Washington, DC, December 17--Disputing the government's charges, DuPont Co. contended Thursday it was not legally obligated to share information about the potential harm from a chemical used to make Teflon.
The Environmental Protection Agency is accusing DuPont of failing to provide lab results on the chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, and its salts, on several occasions. The chemical giant has made a settlement in a lawsuit accusing it of contaminating local water supplies near a plant on the Ohio River close to Parkersburg, West Virginia.
"It's not as though DuPont is trying to conceal something," said John Martin, a lawyer representing DuPont at an administrative court hearing.
The Wilmington, Del.-based company maintains that the chemical, known as PFOA or C-8, is harmless. It is an ingredient in making Teflon, but is not part of Teflon itself.
EPA lawyer Meredith Miller said the agency "wanted to make sure it was getting information about a serious risk of harm."
She said the agency's "fuzzy" guidance to industry in the mid-1990s about what information had to be reported amounted to "a big gift to the industry, and DuPont is now trying to use that as a shield."
The EPA says DuPont failed to provide a one-page document on PFOA from the early 1980s confirming there was a nostril and eye birth defect in a 4-month-old child and listing an unconfirmed eye and tear duct birth defect in a 2-year-old. The document came to the government's attention when Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, saw it in court papers.
DuPont also is accused of failing to provide results from blood samples taken in July from 12 people living near the company's Washington Works Facility near Parkersburg, W.Va.
The EPA says those people were exposed to PFOA through drinking water from a public supply. The agency says that three years after they had stopped using that supply as their primary source of water, their blood samples still showed concentrations of PFOA averaging more than 13 times the national average.
The government said DuPont was required to report that information. DuPont's lawyers said the company volunteered all the data it legally had to.
"What we have here is a case where we have an obligation that has a distinct beginning and a distinct end," Martin said.
Jane Houlihan, vice president of research for the environmental group, said after the two-hour hearing before Barbara A. Gunning, an EPA administrative law judge, that "these arguments go to the agency's basic authority to collect information to protect people's health."
Gunning suggested it could be at least several months before she makes a ruling rules in the case.
Separately, DuPont has agreed to pay as much as $343 million to settle charges it contaminated drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio with PFOA. As many as 60,000 residents around DuPont's Washington Works plant on the Ohio River sued over their exposure to the chemical. The settlement will not become final until after a public hearing in February.
