Published in The Fayetteville Observer on Sunday, February 19, 2006
2 Photos, Staff photos by David Smith
Melinda and Matt McDowell have dinner with their sons, Wesley, left, and Lukas, at their home near DuPont’s Washington Works plant. Both parents have had cancer since moving to Ohio, and Wesley has had liver problems.
VINCENT, Ohio — Babe and Cheeto scamper up the driveway at Melinda McDowell’s home, barking and wagging. Babe, the black Lab, likes to jump.
The home is on a wooded lot in a secluded cul-de-sac overlooking Veto Lake. The 4,000-square-foot, timber-frame design features red oak from Pennsylvania and cost $350,000.
“It was our dream home,” McDowell said.
But three years ago, McDowell, 49, and her husband, Matt, 50, found out that the water they had been drinking and cooking with and had used to make their son’s baby formula was polluted.
The McDowells are outraged that DuPont knew the area’s groundwater was contaminated with C8 since the early 1980s but didn’t tell anybody.
“If we had known, we never would have built here,” Matt said. “Gee, they have tainted water over here and clean water over there. Where would you build?”
After getting married in Houston, the McDowells went out of their way in 1994 to find an upscale, rural community to build a home for themselves and their son Lukas, now 13. They’ve since had another son, Wesley, who is 9.
Matt refers to the water that runs through their home’s pipes as “industrial waste.” It comes from lines operated by the Little Hocking Water Association. The family now uses 5-gallon bottles of water — about four or five a week — delivered at DuPont’s expense.
Matt is a computer engineer at another chemical company and says he sees two flaws in current regulations. First, chemicals most often are unregulated until health or environmental questions surface years after they are introduced. Second, the government must rely on industries to monitor themselves.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying C8 to determine what risk it poses to human health and the environment. The agency recently took steps to add C8 to its Toxic Release Inventory, a list of chemicals whose emissions must be reported annually.
An EPA advisory board recommended last week that C8 be considered a likely carcinogen.
“I don’t understand why you have to prove people are getting sick before you start doing something,” Matt said.
Melinda added, “DuPont is going to come up with a new substance and start dumping it in the river and it’s going to be OK because it’s not on somebody’s list. ... It’s like the smoking situation. It took years for them to say there was a link between smoking and cancer. I think this is the same situation.”
DuPont has settled two lawsuits stemming from pollution that contaminated water systems in the Little Hocking area. It paid a record fine of $16.5 million to the EPA for not disclosing what it knew about C8. The company has not admitted wrongdoing.
C8 accumulates in humans, and the McDowells and thousands of other area residents have exceptionally high concentrations in their blood. The chemical has caused cancer, liver damage and birth defects in laboratory animals.
Matt and Melinda each have had forms of cancer since moving to Ohio, and Wesley has had liver problems.
Matt McDowell said DuPont should provide the Little Hocking Water Association with a water supply that is not contaminated — not just bottled water.
“That’s what they’d do if they were a good neighbor,” he said.