2: A flash of genius

Summary

Safe to Drink – Episode 2: A Flash of Genius

Podcast: Safe to Drink
Host: Mara Hoplamazian (NHPR)
Date: January 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into how ordinary people uncovered the hidden dangers of PFOA—one of the so-called "forever chemicals"—in small-town water supplies, and how these discoveries ripple through communities and government institutions. Through the intersecting stories of Michael Hickey in Hoosick Falls, NY, and others like Lorene Allen, listeners learn how a mix of personal tragedy, community observation, and DIY investigation exposed industrial water contamination that officials and companies had long failed to address. The episode builds toward the origins of these persistent chemicals and traces the patterns of discovery, denial, and the slow march toward regulation.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. A Common Thread in Small Towns

• The episode opens with the story of two women, both named Lorene, who met because both their communities faced similar water contamination crises involving PFOA.
• Quote:
  • Mara Hoplamazian: “They were both drinking the same chemical. They also met because, well, they’re kind of birds of a feather.” (01:42)

2. Michael Hickey’s Awakening

• Michael Hickey, an "insurance underwriter" and self-described shy townsperson in Hoosick Falls, NY, loses his father, Ursul, to kidney cancer.
• As cancer and other illnesses seem to cluster in the community, Michael has an epiphany:
  • Michael Hickey: “It seemed like we had a lot of these illnesses. And I’m like, wow, what ties everybody together? Water, right? Water does.” (06:07)
• Michael connects the dots between Teflon production at the local Saint-Gobain plant, scientific studies he finds (the C8 Science Panel), and the community health crisis.

3. The DIY Water Testing Operation

• Hitting barriers from local officials (the mayor, state health departments) and faced with regulatory loopholes (small towns not required to test for PFOA), Michael takes matters into his own hands.
• He collects clandestine water samples (from his mother’s home, his own, a Dollar General, and a McDonald’s), likening himself to “undercover James Bond” (14:31).
• The results are alarming: more than 400 parts per trillion of PFOA found in his father’s house—well above the (then) EPA guideline.
  • Mara Hoplamazian: “Almost two years after his dad died of kidney cancer, Michael Hickey had just proven that his entire town was drinking a chemical linked to kidney cancer.” (16:35)

4. Official Inertia and EPA Intervention

• Despite proof, local and state officials initially downplay the threat, citing compliance with existing (non-binding) guidelines.
  • Michael Hickey: “If we had a whole bunch of brown water, people would probably say, ‘oh, shit.’ But in this case, you didn’t.” (17:27)
• Only when EPA regional administrator Judith Enck reviews the data and acts does the crisis get broad attention:
  • Judith Enck: “You need to tell the public to stop drinking the water, because I’m very concerned about these elevated levels.” (18:11)
• Resistance continues as the state negotiates with the company; ultimately, the EPA publicly advises the town to stop drinking the water, prompting bottled water distribution and wider acknowledgment of the problem.

5. Ripple Effects Across States

• The exposure in Hoosick Falls spurs officials in other states (like Vermont, then New Hampshire) to investigate their own water supplies, especially where Saint-Gobain has operated.
• Michael Hickey’s investigation sets off a chain reaction, making national news and forcing companies and regulators to pay attention.

6. The Unlikely Origin of Teflon and PFOA

• The episode detours into chemistry history with Roy Plunkett’s accidental discovery of PTFE (Teflon) at DuPont in 1938, originally a serendipitous lab event later weaponized and commercialized.
  • Roy Plunkett: “The discovery of PTFE has been variously described as... an example of serendipity. A lucky accident, a flash of genius.” (26:48)
• PTFE’s properties (strong C–F bonds) make it resistant to breakdown, earning these compounds the “forever chemicals” moniker.

7. Parkersburg – The Blueprint for the Forever Chemicals Crisis

• The Parkersburg, WV, story emerges as the "original" case:
  • Farmer Wilbur Tennant links dead cows and polluted water to a DuPont landfill, documenting shocking animal deaths (videos of frothy streams, sick cows, and autopsies).
  • He brings in lawyer Rob Bilott, who, through discovery, obtains damning DuPont internal documents about C8/PFOA toxicity (35:33–36:09).
    • Rob Bilott: “What really struck me was seeing the DuPont company’s own scientists raising concerns about the potential cancer effects.” (36:45)
  • Both DuPont and 3M’s unpublished studies showed health dangers; companies neither informed regulators nor the public.

