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.). 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. 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. In October 2018, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of a firefighter, who used fire suppression foam and equipment containing PFAS for 40 years. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. Initial data showed evidence that it did. And theyre going to find out one of these days that somebodys tired of it.. As in the movie, he at first had a cozy relationship with DuPont, though some of the details of the relationship in the movie are invented. 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. The chemical companies are appealing the decision. "If that's what it takes to get people the information they need and to protect people, we're willing to do it.". The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. LinkedIn sets this cookie for LinkedIn Ads ID syncing. All rights reserved. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. Tennants Farm Pond Dam, Wood County, West Virginia. Used to help protect the website against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks. But that's just the start. The test_cookie is set by doubleclick.net and is used to determine if the user's browser supports cookies. People who didn't know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. They would nuzzle him as he scratched their heads. 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. Wilbur Tennant's family farm was located next to a "non-hazardous" landfill operated by the chemical company. W. Earl Tennant Wilbur Earl Tennant, 67 of New England passed away suddenly at his residence May 15, 2009. . And Im gonna cut her open and find out what caused her to die. When their attorney, Robert Bilott of Cincinnati, asked the EPA to order DuPont to stop using C8, the company sought a restraining . The edge in his voice was anger. See how thats all wallered down? 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. Nothing jumped out in page after page he reviewed, Bilott recalled. Wilbur Tennant's 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 family's 600-some . Bilott found studies that potentially linked PFOA with a variety of cancers, birth defects, and illnesses. The TiPMix cookie is set by Azure to determine which web server the users must be directed to. New York, NY 10004. In 1973 she [took] him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants' neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. 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. People who didnt know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. On August 31st of 2017, E. I. Dupont de Nemours Company and the Dow Chemical Company merged as part of a $130 billion merger. The herd that had once been nearly three hundred head had dwindled to just about half that. They just turn their back and walk on. They are everywhere. However, the company didn't tell employees or regulators and ended the study, the Huffington Post reports. 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 . He sliced open the chest cavity, pulled out a lung, and turned the camera back on. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". Attached to it was a gallbladder that didnt. His freezer had brimmed with venison, wild turkey, squirrel, and rabbit. Thats Hollywood, I guess. (Bilott has not yet responded to my email and telephone inquiries about whether he has ever enjoyed a celebratory Mai Tai or any other tropical, rum-based cocktail.). This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. Attorney Rob Bilott discusses the Fight Forever Chemicals campaign on Nov. 19, 2019. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. 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. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". 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. No one would help him. The farm spread roughly 600 acres, and had a total of 200 cattle roaming around. 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. DuPont de Nemours & Co., used to dump chemical waste from the company's . The Kiger family, teacher Joseph Kiger and his wife, Darlene, really did receive a cagey and curiously worded letter from the local Lubeck water district in October 2000 notifying them that an unregulated chemical named PFOA was present in their drinking water at low concentrations. And, as the film intimates, this letter, delivered on the public utilitys letterhead, was first reviewed by DuPont and started the clock on the statute of limitations. Much of the biographical information about the Kiger family, including Darlenes first marriage to a DuPont engineer who came home sick and called it the Teflon flu, also checks out. Tennant stated that . 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. In 2000, Bilott found notations on an internal DuPont document that referred to a chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8, in Dry Run Creek. He owned 200 cows that grazed on 600 acres. 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. No one believed him when he told them about the things he saw happening to his land. Wilbur Tennant shot this video on his property between 1995 and 1997. Joseph and Darlene Kiger in Park City, Utah, in 2018. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, sold DuPont a 66-acre tract of land that became part of the Dry Run Landfill. The carcass was starting to smell. Science Friday is produced by the Science Friday Initiative, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Tennant recounted to anyone who would listen that he'd lost about 100 calves and 50 cows over the years. Now, he was feeding them twice as much and watching them waste away. In 1999, a farm farmily sued DuPont for the death of their cattle and the ill health of exposed family and farm workers. He panned again: a bonfire on a grassy slope, a pyre of logs as fat as garbage cans. In 1981 , 3M found that ingestion of . 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. They are still in all of us.. The other companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to Time's requests for comment. 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. Seventy years later these chemicals are in our soil, our air, in wildlife. He died of cancer in 2009. The carcasses lay where they fell. LinkedIn sets this cookie from LinkedIn share buttons and ad tags to recognize browser ID. At fifty-four, Earl was an imposing figure, six feet tall, lean and oxshouldered, with sandpaper hands and a permanent squint. 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. The West Virginia-based . 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 . Shorty after that, DuPont started to medically monitor female workers at the Washington Works plant to, as the company's medical director noted, "answer a single question does C8 cause abnormal children?" PFAS are ubiquitous. "Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. 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. Birds sang through the white-hot humidity as he panned the camcorder across the creek. He had formerly worked for the Wood County Schools as a bus. The company turned this land into the unlined Dry Run Landfill. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better experience for the visitors. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. His name is Wilbur Tennant. Bubbles formed as it tumbled over stones in a sudsy film. death of 260 cattle in West Virginia. Earl had sought help, but no one would step up. These chemicals are most harmful when ingested and consequently bioaccumulate, meaning they build up over time in the body (just as they build up in the environment). Maybe if he filmed it, they could see for themselves and realize he was not just some crazy old farmer. Cows that drank from the creek had been healthy. 