On August 31st of 2017, E. I. Dupont de Nemours Company and the Dow Chemical Company merged as part of a $130 billion merger. Todd Haynes new film Dark Waters wades into some of the most complicated topics in public health, chemistry, and the law to dramatize the story of environmental attorney Robert Bilott and his nearly two decades of civil actions against DuPont. This cookie is managed by Amazon Web Services and is used for load balancing. His name is Wilbur Tennant. The cows grazed on a mixed pasture of white Dutch clover, bluegrass, fescue, red clover . At fifty-four, Earl was an imposing figure, six feet tall, lean and oxshouldered, with sandpaper hands and a permanent squint. SiteLock sets this cookie to provide cloud-based website security services. Edit your search or learn more. Sure, bitters make cocktails taste great. Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. The state vet wouldnt even come out to the farm. Isnt that lovely?. Tennant had a problem. Photos by Focus Features and EPK. There also are related substances called precursors that transform into PFOA and PFOS in the body or the environment. Sometimes the cattle watered at a spring-fed bathtub trough at the farthest end of the field, but mostly they drank from Dry Run. They just turn their back and walk on. 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.". Tennant was a West Virginia farmer whose family owned land near a DuPont factory on the Ohio River where the chemical giant made one of its signature inventions: Teflon nonstick and anti-stain coatings used in carpets, clothing, cookware and hundreds of other products. The use of these cookies is strictly limited to measuring the site's audience. Nearly 70,000 people participated. Bilott's connection to Parkersburg dated back to his childhood, when he spent summers there visiting his grandmother, and her friend is the one who suggested to Wilbur Tennant that he call Bilott, an environmental lawyer at Cincinnati firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, for help. May 15, 2009; Location: Washington, West Virginia; Tribute & Message From The Family. . The campaign coincided with the release of the film "Dark Waters" starring Mark Ruffalo inspired by the true story of Bilott, who discovered a community had been dangerously exposed for decades to deadly chemicals. Yes, DuPont is still in business, although it has struggled slightly to survive independently from time to time due to its poor public reputation. Over the course of that lawsuit, Bilott discovered that DuPont had been using a chemical called PFOA in the production of Teflon for decades, while quietly studying its effects on lab animals and factory workers. Mr. Tennant believed early on that something coming out of the plant and landfill was poisoning the water and the animals on his farm. 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. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". But a single letter, sent by a DuPont scientist to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, began unraveling a more alarming story. Used to help protect the website against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks. apples, bread, green beans and ground beef. Just because there really is something in the water doesnt mean you cant also be paranoid. 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. Photos by Focus Features and Mike Coppola/Getty Images. The Devil We Know: Directed by Stephanie Soechtig, Jeremy Seifert. Wilbur Tennant shot this video on his property in the 1990's. Tennant was a farmer who sold part of his land in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to DuPont, for what the company had assured him would be a non-hazardous landfill. 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. When he cut out the other lung, he noted dark purple splotches where they should have been fluffy and pink. Seventy years later these chemicals are in our soil, our air, in wildlife. Her son, Bucky, was born in 1981 with nose and eye deformities. 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?" Hunting had been one of Earls greatest pleasures. Azure sets this cookie for routing production traffic by specifying the production slot. He hardly ever saw minnows swimming in the creek anymore, except the ones that floated belly up. Thats where theyre supposed to come down here and pull water samples, to see whats in that water. He pointed the camera at a stagnant pool of water flanked by knee-high grass. C8 is a "surfactant," a chemical compound that reduces surface tension. When he noticed his cows were mysteriously dying, he filmed what was happening on the farm, and the toxic legacy of C8 - DuPont's Teflon chemical - was discovered. So, the couple sold about 60 acres to DuPont. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. DuPont's Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. 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. In the 1980s, Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, got an offer from DuPont. Thank you for helping us continue making science fun for everyone. Its head was tipped back at an awkward angle. And if it weren't for one West Virginia farmer, Wilbur Tennant, we still might not know much about them. After contacting the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, he felt stonewalled. Tennant's farm is close to a newly DuPont-owned landfill. When the cattle on Wilbur Earl Tennants farm began to mysteriously fall ill and die, he suspected it wasnt what the animals were eatingit was what they were drinking. DuPont detected PFOA in the drinking water of communities near the Teflon plant. 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. The herd that had once been nearly three hundred head had dwindled to just about half that. The same year, the EPA fined DuPont more than $10 million for "failing to report 'substantial risk of injury to human health' from C8 (PFOA)," according to The Intercept. They just turn their back and walk on, he told the camera. 