{"id":62459,"date":"2015-08-17T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=62459"},"modified":"2015-08-24T15:02:25","modified_gmt":"2015-08-24T14:02:25","slug":"the-teflon-toxin-dupont-and-the-chemistry-of-deception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/08\/the-teflon-toxin-dupont-and-the-chemistry-of-deception\/","title":{"rendered":"The Teflon Toxin – Part 1: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part 2:\u00a0The Case Against DuPont<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Part 3: How DuPont Slipped Past the EPA<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Illustration:<\/a>

Illustration: Philipp Hubert for The Intercept<\/p><\/div>\n

Aug. 11 2015 – <\/em>Ken Wamsley sometimes dreams that he\u2019s playing softball again. He\u2019ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he\u2019s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. Wamsley calls them nightmares, these stories that play out in his sleep, but really the only scary part is the end, when \u201cI wake up and I have no rectum anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wamsley is 73. After developing rectal cancer and having surgery to treat it in 2002, he walks slowly and gets up from the bench in his small backyard slowly. His voice, which has a gentle Appalachian lilt, is still animated, though, especially when he talks about his happier days. There were many. While Wamsley knew plenty of people in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who struggled to stay employed, he made an enviable wage for almost four decades at the DuPont plant here. The company was generous, helping him pay for college courses and training him to become a lab analyst in the Teflon division.<\/p>\n

He enjoyed the work, particularly the precision and care it required. For years, he measured levels of a chemical called C8 in various products. The chemical \u201cwas everywhere,\u201d as Wamsley remembers it, bubbling out of the glass flasks he used to transport it, wafting into a smelly vapor that formed when he heated it. A fine powder, possibly C8, dusted the laboratory drawers and floated in the hazy lab air.<\/p>\n

At the time, Wamsley and his coworkers weren\u2019t particularly concerned about the strange stuff. \u201cWe never thought about it, never worried about it,\u201d he said recently. He believed it was harmless, \u201clike a soap. Wash your hands [with it], your face, take a bath.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today Wamsley suffers from ulcerative colitis, a bowel condition that causes him sudden bouts of diarrhea. The disease also can \u2014 and his case, did \u2014 lead to rectal cancer. Between the surgery, which left him reliant on plastic pouches that collect his waste outside his body and have to be changed regularly, and his ongoing digestive problems, Wamsley finds it difficult to be away from his home for long.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, between napping or watching baseball on TV, Wamsley\u2019s mind drifts back to his DuPont days and he wonders not just about the dust that coated his old workplace but also about his bosses who offered their casual assurances about the chemical years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho knew?\u201d he asked. \u201cWhen did they know? Did they lie?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Washington Works DuPont plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, on Wednesday, August 5, 2015.
Photo: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept\/Investigative Fund<\/p><\/div>\n

Until recently, few people<\/strong> had heard much about chemicals like C8. One of tens of thousands of unregulated industrial chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid,\u00a0or PFOA \u2014 also called C8 because of the eight-carbon chain that makes up its chemical backbone \u2014 had gone unnoticed for most of its eight or so decades on earth, even as it helped cement the success of one of the world\u2019s largest corporations.<\/p>\n

Several blockbuster discoveries, including nylon, Lycra, and Tyvek, helped transform the E. I. du Pont de Nemours company from a 19th-century gunpowder mill into \u201cone of the most successful and sustained industrial enterprises in the world,\u201d as its corporate website puts it. Indeed, in 2014, the company reaped more than $95 million in sales each day. Perhaps no product is as responsible for its dominance as Teflon, which was introduced in 1946, and for more than 60\u00a0years C8 was an essential ingredient of Teflon.<\/p>\n

Called a \u201csurfactant\u201d because it reduces the surface tension of water, the slippery, stable compound was eventually used in hundreds of products, including Gore-Tex and other waterproof clothing; coatings for eye glasses and tennis rackets; stain-proof coatings for carpets and furniture; fire-fighting foam; fast food wrappers; microwave popcorn bags; bicycle lubricants; satellite components; ski wax; communications cables; and pizza boxes.<\/p>\n

Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story\u00a0of DuPont\u2019s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle \u2014 culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September \u2014 a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.<\/p>\n

This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont\u2019s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And\u00a0through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company\u2019s\u00a0workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.<\/p>\n

\"Ken<\/a>

Ken Wamsley, 73, stands outside of his home in Parkersburg, West Virginia, on Tuesday, August 4, 2015.
Photo: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept\/Investigative Fund<\/p><\/div>\n

The best evidence of how C8 affects humans has also come out through the legal battle over the chemical, though in a more public form. As part of a 2005 settlement over contamination around the West Virginia plant where Wamsley worked, lawyers for both DuPont and the plaintiffs approved a team of three scientists, who were charged with determining if and how the chemical affects people.<\/p>\n

In 2011 and 2012, after seven years of research, the science panel found that C8 was \u201cmore likely than not\u201d linked to ulcerative colitis \u2014 Wamsley\u2019s condition \u2014 as well as to high cholesterol; pregnancy-induced hypertension; thyroid disease; testicular cancer; and kidney cancer. The scientists\u2019 findings, published in more than three dozen peer-reviewed articles<\/a>, were striking, because the chemical\u2019s effects were so widespread throughout the body and because even very low exposure levels were associated with health effects.<\/p>\n

We know, too, from internal DuPont documents that emerged through the lawsuit, that Wamsley\u2019s fears of being lied to are well-founded. DuPont scientists had closely studied the chemical for decades and through their own research knew about some of the dangers it posed. Yet rather than inform\u00a0workers, people living near the plant, the general public, or government agencies responsible for regulating chemicals, DuPont\u00a0repeatedly kept its\u00a0knowledge secret.<\/p>\n

Another revelation about C8 makes all of this more disturbing and gives the upcoming trials, the first of which will be held this fall in Columbus, Ohio, global significance: This deadly chemical that DuPont continued to use well after it knew it was linked to health problems is now practically everywhere.<\/p>\n

A man-made compound that didn\u2019t exist a century ago, C8 is in the blood of 99.7 percent of Americans, according to a 2007 analysis of data<\/a> from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as in newborn human babies, breast milk, and umbilical cord blood. A growing group of scientists have been tracking the chemical\u2019s spread through the environment, documenting its presence in a wide range of wildlife, including Loggerhead sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins, harbor seals, polar bears, caribou, walruses, bald eagles, lions, tigers, and arctic birds. Although DuPont no longer uses\u00a0C8, fully removing the chemical from all the bodies of water and bloodstreams it pollutes is now impossible. And, because it is so chemically stable \u2014 in fact, as far as scientists can determine, it never breaks down \u2014 C8 is expected to remain on the planet well after humans are gone from it.<\/p>\n

Eight companies are responsible for C8 contamination in the U.S. (In addition to DuPont, the leader by far in terms of both use and emissions, seven others had a role, including 3M, which produced C8 and sold it to DuPont for years.) If these polluters were ever forced to clean up the chemical, which has been detected by the EPA 716 times across water systems in 29 states, and in some areas may be present at dangerous levels, the costs could be astronomical \u2014 and C8 cases could enter the storied realm of tobacco litigation, forever changing how the public thinks about these products and how a powerful industry does business.<\/p>\n

In some ways, C8 already is the tobacco of the chemical industry \u2014 a substance whose health effects were the subject of a decades-long corporate cover-up. As with tobacco, public health organizations have taken up the cause \u2014 and numerous reporters have dived into the mammoth story. Like the tobacco litigation, the lawsuits around C8 also involve huge amounts of money. And, like tobacco, C8 is a symbol of how difficult it is to hold companies responsible, even when mounting scientific evidence links their products to cancer and other diseases.<\/p>\n

There is at least one sense in which the tobacco analogy fails. Exposure to tobacco usually contains an element of volition, and most people who smoked it in the past half century knew about some of the risks involved. But the vast majority of Americans \u2014 along with most people on the planet \u2014 now have C8 in their bodies. And we\u2019ve had no choice in the matter.<\/p>\n