8. The C8 Science Panel and Confirmed Health Links

• Legal action leads to the landmark C8 study: 70,000 exposed people, years of research, and the landmark findings (2011).
  • Probable links established between PFOA exposure and: kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, preeclampsia, and ulcerative colitis.
    • Rob Bilott: "They were able to confirm what frankly we had seen in the internal documents years earlier, but the companies were denying, which is that the chemical can in fact cause harm in humans." (41:51)
• Despite compelling evidence, the EPA stops short of enforcing strict limits, resulting in a repetitive, “ground zero” response every time contamination surfaces in a new community.
  • Rob Bilott: “It’s almost as if everybody was starting from ground zero... Very frustrating, because here we had a situation where this had been going on for decades.” (45:02)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Michael Hickey:

  • “I’m not an activist but I was pissed off so I’m a pissivist.” (02:02)
  • “I needed to be able to sleep at night. Right? Like that was the whole thing. I was like, I was so obsessed at that point. I’m like, all right, did my dad really get cheated?” (12:38)

• Judith Enck (EPA):

  • “And I kept telling the Cuomo administration, ‘you’ve got to tell the public, and if you don’t, I will.’ And they refused.” (18:52)

• Roy Plunkett (on his discovery):

  • “I’m proud of my part in this development ... and most of all, I’m proud of all the benefit to mankind from this original invention.” (30:18)

• Wilbur Tennant (farmer):

  • “This is the hundredth and seventh calf that has... had this problem, and I burned them all.” (34:23)

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Chronological Structure / Important Segments

• 01:24–02:12: Introduction of the “Lorenes” and Michael’s motivation for his investigation.
• 03:04–06:30: Michael Hickey’s family background; first suspicions about water causing illness.
• 07:36–08:03: Michael discovers PFOA studies and becomes obsessed with finding answers.
• 10:31–13:58: Michael reads scientific studies and conducts covert sample collections.
• 16:35–19:01: Discovery of high PFOA levels; local and state government response; EPA’s intervention.
• 21:33–22:11: Reflection on impact—Michael’s view (“How do you measure absence of suffering?”).
• 26:10–27:05: Chemistry origin story—Roy Plunkett accidentally invents PTFE (Teflon).
• 33:07–36:09: Parkersburg, WV, and Wilbur Tennant’s fight; introduction of lawyer Rob Bilott.
• 41:51–44:04: The C8 Science Panel findings and government hesitance to regulate.
• 45:02–46:20: Frustration at the “ground zero” cycle of discovery and denial.

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Tone & Language

Conversational yet investigative, marked by personal anecdotes, a sense of frustration with regulatory inertia, and a persistent search for justice and scientific truth. The speakers alternate between dry humor, sorrow, and righteous anger.

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Summary

“A Flash of Genius” reveals how everyday citizens—inspired by personal loss and community concern—cracked the code of a hidden environmental crisis perpetuated by companies and overlooked by regulators. From Michael Hickey’s clandestine water testing in Hoosick Falls to Wilbur Tennant’s documentation of sick cattle in Parkersburg, the episode exposes the patterns of chemical concealment, bureaucratic foot-dragging, and the slow accrual of scientific proof. It unpacks the chemistry and corporate legacy of Teflon/PFOA, explaining how we came to be surrounded by invisible, potent “forever chemicals.” Listeners see how each new town forced to face water contamination must navigate the same cycle of disbelief, study, and slow action—a cycle the EPA’s lack of enforceable regulation has failed to disrupt, despite mounting science and heartbreak.

For more details, referenced court documents, or historical media, visit nhpr.org/safetodrink.

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End of summary.

Transcript

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[Mara Hoplamazian]

also thinks it's funny that she shares a name with Lorene Allen. They run in the same circles now. I've heard them called the Lorenes.

[Michael Hickey]

In our group we use our last names. Yo Hackett, Lorene 1, Laureen 2. Doesn't work cause we never know which one's which.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

The Lorene's met because the same thing happened to their water in their two small towns about 100 miles away from each other. They were both drinking the same chemical. They also met because well they're kind of birds of a feather. I was in lock on target mode. That part of me that really is

[Reza Satchew]

about justice just was like rah.

[Michael Hickey]

I'm not an activist but I was pissed off so I'm a pissivist.

[Roy Plunkett]

You know.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

I promise we're going to spend more time with the Lorene's. But first I need to tell you the story of how Laureen Hackett foundation found out there was something up with the water in her town, Hoosick Falls, New York. Because if not for what happened in Hoosick Falls, people in Merrimack, New Hampshire might still not know about the chemical in their water. It started with a guy named Michael Hickey. Michael was never one to speak up. He says he's a behind the scenes kind of guy, like the kid in the back of the class.

