People who didn't know him very well called him Wilbur, but friends and family called him Earl. The farm spread roughly 600 acres, and had a total of 200 cattle roaming around. Call him, they suggested. This cookie is used for storing country code selected from country selector. His mothers grandfather had bought this land, and it was the only home he had ever known. Now it was filled with specimens you might find in a pathology lab. DuPont later paid more than $750 million to settle lawsuits filed by Teflon plant neighbors with PFOA-linked diseases, including testicular and kidney cancer, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease and pregnancy-induced hypertension. 'Dark Waters' is an upcoming American legal thriller helmed by Todd Haynes. 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. That looks a little bit like cancer to me.. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance. At least thats what his family had been told thirteen years before by the company that had bought their land. 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. However, the company didn't tell employees or regulators and ended the study, the Huffington Post reports. Wilbur Tennant had become desperate. C8 and other long-chain per-fluorinated chemicals are used in a myriad of household, industrial, and commercial products. Tennant told him that DuPont had bought land from his family that was adjacent to his farm, for what the company had assured him would be a non-hazardous landfill, according to a letter Bilott later filed with the Environmental Protection Agency. This video contains graphic imagery. Maybe if he filmed it, they could see for themselves and realize he was not just some crazy old farmer. The other companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to Time's requests for comment. Their innards smelled funny and were sometimes riddled with what looked to him like tumors. 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. All Public Member Trees results for Wilbur Tennant. Teflon came into prominence in the 1940s, and with it came DuPont's rise as a chemical giant. 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. The pattern element in the name contains the unique identity number of the account or website it relates to. As a man, he had walked its banks with his wife. A load balancing cookie set to ensure requests by a client are sent to the same origin server. In April 2000, after 3M conducted tests and studies on a similar, sister chemical to C8 (PFOA) called PFOS, the company notified the Environmental Protection Agency it found that "even modest exposure could have devastating health effects" and started to phase out PFOS use, as well as PFOA, according to the Huffington Post. oh, two-thirds bigger than it should be., The kidneys, too, looked abnormal. 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. 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 . PFOA (C8) and PFOS were the long-chain, more commonly used substances in a larger group of more than 4,000 man-made chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). But what about the alarming moment when a fire breaks out at the home of Joseph Kigers father, who shares his name? PFOA and PFOS are among more than 9,000 versions of synthetic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. (He later would be played by actor Mark Ruffalo in the 2019 film Dark Waters.). DuPont de Nemours & Co., used to dump chemical waste from the company's . 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. None of this information was shared with the public. Two of seven babies born to Teflon plant employees in 1981 had facial deformities similar to what 3M had found in newborn rats. Yes, DuPont is still in business, although it has struggled slightly to survive independently from time to time due to its poor public reputation. You could poke it with a stick and leave a hole. Todd Haynes new film Dark Waters wades into some of the most complicated topics in public health, chemistry, and the law to dramatize the story of environmental attorney Robert Bilott and his nearly two decades of civil actions against DuPont. 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. In the 1990s Wilbur began to notice weird deformities in his cows and some of them were even dying. Flies. . The smell was odd. And I burn them all. . 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. In 1999, a farm farmily sued DuPont for the death of their cattle and the ill health of exposed family and farm workers. These included a polluted river . Excerpt from Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. As company scientists noted in internal documents, Nine out of ten people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever, and coughing.. It wasnt just his cattle dying. The Taft offices are in Cincinnati, Ohio. So, the couple sold about 60 acres to DuPont. 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 carcass was starting to smell. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. DuPont immediately removed all female workers from areas where they might come into contact with the chemical.". Alternatives for PFOA and PFOS promoted as safe by industry are just as dangerous, if not more so, scientists are finding. Whatever had killed this cow appeared to Earl to have eaten her from the inside out. One person can't always cause a change, but one person can set off a chain of reactions to cause change. Behind him, white-faced Herefords grazed in rolling meadows. We consulted a variety of sources, including Nathaniel Richs 2016 New York Times Magazine feature The Lawyer Who Became DuPonts Worst Nightmare (upon which the movie is based), Bilotts own book, other longform articles, and attorney Harry Deitzler (the personal-injury lawyer played in the movie by Bill Pullman), to help sort out whats true and whats embellished. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. The suit, rather than seeking compensation, requests that the companies fund independent, scientific studies on the health effects of PFAS, according to Time Magazine. Tennants Farm Pond Dam, Wood County, West Virginia. 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. The calf was engulfed in a black, humming mist. Wilbur Tennant shot this video on his property between 1995 and 1997. 