For its first hundred years,<\/u><\/strong> DuPont mostly made explosives, which, while hazardous, were at least well understood. But by the 1930s, the company had expanded into new products that brought new mysterious health problems. Leaded gasoline, which DuPont made in its New Jersey plant, for instance, wound up causing madness and violent deaths and life-long institutionalization of workers. And certain rubber and industrial chemicals inexplicably turned the skin of exposed workers blue.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most troubling, at least to a DuPont doctor named George Gehrmann, was a number of bladder cancers that had recently begun to crop up among many dye workers. Worried over \u201cthe tendency to believe [chemicals] are harmless until proven otherwise,\u201d Gehrmann pushed DuPont to create Haskell Laboratories in 1935. Haskell was one of the first in-house toxicology facilities\u00a0and its first project was to address the bladder cancers. But the inherent problems of assigning staff scientists to study a company\u2019s own employees and products became clear from the outset.<\/p>\n

One of Haskell\u2019s first employees, a pathologist named Wilhelm Hueper, helped crack the bladder cancer case by developing a model of how the dye chemicals led to disease. But the company forbade him from publishing some of his research and, according to epidemiologist and public health scholar David Michaels, fired him in 1937 before going on to use the chemicals in question for decades.<\/p>\n

C8 would prove to be arguably even more ethically and scientifically challenging for Haskell. From the beginning, DuPont scientists approached the chemical\u2019s potential dangers with rigor. In 1954, the very year a French engineer first applied the slick coating to a frying pan, a DuPont employee named R. A. Dickison noted that he had received an inquiry regarding C8\u2019s \u201cpossible toxicity.\u201d In 1961, just seven years later, in-house researchers already had the short answer to Dickison\u2019s question: C8 was indeed toxic and should be \u201chandled with extreme care,\u201d according to a report filed by plaintiffs. By the next year experiments had honed these broad concerns into clear, bright red flags that pointed to specific organs: C8 exposure was linked to the enlargement of\u00a0rats\u2019 testes, adrenal glands, and kidneys. In 1965, 14 employees, including Haskell\u2019s then-director, John Zapp, received a memo describing preliminary studies that showed that even low doses of a related\u00a0surfactant could increase the size of rats\u2019 livers, a classic response to exposure to a poison.<\/p>\n

The company even conducted a human C8 experiment, a deposition revealed. In 1962, DuPont scientists asked volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with the chemical and observed that \u201cNine out of ten people in the\u00a0highest-dosed group were noticeably ill\u00a0for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills,\u00a0backache, fever, and coughing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of its toxicity, C8 disposal presented a problem. In the early 1960s, the company buried about 200 drums of the chemical on the banks of the Ohio River near the plant. An internal DuPont document from 1975 about \u201cTeflon Waste Disposal\u201d detailed how the company began packing the waste in drums, shipping the drums on barges out to sea, and dumping them into the ocean, adding stones to make the drums sink. Though the practice resulted in a moment of unfavorable publicity when a fisherman caught one of the drums in his net, no one outside the company realized the danger the chemical presented. At some point before 1965, ocean dumping ceased, and DuPont began disposing of its Teflon waste in landfills instead.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A view of Parkersburg, West Virginia, from Fort Boreman Park on Wednesday, August 5, 2015.
Photo: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept\/Investigative Fund<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1978, Bruce Karrh<\/strong>,<\/u> DuPont\u2019s corporate medical director, was outspoken about the company\u2019s duty \u201cto discover and reveal the unvarnished facts about health hazards,\u201d as he wrote in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine <\/em>at the time. When deposed in 2004, Karrh emphasized that DuPont\u2019s internal health and safety rules often went further than the government\u2019s and that the company\u2019s policy was to comply with either laws or the company\u2019s internal health and safety standards, \u201cwhichever was the more strict.\u201d In his 1978 article, Karrh also insisted that a company \u201cshould be candid, and lay all the facts on the table. This is the only responsible and ethical way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet DuPont only laid out some of its facts. In 1978, for instance, DuPont alerted workers to the results of a study done by 3M showing that its employees were accumulating C8 in their blood. Later that year, Karrh and his colleagues began reviewing employee medical records and measuring the level of C8 in the blood of the company\u2019s own workers in Parkersburg, as well as at another DuPont plant in Deepwater, New Jersey, where the company had been using C8\u00a0and related chemicals since the 1950s. They found that exposed workers at the New Jersey plant had increased rates of endocrine disorders. Another notable pattern was that, like dogs and rats, people employed at the DuPont plants more frequently had abnormal liver function tests after C8 exposure.<\/p>\n

