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Environment

Merged lawsuit filed against DuPont and Chemours in North Carolina

New suit seeks to compensate residents for fluorosurfactant-tainted drinking water from the Cape Fear River

by Marc S. Reisch
February 9, 2018 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 96, Issue 7

A photo of the Cape Fear River showing Wilmington, N.C., in the background.
Credit: Shutterstock
Residents of Wilmington, N.C., shown in the background, are among those filing a class-action suit over tainted drinking water from the Cape Fear River.

Lawyers have filed a new class-action lawsuit against DuPont and Chemours claiming that a plant run by the two firms contaminated the Cape Fear River in North Carolina with fluorosurfactants. The river is a source of drinking water for much of the southeast part of the state (see page 28).

The filing, made late last month, consolidates and updates three class-action suits filed since October by lawyers representing thousands of people who claim they are ill or could get ill because they drank water from the Cape Fear River and from wells surrounding the plant, now run by DuPont spin-off Chemours. A judge in the U.S. federal district court in Wilmington, N.C., ordered the consolidation in early January to streamline the effort to try claims.

The consolidated suit charges that DuPont dumped potentially toxic fluorosurfactants from the Fayetteville, N.C., plant starting in the 1980s. It also claims that DuPont knew as far back as the 1960s that some of those compounds, such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), had toxic effects on laboratory animals.

DuPont acknowledges that the lawsuits and ongoing federal and state investigations “could result in penalties or sanctions,” according to documents it has filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Chemours says in its SEC filings that it believes discharges from the Fayetteville site “have not impacted the safety of drinking water in North Carolina.”

In February 2017, the two firms agreed to pay $670 million to settle 3,550 lawsuits in Ohio and West Virginia by residents who say they were sickened by drinking water that was contaminated with PFOA released from what is now Chemours’s Parkersburg, W.Va., site.

The latest suit seeks funding for an epidemiological study to gauge the impact of PFOA, other polyfluoroalkyl substances, and GenX—which Chemours considers a safer alternative to PFOA—on residents along the Cape Fear River. It also seeks undetermined compensatory and punitive damages for illness, reduced property value, and the cost of water filtration.

“We will make these companies take responsibility,” says Steve Morrissey, plaintiff’s counsel at the law firm Susman Godfrey.

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