Dark Waters
2019 · Film · 127 min
Directed by Todd Haynes
A tenacious attorney uncovers a dark secret that connects a growing number of unexplained deaths to one of the world's largest corporations. In the process, he risks everything — his future, his family, and his own life — to expose the truth.
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61 comments on Hacker News
After watching the movie "dark waters" about the whole Teflon scandal, seems like it should be the highest up person (or people) who had knowledge of the incident (obviously must be proven). An individual engineer knowing a car has a dangerous edge case isn't enough to get them in trouble in my view, especially if the company has claimed they are working on fixing it. Also legitimate mistakes are just mistakes, companies won't get it right every single time.
However there's cases where its completely proven that someone high up knew there was a systemic safety issue (they had a broad view and could see all the different areas of what was going on), they knew exactly what was causing it, and they do nothing because they want to keep the profit going. The fact those people don't go to jail just tells me that corporations have way too much leeway.
There is this scene from the movie Dark Waters that stuck in my head [0]
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zoxxd6gM3oU
I think the movie's name is "Dark Waters". There's a PFAS movie that was really eye opening and felt recently reverent to the topic, the innocent bystanders, and most importantly the people in the fight or who lost their fights on the subject.
I just watched Dark Waters on Netflix last night. Really good movie about DuPont and teflon. In the movie, people near the plant suffer disproportionally.
If you like "based on true events" movies give Dark Waters a watch. It's horrifying what corporations are allowed to get away with here in the US.
If your interested in this topic, I suggest you watch the movie "Dark Waters" starring Mark Ruffalo
In term of specific PFAS, the film Dark Waters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)) dramatizes DuPont's legal battle over PFOA/C8.
In the legal cases, it came to light that chemical companies had themselves documented a wide and significant amount of damages to humans and animals, including a large amount of assembly line workers involved in the production of Teflon, who died or suffered significant illnesses.
There's a dramatised version of this story on Disney+ called "Dopesick", it's very good, but not great PR for the US.
There's also the movie "Dark Waters" about DuPont and Teflon if you want to trust your government even less.
Dark Waters is a relevant movie about a town in Pennsylvania that suffered from poisoning by the Dupont corporation.
Consider watching Dark Water movie.
Real life story of lawyer who goes after Duport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)?useskin=vector
Also, read the NYT article The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare[0][1] that the film Dark Waters[2] is based on.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html
[1] https://archive.is/NmSH0
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
The movie Dark Waters sheds some light on this. DuPont knew of its effects and hid their studies.
I saw the DuPont logo on the first image and I knew what was coming. This is not the first time they have contaminated natural resources with harmful forever chemicals. Their contamination of a site with PFOA in West Virginia, is covered in the movie Dark Waters.
They not only dumped tons of that chemical in a landfill, they also tried their best to cover it up and delay discovery when they were caught. During the entire time they were fully cognisant of the fact that the chemical is carcinogenic and fatal for livestock and humans.
The fact that these corporations are still solvent and allowed to operate near human settlements or wildlife is a failure of regulatory authorities.
I would argue there are enough companies that have continued creating these cash cow chemicals even after there was sufficient evidence of substantial harm that additional testing would be useless, except to class action lawsuit plaintiffs to prove what the defendants already know.
Movies that cover this topic: Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, Dark Waters. More recently the talc powder lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson.
Hell, the Bay Area is littered with EPA Superfund Sites where all of the old chipmakers and their suppliers were. Good luck to Chandler, AZ (where the new American chip fans are being built). I hope you learn at least a little something from the SF peninsula’s mistakes of the 1960s-1990s.
A former naval base in my area has been decommissioned for years but still hasn’t cleaned up the firefighting chemical runoff that has seeped into the ground. Sometimes there simply isn’t a healthier substitute for a chemical or there is no legal method to prevent an organization from screwing up the environment (good luck suing the Navy for something they did 50 years ago before the harm was known).
I would agree that better testing and health trials could have identified these health risks before the companies started using these chemicals, but companies don’t have emotions or ethics. They are sociopaths seeking maximum returns and will turn a blind eye (or worse) if their profits are threatened. There is a ton of motivated reasoning within and around companies that produce and use harmful chemicals, especially if they are the only industry in a region.
This is the article [0] that inspired the (brilliant) film [1].
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
I'm also from Appalachia. But just across the river in WV.
>from what I’ve heard but not completely personally confirmed, it’s already contaminating downstream into the Ohio river.
As someone who grew up in the town both The Devil We Know (Documentary on Netflix) and Dark Waters (loosely based on real events) are about - and the bizarre fillings to prove it - when it was happening to the people living there, this is sadly normal.
>But. I don’t know what to say. Other than… these people have been voting against their best interests. Their entire damn lives.