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. He suspected one of his town's largest employers was up to no good, allegedly dumping chemicals and contaminating his farm's water supply, and the result was hundreds of sickened and dead cattle. A month before DuPonts letter about PFOA, the Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M announced it would stop making a chemical with a similar sounding name: perfluorooctane sulfonic acid or PFOS. Photo illustration by Slate. As he does in the film, the real Bilott did begin to experience strange symptoms in 2010 similar to the strokelike transient ischemic attack seen in the movie. According to the book, DuPont had commissioned a photographer to take aerial photos of the property as part of its defense. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. 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. '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. It was different from the regular dead-cow smells he had dealt with all his life. Home. DuPont settled the Tennant case for an undisclosed amount. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Recently, the cows had started charging, trying to kick him and butt him with their heads, as this one had before she died. The pipe flowed out of a collection pond at the low end of a landfill. When the cattle on Wilbur Earl Tennant's farm began to mysteriously fall ill and die, he suspected it wasn't what the animals were eatingit was what they were drinking. Some of the more surprising moments in the film were in fact real and confirmed by Bilott in his memoir about the case, like when the farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), who brought the case to . During manufacturing processes, PFAS chemicals are released into the air, soil, and water around industrial facilities, the EPA reports. The olive green water had a greenish brown foam encrusting the grassy bank. Michael Hawthorne is a Pulitzer-finalist investigative reporter who focuses on the environment and public health for the Chicago Tribune. The suit, rather than seeking compensation, requests that the companies fund independent, scientific studies on the health effects of PFAS, according to Time Magazine. He was certain that DuPont was fouling the waters that his cattle drank, and he'd already lost more than half of his herd to bizarre illnesses. Class Action - Part 1. 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. The use of these cookies is strictly limited to measuring the site's audience. He toldThe Intercept in 2015 that it bubbled up out of glass containers and "was everywhere." Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. It is a chemical used in the manufacturing process of Teflon. That calf had died miserable. song that goes bum bum bum 2020. wilbur tennant farm locationconservation international ceo. 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. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. Today, that site is home to Chemours Washington Works, a spinoff of DuPont that employs more than 600 people and produces a variety of products used in construction, aerospace, and household goods. He died of cancer in 2009; he was 67. At least thats what his family had been told thirteen years before by the company that had bought their land. NID cookie, set by Google, is used for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to mute unwanted ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads. The primary coordinates for Tennants Farm Pond Dam places it within the WV 26184 ZIP Code delivery area. Even down near the tips of it. 1998: Wilbur Tennant contacts Taft's and Hollisters' (Taft) lawyer, Robert Billot, to assist in his case against DuPont for dumping chemical waste into the river that his cows drink from, causing them severe health problems. It was really his dedication to bringing that out that really inspired me to try to find a way to address the bigger problem., Amazingly, the Pakula-esque paranoid thriller scene, in which Wilbur Tennant spots a low-level helicopter hovering ominously over his property, uses the scope of his hunting rifle to better examine the vehicle, and scares it off in the process, did in fact occur. The calf was engulfed in a black, humming mist. Given the fact that the events depicted on the Tennant cattle farm in Parkersburg, West Virginia, are Dark Waters' most important evidence, the filmmakers should have treated them with the utmost authenticity - to their credit, they did for the most part.Wilbur Tennant's brother Jim really was a DuPont employee who got sick with a disease the doctors couldn't diagnose; and the chemical . 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. The unlikely hero was an Ohio-based corporate defense lawyer paid to protect chemical companies, just like the one the farmer suspected of foul play. This cow died about twenty, thirty minutes ago, Earl said. Thing was, time was running out. He focuses on the froth-covered creek before the tape cuts to a dissected calf with blackened teeth and oddly colored organs. The underdog was a farmer whose family worked the land for generations, building it from a small operation to a thriving livelihood. DuPont's Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. DuPont initially refused, but a court order ultimately forced them to turn over what amounted to more than 100,000 pages, some dating back 50 years. You notice them dark place there, all down through? GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. "I've been dealing with this for . November 25, 2019 12:03 PM EST. DuPont's response was they would settle with the Tennant's however Bilott was . This cookie is managed by Amazon Web Services and is used for load balancing. The tongue looked normal, but some of the teeth were coal black, interspersed with the white ones like piano keys. Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category . How would you like for your livestock to have to drink something like that? he asked his imagined audience. Bilott created a timeline that showed what DuPont and 3M knew about the chemicals. 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. . This cookie is used for load balancing purposes. Mr. Tennant believed early on that something coming out of the plant and landfill was poisoning the water and the animals on his farm. Wilbur Tennant shot this video on his property in the 1990's. Tennant was a farmer who sold part of his land in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to DuPont, for what the company had assured him would be a non-hazardous landfill. Jim still calls it "the home place," although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling into the field. Wilbur's brother, Jim, was also . 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. In 1998, corporate lawyer Robert Bilott ( Mark Ruffalo) is approached by Wilbur Tennant ( Bill Camp) a farmer from his hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia. It is cut from the same cloth as movies like 'Erin Brockovich' and 'A Civil Action'. Bilott had now discovered the cause in the deaths of the cattle on Tennant's farm and had called DuPont regarding this information. The EPA on its own only recently started to take steps to study, monitor, and regulate the use of PFAS and released an update to its action plan programin February 2020. In the 1980s, Jim and his wife, Della, would sell acreage to DuPont for use as a landfill for scrap metal, according to the New York Times Magazine. Something is the matter right there. AWSALB is an application load balancer cookie set by Amazon Web Services to map the session to the target. Bilott did marry a fellow lawyer, Sarah Barlage, who left her career defending corporations against workers compensation claims to raise their sons. The first thing Im gonna do is cut this head open, check these teeth.. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.