He panned the camera a few degrees. The visit to the Grahams' farm was one of his happiest childhood memories. At least thats what his family had been told thirteen years before by the company that had bought their land. Wilbur Tennant's family farm was located next to a "non-hazardous" landfill operated by the chemical company. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. That's just some of the video footage Wilbur showed lawyer Robert Bilott, according to an excerpt from Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. He zoomed out and panned over to an industrial pipe spewing froth into the creek. This cookie is set by the provider Akamai Bot Manager. A few years after the sale, Tennant suspected DuPont had filled the landfill with more than just garbage. DuPont bought 66 acres of the Tennant's farm land from Wilbur Tennant's brother Jim and his wife Della [1]. The cattle farmer stood at the edge of a creek that cut through a sun-dappled hollow. Cookie used to remember the user's Disqus login credentials across websites that use Disqus. 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. A key component of Teflon was C8, also known as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). As a boy, he had cooled his bare feet in this creek. Photo illustration by Slate. It dont do you any good to go to the DNR about it. DuPont bought C8 from 3M and used it to prevent Teflon from clumping during the manufacturing process. working in the garden and around the farm with his grandson . Parkersburg is also home to the Tennant family, who, for nearly a century, have worked land that eventually grew to 700-plus acres and raised more than 200 head of cattle. 'Dark Waters' is an upcoming American legal thriller helmed by Todd Haynes. This cookie is set by Facebook to display advertisements when either on Facebook or on a digital platform powered by Facebook advertising, after visiting the website. A group of citizens in West Virginia challenges a powerful corporation to be more environmentally responsible. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Tennant didnt live to witness the scope of what unfolded after he persuaded Bilott to file the lawsuit about his dead cows. Wilbur Earl Tennant was a cattle farmer in Parkersburg, Virginia, who was known to his family and friends as Earl. Deitzler suggests it would have been a historic first for no partners at a firm of Tafts size and corporate client base to express qualms about a class-action suit of this kind. He couldnt quite place it. Next door to Tennant's farm was a landfill owned by E.I. They concluded that 'the study was valid' and that 'the observed fetal eye defects were due to C8,' according to internal DuPont documents. I dont understand them great big dark red places across there. Tennants Farm Pond Dam, Wood County, West Virginia. When the cattle on Wilbur Earl Tennants farm began to mysteriously fall ill and die, he suspected it wasnt what the animals were eatingit was what they were drinking. Calf born dead. Earl loved his cows, and the cows loved Earl. 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. Attached to it was a gallbladder that didnt. A thicker foam gathered in eddies, trembling like egg whites whipped into stiff peaks so high they sometimes blew off on a breeze. The state vet wouldnt even come out to the farm. 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. (Ammonium perfluorooctanoate or C8) wastes near the farm. (Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call). Wilbur's brother, Jim, was also . 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. It wasnt just his cattle dying. 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. VigLink sets this cookie to show users relevant advertisements and also limit the number of adverts that are shown to them. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. 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. Shes poor as a whippoorwill. These cookies help provide anonymized information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. "Hold on to something," Jim Tennant warned as he fired up his tractor. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public," the magazinenotes. I fed her at least a gallon of grain a day. Yet to this day the companies deny responsibility, Bilott said in an interview. She had spent the summer in the hollow, drinking out of Dry Run until shed started to act strangely. There also are related substances called precursors that transform into PFOA and PFOS in the body or the environment. The same year, the EPA fined DuPont more than $10 million for "failing to report 'substantial risk of injury to human health' from C8 (PFOA)," according to The Intercept. All rights reserved. Wilbur Tennant had become desperate. In his memoir, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, published earlier this year, Bilott says that doctors could only really diagnose the issue as unusual brain activity after an MRI similar to the one he undergoes in the film. From playing with computers to building networks: How the space for Black Software was made. It wasnt his first. 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. "If we can't get where we need to go to protect people through our regulatory channels, through our legislative process, then unfortunately what we have left is our legal process," Bilott told Time in November 2019. Two weeks after he filmed the foamy water, Earl aimed the camcorder at one of his cows. Now it looked like dirty dishwater. He had stopped feeding his family venison from the deer he shot on his land. Invest in quality science journalism by making a donation to Science Friday. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. However, the company didn't tell employees or regulators and ended the study, the Huffington Post reports. Sue Bailey was pregnant when she worked in the Teflon division of the plant. In 1973 she [took] him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants' neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. No one believed him when he told them about the things he saw happening to his land. Thank you for helping us continue making science fun for everyone. Wilbur's brother, Jim, was also employed as a laborer at the Washington Works plant, along with hundreds more who found steady work at the area's largest employer. They just turn their back and walk on, he told the camera. Thats very unusual. song that goes bum bum bum 2020. wilbur tennant farm locationconservation international ceo. Standing walleyed in an open field was a polled Hereford red with a white face and floppy ears. Bilotts law firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, typically represents corporate clients like DuPont in environmental cases, not people like Tennant. I noticed that in at least one of the scenes where I was portrayed. Tennant and his brother Jim wanted to get to the bottom of it, so they dissected some carcasses. . "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.". In another field, a grown cow lay dead. This cookie is used to manage the interaction with the online bots. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. 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. They just turn their back and walk on. 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 . "The innards was bright green.". But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. As a man, he had walked its banks with his wife. Did they think he would just sit by? As Bilott details in Exposure, the April 23, 2001, incident was eventually confirmed between his legal team and DuPonts. PFOA and PFOS are among more than 9,000 versions of synthetic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. A videotape Tennant shot with a VHS camcorder shows emaciated cows with tumors on their hides. . Up until about a decade ago, few in the public knew about C8, let alone its potential health effects, but DuPont allegedly knew its toxic effects for decades and purportedly failed to tell employees or the public, according to The Intercept. As luck would have it, the company bought 66 acres from one of their employees, Wilbur Tennant. Ken Wamsley spent nearly 40 years working at DuPont Washington Works plant, and some of that time, he measured levels of the chemical C8 (PFOA). He sliced open the chest cavity, pulled out a lung, and turned the camera back on. The muscle looked fine, but a thin, yellow liquid gathered in the cavity where it once beat. One tooth had an abscess so large he reckoned he could stick an ice pick clear under it. Azure sets this cookie for routing production traffic by specifying the production slot. (Chicago Tribune Handout). These cookies do not allow the tracking of navigation on other websites and the data collected is not combined or shared with third parties. This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. Lawyers in Parkersburg, West Virginia, turned him down when he urged them to sue DuPont, then one of areas biggest employers. In Minnesota, 3M paid an $850 million settlement after the states attorney general used the industry documents in a lawsuit demanding clean drinking water for communities near one of its manufacturing plants outside Minneapolis. Thats whats so scary about these chemicals, said Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University who studies PFAS. That day had never come, so he decided he would make them watch a video. The use of these cookies is strictly limited to measuring the site's audience. One person can't always cause a change, but one person can set off a chain of reactions to cause change. Class Action - Part 1. Dark Waters is a 2019 American legal thriller film directed by Todd Haynes and written by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan.The story dramatizes Robert Bilott's case against the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont after they contaminated a town with unregulated chemicals. Nothing jumped out in page after page he reviewed, Bilott recalled. 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. Details of what DuPont allegedly knew and when came to light in pages and pages of documents, initially as part of the lawsuit Bilott filed against the company on behalf of Wilbur Tennant and then in more than 3,000 subsequent personal injury suits that have followed in the past two decades. W. Earl Tennant Wilbur Earl Tennant, 67 of New England passed away suddenly at his residence May 15, 2009. . The flies hummed as loud as bees. A downstate Illinois native, Hawthorne joined the Tribune in 2004 after covering the environment and state government in Ohio, Illinois and Florida. People who didnt know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. 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. The calf was engulfed in a black, humming mist. By the late 1990s, West Virginia farmer Wilbur Tennant was at his wits end. emily in paris savoir office. Bilott also discovered that years before he sued DuPont on behalf of the Tennants, company scientists had tested the creek running through the familys pasture. It dont do you any good to go to the DNR about it. 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." He focuses on the froth-covered creek before the tape cuts to a dissected calf with blackened teeth and oddly colored organs. These included a polluted river . Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Something is the matter right there. . 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. None of this information was shared with the public. As in the movie, these events really did lead to a large class-action suit that triggered a massive epidemiological study that, after a yearslong wait, showed there really was a probable link between PFOA and certain conditions, including high cholesterol, kidney cancer, and testicular cancer, though the movie depicts one scientist going so far as to tell Bilott that the results are irrefutable. (DuPont has continued to deny that it did anything wrong.). Bubbles formed as it tumbled over stones in a sudsy film. He marked each one on a calendar, a simple slash mark for each grotesque death. When their attorney, Robert Bilott of Cincinnati, asked the EPA to order DuPont to stop using C8, the company sought a restraining . The pipe flowed out of a collection pond at the low end of a landfill. Twitter sets this cookie to integrate and share features for social media and also store information about how the user uses the website, for tracking and targeting. During the years before DuPont settled the lawsuit paying the Tennants an undisclosed amount without assigning blame for the dead cows the company sent Bilott boxes of documents he requested through the normal court process. The Devil We Know: Directed by Stephanie Soechtig, Jeremy Seifert. His hand shook as he pressed the zoom button, zeroing in on a stagnant pool. 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 . This cookie is native to PHP applications. In May 2015, a consortium of scientists across many disciplines released a document called the Madrid Statement. Flies. The carcasses lay where they fell. For example, the DuPont executive played by Victor Garber, Phil Donnelly, seems to be a composite, and the scene where he turns on Bilott, hissing at him, Fuck you, hick, appears to be invented. Copyright 2019 by Robert Bilott. Bilott tries to communicate to Tennant that he "isn't that kind of environmental lawyer," yet Tennant's exasperated resilience strikes a chord with the compassionate . But two years before 3M announced its phaseout in 2000, the company informed EPA officials for the first time that PFOA and PFOS accumulate in human blood, take years to leave the body and dont break down in the environment. It all started with Wilbur Tennant's dying cows. In 1999, a farm farmily sued DuPont for the death of their cattle and the ill health of exposed family and farm workers. Earl pulled on white gloves and pried open the cows mouth, probing her gums and teeth. Listen to an interview with Bilott about the chemical lawsuits on Science Friday. So, the couple sold about 60 acres to DuPont. The Teflon Toxin, Part 2: Wilbur Tennant vs. DuPont. See how thats all wallered down? Maybe if he filmed it, they could see for themselves and realize he was not just some crazy old farmer. He panned again: a bonfire on a grassy slope, a pyre of logs as fat as garbage cans. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. The Messed Up True Story Behind Dark Waters, Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia. Jim still calls it "the home place," although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling into the field. He was speaking to the camcorder pressed to his eye. Tennant Farm, December 1999, from DuPont Cattle Team Report. The problem, he thought, was not what they were eating but what they were drinking. He made for an imposing figure at six feet tall, lean and broad shouldered, his . 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. November 25, 2019 12:03 PM EST. Wilbur Tennant and his family had recently sold part of their farmland to a company and had no idea what would end up coming of it. He was an excellent marksman, and his family had always had enough meat to eat. Among the files, many mentions of the chemical PFOA, also known as C8, a slippery surfactant, that was first produced by DuPont in 1938, appeared. But a single letter, sent by a DuPont scientist to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, began unraveling a more alarming story. death of 260 cattle in West Virginia. Some states aren't waiting for the feds to act, taking steps to hasten a response to "forever chemicals" through mitigation and regulation, and some of those steps include court action. Over the course of that lawsuit, Bilott discovered that DuPont had been using a chemical called PFOA in the production of Teflon for decades, while quietly studying its effects on lab animals and factory workers. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. His mothers grandfather had bought this land, and it was the only home he had ever known. Something was killing cattle on his West Virginia farm, but no one wanted to help him prove that frothy, green-colored water coming from a neighboring property . riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. People who didn't know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. In time, the connection between the Tennants and DuPont would run as deep as the Ohio River. Now it was filled with specimens you might find in a pathology lab. LinkedIn sets the lidc cookie to facilitate data center selection. Bill Pullman was portraying me, and hes taller and younger, and everyone appeared to be drinking. 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. . It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. Other testing by 3M found the compounds in apples, bread, green beans and ground beef. 