DuPont and C-8

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Please improve this article if you can. (October 2006)

1 History
2 Cover up
3 Settlement
4 Notes

[edit] History

In West Virginia June 1999, the Tennant family sued DuPont for accidentally killing 280 Hereford cows with C-8, an alleged animal carcinogen. DuPont was dumping the chemical in a landfill for nonhazardous waste. The chemical leaked into Dry Run Creek, where the cows drank it. The Tennants settled. As part of the settlement, the Tennants were forbidden to discuss the case. The local drinking water was also contaminated with the C-8. Up to 50,000 residents of the Mid-Ohio Valley started a class-action lawsuit against DuPont. They claim that DuPont knew that C-8 was in the public water supply since 1984, but never informed the community. DuPont says the amount of C-8 is too low to raise health concerns, and that they met their reporting obligations.

After learning about the issue from an Environmental Working Group (EWG) petition, EPA brought its lawsuit against DuPont in July 2004.[1]^[2] The EPA charged that for twenty years the company had covered up information about the dangers posed by PFOA, or C-8, a chemical used in the manufacture of Teflon. Internal studies by DuPont indicated that the indestructible chemical causes cancer, birth defects and other serious health problems in animals. The EPA researched how C-8 has entered the bloodstream of much of the country’s population. Blood-bank samples from across the U.S. were looked at. The chemical is in the blood of over 95 percent of Americans.^[3]

DuPont officials repeatedly assured the public in 2000 and 2001 that C-8 in tap water was safe, even as their own scientists and lawyers were seriously concerned that the company lacked key studies to support the claim. When critical studies on C-8 were completed in 2002 they showed birth defects serious enough to trigger what EPA Deputy Administrator Steve Johnson called the largest regulatory review under the Toxic Substances Control Act in the history of the EPA.^[4]

On May 26, 2003, ammonium perfluorooctanoate or APFO (used to produce Teflon and similar products) was found in groundwater near a North Carolina DuPont plant. The chemical had leaked from a cement cistern the company was not using.

[edit] Cover up

DuPont concealed information showing that tap water levels of C-8 were far higher than historic testing data had revealed. When DuPont engineers discovered in 2001 that the company's detection methods for C-8 in tap water failed to find about 80 percent of the Teflon ingredient in the water, the company withheld this critical information from local water utility officials for 3 years, and even then did not directly communicate it to them. Authorities with the Little Hocking water system in Ohio only found out about the problems with testing methods in 2004, when plaintiff's lawyers obtained the documents.^[5]

In November of 2000, DuPont lawyer John Bowman, in a memo to DuPont lawyer, Bernard Reilly and others states,

"Our story is not a good one, we continue to increase our emissions into the river in spite of internal commitments to reduce or eliminate the release of this chemical...."^[6]

EPA investigated the company's 17-year suppression of birth defect studies at its Parkersburg, West Virginia plant and drinking water contamination in two neighboring communities.^[7]

[edit] Settlement

The case was settled in December, 2005, for $10.25 million in fines plus $6.25 million for environmental research and education, the largest civil administrative penalty the EPA ever levied. The government did not require the company to admit legal liability.^[8]^[9]

In its defense, DuPont stated that the amount of C-8 used in their products was too low to raise health concerns and as part of the agreement. DuPont officials further stated that they did not deliberately withhold information from the government and settled with the EPA only to avoid a protracted and expensive court battle. After the settlement was reached, DuPont announced that it had already taken the steps to cut PFOA emissions and that by the time the settlement with the EPA was made, emissions from DuPont plant's in the U.S. had been reduced by 98%.