It took one lawsuit to expose the toxicity of PFAS. And more than two decades of litigation to begin to address the harm it has caused.

By Michael DiGiannantonio

In 1999, a farmer in West Virginia, Wilbur Tennant, filed the first lawsuit against DuPont for contaminating water with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), part of the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) family of around 6,000 manmade chemicals. Tennant saw his cattle suffer numerous health issues, such as stillborns, birth defects, tumors, and black teeth. He lost over 100 cattle to cruel deaths. The cattle drank water downstream from an unlined landfill where DuPont dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge during the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, DuPont tested the creek water and found it contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. But it did not disclose this fact to Tennant, despite its knowledge of the chemical’s toxicity, and instead blamed the farmer for poor husbandry of his cows.

Tennant’s story is well documented in various media, including the motion picture, "Dark Waters," and the book that inspired it, "Exposure," as well as the documentary, "The Devil We Know." What started out as one man’s legal fight against a large corporation turned into the exposure of a full-blown public health emergency that has spawned hundreds of lawsuits across the country over the past two decades. To understand why so many water providers, property owners, individuals and governments are suing PFAS manufacturers, one needs to know the prevalence of these chemicals, and the evolution of such litigation within the context of ever-increasing state and federal regulation.