Wilbur Tennant: The Farmer Who Exposed DuPont’s PFOA Scandal

Wilbur Earl Tennant was a West Virginia cattle farmer whose livestock began dying in grotesque ways in the 1990s after DuPont built a landfill on land his family had sold the company. His refusal to let the deaths go unexplained, and his 1999 lawsuit against the chemical giant, cracked open a corporate archive showing DuPont had hidden the dangers of PFOA for decades. The Wilbur Tennant DuPont case is the origin point of nearly every PFAS lawsuit, settlement, and drinking-water rule that has followed.

The Farmer Behind the Case

Tennant was born on March 6, 1942, to Blaine and Lydia Wildman Tennant, and he spent his life in the rural community of New England, near Parkersburg. He farmed, drove a school bus for Wood County Schools, and ran heavy equipment for the West Virginia Department of Highways. He married Sandy Knight, and they had two daughters, Crystal and Amy.¹

The Tennants had worked the land outside Parkersburg for more than a century.² Wilbur ran the family cattle operation with his brothers Jack, Charlie, and James (Jim), and his sister Mary Catherine. Over the years the herd grew from seven cows to roughly 200 head grazing more than 600 hilly acres.³ He was a big man in a flannel shirt and ball cap, with a thick Appalachian accent, who hunted and gardened when he wasn’t working.¹

The Land Sale and the Dry Run Landfill

In the early 1980s, DuPont approached the Tennants about buying part of their property to use as a landfill for its nearby Washington Works chemical plant, which manufactured Teflon. Wilbur’s brother Jim, a laborer at the plant, and Jim’s wife Della sold 66 acres to the company. Jim had been suffering from undiagnosed health problems, and the family needed the money for his medical care.³

DuPont told the family the site, which it called the Dry Run Landfill after the creek that ran through it, would hold only non-toxic material like ash and scrap metal.²³ The creek draining the landfill flowed into the pastures where Tennant’s cattle grazed and drank.

What Happened to the Cattle

By the mid-1990s the signs were impossible to miss. Dry Run Creek turned black and foamy. Deer died near the water. Then the cows began to deteriorate. They went blind, grew tumors, and vomited blood. Their tails turned stringy, their hooves warped, and a white toothpaste-like discharge appeared on their bodies. Some turned aggressive and charged at the farmers trying to handle them.³²

Wilbur and his brother Earl started doing their own postmortems. They cut open dead cows and found livers, hearts, and kidneys tinted bright green.² Wilbur picked up a VHS camcorder and recorded hours of footage. Between 1995 and 1997 he narrated two videotapes documenting 60 cases, from dead crayfish in the creek to emaciated, tumor-covered cattle. He also submitted carcasses and tissue samples to diagnostic labs, including the Ohio Department of Agriculture and Michigan State University’s Animal Health Diagnostic Laboratory.⁴

He went to veterinarians, doctors, politicians, journalists, and environmental agencies. Nobody would help him. “DuPont just about owned the entire town,” he said.⁵

Finding a Lawyer Through a Family Friend

In 1998, Tennant’s neighbors, the Grahams, connected him to Robert Bilott, a corporate defense attorney at the Cincinnati firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister. The link ran through Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White, a friend of the Grahams. The referral was unlikely: Bilott had spent his career defending chemical companies and had previously worked on cases alongside DuPont’s own lawyers.³

Bilott agreed to see him as a favor. Tennant and his wife drove to Taft’s Cincinnati offices with cardboard boxes of documents, photographs, and the videotapes. What Bilott and his supervisor Thomas Terp saw on those tapes — the blackened teeth, the bloated organs, the green viscera — convinced them to take the case.³ Tennant described white foam leaking out of the DuPont landfill into the creek his cattle drank from.⁶

Tennant v. DuPont

In 1999, Bilott and West Virginia attorney Larry Winter of Winter Johnson & Hill filed Tennant v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, Case No. CA-6:99-048.⁶⁷

