It's a story straight out of a legal thriller penned by John Grisham, though instead of the Deep South, this one takes place in Appalachia. A few years after the sale, Tennant suspected DuPont had filled the landfill with more than just garbage. Bilott created a timeline that showed what DuPont and 3M knew about the chemicals. His name is Wilbur Tennant. Wilbur Earl Tennant and his siblings took over the land when their father abandoned them in the 1950s, according to the Huffington Post. Whatever had killed this cow appeared to Earl to have eaten her from the inside out. The problem had to be Dry Run, he thought. Sometimes the cattle watered at a spring-fed bathtub trough at the farthest end of the field, but mostly they drank from Dry Run. During manufacturing processes, PFAS chemicals are released into the air, soil, and water around industrial facilities, the EPA reports. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. The Post read a statement from DuPont that reiterated the company's commitment to health and safety and protecting the environment: "Although DuPont does not make the chemicals in question, we have announced a series of commitments around our limited use of PFAS and are leading [the] industry in supporting federal legislation and science-based regulatory efforts to address these chemicals." The carcass was starting to smell. . The farmer Wilbur Tennant had suspected that the chemical company DuPont was responsible for the death of many of his cows. DuPonts lawyers had a different perspective on the incident, however, writing in an email, It is a federal offense to threaten violence against an aircraft carrying passengers and Please be advised that the helicopter pilot has indicated that he will pursue todays incident with federal authorities.. While DuPont did also conduct walk-throughs and physical searches of the Tennants belongings, deeply alienating some of the familys renters, the movie depicts some of Tennants evidence going mysteriously missing. Her white hide was crusted with diarrhea, and her hip bones tented her hide. We consulted a variety of sources, including Nathaniel Richs 2016 New York Times Magazine feature The Lawyer Who Became DuPonts Worst Nightmare (upon which the movie is based), Bilotts own book, other longform articles, and attorney Harry Deitzler (the personal-injury lawyer played in the movie by Bill Pullman), to help sort out whats true and whats embellished. Bilott helped companies comply with new environmental regulations established by the Superfund legislation and became an expert at the chemistry of pollutants, according to the New York Times Magazine. They concluded that 'the study was valid' and that 'the observed fetal eye defects were due to C8,' according to internal DuPont documents. Hunting had been one of Earls greatest pleasures. Quite soon after DuPont establishes their landfill, weird things start happening to his cattle. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. It was different from the regular dead-cow smells he had dealt with all his life. He focuses on the froth-covered creek before the tape cuts to a dissected calf with blackened teeth and oddly colored organs. (Chicago Tribune Handout). And, based on Centers for Disease Control data, PFAS chemicals were found the blood of 98 percent of people studied. The pipe flowed out of a collection pond at the low end of a landfill. 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. These "forever chemicals" are an emerging global health and environmental issue. . 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. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public," the magazinenotes. 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. He had formerly worked for the Wood County Schools as a bus. Then, in 1998 Bilott received a phone call from Wilbur Tennant who lived on his farm in Parkersburg, West Virginia. W. Earl Tennant Wilbur Earl Tennant, 67 of New England passed away suddenly at his residence May 15, 2009. . It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. The June 23, 2000, letter listed something in the landfill that didnt appear in the other documents or in Tafts chemical dictionaries. Its surface was matte with a crusty film that wrinkled against the shore. . 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. DuPont immediately removed all female workers from areas where they might come into contact with the chemical.". He didnt believe it anymore. The cattle farmer stood at the edge of a creek that cut through a sun-dappled hollow. Wilbur Earl Tennant, 67 of New England passed away suddenly at his residence May 15, 2009. People who didnt know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. That things about . A downstate Illinois native, Hawthorne joined the Tribune in 2004 after covering the environment and state government in Ohio, Illinois and Florida. Class Action - Part 1. 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. DuPont detected PFOA in the drinking water of communities near the Teflon plant. Tennant Farm, December 1999, from DuPont Cattle Team Report. 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 . The cows grazed on a mixed pasture of white Dutch clover, bluegrass, fescue, red clover . 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. On August 31st of 2017, E. I. Dupont de Nemours Company and the Dow Chemical Company merged as part of a $130 billion merger. 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. Bubbles formed as it tumbled over stones in a sudsy film. Bilott, with begrudging support of his firm (Tim Robbins plays his boss), confirms Wilbur's worst fears: the local DuPont plant has been dumping toxic waste on land next to the Tennant farm. That looks a little bit like cancer to me.. Wilbur Earl Tennant was a cattle farmer in Parkersburg, Virginia, who was known to his family and friends as Earl. VigLink sets this cookie to track the user behaviour and also limit the ads displayed, in order to ensure relevant advertising. And Im gonna cut her open and find out what caused her to die. . 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. Call him, they suggested. Did they think he would just sit by? On paper, Rob Bilott didnt appear to be one of those crusading lawyers in legal thrillers. In 1973 she [took] him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants' neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. "In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. Wilbur Earl Tennant. The Devil We Know: Directed by Stephanie Soechtig, Jeremy Seifert. Then one autumn day in 2000, local schoolteacher Joe Kiger . riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. C8 is a "surfactant," a chemical compound that reduces surface tension. 