DuPont C-8 Water Contamination: $671 Million Settlement After a String of Trial Wins

For decades, DuPont's Washington Works plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia, used a chemical called PFOA, also known as C-8, to manufacture Teflon. The plant released the chemical into the air, the ground, and the Ohio River. C-8 does not break down easily. It spread through the drinking water of communities across the Mid-Ohio Valley in West Virginia and Ohio.

Residents drank that water for years. An independent science panel, set up under an earlier class settlement, studied tens of thousands of exposed people and tied C-8 to six conditions: kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and high cholesterol. About 3,550 people who developed these illnesses, or their surviving families, filed personal-injury and wrongful-death claims. The cases were consolidated as multidistrict litigation (MDL 2433) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

Jon Conlin of Cory Watson Attorneys served as one of the lead lawyers on the plaintiffs' steering committee. The litigation moved forward through bellwether trials, test cases meant to show how juries would weigh the evidence. In October 2015, a jury awarded Carla Bartlett $1.6 million for kidney cancer. In July 2016, David Freeman won $5.1 million in compensatory damages plus $500,000 in punitive damages for testicular cancer. In January 2017, a jury added a $10.5 million punitive award to Kenneth Vigneron's $2 million verdict, another testicular cancer case. Across these trials, the plaintiffs proved that DuPont's own internal studies, going back to the 1950s and 1960s, had warned the company that C-8 caused harm, and that DuPont kept using it anyway.

With three straight plaintiff verdicts and thousands of claims still waiting for trial, DuPont and its spinoff, Chemours, agreed in February 2017 to a global settlement of $670.7 million, rounded in news coverage to $671 million. The two companies split the payment evenly, $335.35 million each. The agreement resolved roughly 3,550 claims at once. For the next five years, Chemours agreed to pay the first $25 million of any future PFOA costs each year, with DuPont covering up to $25 million more.

"This is a tremendous positive step toward resolving this litigation in a way that provides compensation for our injured clients without the need for additional, lengthy, and expensive trials," the plaintiffs' lawyers said.

Because the resolution was a negotiated settlement rather than a jury verdict, no part of the $670.7 million was subject to remittitur or reduction on appeal. DuPont and Chemours did not admit fault or liability as part of the deal.