DuPont elected not to disclose its findings to regulators. The reasoning, according to Karrh, was that the abnormal test results weren\u2019t proven to be adverse health effects related to C8. When asked about the decision in deposition, Karrh said that \u201cat that point in time, we saw no substantial risk, so therefore we saw no obligation to report.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not long after the decision was made not to alert the EPA, in 1981, another study of DuPont workers by a staff epidemiologist declared that liver test data collected in Parkersburg lacked \u201cconclusive evidence of an occupationally related health problem among workers exposed to C-8.\u201d Yet the research might have reasonably led to more testing. An assistant medical director named Vann Brewster suggested that an early draft of the study be edited to state that DuPont should conduct further liver test monitoring. Years later, a proposal for a follow-up study was rejected.<\/p>\n

If the health effects on humans could still be debated in 1979, C8\u2019s\u00a0effects on animals continued to be apparent.\u00a0A report prepared for plaintiffs stated that by then, DuPont was aware of studies showing that exposed beagles had abnormal enzyme levels \u201cindicative of cellular damage.\u201d Given enough of the stuff, the dogs died.<\/p>\n

DuPont employees knew in 1979 about a recent 3M study showing that some rhesus monkeys also died when exposed to C8, according to documents submitted by plaintiffs. Scientists divided the primates into five groups and exposed them to different amounts of C8 over 90 days. Those given the highest dose all died within five weeks. More notable was that three of the monkeys who received less than half that amount also died, their faces and gums growing pale and their eyes swelling before they wasted away. Some of the monkeys given the lower dose began losing weight in the first week it was administered. C8 also appeared to affect some monkeys\u2019 kidneys.<\/p>\n

Of course, enough of anything can be deadly. Even a certain amount of table salt would kill a lab animal, a DuPont employee named C. E. Steiner noted in a confidential 1980 communications meeting. For C8, the lethal oral dose was listed as one ounce per 150 pounds, although the document stated that the chemical\u00a0was most toxic when inhaled. The harder question was to determine a maximum safe <\/em>dosage. How much could an animal \u2014 or a person \u2014 be exposed to without having any effects at all? The\u00a0<\/strong>1965 DuPont study of rats\u00a0suggested that even a single dose of a similar surfactant could have a prolonged effect. Nearly two months after being exposed, the rats\u2019 livers were still three times larger than normal.<\/p>\n

Steiner declared that there was no \u201cconclusive evidence\u201d that C8 harmed workers, yet he also stated that \u201ccontinued exposure is not tolerable.\u201d Because C8 accumulated in bodies, the potential for harm was there, and Steiner predicted the company would continue medical and toxicological monitoring and described plans to supply workers who were directly exposed to the chemical with protective clothing.<\/p>\n

Two years after DuPont learned of the monkey study, in 1981, 3M shared the results of another study it had done, this one on pregnant rats, whose unborn pups were more likely to have eye defects after they were exposed to C8. The EPA was also informed of the results. After 3M\u2019s rat study came out, DuPont transferred all women out of work assignments with potential for exposure to C8. DuPont doctors then began tracking a small group of women who had been exposed to C8 and had recently been pregnant. If even one in five women gave birth to children who had craniofacial deformities, a DuPont epidemiologist named Fayerweather warned, the results should be considered significant enough to suggest that C8 exposure caused the problems.<\/p>\n

\"Photos<\/a>

Photos of Bucky Bailey as a baby, as well as article clippings his mother, Sue, saved over the years.
Photo: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept\/Investigative Fund<\/p><\/div>\n