[Michael Hickey]

I'm a little bit timid, right? I don't like public speaking. My voice is shaky on doing this podcast. Right.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Michael grew up in the town of Hoosick Falls. It's a beautiful spot in upstate New York, built along two rivers. There's a folk artist, grand Grandma Moses, who got popular in the 1950s partly for her scenes of the area. Covered bridges, little white houses with big chimneys, rolling hills under blankets of snow. Michael really liked his childhood there. He got along well with his parents. They both had jobs at a local factory owned by Saint Gobain.

[Michael Hickey]

It's a blue collar lifestyle, right? And they were lucky, and we were lucky as their kids, being my brother and my sister, to be brought up that way.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

His dad worked the overnight shift, 11pm to 7am and then he would leave work and go drive a school bus.

[Michael Hickey]

He drove from 7 to 8:30. He went home. He slept from 8:30 to noon, and he drove from noon to 5. And he did it all over again. 32 years. And then he drove limos on the weekends.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Everyone called Michael's dad Ursul, after a rockabilly singer named Ursul Hickey. Ursul was beloved. He wore bright shirts and polka dot shorts. He served in local government. Michael says he never heard him say a bad thing about anyone. And he never saw Ursul smoke or drink. He took his work seriously.

[Michael Hickey]

Once he got the job driving a school bus, he never wanted there to be a question if he was hungover on a Monday morning or if he had any kid in his control that he didn't want to ever be. A question if he was that guy out drinking at the bars. Small community, people talk, and he never wanted that.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

When the time came to retire, Ursel was excited to travel. He'd worked hard, saved up. He had an rv. He left his job at the Saint Gobain factory first. Then he stopped driving the school bus. And then seven months later, he died. He was 70.

[Michael Hickey]

It was awful. He didn't. He fought until the very end. Like a lot of people say, they're in a better place and he didn't want to go anywhere.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Ursul died of kidney cancer in the winter of 2013. At first, his family had thought he'd be able to beat it. Then it spread. Michael struggled a lot with his dad's death. He figured Ursul was healthy, didn't do the stuff people say gives you cancer he worried about the way he handled his dad's treatment. About a year after Ursul died, Michael was sitting at home one night up late, thinking. A local math teacher he knew had also just died of cancer. She was 48. Then Michael remembered hearing about other illnesses around town. A nagging thought entered his mind. Maybe it wasn't a coincidence that people were getting sick in Hoosick Falls. Maybe there was a pattern.

[Michael Hickey]

Like, then I started thinking, why are all these people always sick? You know what? Because in a smaller community like this, you know what the neighbor has for illnesses. You know what the person down the road has, you know, like. And it seemed like we had a lot of these illnesses. And I'm like, wow, what ties everybody together? Water, right? Water does.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

The house Michael grew up in was across the street from the Saint Gobain plant, about 150 yards away. And the wells that supplied Hoosick Falls public drinking water were near his house, too, about 500 yards away from the plant. Michael knew what Saint Gobain fabrics coated in Teflon. He'd actually worked there, too. During his college summer breaks, he scraped the soot out of the exhaust towers. So he started Googling, typed in the words Teflon and kidney cancer. He found a group of scientific studies, something called the C8 Science Panel. It was completed in 2013, less than a year after Ursul died of kidney cancer. Michael saw that the panel listed a bunch of illnesses linked to a chemical used to make Teflon, a chemical called pfoa. The study focused on people exposed to the chemical through their drinking water.

[Michael Hickey]

I was like, holy shit. The first one that popped up was kidney cancer. That's what my dad had. And then I read through it, and then I was obsessed. I couldn't sleep at night, right, because of stuff with him. And that's what I did. I read so I didn't have to sleep.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Michael found himself in the middle of something that didn't feel right. But rather than just sit with that feeling, he decided to do something about it. From the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, I'm Mara Hoplamazian. This is safe to drink.

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[Mara Hoplamazian]

So Michael Hickey is staying up all night reading scientific studies about pfoa. Maybe some of the same ones Lorene Allen would eventually read in Merrimack. And just like Lorene, Michael isn't a scientist. He reads some of the studies four or five times to understand them.

[Michael Hickey]

I'm an insurance underwriter, you know, I don't have any science background.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Michael becomes convinced, just like the people in the C8 study, his town was drinking contaminated water. But he figures no one would believe him. Imagine how you'd sound trying to convince your town the water was poisonous. So Michael goes to his friend who's a local doctor. The doctor had taken over a medical practice from his dad, so he had records from people in Hoosick falls going back 50 years. Michael points out the list of illnesses from that study he'd high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, pregnancy induced hypertension, and kidney cancer.

[Michael Hickey]

He's like, we see a lot of these illnesses. There could be something to it.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

There could be something to it. But they have no proof that PFOA is getting into the water. There's only one way to be they have to test the town's drinking water supply. To do that, they go to someone with power. The mayor of Hoosick Falls.

