The economic system that builds the foundation of a free American market is both the driving force that makes America great and corrupt. The legal system is designed to protect, but more than ever, it seems to serve to dish out half-baked justice with a fine on the side.

              Real justice is a four-leaf clover in a field of grass, but its rarity doesn’t distinguish it from the facts brought to life. This is the case for the DuPont company, the “inventors” of Teflon, and truly the innovators of PFAS & PFOS, better known as forever chemicals.

              The story starts with a farmer named Wilbur Earl Tennant, located in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Mr. Tennant was dealing with a mysterious case of his cattle dying abruptly due to strange causes. The cattle would have black teeth, discolored pigmentation, and tumors.

              After investigating the local landscape, Mr. Tennant noticed that there was a water pipe that carried discharge from a local landfill, but the water had a weird white foam following it. The pipe carried discharge from a landfill that was used by DuPont’s first commercial Teflon plant, Washington Works.

              The factory provided jobs for over 2,000 individuals in the town,n and the presence of Dupont was deeply rooted in the town. Residents of the local town put Dupont on a pedestal, for all of the right publicly facing reasons. The company created camping sites, tennis courts, over 20 outdoor community gathering areas, swimming pools, and funded West Virginia University.

The company invested in the community, bringing a sense of pride that was built around the Dupont company. The conflict caused friction between Mr. Tennant and the townsfolk once he decided to lawyer up against the company. Mr. Tennant’s sister-in-law, Della Tennant, put it this way, “We’d walk into a restaurant, and everybody in the restaurant would get up and leave.”

Retroactively examining the situation, it’s simple to state that there should be no chemical run-off leaching into the waterways, especially drinking waterways, but the issue lay in a lack of transparency. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) never had PFAS listed on its database at the time, which made it difficult to link the cause of the deaths to the real killer.

Mr. Tennant and his lawyer called for a records request on the company. The request was met with a standard lawyer’s tactic of flooding the halls with information, in turn hoping that there is nobody willing to examine every file. But just as a fire can burn through a raging storm, Mr. Tennant and his associates dove into the files, and what they uncovered, 40-plus years of hidden secrets, would turn a local story into a global sensation.