Environment | Podcast
Levin Papantonio’s Ned McWilliams on the historic PFAS settlement, the 1975 discovery 3M sat on, and the Pensacola meeting that launched an 18-year fight
3M has agreed to a $7.35 billion global resolution of personal injury claims from people who drank PFAS-contaminated water and developed cancer and other diseases. The deal covers roughly 110,000 people across the country, many of them here in Pensacola.
- Pensacola’s Levin Papantonio law firm has been in the fight since 2008. The firm handled major discovery and expert work in the AFFF multidistrict litigation and filed more than 6,000 lawsuits on behalf of people diagnosed with kidney and testicular cancer.
Attorney Ned McWilliams, who led much of that work, joined me on We Don’t Color on the Dog to talk about the settlement.
“This company, and I’m not being hyperbolic, contaminated the entire world with a cancer-causing chemical.”
—Ned McWilliams
Two phases, Two settlements
The water providers came first. A couple of years ago, the litigation produced a settlement of roughly $12 billion for public water utilities, including systems like ECUA, to pay for filtration to remove the chemicals from drinking water.
The second phase focused on those who had already been drinking the water for years and had already gotten sick. That took another two to three years of work.
- “It’s your neighbors. It’s your friends, it’s my friends,” McWilliams said. “If you know anyone who’s ever developed kidney cancer or testicular cancer or liver cancer, more likely than not they were exposed to PFAS in their drinking water.”
He pointed out that while firefighters and military personnel handled firefighting foam containing the chemicals, they typically wore protective gear. The heaviest exposure, in his view, came from people drinking contaminated water “every day, week after week, month after month.”
The Pensacola Meeting That Started It All
The firm’s involvement traces back to a single day in 2008.
- Rob Bilott, the attorney whose story became the 2019 film Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway, had uncovered PFOA contamination downstream from a DuPont plant in West Virginia after a cattle farmer came to him about his dying herd. McWilliams said the chemical was made by 3M and sold to DuPont.
Bilott, a corporate defense attorney by trade, had signed up thousands of clients and needed help. He came to Pensacola to pitch Mike Papantonio.
- “Pap called me up. ‘Ned, come down here. You gotta hear this,'” McWilliams recalled. “Rob left, and Pap turned to me, he goes, ‘Do you wanna do it?’ I’m like, ‘I’ll look into it.’ And we decided to do it that day.”
What 3M knew in 1975
In discovery, 3M produced tens of millions of pages of documents. The Levin Papantonio team reviewed them page by page, then put 3M witnesses under oath.
- According to McWilliams, the documents showed that on November 6, 1975, 3M learned that a chemical only it made had turned up in human blood worldwide. The company sounded the alarm internally, not externally, and began toxicology testing on rats, monkeys, and beagles. McWilliams said the results were devastating.
The following year, Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, which requires companies to report to the EPA when they learn a chemical they make or use poses a substantial risk to the public.
“They had a meeting, including their CEO. Should we tell the EPA? And they decided no. And they sat on that information for 20 years.”
During those two decades, McWilliams said, 3M ramped up production and made more than 100 million pounds of the chemical, which still persists in the environment today. The company came clean only after an outside scientist independently found what 3M had known since 1975.
Why it matters
“The next time 3M is at a crossroads with a similar situation where they’re deciding whether or not to tell the EPA, I truly believe they will make a different decision,” McWilliams said. “Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because they know there’s people like us that’ll come after them and make it expensive.”