[Michael Hickey]

You know, my hope in the beginning was to bring the mayor a folder and leave, you know, and say, here you go, giddy up, you take care of it, I'm done.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

It didn't happen that way. The mayor says he'll talk to the county about it, but the county says there's no need to do anything. In 2014, in the United States, pretty much only public water systems with more than 10,000 people had to get tested for PFOA. Hoosick Falls is too small. It seems ridiculous to Michael. 10,000 people feels like an arbitrary cutoff. And if there is something in his town's water that's making people sick that might have killed his dad, he has

[Michael Hickey]

to know I needed to be able to sleep at night. Right? Like that was the whole thing. I was like, I was so obsessed at that point. I'm like, all right, did my dad really get cheated?

[Mara Hoplamazian]

So here's where Michael does something big. This soft spoken insurance underwriter with no scientific background decides he's going to test his town's water for PFOA himself. Michael calls around and manages to find a lab in Canada that will do it for 700 bucks. All they need is for him to send the water samples in a special cooler. One day the cooler arrives and Michael gets to work. He takes these little vials and he collects samples from his mom's house. That's the water his dad drank. He also collects water from his own house. But that's not enough. The lab needs four samples of raw water, the water from the town treatment system, before it gets filtered. But there's a problem. The mayor says private citizens aren't allowed to access raw water.

[Michael Hickey]

I was like, what would be the closest to raw that I could get? And that would be the two that are on the other side of the river would be the Dollar Store and the McDonald's.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

The Dollar General and the McDonald's. Michael knew they used private wells that weren't filtered through the town's system. He figured it would be a good proxy for the raw water. But now he has to get his little vials to a sink at the local dollar General and McDonald's without being weird. So Michael hatches a plan at the Dollar General. He will go in and very casually ask for the big wooden key to the bathroom.

[Michael Hickey]

Yeah, I felt a little shady. Yeah, yeah. It was like, alright, I'm really just going in there and taking water though, you know, like. But I felt like there's some crazy shit here. I'm like really undercover James Bond type shit I'm doing.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

For the McDonald's job, Michael orders a Happy Meal with his toddler while his then wife collects the water from the bathroom. No one is the wiser. Michael packs up the little vials into the special cooler and ships it off to the lab in Canada. And then he waits. A few weeks go by. Then finally, the results. PFOA is in the water. And not just the background levels that you'd find in almost every water supply. There's lots of it. More than 400 parts per trillion at the house his dad lived in. Turns out the mayor, who wouldn't give Michael access to the raw water, did his own tests. They confirmed Michael's results. Almost two years after his dad died of kidney cancer, Michael Hickey had just proven that his entire town was drinking a chemical linked to kidney cancer. So here's where I thought the story would have ended. This is the big moment, right? They found PFOA in the water. Like when the meddling kids and Scooby Doo take the mask off their villain at the end of the episode, Michael thought it was obvious. A chemical in the water plus evidence the chemical could make people sick equals tell everybody to stop drinking the water. That's what he and his family did. But it wasn't that simple. The mayor of Hoosick Falls turned to the county public health department and they told the mayor basically, don't worry, it's all good. They said the village was in compliance with all of the regulations, which was true. Remember, at the time, PFOA was not a regulated chemical, even though there was science linking it to some cancers, including that big study Michael had found. There was just that federal guideline on how much PFOA was safe to drink. In 2014, the EPA's guidance was 400 parts per trillion. But the guideline was just that, a suggestion. There was nothing legally enforceable about it. So even though Hoosick Falls had water testing higher than the EPA's guideline, nobody had to do anything. And Michael says it was hard to get many people to believe there was even something going on. After all, PFOA has no smell, no taste, no color, right?

[Michael Hickey]

If we had a whole bunch of brown water, people would probably say, oh, shit. But in this case, you didn't.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

But then in 2015, Word of the water issue in Hoosick Falls made it to the desk of an EPA regulator named Judith Enck. Judith ran the regional EPA office at the time. She's originally from the area, but when she got a call from a county official asking for money to help pay for water filters, she was surprised.

[Judith Enck]

You know, I kind of follow local environmental issues. And I'd never heard of this. So I asked the county executive, what are you talking about?

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Then when she looked at the levels of PFOA in the water, she was even more shocked.

[Judith Enck]

I spoke to the mayor of Hoosick Falls, and I said, you need to tell the public to stop drinking the water, because I'm very concerned about these elevated levels.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

But the town, and even the state run by then Governor Andrew Cuomo, seemed reluctant to make a big deal out of this. Judith says the New York State Health Department told her they had been negotiating with Saint Gobain and they were close to getting the company to offer free bottled water in the local supermarket. She remembers them asking her not to talk publicly about whether the water was safe to drink.

