Jury awards $2 million in C8 case against DuPont
A federal jury in Ohio on Wednesday ordered DuPont Co. to pay $2 million in compensatory damages in the latest of thousands of cases to go to trial over the chemical giant’s contamination of drinking water supplies in the communities surrounding its Wood County manufacturing plant.
Jurors found that Kenneth Robert Vigneron, a 56-year-old truck driver from Washington County, Ohio, contracted testicular cancer as a result of being exposed to DuPont’s C8 chemical pollution. DuPont’s conduct was malicious, according to jurors. That finding allows the jury to consider whether DuPont should have to pay punitive damages. That part of the trial is set for Jan. 4, according to lawyers.
C8 is another name for perfluorooctanoate acid, or PFOA. In West Virginia, DuPont has used C8 since the 1950s as a processing agent to make Teflon and other nonstick products, oil-resistant paper packaging and stain-resistant textiles. DuPont settled a major class-action case that left it liable for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in medical monitoring costs, and — after a scientific panel created by the settlement linked C8 to certain illnesses — liability for thousands of follow-up personal injury cases and for toxic cleanups related to C8.
Lawyers for DuPont argued to jurors that the company had done everything that it could to prevent human exposure.
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