The Lawyer Who Became Dupont's Worst Nightmare

"Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution."

By NATHANIEL RICH, New York Times, Jan. 6, 2016

Another in-depth report in the tradition of Steven Brill's brilliant account of America's Most Admired Lawbreaker, Nathaniel Rich paints a riveting portrait and account of corporate attorney Rob Bilott taking the case of a cattle farmer who called about his cows mysteriously dying. Years of digging let to discovery of the cause: wide scale poisoning from PFOA-tainted water from DuPont's landfill from Teflon production. Long after DuPont learned of PFOA's health hazards, they buried the data and denied the links - and the responsibility. Federal, state and local regulators repeatedly sided with DuPont's claims of safety over citizens' and scientists' claims of harm. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) is now recognized by EPA as a health risk. 

"STATES OF UNCERTAINTY

No one knows for certain how much PFOA is safe to drink. Rob Bilott’s lawsuit against DuPont in West Virginia included anyone whose drinking water had levels above 0.05 parts per billion. But last June, based on a comprehensive review of previous health studies, Philippe Grandjean of the Harvard School of Public Health and Richard Clapp of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell named an ‘‘approximate’’ safe level of 0.001 p.p.b. Soon thereafter, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group analyzed two years of E.P.A. survey data to find that this threshold had been exceeded — in some cases by factors of 100 or more — in 94 water systems across 27 states."

A series of lawsuits have begun against DuPont for PFOA poisoning. The article states that there are 60,000 unregulated chemicals in the United States. 

Read it here: The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare