Lawsuit targets PFOA from Chambers Works
Delaware Online - June 15, 2006
By JEFF MONTGOMERY
The DuPont Co. faces another in a series of class-action lawsuits targeting the company's releases of a chemical used to make nonstick and stain-resistant products, this time in New Jersey.
In the suit, filed Wednesday in Salem County, Pennsville resident Donald Coles charged that the Chambers Works Plant in Deepwater, N.J., released perfluorooctanoic acid (also known as PFOA or C8) and related chemicals into groundwater tapped by utilities in Pennsville Township and Penns Grove.
Coles' suit seeks medical monitoring for residents, a community-wide water filtration system and punitive damages. A separate federal class-action claim targeting the same pollutants was filed in U.S. District Court in April.
DuPont spokesman Tim Ireland said Wednesday the company typically does not comment on lawsuits.
The Salem County case, filed in New Jersey's Superior Court by attorney Philip Stephen Fuoco, arrived a month after a U.S. District Court action in Iowa sought to combine consumer class-action complaints about potential PFOA exposure and Teflon products from 16 other states.
PFOA is under intense federal scrutiny, triggered by concerns the chemical resists breakdown, accumulates in the environment and tissues and can potentially cause cancer and other illnesses. An advisory panel to the Environmental Protection Agency recently recommended listing the chemical as a likely carcinogen.
In March the agency quietly admitted chemicals used to make popular nonstick, nonstain products may be unsafe for humans and the environment. The admission came in documents seeking regulatory changes that would require closer scrutiny for new uses of the compound.
DuPont already has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for pollution releases to drinking-water supplies in West Virginia and Ohio from the company's Parkersburg, W.Va., plant.
The company recently announced a plan to build a treatment system at a factory in Mississippi to remove PFOA from chemicals used at Chambers Works.
SOURCE:
http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs ... /-1/NEWS01