginia who know the arrangement there. But information technology was to me.'' The same DuPont lawyers tasked with writing the safety limit, Bilott said, had go the authorities regulators responsible for enforcing that limit.
Bilott devised a new legal strategy. A year earlier, Westward Virginia had become one of the first states to recognize what is called, in tort law, a medical-monitoring claim. A plaintiff needs to evidence merely that he or she has been exposed to a toxin. If the plaintiff wins, the defendant is required to fund regular medical tests. In these cases, should a plaintiff afterwards become ill, he or she tin sue retroactively for damages. For this reason, Bilott filed the class-action arrange in Baronial 2001 in state court, even though four of the half dozen affected water districts lay across the Ohio edge.
Meanwhile the E.P.A., drawing from Bilott's inquiry, began its own investigation into the toxicity of PFOA. In 2002, the bureau released its initial findings: PFOA might pose human health risks not simply to those drinking tainted water, but also to the general public — anyone, for instance, who cooked with Teflon pans. The E.P.A. was specially alarmed to learn that PFOA had been detected in American claret banks, something 3M and DuPont had known as early as 1976. By 2003 the average concentration of PFOA in the blood of an adult American was four to five parts per billion. In 2000, 3M ceased production of PFOA. DuPont, rather than use an culling compound, built a new factory in Fayetteville, Northward.C., to industry the substance for its own use.
Bilott's strategy appeared to take worked. In September 2004, DuPont decided to settle the class-action suit. It agreed to install filtration plants in the six affected water districts if they wanted them and pay a cash honour of $70 million. It would fund a scientific study to make up one's mind whether in that location was a ''probable link'' — a term that delicately avoided whatever declaration of causation — between PFOA and any diseases. If such links existed, DuPont would pay for medical monitoring of the affected group in perpetuity. Until the scientific study came back with its results, class members were forbidden from filing personal-injury suits against DuPont.
Epitome
A reasonable expectation, at this point, was that the lawyers would motion on. ''In whatsoever other class activeness you've ever read about,'' Deitzler says, ''you get your 10 bucks in the mail, the lawyers become paid and the lawsuit goes abroad. That's what we were supposed to exercise.'' For three years, Bilott had worked for nothing, costing his business firm a fortune. But now Taft received a windfall: Bilott and his team of West Virginian plaintiff lawyers received $21.seven million in fees from the settlement. ''I think they were thinking, This guy did O.K.,'' Deitzler says. ''I wouldn't be surprised if he got a raise.''
Not just had Taft recouped its losses, but DuPont was providing clean water to the communities named in the conform. Bilott had every reason to walk away.
He didn't.
''There was a gap in the data,'' Bilott says. The company'south internal health studies, as damning as they were, were limited to manufacturing plant employees. DuPont could argue — and had argued — that even if PFOA acquired medical problems, it was just because manufacturing plant workers had been exposed at exponentially higher levels than neighbors who drank tainted water. The gap allowed DuPont to claim that it had done nothing wrong.
Bilott represented 70,000 people who had been drinking PFOA-laced drinking water for decades. What if the settlement money could be used to test them? ''Class members were concerned nigh 3 things,'' Winter says. ''One: Do I have C8 in my blood? Two: If I exercise, is it harmful? Three: If it'due south harmful, what are the furnishings?'' Bilott and his colleagues realized they could answer all 3 questions, if but they could test their clients. At present, they realized, there was a way to exercise so. After the settlement, the legal squad pushed to make receipt of the cash award contingent on a full medical test. The class voted in favor of this approach, and within months, nearly 70,000 West Virginians were trading their blood for a $400 bank check.
The team of epidemiologists was flooded with medical data, and there was nothing DuPont could do to stop it. In fact, it was another term of the settlement that DuPont would fund the research without limitation. The scientists, freed from the restraints of bookish budgets and grants, had hit the epidemiological jackpot: an unabridged population's personal data and infinite resources bachelor to study them. The scientists designed 12 studies, including ane that, using sophisticated environmental modeling technology, determined exactly how much PFOA each individual class member had ingested.
Information technology was assured that the panel would return convincing results. But Bilott could not predict what those results would be. If no correlation was institute between PFOA and illness, Bilott's clients would exist barred under the terms of the agreement from filing any personal-injury cases. Because of the sheer quantity of data provided by the customs health written report and the unlimited budget — information technology ultimately toll DuPont $33 million — the panel took longer than expected to perform its analysis. Two years passed without any findings. Bilott waited. A third yr passed. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Still the panel was quiet. Bilott waited.