DuPont Blamed the Farmer

DuPont pushed back hard. A six-veterinarian “cattle team” was assembled, with three members selected by DuPont and three by the EPA. Led by Dr. Perry Habecker of the University of Pennsylvania and coordinated by Dr. Greg Sykes, a pathologist at DuPont Pharmaceuticals, the team visited the farm in April 1999 and reviewed Tennant’s videotapes. Its December 23, 1999 report concluded that poor farm management, not chemical contamination, had killed the cows.⁴

The report blamed fescue toxicity, pinkeye from face flies, protein-energy malnutrition, and copper deficiency. It said there was “no evidence of toxicity associated with chemical contamination of the environment” and cited “deficiencies in herd management, including poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care, and lack of fly control.” It dismissed many of Tennant’s own narrations on the tapes as “incomplete or erroneous.”⁴

Discovery Changed Everything

Bilott refused to accept the cattle team’s findings. He secured a court order compelling DuPont to turn over internal records on the chemicals it had used and dumped at Dry Run. For months he read tens of thousands of pages of corporate files going back decades. The documents showed DuPont had known for years that PFOA was toxic, persistent, and dangerous to human health, and had kept that knowledge to itself.⁸

What Bilott pulled out of those files included:

A 1962 rat study showing liver, kidney, and pancreatic effects from PFOA exposure.
Late-1960s studies finding liver toxicity in beagles.
A 1978 rhesus monkey study in which the entire high-dose group died.
A 1979 internal review showing abnormal liver function in exposed plant employees.
1981 testing of female workers at the Parkersburg plant, which detected C8 in the blood of eight employees. DuPont tracked pregnancies among seven of those women; two of the children were born with birth defects. The company reassigned 50 female employees out of the production area but did not disclose the findings publicly.⁹¹⁰

DuPont’s own testing had already shown that the Dry Run Landfill was draining onto Tennant’s remaining property and that the creek carried “extraordinarily high concentrations” of PFOA. The company never told the Tennants.³

The 2001 Settlement

The case settled in 2001 for an undisclosed sum. DuPont did not accept blame for the cattle deaths.⁶¹¹ For Bilott, the records he had seen were far bigger than one farm.

The Cost to the Tennant Family

Fighting DuPont carried a social price in a town where the company was the biggest employer. After the suit was filed, Jim’s wife Della said the family was treated like “lepers.” Restaurants emptied when they walked in. Fellow churchgoers avoided them. The hostility grew after the broader class action in 2001. Plaintiffs Joe and Darlene Kiger reported that strangers threw water bottles labeled “C8” at their house. Darlene was told to her face: “You’re taking my job away and you’re going to have to feed my kids and pay my bills if DuPont packs up and leaves because of this.”²

What Tennant’s Case Set in Motion

The PFOA documents Bilott uncovered during the Tennant litigation became the foundation of every piece of PFAS litigation and regulation that followed.

The Letter to the EPA

On March 6, 2001, Bilott sent a 19-page letter to EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, and state officials, warning of an “imminent and substantial threat to health or the environment” from PFOA, and noting the chemical was so persistent scientists questioned whether it would ever break down.¹²¹³ It was the first time federal regulators had been formally alerted to the scope of PFOA contamination. Bilott later submitted a 972-page compilation of his findings. In December 2005, DuPont settled the resulting EPA enforcement action over violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act for $16.5 million, which the agency described as its largest civil administrative penalty ever obtained under a federal environmental statute. The penalty was less than two percent of DuPont’s profits on PFOA that year.¹⁴⁸

The Leach Class Action and the C8 Science Panel

DuPont’s Washington Works plant had released PFOA into air, groundwater, and drinking water across a wide stretch of West Virginia and Ohio.¹⁵ The company had secretly tested tap water in Little Hocking, Ohio, between 1984 and 1989 after detecting C8, and never told the utility or the public.¹⁰

In 2001, Bilott, Winter, and the West Virginia firm Hill, Peterson, Carper, Bee & Deitzler filed Jack W. Leach, et al. v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company in Wood County Circuit Court. It was the first PFAS class action, covering roughly 70,000 residents in six water districts.⁶

