People were getting sick. It seemed, at least to me when I started looking at the information, looking at the documents, that this was pretty obvious, what was going on, and if other people could see what we were seeing, they would agree: this is obvious and it needs to stop.
Robert Bilott
There's got to be a point in time where the reality comes home and people realize, here are the facts, and this is either not true or it is true. You've got the facts, you can make your own decision now.
I learned to question everything you read. Don't take anything at face value. Don't care what other people say. I liked that philosophy.
If we can't get where we need to go to protect people through our regulatory channels, through our legislative process, then unfortunately what we have left is our legal process.
You know, unfortunately, as to PFOS, it's starting to look like all of us. This is all of our problems. You know, all of us have been exposed to some degree to these same chemicals.
There was pressure on the EPA to come out with a drinking water guideline, which it did in 2016. And when that guideline came out, it spurred even more testing across the country, including by the Department of Defense.
I had spent the prior eight years working at my firm primarily representing big chemical companies, helping them comply with all the different state and federal laws.
And in my world, when I was dealing with this for our chemical company clients, you had lists of regulated hazardous materials, and things were permitted. And if you had a landfill and you had a permit, you had to comply with certain limits.
I was representing our chemical company clients, and I would routinely talk with or meet with the DuPont attorneys, would be there representing DuPont at these same cleanup sites. So I knew those folks.
My family said that a big firm was where you'd get the most opportunities. I knew nobody who had ever worked at a firm, nobody who knew anything about it. I just tried to get the best job I could.
I'm not stupid, and the people around me aren't stupid. You can't ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think.
You know, really, it's not easy taking a 20 year story and condensing it into two hours. But they did a fantastic job of really being able to capture, you know, what that community went through, what these what these real people in that community went through to bring the story out for the rest of us.
Well, you know, my grandmother actually grew up, you know, her whole family, my mom's family outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia.
You know, I started with the law firm of Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Cincinnati back in 1990.
We found out that we were dealing with a completely unregulated chemical, this chemical PFOA. This was a chemical that was a completely manmade material invented right after World War Two, didn't exist on the planet prior to the 1940s.
We notified the EPA 18 years ago that PFOA in drinking water presented a public health threat, and in 2019 there are still no federal regulatory limits.
But I suspect most people across the United States are still unfamiliar with PFAS and don't realize the exposure that occurs. I'm going to continue doing what I can elevating that awareness.
We're talking about a chemical that's out there. Not just on one farm in West Virginia, not even just in the public water of an entire community there, but it's now in water all over the country, all over the planet, in the blood of virtually every living thing.
There are certain systems that I think are not working well - that's the regulatory system, the whole system of how we regulate chemicals in this country.