As it turned out, at least one of eight babies born to women who worked in the Teflon division did have birth defects. A little boy named Bucky Bailey, whose mother, Sue, had worked in Teflon early in her pregnancy, was born with tear duct deformities, only one nostril, an eyelid that started down by his nose, and a condition known as \u201ckeyhole pupil,\u201d which looked like a tear in his iris. Another child, who was two years old when the rat study was published in 1981, had an \u201cunconfirmed eye and tear duct defect,\u201d according to a DuPont document that was marked confidential.<\/p>\n

Like Wamsley, Sue Bailey, one of the plaintiffs whose personal injury suits are scheduled to come to trial in the fall, remembers having plenty of contact with C8. When she started at DuPont in 1978, she worked first in the Nylon division and then in Lucite, she told me in an interview. But in 1980, when she was in the first trimester of her pregnancy with Bucky, she moved to Teflon, where she often sat watch over a large pipe that periodically filled up with liquid, which she had to pump to a pond in back of the plant. Occasionally some of the bubbly stuff would overflow from a nearby holding tank, and her supervisor taught her how to squeegee the excess into a drain.<\/p>\n

Soon after Bucky was born, Bailey received a call from a DuPont doctor. \u201cI thought it was just a compassion call, you know: can we do anything or do you need anything?\u201d Bailey recalled. \u201cShoot. I should have known better.\u201d In fact, the doctor didn\u2019t express his sympathies, Bailey said, and instead asked her whether her child had any birth defects, explaining that it was standard to record such problems in employees\u2019 newborns.<\/p>\n

While Bailey was still on maternity leave, she learned that the company was removing its female workers from the Teflon division. She remembers the moment \u2014 and that it made her feel deceived. \u201cIt sure was a big eye-opener,\u201d said Bailey, who still lives in West Virginia but left DuPont a few years after Bucky\u2019s birth.<\/p>\n

\"Bucky<\/a>

Bucky Bailey stands inside his mother\u2019s home in Bluemont, Virginia, on Thursday, August 6, 2015.
Photo: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept\/Investigative Fund<\/p><\/div>\n

The Federal Toxic Substances<\/strong> Control Act<\/strong> requires<\/a> companies that work with chemicals to report to the Environmental Protection Agency any evidence they find that shows or even suggests that they are harmful. In keeping with this requirement, 3M submitted its rat study to the EPA, and later DuPont scientists wound up discussing the study with the federal agency, saying they believed it was\u00a0flawed. DuPont scientists neglected to inform the EPA about what they had found in tracking their own workers.<\/p>\n

When DuPont began transferring women workers out of Teflon, the company did send out a flier alerting them to the results of the 3M study. When Sue Bailey saw the notice on the bench of the locker room and read about the rat study, she immediately thought of Bucky.<\/p>\n

Yet when she went in to request a blood test, the results of which the doctor carefully noted to the thousandth decimal point, and asked if there might be a connection between Bucky\u2019s birth defects and the rat study she had read about, Bailey recalls that Dr. Younger Lovelace Power, the plant doctor, said no. According to Karrh\u2019s deposition, he told Karrh the same. \u201cWe went back to him and asked him to follow up on it, and he did, and came back saying that he did not think it was related.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018I was in Teflon. Is this what happened to my baby?\u2019\u201d Bailey remembered. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018No, no.\u2019\u201d Power also told Bailey that the company had no record of her having worked in Teflon. Shortly afterward, she considered suing DuPont and even contacted a lawyer in Parkersburg, who she says wasn\u2019t interested in taking her case against the town\u2019s biggest employer. When contacted for his response to Bailey\u2019s recollections, Power declined to comment.<\/p>\n

By testing the blood of female Teflon workers who had given birth, DuPont researchers, who then reported their findings to Karrh, documented for the first time that C8 had moved across the human placenta.<\/p>\n

In 2005, when the EPA fined the company for withholding this information, attorneys for DuPont argued that because the agency already had evidence of the connection between C8 and birth defects in rats, the evidence it had withheld was \u201cmerely confirmatory\u201d and not of great significance, according to the agency\u2019s consent agreement<\/a> on the matter.<\/p>\n

