First DuPont C-8 Bellwether: $1.6 Million Verdict for Kidney Cancer

For decades, DuPont released a chemical called C-8, also known as PFOA, from its Washington Works plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia. The compound was used to make Teflon, and it spread into the drinking water of communities up and down the Ohio River valley. By the time the contamination was widely known, thousands of residents had been drinking it for years.

Carla Bartlett lived in Coolville, Ohio, and drank from a water supply tainted with C-8. In 1997, doctors found a tumor on one of her kidneys. Surgeons removed the tumor along with part of one of her ribs. She was 59 by the time her case went to trial, and it became one of more than 3,500 personal injury and wrongful death claims consolidated in federal court in southern Ohio.

Jon Conlin of Cory Watson Attorneys served as co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in that litigation, known as MDL 2433. DuPont chose Bartlett's case as the first of six bellwether trials, telling the court it involved comparatively less severe injuries than many of the claims waiting behind it. A science panel created under an earlier class settlement had already found a probable link between C-8 exposure and kidney cancer, which shaped the medical question the jury had to weigh.

The trial in Columbus ran close to a month. Plaintiffs' lawyers showed jurors that DuPont had tracked C-8 in local water and in residents' blood for years, understood it was building up, and kept using and discharging it anyway. They argued the company put the surrounding communities at risk rather than change course.

In October 2015, after less than a day of deliberation, the jury found DuPont negligent and awarded Bartlett $1.6 million: $1.1 million for negligence and $500,000 for emotional distress. Jurors declined to add punitive damages in this first case.

The verdict was watched as a signal for the thousands of claims still pending. DuPont said it would appeal and filed notice, but the $1.6 million award was not reduced or remitted. In February 2017, with several bellwether verdicts on appeal, DuPont and its spinoff company Chemours agreed to pay $670.7 million to settle all of the roughly 3,550 C-8 cases, Bartlett's included.