Robert Bilott - Exposure: poisoned water, corporate greed, and one lawyers twenty-year battle against Dupont

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Copyright 2019 by Robert Bilott

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Interior design by Dana Sloan

Jacket design by Donna Cheng

Jacket photographs Getty Images (Faucet / Water); Shutterstock (Oil)

Author photograph by Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-7281-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-7283-0 (ebook)

For my sons, Teddy, Charlie, and Tony

They wanna try and keep everything hushed up. Like its some kind of big secret. They wont tell us what it is. They dont wanna talk to me. Because Im an old dumb farmer, Im not supposed to know anything. But its not gonna be covered up. Because Im gonna bring it out in the open for people to see.

Wilbur Earl Tennant

F acts and events set forth in this book are based on and a continuation of my efforts over the last several decades to warn of the past and continuing dangers to the public arising from the behavior of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and others presenting a likelihood of substantial harm to individuals and the public interest arising from exposure to PFOA and related PFAS chemicals. Such facts and events are based on and/or derived from information, documents, and/or testimony and/or statements available in public court filings, trial transcripts, regulatory agency or other public dockets or document repositories and/or publications, media statements, and/or other means by which information is publicly available or otherwise contained in or available through a public record and/or not subject to any court-approved confidentiality or protective-order restrictions. All names and characters are unchanged. Out of an abundance of caution, publication of this book comes only after several public jury trials, including three multiple-week-long jury trials in federal court in Ohio resulting in final jury verdicts and orders, including punitive damage verdicts, and completion of full appellate briefing and oral argument. Certain dialogue and events are reconstructed to the best of the authors ability, with every effort undertaken to avoid revealing or disclosing any attorney-client advice, confidences, or work product and without waiving in any way any such privilege, protection, or other legally recognized or otherwise available privileges or protections for any client or other person, and no person shall interpret anything in this book as representing or constituting any such waiver, as any and all such alleged waivers are expressly denied. All opinions and dialogue of the author (outside of quoted court transcripts) are his purely personal opinions, recollections (to the best of his ability), feelings, and statements, and are not to be attributed to any current or former client, partner, law firm, or other person for any purpose.

July 7, 1996

Washington, West Virginia

N o one would help him.

The cattle farmer stood at the edge of a creek that cut through a sun-dappled hollow. Behind him, white-faced Herefords grazed in rolling meadows. His mothers grandfather had bought this land, and it was the only home he had ever known. As a boy, he had cooled his bare feet in this creek. As a man, he had walked its banks with his wife. As a father, he had watched his little girls splash around in its shallow ripples. His cattle now drank from its pools.

The stream looked like many other streams that flowed through his sprawling farm. 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. Thunderstorms occasionally swelled the creek so much that he couldnt wade across it. Dry spells shrank it to a necklace of pools that winked with silver minnows. Sometimes it ran so dry hed find them glittering dead in the mud. Thats why they called it Dry Run.

Dry Run used to flow gin clear. Now it looked like dirty dishwater. Bubbles formed as it tumbled over stones in a sudsy film. A thicker foam gathered in eddies, trembling like egg whites whipped into stiff peaks so high they sometimes blew off on a breeze. You could poke it with a stick and leave a hole. It smelled rotten.

Thats the water right there, underneath that foam, the farmer said.

He was speaking to the camcorder pressed to his eye. No one believed him when he told them about the things he saw happening to his land. Maybe if he filmed it, they could see for themselves and realize he was not just some crazy old farmer. Birds sang through the white-hot humidity as he panned the camcorder across the creek. His hand shook as he pressed the zoom button, zeroing in on a stagnant pool. Its surface was matte with a crusty film that wrinkled against the shore.

How would you like for your livestock to have to drink something like that? he asked his imagined audience.

The farmers name was Wilbur Earl Tennant. People who didnt know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. At fifty-four, Earl was an imposing figure, six feet tall, lean and ox-shouldered, with sandpaper hands and a permanent squint. He often walked through the woods shirtless and shoeless, his trousers rolled up, and he moved with an agile strength built by a lifetime of doing things like lifting calves over fences.

Hard labor was his birthright. 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. The farmhouse stood at the foot of a sloping meadow that rose into a bald knob.

Dry Run was less than a miles walk from the home place, across Lee Creek, through an open field, and along a pair of tire tracks. It flowed through a corner of the three-hundred-acre farm, in a place Earl called the holler. A small valley cut between hillsides, the holler was where he moved the herd to graze throughout the summer. He walked there every day to count heads and check fences. The cows grazed on a mixed pasture of white Dutch clover, bluegrass, fescue, red clover 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. Now, he was feeding them twice as much and watching them waste away.