Ken Wamsley also remembers when his supervisor told him they had taken female workers out of Teflon. \u201cI said, \u2018Why\u2019d you send all the women home?\u2019 He said, \u2018Well, we\u2019re afraid, we think maybe it hurts the pregnancies in some of the women,\u2019\u201d recalled Wamsley. \u201cThey said, \u2018Ken, it won\u2019t hurt the men.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

While some DuPont scientists<\/strong> were carefully studying the chemical\u2019s effect on the body, others were quietly tracking its steady spread into the water surrounding the Parkersburg plant. After it ceased dumping C8 in the ocean, DuPont apparently relied on disposal in unlined landfills and ponds, as well as putting C8 into the air through smokestacks and pouring waste water containing it directly into the Ohio River, as detailed in a 2007 study by Dennis Paustenbach published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By 1982, Karrh had become worried about the possibility of \u201ccurrent or future exposure of members of the local community from emissions leaving the plant\u2019s perimeter,\u201d as he explained in a letter to a colleague in the plastics department. After noting that C8 stays in the blood for a long time \u2014 and might be passed to others through blood donations \u2014 and that the company had only limited knowledge of its long-term effects, Karrh recommended that \u201cavailable practical steps be taken to reduce that exposure.\u201d<\/p>\n

To get a sense of exactly how extensive that exposure was, in March 1984 an employee was sent out to collect samples, according to a memo by a DuPont staffer named Doughty. The employee went into general stores, markets, and gas stations, in local communities as far as 79 miles downriver from the Parkersburg plant, asking to fill plastic jugs with water, which he then took back for testing. The results of those tests confirmed C8\u2019s presence at elevated levels.<\/p>\n

Faced with the evidence that C8 had now spread far beyond the Parkersburg plant, internal documents show,<\/strong> DuPont was at a crossroads. Could the company find a way to reduce emissions? Should it switch to a new surfactant? Or stop using the chemical altogether? In May 1984, DuPont convened a meeting of 10\u00a0of its corporate business managers at the company\u2019s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, to tackle some of these questions. Results from an engineering study the group reviewed that day described two methods for reducing C8 emissions, including thermal destruction and a scrubbing system.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of the options developed are \u2026 economically attractive and would essentially put the long term viability of this business segment on the line,\u201d someone named J. A. Schmid summarized in notes from the meeting, which are marked \u201cpersonal and confidential.\u201d<\/p>\n

The executives considered C8 from the perspective of various divisions of the company, including the medical and legal departments, which, they predicted, \u201cwill likely take a position of total elimination,\u201d according to Schmid\u2019s summary. Yet the group nevertheless decided that \u201ccorporate image and corporate liability\u201d \u2014 rather than health concerns or fears about suits \u2014 would drive their decisions about the chemical. Also, as Schmid noted, \u201cThere was a consensus that C-8, based on all the information available from within the company and 3M, does not pose a health hazard at low level chronic exposure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though they already knew that it had been detected in two local drinking water systems and that moving ahead would only increase emissions, DuPont decided to keep\u00a0using C8.<\/p>\n

In fact, from that point on, DuPont increased its use and emissions of the chemical, according to Paustenbach\u2019s 2007 study, which was based on the company\u2019s purchasing records, interviews with employees, and historical emissions from the Parkersburg plant. According to the study, the plant put an estimated 19,000 pounds of C8 into the air in 1984, the year of the meeting. By 1999, the peak of its air emissions, the West Virginia plant put some 87,000 pounds of C8 into local air and water. That same year, the company emitted more than 25,000 pounds of the chemical into the air and water around its New Jersey plant, as noted in a confidential presentation DuPont made to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in 2006. All told, according to Paustenbach\u2019s estimate, between 1951 and 2003 the West Virginia plant eventually spread nearly 2.5 million pounds of the chemical into the area around Parkersburg.<\/p>\n

