How One Company Secretly Poisoned an Entire City: Parkersburg, West Virginia

In 1951, DuPont began manufacturing Teflon at its Washington Works plant along the Ohio River outside Parkersburg, West Virginia. The factory became the economic backbone of the Mid-Ohio Valley — two thousand jobs, good wages, Little League sponsorships, donations to every school and church in Wood County. What the community didn't know was that DuPont had been dumping a toxic chemical called PFOA, or C8, into the river, the air, and the groundwater for decades, contaminating the drinking water of more than a hundred thousand people. DuPont's own scientists knew C8 was dangerous as early as 1961. In 1981, babies born to female plant workers showed birth defects. In 1984, company executives met at headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, reviewed the evidence, and decided that stopping was "not economically attractive." They doubled production instead, and told no one. It took a cattle farmer named Wilbur Tennant, a hundred and fifty dead cows, and a corporate defense lawyer named Rob Bilott who switched sides to finally crack the cover-up open — exposing one of the longest-running cases of industrial water contamination in American history, and a forever chemical now found in the blood of 99.7 percent of Americans. Sources Sharon Lerner, "The Teflon Toxin: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception," The Intercept, August 11, 2015. Mariah Blake, "Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia," The Huffington Post, August 27, 2015. Taylor Sisk, "DuPont's Lasting Legacy in Parkersburg," Belt Magazine, January 8, 2020. Robert Bilott and Tom Shroder, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont (New York: Atria Books, 2019). "A Lasting Legacy: DuPont, C8 Contamination and the Community of Parkersburg Left to Grapple with the Consequences," Environmental Health News / 100 Days in Appalachia, January 7, 2020. "Parkersburg," e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, West Virginia Humanities Council, updated 2024.