A new Netflix documentary titled, “The Devil We Know,” tells the story of DuPont’s decades-long cover-up of the harm caused by chemicals used to make its popular non-stick Teflon™ products. As DuPont is only required to carry out medical monitoring if scientists prove that PFOA causes the ailments, an independent scientific review is set up.
The movie stars Mark Ruffalo as that tenacious lawyer, Rob Bilott, with Anne Hathaway as his wife. But she wasn’t buying it.
Tommy Joyce, the mayor of Parkersburg, is bullish on West Virginia: “We’ve got enough coal to light the world, gas to heat the world and brains to run the world.” Fellow Parkersburg High grad Brian Flinn, an engineer, worked for DuPont for eight and …
Robert decides to take each defendant's case to DuPont, one at a time. DuPont sent all the women home, but insisted the men were not at risk.Under terms of the $343-million settlement, six water districts could test people’s blood and sue DuPont if the Science Panel could prove exposure to C8 caused any harm. Dark Waters grossed $11.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $10.4 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $21.6 million. To get data for it, Robert's team tells the locals they can get their settlement money after donating blood. 30 years and 30 surgeries later, he tells his story. DuPont agrees to settle for $70 million. On her first day back to work, she heard her co-workers talking about another DuPont employee who had given birth to a baby with deformities very similar to Bucky’s.More than 3,500 cases were filed against DuPont. Her job involved working in a large room with huge cylinders filled with C8. Dark Waters is about Robert Bilott, an attorney who risked his life to expose DuPont’s poisoning of a West Virginia town and is currently being shown at selected theaters around the US. The tumors are similar to those seen in rats exposed to C8.DuPont tried to blame Sue for her son’s birth defects. But it still makes Teflon. Her son, William Bailey, aka Bucky, was born with half of a nose, one nostril, a serrated eyelid and a keyhole pupil where his iris and retina were detached.In order to overcome the challenge of recruiting enough volunteers to submit their blood for analysis, the panel used some of the funds from the settlement to offer each volunteer $400.Sue’s work for DuPont required her to come in direct contact with C8. In 2012, the results were in: Exposure to C8 in drinking water caused six different human diseases.DuPont said it was confident the test results would prove C8 was safe.The film features stories from a number of people who were affected by DuPont’s Teflon, including DuPont employees, children and adults in the surrounding community, as well as pets, livestock and wildlife.The film also features Ken Wamsley, a former DuPont employee who worked for the company for 40 years. Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. TOM LEONARD: As Rob Bilott discovered, the Tennant family's farm was right next to DuPont's vast Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where it manufactured Teflon. In fact, as many as 110 million Americans may be drinking water tainted with PFAS chemicals. The Teflon production process left behind a discharge of water. Bilott investigated DuPont’s use of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, at its Washington Works plant in West Virginia on the Ohio Robert encourages him to accept DuPont's settlement, but Tennant refuses, wanting justice. When a handful of West Virginia residents discover DuPont has been pumping its poisonous Teflon chemical into the air and public water supply of more than 70,000 people, they file one of the largest class action lawsuits in the history of environmental law.