Essentially, DuPont decided to double-down on C8, betting that somewhere down the line the company would somehow be able to \u201celiminate all C8 emissions in a way yet to be developed that would not economically penalize the bussiness [sic],\u201d as Schmid wrote in his 1984 meeting notes. The executives, while conscious of probable future liability, did not act with great urgency about the potential legal predicament they faced. If they did decide to reduce emissions or stop using the chemical altogether, they still couldn\u2019t undo the years of damage already done. As the meeting summary noted, \u201cWe are already liable for the past 32 years of operation.\u201d<\/p>\n

When contacted by The Intercept<\/em> for comment, 3M provided the following statement. \u201cIn more than 30 years of medical surveillance we have observed no adverse health effects in our employees resulting from their exposure to PFOS or PFOA. This is very important since the level of exposure in the general population is much lower than that of production employees who worked directly with these materials,\u201d said Dr. Carol Ley, 3M vice president and corporate medical director. \u201c3M believes the chemical compounds in question present no harm to human health at levels they are typically found in the environment or in human blood.\u201d In May 2000, 3M\u00a0announced that it would phase out its use of C8.<\/p>\n

DuPont confronted its potential liability<\/strong> in part by rehearsing the media strategy it would take if word of the contamination somehow got out. In the weeks after the 1984 meeting, an internal public relations team drafted the first of several \u201cstandby press releases.\u201d The guide for dealing with the imagined press offered assurances that only \u201csmall quantities of [C8] are discharged to the Ohio River\u201d and that \u201cthese extremely low levels would have no adverse affects.\u201d When a hypothetical reporter, who presumably learned that DuPont was choosing not to invest in a system to reduce emissions, asks whether the company\u2019s decision was based on money, the document advises answering \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company went on to draft these just-in-case press releases at several difficult junctures, and even the hypothetical scenarios they play out can be uncomfortable. In one, drafted in 1989, after DuPont had bought local fields that contained wells it knew to be contaminated, the company spokesperson in the script winds up in\u00a0an outright lie. Although internal documents list \u201cthe interests of protecting our plant site from public liability\u201d as one of the reasons for the purchase, when the hypothetical reporter asks whether DuPont purchased the land because of the water contamination, the suggested answer listed in the 1989 standby release was to deny this and to state instead that \u201cit made good business sense to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

DuPont drafted another contingency press release in 1991, after it discovered that C8 was present in a landfill near the plant, which it estimated could produce an exit stream containing 100 times its internal maximum safety level. Fears about the possible health consequences were enough to spur the company to once again rehearse its media strategy. (\u201cWhat would be the effect of cows drinking water from the \u2026 stream?\u201d the agenda from a C8 review meeting that year asked.) Yet other recent and disturbing discoveries had also provoked corporate anxieties.<\/p>\n

In 1989, DuPont employees found an elevated number of leukemia deaths at the West Virginia plant. Several months later, they measured an unexpectedly high number of kidney cancers\u00a0among\u00a0male workers. Both elevations were plant-wide and not specific to workers who handled C8. But, the following year, the scientists clarified how C8 might cause at least one form of cancer in humans. In 1991, it became clear not just that C8-exposed rats had elevated chances of developing testicular tumors \u2014 something 3M had also recently observed \u2014 but, worse still, that the mechanism by which they developed the tumors could apply to humans.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the 1991 draft press release said that \u201cDuPont and 3M studies show that C-8 has no known toxic or ill health effects in humans at the concentrations detected\u201d and included this reassuring note: \u201cAs for most chemicals, exposure limits for C-8 have been established with sufficient safety factors to ensure there is no health concern.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet even this prettified version of reality in Parkersburg never saw the light of day. The standby releases were only to be used to guide the company\u2019s media response if its bad news somehow leaked to the public. It would be almost 20 years after the first standby release was drafted before anyone outside the company understood the dangers of the chemical and how far it had spread beyond the plant.<\/p>\n