[Judith Enck]

And I kept telling the Cuomo administration, you've got to tell the public, and if you don't, I will. And they refused.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

So she did. In November 2015, the EPA sent a letter to Hoosick Falls recommending that people stop using the water for drinking and cooking. We asked the New York State Health Department about this moment. They didn't address whether they asked Judith Enck not to tell the public, but they referred us to testimony officials gave in 2016. They said they were communicating with people in Hoosick Falls about the situation through the county and the town. And they were caught off guard by Enck's letter. They said it was inconsistent with how the EPA was handling similar situations in the rest of the country. A few days after the letter, Saint Gobain began paying for a free bottled water program. Finally, the whole town was beginning to see what Michael Hickey saw. The kid in the back of the class got everyone to pay attention. There's so much more to the Hoosick Falls story. Some local banks announced they would no longer issue mortgages in Hoosick Falls. The EPA classified Saint Gobain's plant as a Superfund site. State officials named PFOA a hazardous substance. Saint Gobain and other companies settled lawsuits without admitting any fault or responsibility for the contamination. They paid out millions of dollars to people who drank pfoa. For years, the story made the national news. Legislators called hearings and asked, how could this have happened? Michael Hickey became a leading PFOA advocate. In 2019, Michael's congressman invited him to President Trump's second State of the Union. Most importantly, Husick Falls installed a treatment system, a series of filters that remove pfoa. After treatment, the water is PFOA free. Saint Gobain's Hoosick Falls plant is still open. Data taken in 2019 showed the plant was no longer releasing PFOA. It was still releasing other PFAS chemicals. Still, Michael says it's a good thing that they didn't leave.

[Michael Hickey]

These people who live in these communities would work these jobs even if they knew they were going to get sick. I know my parents would have, because what else were they going to do? And it's just really unfortunate that these companies, they knew for a long time what they were doing right and they took advantage of these blue collar communities. Right thinking, all right, it's our lifestyle or drinkers or smokers, they, you know, they don't take care of themselves. That's why they're getting sick, when in reality it's the chemicals they're working with.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

But besides a few plaques from the epa, Michael says he doesn't feel like he has much to show for his work. How do you measure the absence of suffering?

[Michael Hickey]

Nobody will ever know what we actually accomplish because people just won't get sick and they won't die, right? So nobody will really know what we accomplished.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

One of the things Michael and others in Hoosick Falls did accomplish was waking up up other towns with Saint Gobain plants to what was in their water. As a direct result of the Hoosick Falls story, officials just next door in Vermont began to wonder about the Saint Gobain plant in their state. In February 2016, officials there announced results from tests of private wells in Bennington, Vermont. One of them came back at 2,880 parts per trillion. The very next day, a director with Saint Gobain placed a call to regulators with the state of New Hampshire. He wanted to let them know that the company had just detected PFOA in Meramax drinking water. Michael Hickey's hunch about his dad's death and his DIY testing had started a chain reaction. Without it, people in Merrimack might still not know about the PFOA in their water. But what about everything Michael found when he first started researching the news articles? That big scientific study? Where did all of that come from? And why did it seem like nobody in New York knew about it? That's coming up. By the way, you can see photos of Michael Hoosick Falls and scroll through a timeline of all of this at our website, nhpr.org safetodrink. When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

help me with that.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help.

[Linley Dixon]

I was ruminating a lot.

[Progressive Insurance Narrator]

Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing.

[Rob Bellott]

Discover what BetterHelp online therapy can do for you.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Visit betterhelp.com today.

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[Mara Hoplamazian]

When I first started reporting on PFOA, it felt to me kind of like Sauron's character in the Lord of the Rings. You never see his face. You don't really know anything about his backstory, at least in the Peter Jackson movies. His presence on Middle Earth, the destruction he's causing. It all feels kind of inevitable. I never really thought to wonder where he came from, why he is the way he is. The industry that would end up contaminating the water in Hoosick Falls and Bennington and Merrimack. It had a pretty unlikely start.

[Roy Plunkett]

The discovery of PTFE has been variously described as an example of serendipity. A lucky accident, a flash of genius. Perhaps all three were involved.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

It was 1938. Roy Plunkett was at work in a lab in New Jersey owned by E.I. dupont de Nemours and Company. You might know it as Dupont. Roy joined Dupont in 1935. He was helping them develop new kinds of refrigerants. This was during the rise of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. You know, the stuff that depleted the ozone layer. Roy told an oral historian that on an early April morning in 1938, he was experimenting with something called tetrafluoroethylene gas. But the experiment didn't go as planned.

