Less than a week after a major victory in a federal court in West Virginia, DuPont Co. today was handed a serious setback in its efforts to fend off citizen lawsuits over PFOA pollution.
The ruling came in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, where residents are suing DuPont over contamination of their drinking water with ammonium perfluorooctanoate, or PFOA, also known as C8.
Ruling in two different cases against DuPont, U.S. District Judge Renee Marie Bumb allowed residents to pursue claims of private nuisance and strict liability as class-action suits against the chemical giant.
I’ve posted a copy of the 44-page decision here.
The result is quite different from that in a similar West Virginia case, where U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin has declined to allow residents to proceed as a class and — in a bombshell ruling last week — dismissed all claims against DuPont except for medical monitoring.
Goodwin was ruling in a case brought by residents of the city of Parkersburg, whose water supply has been polluted with C8 from DuPont’s nearby Washington Works plant. Unlike residents who live outside the city of Parkersburg and get their water from other local water systems, Parkersburg residents have not been offered water treatment or alternative water supplies provided or funded by DuPont.
In New Jersey, residents allege DuPont’s Chambers Work plant in Deepwater polluted drinking water supplies of the Penn’s Grove Water Supply Company and of private residential wells.
Remember that scientists reported in a peer-reviewed journal that they found levels of PFOA in New Jersey drinking water of up to 0.19 parts per billion, far greater than the safety guideline for long-term exposure of 0.04 parts per billion set by that state’s regulators.
Nationwide and in Parkersburg, the U.S. EPA has set a much less protective “health advisory” for PFOA in drinking water of 0.40 parts per billion.
Residents of Parkersburg who drink their city’s water continue to be exposed to levels of C8 greater than those considered safe by regulatory and health experts in New Jersey.
Subscribe to Sustained Outrage
Ironically, on the very same day, Friday, Oct. 9, 2009, with much fanfare DuPont opened its DuPont Environment Education Center on the banks of the Christiana River which flows into the murky Delaware River wherein DuPont dumps daily massive quantities of “treated” hazardous waste from its Chambers Work site in New Jersey. Celebrating the grand opening yesterday were Delaware state and local politicians, Delaware Congressional leaders, and numerous posturing DuPont officials and PR staffers.
Meanwhile on the other side of the dirty Delaware, thousands of residents of south Jersey have found drinking water from their private wells and their home faucets laced with the extraordinarily toxic, likely cancer-causing Teflon chemical PFOA or C8. Unlike their hapless counterparts within the City of Parkersburg, they will have an opportunity for judicial redress and remedy.
This New Jersey class action should be a featured case study on the environment, highly instructional for young students and adults alike, at the new DuPont Environmental Education Center.
…funfundvierzig..