On August 31st of 2017, E. I. Dupont de Nemours Company and the Dow Chemical Company merged as part of a $130 billion merger. "In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. They had seven cows then. 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. Excerpt from Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. The following is an excerpt of Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont by Robert Bilott and Tom Shroder. These chemicals are most harmful when ingested and consequently bioaccumulate, meaning they build up over time in the body (just as they build up in the environment). Photos by Focus Features and Mike Coppola/Getty Images. Bilott had now discovered the cause in the deaths of the cattle on Tennant's farm and had called DuPont regarding this information. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Just because there really is something in the water doesnt mean you cant also be paranoid. Wilbur Earl Tennant and his siblings took over the land when their father abandoned them in the 1950s, according to the Huffington Post. Shes poor as a whippoorwill. The JSESSIONID cookie is used by New Relic to store a session identifier so that New Relic can monitor session counts for an application. These cookies do not allow the tracking of navigation on other websites and the data collected is not combined or shared with third parties. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public," the magazinenotes. When he cut out the other lung, he noted dark purple splotches where they should have been fluffy and pink. Wilbur Earl Tennant, 67 of New England passed away suddenly at his residence May 15, 2009. It had paid for the 150 acres of land his great-grandfather had bought and for the two-story, four-room farmhouse pieced together from trees felled in the woods, dragged across fields, and raised by hand. Its something I have never run into before., He reached back into the cow and pulled out a liver that looked about right. Because I was feeding her enough feed that she shoulda gained weight instead of losing weight. The use of these cookies is strictly limited to measuring the site's audience. That looks a little bit like cancer to me.. 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. At 72, Jim is so slight that he nearly . After contacting the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, he felt stonewalled. His cattle now drank from its pools. . The carcasses lay where they fell. 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 Tennants were initially reluctant, especially because of its intended use, but DuPont promised it would house only nonhazardous waste, like scrap metal and ash, according to the Huffington Post. Quite soon after DuPont establishes their landfill, weird things start happening to his cattle. a series of Camcorder videos showing "soapy froth" in a creek running through DuPont's landfill property and into Tennant's farm. 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. Now it looked like dirty dishwater. 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. Like the movie, Richs article portrays Bilott as an unassuming and understated man driven by an innate sense of decency. Hunting had been one of Earls greatest pleasures. 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. . "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.". 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. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. Vacillating Wildly From Dispiriting to Exhilarating, A New Biopic Reduces One of Historys Greatest Writers to a Cottagecore Emo Girl, How Steven Spielbergs Autobiographical New Movie Rewrites His Story, The Lawyer Who Became DuPonts Worst Nightmare, He knew his neighbors and his community was being poisoned, commissioned a photographer to take aerial photos. The cookie is used to store and identify a users' unique session ID for the purpose of managing user session on the website. Black smoke curled into the daylight. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The stream looked like many other streams that flowed through his sprawling farm. 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. Did they think no one would notice? And, based on Centers for Disease Control data, PFAS chemicals were found the blood of 98 percent of people studied. He zoomed in. In time, the connection between the Tennants and DuPont would run as deep as the Ohio River. It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. DuPont determined that PFOA passed from pregnant employees to their fetuses. The suit, rather than seeking compensation, requests that the companies fund independent, scientific studies on the health effects of PFAS, according to Time Magazine. 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 . Yes, the household name used as a cookware coating agent that is advertised to make food not stick and is known for its durability in . Photo illustration by Slate. His hand shook as he pressed the zoom button, zeroing in on a stagnant pool. The spleen was thinner and whiter than any spleen he had come cross. Robert Bilott isn't done. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. There also are related substances called precursors that transform into PFOA and PFOS in the body or the environment. "Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. The visit to the Grahams' farm was one of his happiest childhood memories. The farmer Wilbur Tennant had suspected that the chemical company DuPont was responsible for the death of many of his cows. Not even buzzards and scavengers would eat them. Issued by Microsoft's ASP.NET Application, this cookie stores session data during a user's website visit. Tennant didnt live to witness the scope of what unfolded after he persuaded Bilott to file the lawsuit about his dead cows. No one would help him. 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. 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. DuPont then really did proceed to turn that plot into a dumping ground for sludge that it knew to be toxic, going so far as to quietly conduct tests for perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in the nearby river and expressing concern for the health of the Tennants livestock in internal documents nearly a decade before they would be denying culpability and blaming the Tennants in court. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. For example, New Hampshire sued 3M and DuPont, along with a handful of companies that make firefighting foam containing PFAS. Anne Hathaway as Sarah Bilott and the real-life Sarah Bilott. He panned the camera a few degrees. He was 7 years old. 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. Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. 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. Photos by Focus Features and EPK. In 2000, Bilott found notations on an internal DuPont document that referred to a chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8, in Dry Run Creek. DuPont's response was they would settle with the Tennant's however Bilott was . Deer, birds, fish and other wildlife were turning up dead in and around Dry Run. The problem, he thought, was not what they were eating but what they were drinking. Cows that drank from the creek had been healthy. 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. Sometimes it ran so dry hed find them glittering dead in the mud. He died of . Created by Bluecadet. 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. 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 . Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Sue Bailey was pregnant when she worked in the Teflon division of the plant. But you just give me time. "If that's what it takes to get people the information they need and to protect people, we're willing to do it.". Late in the film, a disillusioned Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), up against a wall, imagines that the multinational corporation, the likes of which he once defended, might be setting him up to be a cautionary tale for all their would-be litigants: Look, everybody, even he cant crack the maze, Bilott says, and hes helped build it..
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