[Roy Plunkett]

My helper said, hey, Doc, did we use all the gas out of this cylinder? I said, no, I don't think so. He said, well, nothing's coming out, and I don't know what the heck is wrong.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

The cylinder didn't have gas inside, but the weight hadn't changed, so there was something in there. Roy turned it upside down and powder fell out. The gas had polymerized the molecules, all linking together. The tetrafluoroethylene gas had turned into polytetrafluoroethylene ptfe. When he started to test the powder he'd accidentally made, Roy saw that it was special. It was so strong, he couldn't find anything in his lab that would dissolve it. It wouldn't react with any other chemical. Dupont shelved it. It was too expensive to manufacture. But then the US Military came calling

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

as German troops swarm across frontiers in their first offensive since 1914.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

It was World War II, and they were trying to make an atomic bomb. Turns out when you're enriching a lot of uranium, you need something very, very durable. According to Roy, the director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, learned about his invention.

[Roy Plunkett]

And he said, you guys better get a hold of it and develop it, or we're going to take it away from you. That was about the way that it went.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

After the war, dupont and other companies realized PTFE wasn't just useful for nuclear bomb making. It was resistant to the elements. It was extremely slippery. It could have all kinds of applications for consumer products. So they commercialized it. They called it Teflon. A set of Nonstick, easy, clean Teflon 2 certified cookware makes a beautiful just

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

spray, bake and slip away.

[Rob Bellott]

Resolve carpet cleaner with DuPont Teflon engine

[Mara Hoplamazian]

treatment with DuPont, Teflon, Clorox and Teflon

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

bring you the nonstick bath.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Roy Plunkett's accidental discovery became a huge success. And before he died in 1994 of cancer, he got his kudos for it. Lots of awards. A member of the Plastics hall of Fame.

[Roy Plunkett]

I'm proud of my part in this development. I'm proud of the company with whom I worked. I'm proud of what has happened most of the all. I'm proud with all the benefit to mankind from this original invention.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

What makes Teflon so remarkable, almost magical is its chemistry. It's made of a string of carbon and fluorine atoms bonded together. Picture a caterpillar. The body is a bunch of carbon atoms and the feet are fluorine. Now picture a caterpillar with really, really strong legs. Those bonds between the carbon and fluorine atoms are the strongest single bonds in organic chemistry. That bond is what makes Teflon so resistant to the elements. Not long after Dupont created Teflon, another company, 3M, created a similar chemical, PFOA. It also has that carbon fluorine bond. PFOA was useful in the mass production of Teflon, so you'd often find them together. Today, PFOA and Teflon are just two out of thousands of what we now call pfas. Chemicals remember their nickname Forever Chemicals Forever. Because they're so strong, they can withstand breaking down for a long, long time. Studies project it would take thousands of years. And over that time, they can move around pretty easily in air and water and our bodies. I think of them like tiny little caterpillar ghosts moving around in our world. The undead. Starting in the 1950s, Dupont used PFOA to help make Teflon at a factory outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia. They kept it up for decades. What happened next? The story of Parkersburg, West Virginia, is in some ways the original production of the play we've been watching. It starts on a cattle farm outside of town. It's right next door to a landfill used by the dupont factory. The farm is run by Wilbur Earl Tennant. Before there's Lorene Allen in Merrimack or Michael Hickey in Hoosick Falls. There's Wilbur, another person who can just tell something isn't right.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

Somebody's not doing their duty,

[Roy Plunkett]

and they're

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

going to find out one of these days that somebody's tired of it.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

That's Wilbur in a series of camcorder videos he took in the mid-90s. He'd lived and worked on his farm with his siblings since he was a child. He knew the land and he knew his animals. And he made these videos because there was something deeply strange happening to them. The creek that flows to his cow pasture has become frothy, like someone poured in bottles of soap. Wilbur zooms in on a dead fish that's floating upside down.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

When I told you, I didn't see any Minis in this stream of water. This ought to tell you right yonder what I'm talking about. Soon as they hatch out, they don't live very long until this water kills them.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

The cows drinking this water look terrible. Emaciated and sick, Wilbur says They're miserable, kicking and rolling around on the ground, and so many of them are dying. In one video, he points the camcorder at a burn pile. As he narrates, the body of a dead calf is in flames.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

This is a hundredth and seventh calf that has. He met this problem right here, and I burned them all.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

In some of the tapes, Wilbur is doing his own autopsies of the cows. In one, he zooms in on the cow's teeth. They look rotten. In another video, he dissects the cow's internal organs.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

I've never been into anything like it in my lifetime. Even the veterinarian been in it. He wouldn't ever saw anything like this before in his life either.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Wilbur is convinced all of this has something to do with dupont's landfill next door.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

As I said, it's been like this all along. The dnr, EPA or nobody else, and this state government wants to get up off their can and do anything about it. And if he'll kill these minis, what will you do to other stuff in this area?

