Quotes from Robert Bilott

And in my world, when I was dealing with this for our chemical company clients, you had lists of regulated hazardous materials, and things were permitted. And if you had a landfill and you had a permit, you had to comply with certain limits.

There are certain systems that I think are not working well - that's the regulatory system, the whole system of how we regulate chemicals in this country.

We're talking about a chemical that's out there. Not just on one farm in West Virginia, not even just in the public water of an entire community there, but it's now in water all over the country, all over the planet, in the blood of virtually every living thing.

Well, you know, my grandmother actually grew up, you know, her whole family, my mom's family outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia.

You know, unfortunately, as to PFOS, it's starting to look like all of us. This is all of our problems. You know, all of us have been exposed to some degree to these same chemicals.

You know, I started with the law firm of Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Cincinnati back in 1990.

My family said that a big firm was where you'd get the most opportunities. I knew nobody who had ever worked at a firm, nobody who knew anything about it. I just tried to get the best job I could.

There was pressure on the EPA to come out with a drinking water guideline, which it did in 2016. And when that guideline came out, it spurred even more testing across the country, including by the Department of Defense.

I'm not stupid, and the people around me aren't stupid. You can't ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think.

If we can't get where we need to go to protect people through our regulatory channels, through our legislative process, then unfortunately what we have left is our legal process.

We found out that we were dealing with a completely unregulated chemical, this chemical PFOA. This was a chemical that was a completely manmade material invented right after World War Two, didn't exist on the planet prior to the 1940s.

I had spent the prior eight years working at my firm primarily representing big chemical companies, helping them comply with all the different state and federal laws.

I was representing our chemical company clients, and I would routinely talk with or meet with the DuPont attorneys, would be there representing DuPont at these same cleanup sites. So I knew those folks.

We notified the EPA 18 years ago that PFOA in drinking water presented a public health threat, and in 2019 there are still no federal regulatory limits.

But I suspect most people across the United States are still unfamiliar with PFAS and don't realize the exposure that occurs. I'm going to continue doing what I can elevating that awareness.

People were getting sick. It seemed, at least to me when I started looking at the information, looking at the documents, that this was pretty obvious, what was going on, and if other people could see what we were seeing, they would agree: this is obvious and it needs to stop.