This is such a patronizing thing to say. Especially given this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635291
>How can you possibly have any wake-up call for a populace so deep into hatred & corporate bootlicking.
The other side would accuse their opponents of...exactly the same things. The boots are just Big Tech flavored. And the hatred is based on ignorance, as it usually is.
>They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago.
Which political party is that? The recent strikebreaking was led by Biden, which would make the party you're talking about the Democrats:
>So on Friday morning, after three years of failed negotiations, President Biden instead signed into law a measure that imposes the contract agreement brokered by his administration back in September
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden-unions-freight-railroads-averted-strike
>But, again. I do not know what to say. For decades, so many of these people have voted for those that pass laws to make corporations not even slightly accountable & strike down reforms aiming to regulate these industries - regulate so that they’re forced to take up safety measures so shit like this cannot happen
Again, the recent strikebreaking wasn't the party you're obviously implying.
>The damage is done, and they will die before they ever see a better community - politicians that care for their well being.
Outside of Bernie, and maybe the Pauls, I'm not sure those exist.
>They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago.
And you accuse them of hatred? You should re-read what you've written when you've sobered up, methinks.
>Appalachia is such an unfortunate place - so beautiful, but abandoned by modern first world society. (okay, northern ohio is technically slightly out of Appalachia proper - GOMD)
Appalachia goes all the way up into NY state, homie. Much of Ohio along the eponymous river is just Appalachia with a big river in it. And the mountains are older than Saturn's rings(!).
>that the politicians they’ve been voting for as long as they’ve been able have sold out their entire livelihoods for the most meager amounts of $USD
So we've correctly identified the problem as politicians that don't serve their constituents interests. What do we do about it? I suggest uncapping the number of members of the House. Let's see a country where people actually know their Congrescritter. Like it was supposed to be.
The only recent movie which duped me and looked very film-like was "Dark Waters". But Edward Lachman designed it to be as close to 70s film look as possible. It is pointless otherwise.
Since I watched the movie “Dark Waters”, I’m trying to avoid those PFO(A|E) as much as I can.
Threw all non-stick pans away and learnt how to cook with just cast iron or inox pans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
I highly recommend the documentary Dark Waters and more so Rob Bilot's well written book, Exposure. It might make the greatest skeptics a little less confident.
Also great: The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare (The New York Times). And the movie, “Dark Waters”.
Exactly! The burden of proof to prove that something is harmful somehow landed on the public, which allowed harmful things to continue to be in use for years (decades!) while things were litigated and all manner of disinformation was pushed out by industry. This should never have been allowed to be the case.
Slightly off topic: The recent movie starring Mark Ruffalo, Dark Water, is excellent. It covers PFAS and one lawyer’s fight to bring it to light. Very similar to the excellent “A Civil Action” starring John Travolta in the 90s or early 2000s (obligatory: the book is far better than the movie).
There's a fiction movie about it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film) is a great film.
Dark Waters is an entertaining movie about PFAS and PFAO https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
I recommend everyone, downvoters especially, see the movie Dark Waters, then return wiser and upvote. It will make you angry, and depressed, that such practises are allowed to happen, and are so hard to stop after being exposed. TLDW: DuPont made a secret toxic waste dump that poisoned farms, created birth defects etc. The movie's about a lawyer fighting DuPont in court for 20 years over that.
PFAS is teflon. If you ever cooked w/ teflon pans you probably ingested some PFAS directly from that. It's called 'forever chemicals' because it doesn't degrade, it's literally there forever (or nearly), very hard to get rid of.
There's a really good documentary called Dark Waters about a lawyer for the Chemical industry who switches sides after his home town has a lot of people get sick from Dupont poisoining people and he's been fighting a crusade against them ever since. It stars Anne Hathaway and Mark Ruffalo.
Completely unsurprised to see the chemical company dumping ground that is my home state on there.
The movie dark waters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0NmehbOG0) is about the town I grew up in.
I recommend the film "Dark Waters" starring Mark Ruffalo. A true-story dramatisation of a similar case in the US involving DuPont and PFOAs used in the manufacture of Teflon:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
Dark Waters is a fantastic movie about what happened with DuPont Fabros and PFAS.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
There is a great Mark Ruffalo film based on the true story of DuPont dumping these chemicals in West Virginia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
learned about teflon via the movie 'Dark Waters'... it was horrifying
This is a great guide!
Would love if there were additional info on pricing (per pound, per metric), any sustainability issues (see Dark Waters for teflon [1]), and lastly ownership (are these patent protected, largest manufacthrers)
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
I highly recommend this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
also a worthwhile (hollywood) rendition of a waste water scandal by dupont in the USA: Dark Waters; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
>Credibility is easy to be lost and hard to be gained again.
I disagree. If you have media in your team, this is easy, given some time. Particularly in current times when you have a treasure trove of possible distractions that you can make the media throw at a gullible public.