[Mara Hoplamazian]

He's determined to do something. So Wilbur reaches out to a fancy lawyer. His name is Rob Bellott. Rob takes the case and he starts doing lawyer things. He doesn't know exactly what is making the cows die, but he sues Dupont in 1999, and through the discovery process, Dupont is forced to hand over a mountain of internal documents about the chemicals they're using.

[Rob Bellott]

Honestly, it took me a while to really understand what I was seeing.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Rob finds references to a chemical called PFOA. At DuPont, they also called it C8, for the eight carbon atoms that make up the body of every PFOA caterpillar. Rob's never heard of C8 before. It's not on any list of regulated materials, but it turns out the company has been dumping it at the landfill near Wilbur Tennant's farm. That's just the beginning. What Rob finds next is so big, it will shape the debate around forever chemicals for decades to come.

[Rob Bellott]

What really struck me was seeing the DuPont company's own scientists raising concerns about the potential cancer effects.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Scientists inside DuPont and 3M had been studying whether PFOA was toxic for decades. And a lot of what they found suggested it was.

[Rob Bellott]

Not only did Dupont know that, but 3M, the manufacturer, knew that. And there was all of this internal data I was seeing suggesting here we had a chemical that looked to be pretty toxic, bioaccumulative, bio persistent, potential carcinogenic 3M.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

And Dupont had run all kinds of experiments with PFOA. They tested it on rats. Some of them died. Others had problems with their livers, eyes, testicles and kidneys. They tested it on dogs. Two beagles got doses of the chemical and then died within two days. Dupont and 3M tested the blood of their employees based on what they knew about PFOA's effects on pregnant rats. Dupont switched female employees at their West Virginia factory out of areas where they used PFOA. By the 1980s, the companies knew the chemical was toxic to animals and they knew it was getting into human bodies and accumulating. And in the case of DuPont in West Virginia, they knew as early as 1984 that PFOA wasn't just getting onto Wilbur Tennant's farm. It was leaching into the drinking water supply for tens of thousands of people in the Ohio River Valley. It's a huge moment in the history of PFAS chemicals in America. So big they made a movie about it. Wilbur Tennant's lawyer, Rob Bellott, is played by Mark Ruffalo. Honestly, great casting.

[Microsoft Windows 11 Advertiser]

Dupont knew everything.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

They knew that the C8 they put

[Microsoft Windows 11 Advertiser]

into the air and buried into the

[Mara Hoplamazian]

ground for decades was causing cancers. They knew that.

[Rob Bellott]

And yeah, as I'm looking through all this, really not seeing any information being exchanged and disclosed with the government, with the regulators, with the scientific community, and certainly not with the public.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

We reached out to 3M and Dupont with a lot of detailed questions about this. 3M didn't respond to our questions, but they sent a statement about their, quote, voluntary exit from manufacturing PFAS chemicals and the billions of dollars they've paid in settlements to fund remediation efforts. Reaching out to dupont was more complicated. They've done a lot of restructuring. They created a new company called Chemours and stuck it with their PFAS liabilities. Camours didn't respond to our request for comment. The company now known as dupont told me in a statement, basically, they have nothing to do with this. Okay. Rob discovered Dupont and 3M knew PFOA might be toxic to humans. But the companies didn't tell the public and they didn't tell the EPA. So Rob did. In 2001, Rob sent a letter to the EPA and other government officials with what he'd learned. It was like Rob sending up a flare. All the health risks about PFOA that the companies knew about but didn't share, they were no longer a secret. But meanwhile, local authorities in West Virginia sent out letters saying the water was still safe to drink. Rob filed a class action lawsuit against dupont on behalf of the Tens of thousands of people who were exposed to PFOA through their drinking water. It took three years, but in 2004, Dupont settled the lawsuit. As part of the agreement, Dupont would pay for a new scientific study. The study would try to pin down whether PFOA could be linked to illnesses in Parkersburg and nearby towns. It would be called the C8 study, after Dupont's name for PFOA. The team of scientists conducting the study were chosen by Rob and Dupont. Together, almost 70,000 people who'd been exposed to PFOA gave blood samples. It was one of the largest epidemiological studies in history. It took several years. A few years before it was published, Wilbur Tennant died. Finally, at the end of 2011, the results started to come out.