In the meantime<\/strong>,<\/u> fears about liability mounted along with the bad news. In 1991, DuPont researchers recommended another study of workers\u2019 liver enzymes to follow up on the one that showed elevated levels more than a decade before. But Karrh and others decided against the project, which was predicted to cost $45,000. When asked about it in a deposition, Karrh characterized the decision as the choice to focus resources on other worthy scientific projects. But notes taken on a discussion of whether or not to carry out the proposed study included the bullet point \u201cliability\u201d and the hand-written suggestion: \u201cDo the study after we are sued.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 2004 deposition, Karrh denied that the notes were his and said that the company would never have endorsed such a comment. Although notes from the 1991 meeting describe the presence of someone named \u201cKahrr,\u201d Karrh said that he had no idea who that person was and didn\u2019t recall being present for the meeting. When contacted by The Intercept<\/em>, Karrh declined to comment.<\/p>\n

As the secrets mounted so too did anxiety about C8, which DuPont was by now using and emitting not just in West Virginia and New Jersey, but also in its facilities in Japan and the Netherlands. By the time a small committee drafted a \u201cwhite paper\u201d about C8 strategies and plans in 1994, the subject was considered so sensitive that each copy was numbered and tracked. The top-secret document, which was distributed to high-level DuPont employees around the world, discussed the need to \u201cevaluate replacement of C-8 with other more environmentally safe materials\u201d and presented evidence of toxicity, including a paper published in the Journal of Occupational Medicine<\/em> that found elevated levels of prostate cancer death rates for employees who worked in jobs where they were exposed to C8. After they reviewed drafts, recipients were asked to return them for destruction.<\/p>\n

In 1999, when a farmer suspected that DuPont had poisoned his cows (after they drank from the very C8-polluted stream DuPont employees had worried over in their draft press release eight years earlier) and filed a lawsuit seeking damages, the truth finally began to seep out. The next year, an in-house DuPont attorney named Bernard Reilly helped open an internal workshop on C8 by giving \u201ca short summary of the right things to document and not to document.\u201d But Reilly \u2014 whose own emails about C8 would later fuel the legal battle that eventually included thousands of people, including Ken Wamsley and Sue Bailey \u2014 didn\u2019t heed his own advice.<\/p>\n

Reilly clearly made the wrong choice when he used the company\u2019s computers to write about C8, which he revealingly called the \u201cthe material 3M sells us that we poop to the river and into drinking water along the Ohio River.\u201d But the DuPont attorney was right about two things: If C8 was proven to be harmful, Reilly predicted in 2000, \u201cwe are really in the soup because essentially everyone is exposed one way or another.\u201d Also, as he noted in another prescient email sent 15 years ago: \u201cThis will be an interesting saga before it\u2019s thru.\u201d<\/p>\n

EDITORS NOTE: DuPont, asked to respond to the allegations contained in this article, declined to comment due to pending litigation.<\/em><\/p>\n

In previous statements and court filings, however, DuPont has consistently denied that it did anything wrong or broke any laws. In settlements reached with regulatory authorities and in a class-action suit, DuPont has made clear that those agreements were compromise settlements regarding disputed claims and that the settlements did not constitute an admission of guilt or wrongdoing. Likewise, in response to the personal injury claims of Ken Wamsley, Sue Bailey, and others, DuPont has rejected all charges of wrongdoing and maintained that their injuries were \u201cproximately caused by acts of God and\/or by intervening and\/or superseding actions by others, over which DuPont had no control.\u201d DuPont also claimed that it \u201cneither knew, nor should have known, that any of the substances to which Plaintiff was allegedly exposed were hazardous or constituted a reasonable or foreseeable risk of physical harm by virtue of the prevailing state of the medical, scientific and\/or industrial knowledge available to DuPont at all times relevant to the claims or causes of action asserted by Plaintiff.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n

Alleen Brown, Hannah Gold, and Sheelagh McNeill contributed to this story.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In some ways, C8 already is the tobacco of the chemical industry \u2014 a substance whose health effects were the subject of a decades-long corporate cover-up. DuPont elected not to disclose its findings to regulators. A DuPont lawyer referred to C8 as \u201cthe material 3M sells us that we poop to the river and into drinking water along the Ohio River.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,61,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism","category-environment","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}