It smelled rotten. "Mysterious wasting disease" and. Birds sang through the white-hot humidity as he panned the camcorder across the creek. When DuPont settled that lawsuit in 2004, the company agreed to finance a study of PFOAs health effects. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. Now it was filled with specimens you might find in a pathology lab. Used by Yahoo to provide ads, content or analytics. Ill do something about it.. Tennant was a West Virginia farmer whose family owned land near a DuPont factory on the Ohio River where the chemical giant made one of its signature inventions: Teflon nonstick and anti-stain coatings used in carpets, clothing, cookware and hundreds of other products. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Tennant Farm, December 1999, from DuPont Cattle Team Report. 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. Home. "PFASs are extremely persistent in the environment primarily because the chemical bond between the carbon and fluorine atoms is extremely strong and stable," according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In another field, a grown cow lay dead. Wilbur Earl Tennant and his siblings took over the land when their father abandoned them in the 1950s, according to the Huffington Post. And, based on Centers for Disease Control data, PFAS chemicals were found the blood of 98 percent of people studied. 1: The Farm. Wilbur Tennant. The cows grazed on a mixed pasture of white Dutch clover, bluegrass, fescue, red clover . According to the book, DuPont had commissioned a photographer to take aerial photos of the property as part of its defense. In the 1990s Wilbur began to notice weird deformities in his cows and some of them were even dying. But you just give me time. In 1970, a company that purchased 3Ms PFOS-based firefighting foam abruptly halted a demonstration after it killed fish in a nearby stream. You notice them dark place there, all down through? Dark Waters'messed up true story reveals an emerging public health and environmental threat, the pervasiveness of "forever chemicals," and an alleged corporate cover-up. Wilbur Tennant passed away on May 15, 2009 at the age of 67 in Washington, West Virginia. Lawyers in Parkersburg, West Virginia, turned him down when he urged them to sue DuPont, then one of areas biggest employers. . As Bilott recollected in a panel discussion with the Washington Post, it was Wilburs obstinate refusal to simply take his monetary settlement and walk away that compelled Bilott to keep pursuing new legal avenues to hold DuPont to account. wilbur tennant farm location. 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. It was different from the regular dead-cow smells he had dealt with all his life. The pipe flowed out of a collection pond at the low end of a landfill. And if it weren't for one West Virginia farmer, Wilbur Tennant, we still might not know much about them. He was speaking to the camcorder pressed to his eye. 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. A corporate courtroom drama typically doesn't need extensive visual effects, but "Dark Waters" had a few key moments that could not be created practically. The suit, rather than seeking compensation, requests that the companies fund independent, scientific studies on the health effects of PFAS, according to Time Magazine. Class Action - Part 1. Theres been fifty-six cows thats been burnt just like this.. The campaign coincided with the release of the film "Dark Waters" starring Mark Ruffalo inspired by the true story of Bilott, who discovered a community had been dangerously exposed for decades to deadly chemicals. ATSDR/CDC also notes that more studies need to be done in the area of health effects, particularly on shorter-chain substances. 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. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s. DuPont bought C8 from 3M and used it to prevent Teflon from clumping during the manufacturing process. Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyers Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont. They are everywhere. It is based on a shocking true story, where a series . When she returned to work at DuPont, Bailey learned about a study by 3M (the manufacturer of C8) that found similar deformities in unborn rats exposed to the chemical, according to the Huffington Post. She had spent the summer in the hollow, drinking out of Dry Run until shed started to act strangely. Other testing by 3M found the compounds in apples, bread, green beans and ground beef. The edge in his voice was anger. 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 . June 14, 2022; salem witch trials podcast lore 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.". All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. Azure sets this cookie for routing production traffic by specifying the production slot. It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. 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. apples, bread, green beans and ground beef. Two weeks after he filmed the foamy water, Earl aimed the camcorder at one of his cows. Wilbur Earl Tennant was a cattle farmer in Parkersburg, Virginia, who was known to his family and friends as Earl. Issued by Microsoft's ASP.NET Application, this cookie stores session data during a user's website visit. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. It is a chemical used in the manufacturing process of Teflon. The chemical companies are appealing the decision. It does not store any personal data. It looked, at most, a few days old. The farmer's name was Wilbur Earl Tennant. 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 less than two years he had lost at least one hundred calves and more than fifty cows. It wasnt his first. By that point, 153 animals died had died grisly deaths on his property . The US House of Representatives passed a bill in January 2020 that would require the EPA to deem per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) hazardous and establish a national drinking water standard. Initial data showed evidence that it did. Tennant and his brother Jim wanted to get to the bottom of it, so they dissected some carcasses. The sometimes contentious tenor of Bilotts relationship with Wilbur Tennant is also true to life. DuPont's own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers," according to the New York Times Magazine. Did they think no one would notice? It begs the question: How many cancers and other health effects are we willing to accept?, Read the investigation: Tribune finds more than 8 million Illinoisans get drinking water from a utility where forever chemicals have been detected >>>. Because I was feeding her enough feed that she shoulda gained weight instead of losing weight. Tennant wants to sue chemical giant . Thank you for helping us continue making science fun for everyone. Attorney Rob Bilott discusses the Fight Forever Chemicals campaign on Nov. 19, 2019. A farmer's cows suddenly start dying off. On the other side of his property line, Dry Run Landfill was filling up the little valley that had once belonged to his family. 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.). 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. 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. Its just like that other calf up yonder, he said, panning over the matted grass. The substance is stable, persistent, and very difficult to break down. The carcasses lay where they fell. Bilott helped companies comply with new environmental regulations established by the Superfund legislation and became an expert at the chemistry of pollutants, according to the New York Times Magazine. Neither Tennant nor Bilott would accept this as the end of the case. Then, in 1998 Bilott received a phone call from Wilbur Tennant who lived on his farm in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Trial lawyer Harry Deitzler, whos played by Bill Pullman in the film, told Slate in a telephone interview that while Dark Waters captured Bilotts sense of commitment and general modesty, it was less accurate in its depiction on one particular issue: Robert Bilott has not been known to be an especially big fan of Mai Tais, either in general or on special occasions. Once this came to light, reports indicate, the Tennants settled their lawsuit against DuPont in August 2000, but the fight wasn't over. His pleas for help fell on deaf ears, according to the Huffington Post's article, "Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia." 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. One person can't always cause a change, but one person can set off a chain of reactions to cause change. Tennant didnt live to witness the scope of what unfolded after he persuaded Bilott to file the lawsuit about his dead cows. Earl had sought help, but no one would step up. Dont understand that at all. And Im gonna cut her open and find out what caused her to die. She had a calf over there. Nothing jumped out in page after page he reviewed, Bilott recalled. Wilbur Tennant, played by Bill Camp in the film, showed Bilott videos and pictures he had taken of his cows foaming at the mouth and staggering in ways they hadn't before, with lesions covering . Joseph and Darlene Kiger in Park City, Utah, in 2018. One tooth had an abscess so large he reckoned he could stick an ice pick clear under it. As a man, he had walked its banks with his wife. 0 Comments Comments 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. Tennant was a farmer who sold part of his land in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to DuPont, for Wilbur Tennant vs. DuPont on Vimeo Over the decades they steadily acquired land and cattle, until 200 cows roamed more than 600 hilly acres. GRAPHIC CONTENT: An excerpt from Wilbur Earl Tennant's video showing the mysterious wasting disease affecting his cows in the 1990s.