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PFOA Class Action Suit
Newspaper articles and Documents
related to PFOA Class Action
December 19, 2005
Chemical & Engineering News
Volume 83, Number 51, p. 10
DuPont, EPA Settle. Company
to pay $16.5 million to settle PFOA allegations.
Cheryl Hogue
DuPont will spend $16.5 million to settle allegations
that it withheld information about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)
from EPA, the agency said.
Granta Y. Nakayama, EPA assistant administrator
for enforcement, says the most serious allegation involved failure
to report for more than 20 years that PFOA was found in the umbilical
cord blood of a baby of a woman working at DuPont's plant outside
of Parkersburg, W.Va. That facility uses PFOA to manufacture DuPont's
Teflon brand of polytetrafluoroethylene.
The information demonstrating that PFOA moves across
the placenta "should have been reported immediately to EPA,"
Nakayama says.
DuPont also allegedly failed to report the results
of blood tests, done at the company's request, of plaintiffs in
a class-action lawsuit who live near the West Virginia plant.
Those people drank water drawn from wells near the plant and had
blood levels of PFOA that were significantly higher than that
of the U.S. population.
Other data DuPont allegedly did not turn over to
EPA as promptly as required by law include three studies showing
that an unidentified perfluorochemical was "significantly
lethal" when inhaled by laboratory rats.
DuPont denied the allegations. Stacey J. Mobley,
DuPont senior vice president and general counsel, says the company's
interpretation of reporting requirements differed from EPA's.
"The settlement allows us to put this matter behind us,"
Mobley says. DuPont had earlier set aside $15 million to cover
the suit.
The company will pay a $10.25 million fine and spend
$6.25 million for two additional projects. One is $5 million in
research evaluating the potential for nine DuPont fluorotelomers
to break down into PFOA. The remaining $1.25 million will fund
microscale chemistry and green chemistry programs in schools near
the West Virginia plant.
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