Ted Leopold, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll (Photo: Melanie Bell) A lead lawyer spearheading the litigation over the Flint water crisis has brought a class action over drinking water contamination that allegedly has exposed residents in five counties to liver cancer and other health risks.
du Pont de Nemours and Co. and its subsidiary, The Chemours Co.
The suit claims both companies, which make Teflon, created a public health crisis when they dumped several chemicals into the Cape Fear River for decades from a plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina—then hid their actions from federal and state regulators.
“Together, the chemical compounds DuPont discharged into the Cape Fear River over 45 years comprise a toxic cocktail with serious impacts to plaintiff’s and class members’ health, property and lives,” the complaint says.
Calls to du Pont and Chemours, both based in Delaware, were not returned.
The complaint cites numerous internal studies that DuPont conducted on rats as part of a 2009 consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that found incidences of cancer and birth defects.
But DuPont failed to warn regulators or the public about the risks and dismissed the findings, concluding that they weren’t relevant to human health, the complaint says.
The class action seeks damages and injunctive relief for residents of five counties that get their drinking water from the Cape Fear River.
According to the complaint, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that those five counties, with a population of nearly 775,000, have the highest concentration of liver disease in the United States.
In February, DuPont and Chemours agreed to pay $670.7 million to settle 3,550 lawsuits over C8 contamination of the Ohio River in West Virginia.