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. Their quest for justice wound its way through the American judicial system for nearly two decades, unearthing long-hidden deeds which, some reports say, are akin to those perpetrated by big tobacco on the public. . If Wilbur Earl Tennants cows hadnt died from a mysterious wasting disease during the 1990s, the world might have never learned about the secret history of toxic forever chemicals. A variation of the _gat cookie set by Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to allow website owners to track visitor behaviour and measure site performance. Did they think no one would notice? When DuPont settled that lawsuit in 2004, the company agreed to finance a study of PFOAs health effects. 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 film seems to imply that the fire might have been an arson attempt that hit the wrong house, though it doesnt suggest who might have lit it. 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. 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. We lurched down a rutted dirt road past the old clapboard farmhouse where he grew up. But the point I want to make, and make it real clear, he said, zooming in, thats the mouth of Dry Run.. People who didn't know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. It also helps in fraud preventions. Neither Tennant nor Bilott would accept this as the end of the case. This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. VigLink sets this cookie to show users relevant advertisements and also limit the number of adverts that are shown to them. And if it sounds familiar, it should. 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.. I dont understand them great big dark red places across there. I noticed that in at least one of the scenes where I was portrayed. The company told the family that they wanted to use the land to . "If that's what it takes to get people the information they need and to protect people, we're willing to do it.". Washington, West Virginia. Lawyers in Parkersburg, West Virginia, turned him down when he urged them to sue DuPont, then one of areas biggest employers. No matter how much he fed them, they always looked to be wasting away, and some even bled from their mouth as they bellowed, according to the New York Times Magazine. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. 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. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. Thats very unusual. He sliced open the chest cavity, pulled out a lung, and turned the camera back on. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. 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. They just turn their back and walk on. Wilbur Tennant showed Bilott alarming video footage in which his previously docile animals had turned . For example, New Hampshire sued 3M and DuPont, along with a handful of companies that make firefighting foam containing PFAS. 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. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. They're in virtually everything we use, including stain-resistant fabric and carpets, nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing, and firefighting foam. In 1981 , 3M found that ingestion of . The farmhouse stood at the foot of a sloping meadow that rose into a bald knob. Thats the largest gall I ever saw in my life! As a father, he had watched his little girls splash around in its shallow ripples. Bilott's grandmother had lived close by, and as a child he had spent a summer on a neighbouring farm, where family members recalled that Bilott had grown up to become an environmental lawyer, and put his name forward to the Tennants. He hardly ever saw minnows swimming in the creek anymore, except the ones that floated belly up. 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. 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. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". On the other line was Wilbur Tennant (played by Bill Camp), a cattle farmer from Parkersburg, W.V. The calf was engulfed in a black, humming mist. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. Wilbur Tennant shot this video in the late 1990s on his property in West Virginia. 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. 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. And the money came in handy, too, since Jim, a Washington Works employee, had for years suffered from flu-like symptoms and illnesses that baffled doctors, as outlined in a Delaware Online article from 2016. In the 1990s Wilbur began to notice weird deformities in his cows and some of them were even dying. Jim still calls it "the home place," although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling into the field. However, the company didn't tell employees or regulators and ended the study, the Huffington Post reports. (Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call). 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. "The innards was bright green.". Home. DuPont named this sight Dry Run Landfill after the creek that ran onto the Tennant farm. At least thats what his family had been told thirteen years before by the company that had bought their land. The TiPMix cookie is set by Azure to determine which web server the users must be directed to. 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. 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. As company scientists noted in internal documents, Nine out of ten people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever, and coughing.. Bilott is currently suing several makers and users of these chemicals on behalf of all Americans with PFAS in their blood. The herd that had once been nearly three hundred head had dwindled to just about half that. 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 died of cancer in 2009. Predictably, his complaints to government went ignored. It is a chemical used in the manufacturing process of Teflon. And I burn them all. 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 . July 7, 1996 Washington, West Virginia. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Bilott is seeking class-action status in the case against several companies, including 3M and Chemours. The edge in his voice was anger. Seventy years later these chemicals are in our soil, our air, in wildlife. Teflon came into prominence in the 1940s, and with it came DuPont's rise as a chemical giant.
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