It was non a peaceful expect. The pressure on Bilott at Taft had congenital since he initiated the form-action suit in 2001. The legal fees had granted him a reprieve, but as the years passed without resolution, and Bilott continued to spend the house's money and was unable to concenter new clients, he establish himself in an bad-mannered position.
''This case,'' Winter says, ''regardless of how hugely successful it ends upward, will never in the Taft business firm's heed supersede what they've lost in the mode of legal business over the years.''
The longer it took for the science panel to conduct its research, the more expensive the case became. Taft continued to pay consultants to interpret the new findings and relay them to the epidemiologists. Bilott counseled class members in West Virginia and Ohio and traveled often to Washington to attend meetings at the E.P.A., which was deciding whether to issue advisories near PFOA. ''We were incurring a lot of expenses,'' Bilott says. ''If the scientific panel found no link with diseases, nosotros'd have to consume it all.''
Image
Clients chosen Bilott to say that they had received diagnoses of cancer or that a family fellow member had died. They wanted to know why it was taking so long. When would they go relief? Among those who called was Jim Tennant. Wilbur, who had cancer, had died of a heart attack. Two years later, Wilbur's wife died of cancer. Bilott was tormented past ''the thought that we still hadn't been able to hold this visitor responsible for what they did in fourth dimension for those people to see information technology.''
Taft did non waver in its support of the case, just the strain began to show. ''It was stressful,'' Sarah Barlage, Bilott'southward married woman, says. ''He was exasperated that it was lasting a long time. But his heels were and then dug in. He's extremely stubborn. Every day that went past with no motion gave him more bulldoze to run across it through. But in the back of our minds, we knew that in that location are cases that go on forever.''
His colleagues on the case detected a change in Bilott. ''I had the impression that it was extremely tough on him,'' Wintertime says. ''Rob had a young family unit, kids growing upward, and he was under pressure from his business firm. Rob is a individual person. He didn't complain. But he showed signs of beingness under enormous stress.''
In 2010, Bilott began suffering foreign attacks: His vision would blur, he couldn't put on his socks, his arms felt numb. His doctors didn't know what was happening. The attacks recurred periodically, bringing blurry vision, slurred voice communication and difficulty moving one side of his torso. They struck suddenly, without alert, and their effects lasted days. The doctors asked whether he was under heightened stress at work. ''Null different than normal,'' Bilott told them. ''Nothing information technology hadn't been for years.''
The doctors ultimately hit upon an constructive medication. The episodes ceased and their symptoms, autonomously from an occasional tic, are nether control, just he even so doesn't have a diagnosis.
''It was stressful,'' Bilott says, ''non to know what the heck was going on.''
In December 2011, after vii years, the scientists began to release their findings: there was a ''likely link'' between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, loftier cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.
''There was relief,'' Bilott says, understated nearly to the indicate of self-effacement. ''We were able to deliver what we had promised to these folks seven years earlier. Especially since, for all those years, DuPont had been saying that we were lying, trying to scare and mislead people. Now we had a scientific answer.''
As of Oct, iii,535 plaintiffs take filed personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont. The showtime member of this grouping to get to trial was a kidney-cancer survivor named Carla Bartlett. In October, Bartlett was awarded $i.6 1000000. DuPont plans to appeal. This may have ramifications well beyond Bartlett'south instance: Hers is one of v ''bellwether'' cases that volition be tried over the grade of this year. Afterward that, DuPont may choose to settle with every afflicted course member, using the outcome of the bellwether cases to decide settlement awards. Or DuPont can fight each conform individually, a tactic that tobacco companies accept used to fight personal-injury lawsuits. At the rate of iv trials a year, DuPont would continue to fight PFOA cases until the year 2890.
DuPont's standing refusal to take responsibility is maddening to Bilott. ''To think that you've negotiated in skillful organized religion a deal that everybody has abided by and worked on for seven years, you reach a betoken where certain things were to be resolved merely then remain contested,'' he says. ''I think almost the clients who have been waiting for this, many of whom are sick or take died while waiting. Information technology'due south infuriating.''
Equally part of its agreement with the E.P.A., DuPont ceased product and use of PFOA in 2013. The five other companies in the world that produce PFOA are also phasing out production. DuPont, which is currently negotiating a merger with Dow Chemic, last year severed its chemical businesses: They accept been spun off into a new corporation called Chemours. The new company has replaced PFOA with similar fluorine-based compounds designed to biodegrade more quickly — the alternative considered and so discarded past DuPont more than 20 years ago. Like PFOA, these new substances have non come nether any regulation from the E.P.A. When asked about the safety of the new chemicals, Chemours replied in a statement: ''A significant torso of data demonstrates that these alternative chemistries can be used safely.''
