And now, another side of the DuPont story …
A few weeks ago, following the announcement that DuPont would be merging with Dow Chemical, I wrote about the company’s long history in Delaware.
It’s a story of a company and a state that, as far as I know, has no parallel in the United States. Ralph Nader, in a 1973 report, even labeled Delaware the “company state.”
Despite Nader’s criticism, many Delawareans remained proud of DuPont. My recent column reflected the positive side of the company’s history.
But companies - like people - are complicated, neither all good nor all bad, as an article about DuPont in this week’s New York Times Magazine made clear.
The story goes beyond merely negative. It’s one of the most damning examples I’ve ever read about corporate misbehavior.
And the ultimate source is DuPont itself.
Here’s a capsule version of Nathaniel Rich’s “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” and why it’s important not only for Delawareans but for all Americans.
It should be as central to our political conversation in Election Year 2016 as the abuses of Wall Street.
Wilbur Tennant, a cattle farmer in Parkersburg, W.Va., the site of a huge DuPont plant, had over many years gradually built up his herd. He owned 200 cows that grazed on 600 acres.
They were so gentle they would come over to the Tennants to be milked.
But that changed shortly after DuPont began dumping a chemical compound known as PFOA into a stream that flowed down to Tennant’s property.
The cows not only began acting strangely - they would charge the Tennants if they came near - they also began dying left and right.
Tennant thought he knew the source of the trouble, the runoff from the DuPont plant.
Tennant called veterinarians. None would help. Neither would politicians or journalists. Just as Delaware was a company state, Parkersburg was a company town.
To prepare his case Tennant recorded himself dissecting cows.
All the organs he sliced open had “unusual discolorations - some dark, some green.” He photographed one dead cow with an eye that was a “brilliant, chemical blue.”
Before they died, the cows suffered “constant diarrhea” and slobbered “white slime the consistency of tooth paste.” He lost 153 cows.
With no one to help him locally, Tennant took his evidence to Rob Bilott of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Billot was an environmental lawyer, but he worked for the other side. He had spent his career defending chemical companies such as DuPont. Despite that background, Bilott took the case.
Here’s where the story gets really depressing. After Bilott filed suit against DuPont in 1999, the company’s lawyer informed him that DuPont and the EPA would conduct a joint study.
The study would be led by six veterinarians, three picked by DuPont and three picked by the EPA.
That sounds like that would be a gold standard study.
Here’s what the veterinarians found: Despite their decades of experience, the Tennants didn’t know how to raise cows. The deaths, they said, were the result of “poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.”
Neither Tennant nor Bilott would accept this as the end of the case.
In his research, Bilott had come across a DuPont letter that referred to a chemical known as PFOA, which is used in the making of Teflon.
He asked DuPont for all files pertaining to PFOA. DuPont initially refused but was forced by a judge to hand over the documents, “110,000 pages in all, some a half century old.”
As he plowed through the documents, Bilott was shocked. They were so damning that Bilott thought that perhaps DuPont didn’t realize what they contained, internal papers and studies that proved DuPont, for decades, had known of the dangers of PFOA.
Interestingly enough, DuPont workers knew something was going on.
Plant employees even referred to “teflon flu,” a condition that included fever, vomiting and diarrhea, after working on the PFOA storage tanks.
In 1976, it says in the article, DuPont did tell employees not to bring home their work clothes, because they could cause health problems for women and birth defects in children. But the public was kept in the dark.
Here are two of the most damaging facts to emerge from Tennant’s case:
• A 1993 interoffice memo says that DuPont has found a compound to replace PFOA that appears to be less toxic. The article says, “Discussions were held at DuPont’s corporate headquarters to discuss switching to the new compound. DuPont decided against it.”
Management didn’t want to risk the $1 billion in yearly profits brought in from products made with PFOA.
• Internally, DuPont scientists had arrived at a safety threshold for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion.
But when DuPont learned that Bilott would be filing another suit, it announced a study to reevaluate that finding. It was by conducted a team of scientists from both DuPont and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
The study found a new, supposedly safe level of exposure: Instead of one part per billion, it was now 150 parts.
But of course the federal EPA jumped all over that, right?
Nope. PFOA isn’t even a regulated substance.
This is why the case is so important to our political discussion, both locally and nationally.
I would wager most people are under the illusion that the EPA is this all-powerful agency keeping tabs of all the chemical substances that we come in contact with every day.
But as the article says, “Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm.
“This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.”
Only five chemicals are restricted. And yet that’s too many for some. Congressional Republicans are actively working to cut EPA funding.
Do you really think that’s a good idea?
This column doesn’t do the article justice. Read the whole thing.
Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.
