Attorneys from Bennington have filed a class action suit against the makers of so-called forever chemicals following revelations that contamination in the area is more widely spread than originally thought. Barr Sternberg Moss Silver & Munson, which brought a similar class action lawsuit in 2016, filed the new suit in federal court on Tuesday.
The firm’s previous litigation resulted in a $34 million settlement that provided compensation and medical monitoring to an estimated 2,400 property owners.
They alleged that Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the former owner of a fabric coating factory in North Bennington, was responsible for contaminating the soil and groundwater around their homes. The new suit is also against Saint-Gobain, but adds international chemical makers 3M and Dupont as defendants.
All are alleged to be responsible for contaminating hundreds of additional properties with PFOA, one of the many compounds known as PFAS that have been linked to multiple health risks.
“PFOA contamination from Saint-Gobain has spread significantly to affect many new innocent homeowners with poisonous, toxic, carcinogenic chemicals,” attorney David Silver told Seven Days.
Silver estimated “at least 1,000 people, maybe more” have been affected by contamination that was not fully understood at the time of the previous case. How many remains unclear because testing by the state is still ongoing, he said. The suit claims that approximately 250 additional wells have been identified as contaminated.
For more than two decades, the Chemfab facility in North Bennington, which closed in 2002, baked liquid Teflon onto fabrics to make them waterproof and durable. Airborne PFOA settled wound up in the groundwater that people drank. A number of plaintiffs claim to have PFOA in their blood.
The suit alleges that the multinational chemical companies knew of the health risks of PFAS and ignored them. The previous case took six years to resolve. Silver said he fully expects the companies to try to drag the case out as long as possible and bury him and his fellow attorneys with legal filings in an effort to wear them down.
“We will not be deterred by those tactics,” Silver said.
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