[Rob Bellott]

They were able to confirm what frankly we had seen in the internal documents years earlier, but the companies were denying, which is that the chemical can in fact cause harm in humans.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Six different diseases that were linked to six different diseases. The scientists found probable links between exposure to PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, preeclampsia, and ulcerative colitis. The term probable link was defined this given the available scientific evidence, it is more likely than not that among class members a connection exists between PFOA exposure and a particular human disease. The internal company research and animal experiments Rob had uncovered raised serious red flags. And now there was a massive study to add to that. A study that said it was more likely than not that PFOA was making people sick. A study you could [e-mail] if you search the terms Teflon and kidney cancer. In the aftermath of all of this, Rob Bellott thought, okay, here we go. PFOA in the water plus evidence PFOA causes bad things to happen to humans equals the government needs to make sure people stop drinking water with PFOA in it.

[Rob Bellott]

I remember going back again to U.S. ePA and saying, okay, now that we've gotten this data, that's pretty much the definitively finally confirmed what we've been saying for years. What else do we need to finally move forward and begin regulating these chemicals in the drinking water of this country?

[Mara Hoplamazian]

But the EPA wanted more data to find out how widespread the PFOA issue was before making any enforceable rules. In the meantime, The EPA got DuPont and seven other PFOA manufacturers to start voluntarily phasing out the chemical by 2015. They also created that health advisory guideline. 400 parts per trillion later, they revised it down to 70. These might seem like victories for Rob. But year after year, the EPA didn't do the one thing he really wanted. Set a legally enforceable limit for how much PFOA was allowed in public drinking water. And without a federal limit, whenever contamination was discovered in a new town, it was like someone hit rewind and started the story over.

[Rob Bellott]

It's almost as if everybody was starting from ground zero and trying to find out, what do we know about this chemical? Is there any information about the health effects? Has anybody ever dealt with this before? Very frustrating, because here we had a situation where this had been going on for decades.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

Rob watched this happen over and over. PFOA is discovered in a town, and it's like Parkersburg never happened. No one's heard of pfoa. It's an unregulated chemical, an emerging contaminant. Same play, different set. So why does this keep happening in Parkersburg, Hoosick Falls, Merrimack and other towns? That too. Why doesn't the story of this chemical stick? You will hear industry. Their constant refrain is that each One of these 15,000 PFOS chemicals is like a snowflake.

[Michael Hickey]

You follow the science, and that's kind of your only. If you don't follow the science, then you're in the wilderness.

[Mara Hoplamazian]

That's next time on Safe to Drink. Safe to Drink is reported by me, Mara Hoplamazian. Additional reporting and production by Jason Moon. Our editors are Daniela Allee and Katie Colinari. Editing help from Daniel Barrick, Rebecca Lavoy, Taylor Quimby, Elena Eberwine and Lau Guzman. Fact checking by Danya Suleiman. Legal review by Jeremy Eggleton. Jason Moon wrote all the music you hear in this podcast. Photos by Raquel Zaldivar. Sarah Plour designed our website. Again, that's nhpr.org safetodrink where you can also check out Rob Bellott's letter to the epa, documents he discovered through court cases, and see footage from Wilbur Tennant's camcorder videos. Nate Hedge designed our logo. Special thanks to Sharon Lerner, whose writing for The Intercept and ProPublica was very helpful when I was reporting this episode. And to Mariah Blake, whose book they Poisoned the World introduced me to people in Hoosick Falls. Safe to Drink is a production of the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio.

[Reza Satchew]

Have you ever wondered why Reese Witherspoon founded hello Sunshine? Or where Kevin o' Leary got his start? Or even how Alex Earle became the most accessible founder to someone who may not even consider this space? Enter the Founder Mindset, a new podcast from Harvard Business School Foundry hosted by ME, Reza Satchew As a leading educator in entrepreneurship, I've built multiple high profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures and with the Founder Mindset. I'm sharing those lessons with you by sitting down with world class entrepreneurs including Witherspoon, o' Leary and Earl, plus Tim Ferriss and many more to break down exactly how they commit, decide and build for impact. These aren't surface level interviews. Each episode I challenge my guests to revisit their toughest moments, their boldest decisions, and the mindset that carried them through. Follow the Founder Mindset wherever you get your podcasts.

[Bill Kerr]

From artificial intelligence to the gig economy to global volatility, the economy is changing at a dizzying pace. Enter the Managing the Future of Work podcast, the chart topping and critically acclaimed podcast from Harvard Business School. Hosted by me, Bill Kerr and by Managing the Future of Work project Co chair Joe Fuller. This show explores technology trends, demographic changes, the rise of the care economy and many other forces transforming the landscape of work. We'll highlight the insights of business leaders, technologists and experts like Business Roundtables Kristen Silberg on corporate workforce strategy and Khan Academy founder sal Khan on AI education and the future of work. With more than two and a half months, million downloads and close to 300 episodes, there is something for everyone. Follow HBS Managing the Future of Work on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now.