If one looks closely, then I think CDC/FDA etc have lost credibility a long time back. The real events portrayed in documentaries like "What lies upstream" and movies like "Dark Waters" should be enough to reject these agencies outright.
What is enormously surprising to me is that, not only we consider them very credible, but are also willing to consider their word as unfailable and final in many cases.
Even more sad thing is that the power of CDC/FDA extends even to many developing countries, so this affects much more than their home country.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5165878/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
That burden is well documented in the movie 'Dark Waters' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film).
I really don't understand how some companies are getting off scot-free.
This article was published in 2016 which talks about an environmental lawyer Robert Biliot who took on one of the biggest chemical companies in the world and how his fight for chemical pollution is still going on. This was also the subject matter for 2019's movie called Dark waters starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hatheway. What I find interesting is the subject all this covers. Forever carbons is a big topic for health and safety yet we hear so less about it. I believe just like everything which is going on in the world right now this deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
The gravity of the situation was known long ago. Dark Waters is a great film about it.
A lot longer than 30 years.
I'm reading Exposure by the lawyer who helped blow the case open, Robert Bilott, portrayed in the movie Dark Waters, which I recommend -- the book and movie.
What DuPont knowingly did, sacrificing our health for their profit, would be unbelievable except that it happened.
Over 99 percent of us have these known carcinogens and causers of birth defect in our blood. As they knew, our bodies don't know how to get rid of them nor process them into anything benign.
And that's just one class of known-to-be-dangerous but profitable chemicals they create and dump. If they had to pay the externalities, Teflon would cost . . . well, what price do you put on testicular cancer, or a baby born with half a nose or eyes in the wrong place?
I highly recommend the film “Dark Waters” (2019) starring Mark Ruffalo.
It dramatises environmental lawyer Robert Bilott’s case against DuPont for contaminating water supplies with dumped PFOA/PFOS chemicals.
It’s currently available to stream on Prime Video in the UK.
https://imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
> scaremongering is spending 2/3rds of an article playing up how teflon poisoning our blood is some tightly-guarded secret by nefarious actors
Issue is - it was tightly-guarded secret by nefarious actors, and still is because "informing" as you say does not do anything. I do not know how you call the people who poison other people for the sake of profit, but historically if you do it on small scale they call you murderer and you end up behind the bars. I would like to avoid quoting Stalin here. By many country law, for instance if you see crime in progress (rape, murder, robbery...) and you do not do anything about it you are defined as accomplice, in DuPont no one said anything, they had mortgages, families to feed, salaries and investment to protect.
So, DuPont knew all along that their product is not safe because they paid for the tests, and they hid the results. Their explanation was and still is that Teflon is too valuable and it is American product. So, lets scale this down, let's say I make a alcohol beverage, and it has poisons levels of methanol, and I know about it I know it is deadly, but I serve you that drink never the less because my excuse is, "I would be too ashamed and I will lose profit", so my question to you is what I am doing criminal is it evil and wicked?
Now, what if you scale that same beverage to the entire planet, and you do not tell anyone, because business is booming? People are poisoned slowly ...
"In 2019, DuPont led the Toxic 100 Water Polluters Index.[34] The film Dark Waters dramatized a legal case against DuPont related to contaminating a town in West Virginia with unregulated toxic chemicals which poisoned thousands of individuals, this case led to DuPont finally settling all 3,535 cases for $670.7 million."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
In DuPont case they settled for $670.7 million and no one ended behind bars, and government needed years before reeling finding, while at the same time DuPont was lobbying and using different kind of other tricks to stop the entire case. DuPont for instance delayed the case, and prolong poisoning of all people on the planet, by finding loophole that says that case can be run against them on person bases. The entire battle lasted for 20 years. And you tell me that is not nefarious? How many people do you know that had perseverance to continue battle for 20 years, when you are running out of resources and everyone is abandoning you?
And I would like if you could explain me what is "actionable information"? You cannot go to hospital and say, please extract PFAS and PFOS out of me, it is deposited in our bodies, slowly killing us and we cannot do zip about it, only thing we can do is go for DuPont management (as it seems from the 2019 they have not change the way they do business) and shut them down forever and put all connected behind the bars.
I'm curious if you read the article, as the end the article points to the Dark Waters film (pointing out that the author's book was the inspiration for the movie), along with two other resources. This article is obviously an opinion piece meant to alert the general public to this topic, and did a good job - I think - of pointing people to deeper resources.
>> There is a pretty good movie about this topic, Dark Waters. The movie is well informed, largely accurate, and more factual than this article. The main protagonist of the movie is actually Robert Billott, the author of this article.
I think there's a place for running articles by major figures as-is. And Robert Bilott would seem to qualify as a major figure in this context.
Yes. The author is also from the movie Dark Waters.
