One, Two, Many Flints

 “Dirty Waters”film by Todd Haynes, 2019

This is the true story of the discovery of the toxic effects of PFOAs / PFOS / PFAS from the manufacture of Teflon, flame retardants, pesticides, sealants, carpets and more, specifically by DuPont de Nemours Inc.  It is called the ‘forever’ chemical as it never degrades and just accumulates. If a film stars liberal actor Mark Ruffalo, you know where it’s headed.  He plays attorney Robert Bilott who is still litigating PFOAs.   

The lawyer sees the dead cows.

A gruff dairy farmer in West Virginia finds many of his cows dying with enlarged livers, cancers, crazed behavior and more, drinking the water from a creek running by his house.  Upstream is a waste dump run by DuPont from effluents out of their Teflon factory.  The town of Parkersburg, West Virginia is dominated by the firm’s factory, as it pays well.  Bilott, a newly-minted law partner, is told by the angry farmer that ‘the system is rigged’ when Bilott suggests he'd look into the matter, as the man is an acquaintance of his grandma. Seeing the many humps of buried cattle was convincing.

Oddly Bilott works for a corporate chemical DEFENSE firm in Cincinnati, so he’s usually on the other side of these legal fights.  Bilott has to play down the fact that he’s from ‘hicksville’ West Virginia to his white-shoe co-workers.  Somehow his boss allows him to take on this charity cow case and file a quiet suit.  Somehow!  What follows is a long, long legal fight to stop DuPont and bring financial compensation, as it’s a civil matter.  What he discovers is that beyond the cows the drinking water in town is also contaminated with PFOAs, leading to higher than average rates of human cancers and other health problems.  Workers on the Teflon line have miscarriages.  People in town are dying.  He discovers DuPont knew that PFOA/PFOS were harmful in the 1970s but kept it secret – just like the tobacco, Round-Up, asbestos, DDT and carbon companies did for their products.

The case in the film starts in 1999.  It ends with high individual and then class-wide legal settlements in 2017 – 18 years later.  The EPA did not regulate PFOAs because of their neo-liberal policy of allowing industry to police itself. DuPont knew that 1 part per million was toxic, while the incompetent West Virginia EPA claimed it was 150 parts per million.  Later tests revealed that 6 parts per million was in the water.  The law Bilott used was that if a firm knew something was harmful, that knowledge was the legal standard absent government regulation. 

After discovery, Bilott eventually forces DuPont to settle with a smaller settlement and medical monitoring.  80,000 residents are tested, the largest epidemiological study in history.  But it takes 7 years for the results to be tabulated while Parkersburg citizens continue to die. When the results come in, they indicate at least 6 deadly diseases.  So DuPont reneges on the agreement to compensate the class, and he has to take them to court, one plaintiff at a time.  He wins big, so they finally settle for $671M for the rest of the class.  The original farmer has long died of some kind of disease, possibly related to the water. 

There is an unlikely scene of lonely Bilott going through hundreds of boxes of original paper documents by hand, on his hands and knees, without a paralegal, high-speed scanner and OCR software.  All those were available in the late 1990s to a high-end law firm like his.  The film shows the slow but sure pursuit of ‘justice’ by U.S. courts and eventually the EPA.  It’s another familiar ‘success’ story against corporate profiteering and government complicity, as the regulators were previously captured by DuPont. But the 40 years of toxic effects were not reversed and are still on-going. How much of what we are still surrounded by contain PFOAs?  It is claimed that every person in the U.S. has them in their body.   Nearly everyone had a Teflon frying pan at one time for instance and to this day all pans do not list if they have PFOAs or not.  

The film is a snapshot of unregulated capital doing what it does.  And sometimes this has permanent effects. It shows the government, unless forced, to be in the pocket of capital.  It shows the drive for billions in profits will hide the science.  It shows the endless process of court actions when confronting a monied antagonist.  Heroic attorneys will evidently save us – a message pounded in for years in films like this.  Sometimes they are successful, though in this case the personal damage to Bilott and everyone else was very high.  But the basic problem of profiteering, regardless of consequences, remains even after this suit.

P.S. - Minnesota's own 3M invented these substances, and poisoned the ground and groundwater of 3 east St. Paul communities in the process.  They claim they will stop producing them in several years.  The EPA this year for the first time issued a warning on water levels of PFAs.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Blue Covenant,” “Ecology and Marxism,” “The Insect Crisis,” “The Tragedy of American Science,” “Reflections in the Woods,” “Stop Tar Sands Straw,” “Garbage Land,” “The Robbery of Nature” and “Ecological Marxism” (both by JB Foster); “The Playbook,” “How Beautiful We Were,” “Class Action,” “Gray Mountain” (Grisham); “Junk Science.”

The Cultural Marxist / May 7, 2024