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. It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time." His pleas for help fell on deaf ears, according to the Huffington Post's article, "Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia." "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.". Editors note: In 1999, Robert Bilott sued E.I. The chemical companies are appealing the decision. One person can't always cause a change, but one person can set off a chain of reactions to cause change. In March, a federal judge limited the case to Ohio residents with a specific amount of the chemicals in their blood, which alone could include up to 11 million people. Her white hide was crusted with diarrhea, and her hip bones tented her hide. The goal of the merger was to combine two businesses that dabbled in . Bilott found studies that potentially linked PFOA with a variety of cancers, birth defects, and illnesses. Earl pulled on white gloves and pried open the cows mouth, probing her gums and teeth. 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. When DuPont settled that lawsuit in 2004, the company agreed to finance a study of PFOAs health effects. Ken Wamsley spent nearly 40 years working at DuPont Washington Works plant, and some of that time, he measured levels of the chemical C8 (PFOA). Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, sold DuPont a 66-acre tract of land that became part of the Dry Run Landfill. Location of conflict: Little Hocking, City of Belpre, Tuppers Plains, Village of Pomeroy, Lubeck Public Service District, and Mason County Public Service District: . He died of . He toldThe Intercept in 2015 that it bubbled up out of glass containers and "was everywhere." Once this came to light, reports indicate, the Tennants settled their lawsuit against DuPont in August 2000, but the fight wasn't over. . "Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. When she returned to work at DuPont, Bailey learned about a study by 3M (the manufacturer of C8) that found similar deformities in unborn rats exposed to the chemical, according to the Huffington Post. working in the garden and around the farm with his grandson . The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. Wilbur Tennant is one farmer in a community who sees DuPont as something more than an employer. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. Then one autumn day in 2000, local schoolteacher Joe Kiger . By that point, 153 animals died had died grisly deaths on his property . . VigLink sets this cookie to show users relevant advertisements and also limit the number of adverts that are shown to them. 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. Wilbur Earl Tennant was a cattle farmer in Parkersburg, Virginia, who was known to his family and friends as Earl. Sometimes it ran so dry hed find them glittering dead in the mud. "The innards was bright green.". The federal agency notes that it has made significant progress in addressing the public health concerns "from issuing groundwater cleanup guidance to proposing a positive regulatory determination for both PFOA and PFOS, EPA has made progress under every aspect of the Action Plan.". 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. That day had never come, so he decided he would make them watch a video. He didnt believe it anymore. Wilbur Tennant showed Bilott alarming video footage in which his previously docile animals had turned . I dont recall him drinking, Deitzler says. At fifty-four, Earl was an . 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. In 2005, DuPont agreed to phase out its use of C8 (PFOA) by 2015, according to The Intercept. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. I noticed that in at least one of the scenes where I was portrayed. "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. The stream looked like many other streams that flowed through his sprawling farm. The farmer Wilbur Tennant had suspected that the chemical company DuPont was responsible for the death of many of his cows. LinkedIn sets this cookie to remember a user's language setting. Tennant and his brother Jim wanted to get to the bottom of it, so they dissected some carcasses. In 1970, a company that purchased 3Ms PFOS-based firefighting foam abruptly halted a demonstration after it killed fish in a nearby stream. Then, in 1998 Bilott received a phone call from Wilbur Tennant who lived on his farm in Parkersburg, West Virginia. 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. Wilbur's brother, Jim, was also . The cookie does not store any personally identifiable data. This cookie is associated with Django web development platform for python. His freezer had brimmed with venison, wild turkey, squirrel, and rabbit. The muscle looked fine, but a thin, yellow liquid gathered in the cavity where it once beat. A thicker foam gathered in eddies, trembling like egg whites whipped into stiff peaks so high they sometimes blew off on a breeze. Then he wrote a 19-page letter, attached some of the industry documents and mailed the package to officials at the EPA and the Department of Justice. The campaign coincided with the release of the film "Dark Waters" starring Mark Ruffalo inspired by the true story of Bilott, who discovered a community had been dangerously exposed for decades to deadly chemicals. Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category . Dont understand that at all. Shes poor as a whippoorwill. Copyright 2019 by Robert Bilott. izuku has a rare quirk fanfiction; novello olive oil trader joe's; micah mcfadden parents; qatar airways 787 9 business class; mary holland married; spontaneous novel ending explained The EPA on its own only recently started to take steps to study, monitor, and regulate the use of PFAS and released an update to its action plan programin February 2020. No one believed him when he told them about the things he saw happening to his land. 'Dark Waters' is slated to release on November 22, 2019, and has Mark Ruffalo playing the role of a tenacious attorney, who takes the fight to a big chemical company. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. Invest in quality science journalism by making a donation to Science Friday. 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. He died of cancer in 2009; he was 67. Bilott has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of the chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). Patches of missing hair, discolorations in their . (Ammonium perfluorooctanoate or C8) wastes near the farm. Because I was feeding her enough feed that she shoulda gained weight instead of losing weight. The same year, DuPont found that water in one local district contained PFOA levels at three times that figure. DuPont's Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Initial data showed evidence that it did. Wilbur Tennant. 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." Joseph and Darlene Kiger in Park City, Utah, in 2018. Foam began appearing in a creek that meandered past the landfill before spilling into the Tennants pasture, he later testified in a court filing. Did they think no one would notice? The suit alleges negligence claiming the chemicals contaminated the state's natural resources, according to New Hampshire Public Radio. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. PFOA is part of a larger class of PFAS chemicals. 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. I fed her at least a gallon of grain a day. The farm would have stretched even longer if one of Wilbur Tennant's brothers, Jim, did not sell 66 acres to the DuPont company in the early 1980's for a landfill they were going to create for their factory. 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. riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. Thunderstorms occasionally swelled the creek so much that he couldnt wade across it. But two years before 3M announced its phaseout in 2000, the company informed EPA officials for the first time that PFOA and PFOS accumulate in human blood, take years to leave the body and dont break down in the environment. Wilbur Tennant passed away on May 15, 2009 at the age of 67 in Washington, West Virginia. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. VigLink sets this cookie to track the user behaviour and also limit the ads displayed, in order to ensure relevant advertising. emily in paris savoir office. At least thats what his family had been told thirteen years before by the company that had bought their land. But you just give me time. It wasnt just his cattle dying. The sp_landing 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. du Pont de Nemours and Co, better known as DuPont, on behalf of a West Virginia farmer whose cows were dying. Something was killing cattle on his West Virginia farm, but no one wanted to help him prove that frothy, green-colored water coming from a neighboring property . C8 and other long-chain per-fluorinated chemicals are used in a myriad of household, industrial, and commercial products. Not even buzzards and scavengers would eat them. (Maddie McGarvey/for the Washington Post). Michael Hawthorne is a Pulitzer-finalist investigative reporter who focuses on the environment and public health for the Chicago Tribune. It was really his dedication to bringing that out that really inspired me to try to find a way to address the bigger problem., Amazingly, the Pakula-esque paranoid thriller scene, in which Wilbur Tennant spots a low-level helicopter hovering ominously over his property, uses the scope of his hunting rifle to better examine the vehicle, and scares it off in the process, did in fact occur. Tennants Farm Pond Dam, Wood County, West Virginia. 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. Its something I have never run into before., He reached back into the cow and pulled out a liver that looked about right. A farmer's cows suddenly start dying off. He sued DuPont again on behalf of thousands of people who lived near the Teflon plant and for decades had been exposed to PFOA through drinking water and air pollution. A corporate courtroom drama typically doesn't need extensive visual effects, but "Dark Waters" had a few key moments that could not be created practically. This cookie is used for load balancing purposes. The company turned this land into the unlined Dry Run Landfill. Tennant Farm, December 1999, from DuPont Cattle Team Report. The olive green water had a greenish brown foam encrusting the grassy bank. As a linchpin bolstering Dark Waters case as a message movie, the events depicted on the Tennant cattle farm in Parkersburg, West Virginia, really ought to be accurate, and for the most part, they are. There is something wrong with this water, Tennant says on the videotape. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Quite soon after DuPont establishes their landfill, weird things start happening to his cattle. The films portrayal of the physical toll that the excruciating, decadeslong legal battle against DuPont seems to have had on Bilotts health is also accurate. The sometimes contentious tenor of Bilotts relationship with Wilbur Tennant is also true to life. 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. He knew the folks at the DNR, because they gave him a special permit to hunt on his land out of season. The smell was odd. Even though he sold them to be finished and slaughtered for beef, he didnt have the heart to kill one himself, unless it had a broken leg and he needed to end its suffering. 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. Anyone could see that something was terribly wrong, not only with the landfill itself but with the agencies responsible for monitoring it. None of this information was shared with the public. These included a polluted river . Some of the more surprising moments in the film were in fact real and confirmed by Bilott in his memoir about the case, like when the farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), who brought the case to . 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.). Its surface was matte with a crusty film that wrinkled against the shore. 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. Bilott created a timeline that showed what DuPont and 3M knew about the chemicals. We'll assume you're okay with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Birds sang through the white-hot humidity as he panned the camcorder across the creek. 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. Two of seven babies born to Teflon plant employees in 1981 had facial deformities similar to what 3M had found in newborn rats. And I burn them all. Thats why they called it Dry Run.