Yea: I have to agree. The 2016 NYT piece you linked is a better read. Thanks.
This article is not great, it reads too much like scaremongering. But the underlying problem of PFOA/PFOS is real. The article fails to mention that most chemical companies have been phasing out these chemicals for several years.
There is a pretty good movie about this topic, Dark Waters. The movie is well informed, largely accurate, and more factual than this article. The main protagonist of the movie is actually Robert Billott, the author of this article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
Well. It’s a guardian opinion piece. While I often find guardian language stilted, I find that there is value in reading it.
DuPont is one of the big daddies of the chemical industry. The few who control the poisons of the world also control our seeds.
Having said that, learning about the author is also important to understand the motivation :
[..] Rob Bilott is a partner at the law firm of Taft Stettinius & Hollister, LLP and author of Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont.
His book was the story behind the film, Dark Waters and the documentary, The Devil We Know.
Rob is also a 2017 recipient of the 2017 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for his work on Forever Chemicals.
On Thursday, Rob Bilott is participating in an online discussion on the need to regulate PFAS titled Dark Waters no more! Is it time for a global agreement on toxic chemicals?[..]
> A close family member had parkinson's. A total of 5 coworkers developed parkinson's disease. There was speculation that some sort of common environmental factor was involved, but there was no medical (or legal) way of determining if or what it was.
For anyone who hasn't seen Dark Waters yet, I would recommend watching it, or at least reading up on the Chemical Industry's shady business practices. Let's just say we no longer use non-stick pans in our household. (This is not to say it has a connection specifically to Parkinson's).
Also in Parkersburg, where the resulting long legal battle was portrayed in the movie Dark Waters last year. Another great addition to the genre of "Mark Ruffalo investigative thrillers".
> it doesn't have the complex production complex
I wondered about the manufacturing life cycle dynamics of DuPont's Kapton, particularly after reading this in the article:
> Planes built since then generally use TKT, which is Kapton with two thin layers of Teflon to provide better resistance to mechanical abrasion and water intrusion.
Would a measurement of the complexity of the production complex include the part where they dump the untreated toxic manufacturing waste into virgin streams in West Virginia, or would that be an externality?
I recently saw a film produced by Mark Ruffalo that told the story of the West Virginia farmers whose stream was poisoned. They had to spend 7 years fighting DuPont's lawyers for justice, and then they died of cancer.
Dark Waters trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY
DuPont did something similar in West Virginia with Teflon waste.
Mark Ruffalo made an excellent movie about it.
Dark Waters trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY
The way public opinion, journalism, and justice work in America, unless Ruffalo makes a great movie about the "Amazon Chernobyl", Steven Donziger is going to spend a lot more time in his apartment, and Ecuadorians are not going to get that $9.5 billion.
> "Presumably they aren't dumping beyond the legal limits. That's how our system works."
They have and probably still do though[1]. Lived only a couple hours from the location of the film and my wife grew up in a city on the Ohio River they were dumping chemicals into. Was in the local paper here almost weekly during the late 90s and early 00s.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
Watched dark waters last night. Pretty unreal how these companies behaved.
https://imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
The 2019 feature film "Dark Waters" gives background on this. Highly recommended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
>PTFE has a long established safety record, and is completely different from the unpolymerized PFCs that are showing up in ground water and in people's blood.
Teflon is mentioned in the article as a PFAS based chemical that has had legal trouble due to health hazards in the past..
"A just-released film, Dark Waters, stars Mark Ruffalo as an intrepid lawyer battling DuPont in the early 2000s after the chemical giant began making a PFAS-based product, Teflon, at its factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where chronic illness and untimely deaths spiked among nearby residents. Several states, New York and Ohio among them, have filed lawsuits that seek compensation for health problems caused by drinking water polluted by PFAS. DuPont and 3M are frequently defendants in these suits."
Relevant comment/thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22117840
Huffington Post article: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg
Dark Waters film on the topic: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
DuPont was the entity responsible for the pollution and coverup.
[citation needed]
Dark Waters is not a documentary.
You MUST watch the amazing film, “Dark Waters” .... it’s about the origin of this problem. DuPont knowingly poisoned the public. And the effects will never go away. And then people wonder why cancer rates are so high? Duh!!!
Dark Waters (movie) was a real eye-opener for me. Also a way to ingest information that I otherwise probably wouldn't have been able to take in. It's no surprise that cancer is so prevalent.
There's a movie, Dark Waters, about this as well. Great watch.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
EDIT: Spelling.
A recent movie, Dark Waters, covers this same subject. Which seems a little coincidental.
Having just watched them movie Dark Waters[1], I'm surprised I hear more about this than I do of that [2].
That said, while I'm glad that they're doing these studies, I'd like to here something more conclusive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film) [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html