Last May, 200 scientists from a variety of disciplines signed the Madrid Statement, which expresses concern about the production of all fluorochemicals, or PFASs, including those that take replaced PFOA. PFOA and its replacements are suspected to belong to a big class of artificial compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals; these compounds, which include chemicals used in the production of pesticides, plastics and gasoline, interfere with homo reproduction and metabolism and cause cancer, thyroid problems and nervous-arrangement disorders. In the last five years, however, a new wave of endocrinology enquiry has found that even extremely depression doses of such chemicals can create significant health problems. Among the Madrid scientists' recommendations: ''Enact legislation to require just essential uses of PFASs'' and ''Whenever possible, avoid products containing, or manufactured using, PFASs. These include many products that are stain-resistant, waterproof or nonstick.''
When asked nigh the Madrid Argument, Dan Turner, DuPont's head of global media relations, wrote in an email: ''DuPont does not believe the Madrid Statement reflects a true consideration of the available data on alternatives to long-chain perfluorochemicals, such as PFOA. DuPont worked for more than a decade, with oversight from regulators, to innovate its alternatives. Extensive information has been developed, demonstrating that these alternatives are much more rapidly eliminated from the body than PFOA, and take improved health rubber profiles. 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 earth.''
Every yr Rob Bilott writes a letter to the E.P.A. and the Due west Virginia D.E.P., urging the regulation of PFOA in drinking water. In 2009, the E.P.A. set a ''conditional'' limit of 0.iv parts per billion for short-term exposure, but has never finalized that figure. This means that local water districts are nether no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. In response to Bilott's most recent letter of the alphabet, the E.P.A. claimed that it would announce a ''lifetime health informational level for PFOA'' by ''early 2016.''
This advisory level, if indeed appear, might be a source of comfort to future generations. But if you are a sentient being reading this article in 2016, y'all already have PFOA in your blood. It is in your parents' claret, your children'due south blood, your lover'due south blood. How did information technology get there? Through the air, through your diet, through your use of nonstick cookware, through your umbilical cord. Or you might have boozer tainted water. The Environmental Working Group has found manufactured fluorochemicals present in 94 water districts beyond 27 states (see sidebar starting time on Folio 38). Residents of Issaquah, Wash.; Wilmington, Del.; Colorado Springs; and Nassau County on Long Island are amid those whose water has a college concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in Rob Bilott'due south course-action suit. The drinking water in Parkersburg itself, whose water district was not included in the original class-activeness suit and has failed to hogtie DuPont to pay for a filtration organisation, is currently tainted with high levels of PFOA. Virtually residents appear not to know this.
Where scientists have tested for the presence of PFOA in the world, they have found information technology. PFOA is in the blood or vital organs of Atlantic salmon, swordfish, striped mullet, grayness seals, common cormorants, Alaskan polar bears, brown pelicans, ocean turtles, sea eagles, Midwestern bald eagles, California sea lions and Laysan albatrosses on Sand Island, a wildlife refuge on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway betwixt North America and Asia.
''We encounter a situation,'' Joe Kiger says, ''that has gone from Washington Works, to statewide, to the United States, and now it's everywhere, it's global. We've taken the cap off something here. But it's just not DuPont. Good God. There are threescore,000 unregulated chemicals out there right at present. We have no idea what nosotros're taking.''
Bilott doesn't regret fighting DuPont for the last 16 years, nor for letting PFOA consume his career. But he is still angry. ''The idea that DuPont could get away with this for this long,'' Bilott says, his tone landing halfway betwixt wonder and rage, ''that they could go on making a profit off it, and then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to supplant it with an culling with unknown human furnishings — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they've essentially done nothing. That's 14 years of this stuff standing to be used, standing to be in the drinking h2o all over the country. DuPont just quietly switches over to the next substance. And in the meantime, they fight everyone who has been injured by it.''
Bilott is currently prosecuting Wolf v. DuPont, the second of the personal-injury cases filed by the members of his class. The plaintiff, John M. Wolf of Parkersburg, claims that PFOA in his drinking water caused him to develop ulcerative colitis. That trial begins in March. When information technology concludes, there will be 3,533 cases left to try.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html
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