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.. A creek connects the landfill and the fields of Tennant's farm. Ill do something about it.. Teflon came into prominence in the 1940s, and with it came DuPont's rise as a chemical giant. Bilott is currently suing several makers and users of these chemicals on behalf of all Americans with PFAS in their blood. Behind him, white-faced Herefords grazed in . 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. DuPont's Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He died of cancer in 2009; he was 67. In the 1980s, Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, got an offer from DuPont. Of Bilotts Famous Letter to the EPA, Terp told the Times that he didnt recall if there was any particular reaction internally and that the partners at Taft were proud of the work that he has done.. Wilbur Tennant shot this video in the late 1990s on his property in West Virginia. And theyre going to find out one of these days that somebodys tired of it.. New York, NY 10004. Eight years later 3M paused one of its animal studies after every monkey fed PFOS died. Isnt that lovely?. Her eyes were sunk deep in her head. Nor was it on the list of substances regulated by the EPA. The spleen was thinner and whiter than any spleen he had come cross. LinkedIn sets this cookie to remember a user's language setting. Even though he sold them to be finished and slaughtered for beef, he didnt have the heart to kill one himself, unless it had a broken leg and he needed to end its suffering. a series of Camcorder videos showing "soapy froth" in a creek running through DuPont's landfill property and into Tennant's farm. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Tennant was a farmer who sold part of his land in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to DuPont, for Wilbur Tennant vs. DuPont on Vimeo (He later would be played by actor Mark Ruffalo in the 2019 film Dark Waters.). Dry Run used to flow gin clear. The cookie is a session cookies and is deleted when all the browser windows are closed. He walked there every day to count heads and check fences. The goal of the merger was to combine two businesses that dabbled in . A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. Michael Hawthorne is a Pulitzer-finalist investigative reporter who focuses on the environment and public health for the Chicago Tribune. She had a calf over there. In 1998, corporate lawyer Robert Bilott ( Mark Ruffalo) is approached by Wilbur Tennant ( Bill Camp) a farmer from his hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia. Behind him, white-faced Herefords grazed in rolling meadows. Wilbur Tennant is one farmer in a community who sees DuPont as something more than an employer. Recently, the cows had started charging, trying to kick him and butt him with their heads, as this one had before she died. The farm would have stretched even longer if one of Wilbur Tennant's brothers, Jim, did not sell 66 acres to the DuPont company in the early 1980's for a landfill they were going to create for their factory. On paper, Rob Bilott didnt appear to be one of those crusading lawyers in legal thrillers. They are everywhere. LinkedIn sets this cookie to store performed actions on the website. 'Dark Waters' is slated to release on November 22, 2019, and has Mark Ruffalo playing the role of a tenacious attorney, who takes the fight to a big chemical company. 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. After the Tennants had been paid and Bilotts law firm collected its fees for representing them, he found himself coming back again and again to the piles of industry documents he had collected, urged on by the persistent Tennant. . When they bought half of the farm from Wilbur they began to use it for a landfill to store the toxins being . During manufacturing processes, PFAS chemicals are released into the air, soil, and water around industrial facilities, the EPA reports. He hardly ever saw minnows swimming in the creek anymore, except the ones that floated belly up. Joseph and Darlene Kiger in Park City, Utah, in 2018. C8 and other long-chain per-fluorinated chemicals are used in a myriad of household, industrial, and commercial products. Editors note: In 1999, Robert Bilott sued E.I. The first thing Im gonna do is cut this head open, check these teeth.. By the 1980s, DuPont had allegedly begun dumping PFOA waste into the Dry Creek Landfill, near the Tennant property. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. The chemical companies are appealing the decision. Bilott found studies that potentially linked PFOA with a variety of cancers, birth defects, and illnesses. They were green like the foamy water that ran out of a pipe from the nearby Dry Run Landfill and into the creek from which the Tennant cattle drank. This time he is seeking to force 3M and DuPont to pay for medical monitoring of every American exposed to PFAS. Bilott is back in court again. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. As unbelievable as it may sound, DuPont really did, in the 1960s, offer some of its staff Teflon-laced cigarettes as a human experiment into the potential side effects of the PFOA-produced nonstick material, as the movie recounts. DuPont responds with a study of the Tennant farm conducted with the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A) that . 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. Bilott did marry a fellow lawyer, Sarah Barlage, who left her career defending corporations against workers compensation claims to raise their sons. 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.