The Leach case produced a $107 million pretrial settlement in November 2004. DuPont agreed to install water treatment in the affected districts and to fund an independent C8 Science Panel of three epidemiologists, jointly chosen by plaintiffs and DuPont, to study whether PFOA exposure caused human disease. Between 2005 and 2006, the resulting C8 Health Project enrolled 69,030 participants, whose average serum PFOA was roughly 500 percent higher than the typical American’s.¹⁶

In 2011 and 2012, the Science Panel found a “Probable Link” between C8 exposure and six conditions: diagnosed high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, and pregnancy-induced hypertension.¹⁷ Under the settlement, DuPont had agreed not to contest general causation for any disease the panel linked to PFOA, which opened the door to thousands of personal injury claims.

The $670 Million Personal Injury Settlement

In April 2013, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated the personal injury and wrongful death claims into In re: E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company C-8 Personal Injury Litigation, Case No. 2:13-md-2433, in federal court in Ohio, with Bilott as co-lead counsel. Three bellwether trials produced plaintiff verdicts, including $1.6 million for kidney cancer plaintiff Carla Marie Bartlett and $5.1 million plus $500,000 in punitive damages for testicular cancer plaintiff David Freeman.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰

Tennant’s Death

Tennant did not live to see most of what his case produced. He was diagnosed with cancer and died suddenly of a heart attack on May 15, 2009, at his home in New England, West Virginia. He was 67. Per his wishes, he was cremated, and his remains were buried at New England Cemetery. His wife Sandy survived him.¹¹¹

Tennant in Dark Waters

Tennant’s story reached a wide audience through the 2019 film Dark Waters, directed by Todd Haynes and based on the 2016 New York Times Magazine article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.” Mark Ruffalo played Bilott, and Bill Camp played Tennant, consulting with Tennant family members to capture his mannerisms.²¹ Bilott’s own memoir, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont, co-written with Tom Shroder, was published in October 2019 and treats the Tennant case as the starting point of the PFAS fight.²²

In 2024, the EPA finalized the first national drinking-water regulation for PFAS, setting the maximum contaminant level for PFOA at 4.0 parts per trillion.²³ The rule, like the lawsuits and settlements that preceded it, traces back to a cattle farmer in West Virginia who saw something wrong in his creek, picked up a camcorder, and refused to be ignored.

1
Leavitt Funeral Home. Wilbur Earl Tennant Obituary
2
HuffPost Highline. Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg
3
The New York Times. The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare
4
Toxic Docs. Tennant Farm Herd Health Investigation
5
The New York Times. The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare
6
Taft Stettinius & Hollister. Taft Is a Global Leader in PFAS Forever Chemicals Litigation and Advisory Work
7
Toxic Docs. Tennant v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours
8
Right Livelihood Foundation. Robert Bilott
9
Orion Magazine. Exposure
10
Environmental Working Group. DuPont Hid Teflon Pollution for Decades
11
Chicago Tribune. Persistent Farmer Whose Cows Died From a Mysterious Disease Helped Unravel the Origin of Toxic Chemicals
12
Inside Climate News. PFAS Forever Chemicals EPA Restrictions
13
West Virginia University Public Health. Dark Waters Behind the Scenes With Attorney Who Took On DuPont
14
U.S. EPA. E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company PFOA Settlements
15
U.S. EPA. Chemours Washington Works History and Safe Drinking Water Act Settlements
16
National Center for Biotechnology Information. C8 Health Project Design and Methods
17
C8 Science Panel. C8 Science Panel
18
U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio. C-8 Personal Injury MDL
19
Ohio Governor’s Office. State Secures Settlement With DuPont for Environmental Restoration Along Ohio River
20
Ethical Systems. Robert Bilott Author of Exposure Reflects on His Fight Against Corporate Arrogance
21
The Hollywood Reporter. True Story of Dark Waters
22
Simon & Schuster. Exposure by Robert Bilott
23
Federal Register. PFAS National Primary Drinking Water Regulation