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. Earl had sought help, but no one would step up. Taking on the case of Wilbur Tennant (played by Bill Camp in the film), a West Virginian farmer whose land is contaminated from toxic run-off dumped near his premises by DuPont Company, Bilott (Ruffalo) quickly encounters the gargantuan machine of corporate disinformation, negligence, cover-up, and strong-arm tactics that allow the company to . Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. He knew his neighbors and his community was being poisoned, Bilott told the Post. 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. These "forever chemicals" are an emerging global health and environmental issue. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. These cookies help provide anonymized information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. 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. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time." Cows that drank from the creek had been healthy. wilbur tennant farm location . When they bought half of the farm from Wilbur they began to use it for a landfill to store the toxins being . . The company told the family that they wanted to use the land to . SiteLock sets this cookie to provide cloud-based website security services. Did they think no one would notice? 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. The farmhouse stood at the foot of a sloping meadow that rose into a bald knob. We'll assume you're okay with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. They had seven cows then. He panned again: a bonfire on a grassy slope, a pyre of logs as fat as garbage cans. The muscle looked fine, but a thin, yellow liquid gathered in the cavity where it once beat. 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. It was different from the regular dead-cow smells he had dealt with all his life. He couldnt quite place it. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. 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. Calf born dead. Earl loved his cows, and the cows loved Earl. 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 . W. Earl Tennant Wilbur Earl Tennant, 67 of New England passed away suddenly at his residence May 15, 2009. . Then one autumn day in 2000, local schoolteacher Joe Kiger . Seventy years later these chemicals are in our soil, our air, in wildlife. Predictably, his complaints to government went ignored. When he noticed his cows were mysteriously dying, he filmed what was happening on the farm, and the toxic legacy of C8 - DuPont's Teflon chemical - was discovered. Wilbur's brother, Jim, was also . Bubbles formed as it tumbled over stones in a sudsy film. Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. "The innards was bright green.". The use of these cookies is strictly limited to measuring the site's audience. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Tennants Farm Pond Dam is a cultural feature (dam) in Wood County. Edit your search or learn more. Theres been fifty-six cows thats been burnt just like this.. The cattle farmer stood at the edge of a creek that cut through a sun-dappled hollow. Two weeks after he filmed the foamy water, Earl aimed the camcorder at one of his cows. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. 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. Wilbur Earl Tennant. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. It dont do you any good to go to the DNR about it. 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 sliced open the chest cavity, pulled out a lung, and turned the camera back on. 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. The saga began for Bilott when Wilbur Tennant, a cattle farmer from Parkersburg, West Virginia, called Bilott a few months before he made partner at a white-shoe Cincinnati law firm. Thats the water right there, underneath that foam, the farmer said. 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). He was born at New England, a son of the late Blaine Tennant and Lydia (Wildman) Tennant. DuPont appeared to be concerned enough about PFOA that the company tested employees at the Teflon plant and found the chemical in their blood, the letter to the EPA revealed. DuPont named this sight Dry Run Landfill after the creek that ran onto the Tennant farm. The company turned this land into the unlined Dry Run Landfill. 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). But now it seemed they were ignoring him. Wilbur Tennants 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 familys 600-some-acre property in the 1980s. 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. Wilbur Tennant shot this video in the late 1990s on his property in West Virginia. DuPont and the family settled the lawsuit soon after Bilott shared that information with one of the companys lawyers, who had referred to PFOA in an email as the material 3M sells us that we poop into the river and into drinking water.. Issued by Microsoft's ASP.NET Application, this cookie stores session data during a user's website visit. On the other side of his property line, Dry Run Landfill was filling up the little valley that had once belonged to his family. The cattle farmer stood at the edge of a creek that cut through a sun-dappled hollow. After this sale, Tennant's cattle started to become sick and Tennant began to understand that . 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 determined that PFOA passed from pregnant employees to their fetuses. Michael Hawthorne is a Pulitzer-finalist investigative reporter who focuses on the environment and public health for the Chicago Tribune. He sued DuPont again on behalf of thousands of people who lived near the Teflon plant and for decades had been exposed to PFOA through drinking water and air pollution. The federal agency notes that it has made significant progress in addressing the public health concerns "from issuing groundwater cleanup guidance to proposing a positive regulatory determination for both PFOA and PFOS, EPA has made progress under every aspect of the Action Plan.". . . Around here, that economic engine was DuPont, known for innovations like nylon, Tyvek, and Teflon. Yet to this day the companies deny responsibility, Bilott said in an interview. The Tennants had sold some of their property to DuPont years earlier. (Maddie McGarvey/for the Washington Post) If Wilbur Earl Tennant's cows hadn't died from a mysterious wasting disease during the .
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