DuPont didn’t inform its workers of these developments, much less take additional safety precautions. Shift after shift, Ken Wamsley says he handled C8 samples with his bare hands and inhaled fumes from the furnace where he heat-tested Teflon at 700 degrees. Before long, he developed asthma and crippling stomach pain. “I started cramping up real bad, getting diarrhea,” he explained. “One time, I woke up and my underpants was completely wet with blood.”
As the evidence about C8 piled up, DuPont started to consider the effect the substance might be having outside the factory fence. Over the decades, the company had dumped huge quantities of Teflon waste into the ocean and into unlined pits along the Ohio River. In 1984, DuPont began dispatching employees to secretly fill jugs of water at gas stations and general stores around the plant and bring them in for testing. Sure enough, the tests revealed C8 in the water supplies of two nearby towns—Lubeck, West Virginia, and Little Hocking, Ohio, just across the river from Washington Works. DuPont considered notifying the public, but ultimately chose not to.
That May, a group of DuPont executives gathered at the company’s Wilmington headquarters to discuss the C8 issue. According to the minutes, attendees discussed recently adopted plans to cut C8 emissions at Washington Works, such as adding scrubbers to vents that spewed the chemical into the air. But they decided to scrap these initiatives. The additional expense was not “justified,” the executives concluded, since it wouldn’t substantially reduce the company’s liability. “Liability was further defined as the incremental liability from this point on if we do nothing as we are already liable for the past 32 years of operation,” the minutes read. “From a broader corporate viewpoint the costs are small.”
