Ep 82 PFOA and the Sudbury Effect

This week's engineering failures are from our mini failure library. We’re talking about PFOA and Sudbury Effect.

PFOA - PFOA has been poisoning living creatures in the Ohio river basin for decades. One brave lawyer took on a huge corporation in this real life David and Goliath story. 

Sudbury Effect - Undoing a century of damage, little by little and what went from green and lush, to black and barren, back to green again. Sudbury is now said to have the cleanest air of any city in Ontario. 

Sources:


Episode Summary

Hi and welcome to Failurology; a podcast about engineering failures. I’m your host, Nicole. And I’m Brian. Our podcast journey has been a wild ride and we are immensely thankful for all of your support throughout the course of our show. Especially to our Patreon supporters. But we need a bit of a break this summer. I’m drinking beer on a patio. And I’m trying to avoid getting sunburnt… again. But we didn't want to stop giving you those engineering failures you know and love. So today we’re sharing some more of our mini failures. These mini failures come from our environmental disaster series we did last fall. The last two we’re going to share with you are PFOA Contamination and the Sudbury Effect. PFOA, also known as the Dupont Scandal, has been poisoning living creatures in the Ohio river basin for decades. One brave lawyer took on a huge corporation in this real life David and Goliath story. And the City of Sudbury has been undoing a century of damage, little by little and what went from green and lush, to black and barren, back to green again. Sudbury is now said to have the cleanest air of any city in Ontario. So without further adieu, here is our mini failure on the PFOA, with the Sudbury Effect episode to follow afterwards.


Hi, and welcome to Failurology; a podcast about engineering failures. I’m your host, Nicole And I’m Brian. And we’re both from Calgary, AB. Welcome to our thirty second mini-failure episode. We’re bringing you engineering failures in bite-size pieces. Make no mistake, these are still significant failures, but they either have pretty straightforward causes or not enough information available for a full episode. These episodes are also just the failure, no news and no ads (for now at least). It’s like Failurology-lite.

This is our last mini failure for 2022! 2 weeks from now will be December 25th. Happy Holidays to all of you, whatever you are celebrating, including the Grinchs out there. I personally celebrate not moving from the couch for as long as I possibly can during this period of time.   Thank you to all of the support you’ve given us this year. We look forward to bringing you more engineering failures in 2023. But also hope that things don’t continue to fail due to poor engineering design, even if it would mean ending this show. 

On that note, if there is a failure you want to see us cover, either as a regular or bonus episode, please drop it in the comments, we are always on the lookout for more content.

This episode, in fact, came as a listener's recommendation. And it was a great one at that!

This week’s mini failure is about PFOA/C8 contamination, otherwise referred to as the DuPont scandal.

●     In the late 1990’s, attorney Robert Bilott (bill-aught) filed a lawsuit against DuPont alleging chemical waste, specifically perfluorooctanoic (per-fluoro-octan-o-ic) acid, commonly referred to as PFOA or C8, had fouled the property of a cattle rancher in West Virginia, USA, Wilbur Tennant. PFOA, known as a “forever chemical” is linked to higher incidence of cancer, specifically testicular and kidney by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and is classified as a group 2B carcinogen. For comparison's sake, lead, chloroform, gasoline are also on the group 2B list. Also among the list of 6 categories of serious illness are thyroid disease, pre-eclampsia, ulcerative colitis, and high cholesterol. PFOA is believed to be in the blood of almost every living creature on the planet, including 99.9% of humans.

●        Fun fact - alcoholic beverages and Tobacco smoking are group 1 carcinogens.

●     Bilott’s cases have been featured in many newspapers, a book and even a movie. Called Dark Waters, released in 2019, starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway. It’s on Netflix in Canada if anyone wants to watch it, I did so today, it was great! I don’t know how it hasn’t popped up on my radar before. It gave me Erin Brokovich vibes, which is one of my favorite movies, so maybe I’m biased.

●        There is also a 30 minute radio program airing weekly in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. You can also find these episodes on their podcast called The Allegheny Front, PA’s environmental news podcast wherever you get podcasts. Admittedly, I have not had a chance to listen yet, because I just discovered this hours before recording, but from the show notes it looks like they cover a number of environmental issues throughout Pennsylvania, including the DuPont story.

●        A 2001 class action lawsuit alleges DuPont’s actions caused widespread water contamination in West Virginia and Ohio leading to high cancer rates and other health problems amongst 80,000 people living nearby. DuPont settled in 2005 for $235 million USD to cover medical monitoring for over 70,000 people.

●        In 2017, after undergoing a merger of Dow Chemical and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, they are now known as DowDuPont or commonly shortened to DuPont, with spin offs of Dow Inc and Corteva.

●        As of 2017, DuPont had settled over 3,500 lawsuits for almost $700 million USD. That said, they deny wrongdoing.

●        They also paid $16.5 million USD in fines to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)

●        The University of Massachusetts publishes a list of Toxic 100 Air Polluters. The 2021 report, based on 2019 data, lists DuPont at number 66. And their associate company Dow Inc as number 6. The top air polluter is Boeing with a toxic score almost double the second place corporation.

What did they do?

●        Story goes that DuPont manufactures Teflon, a plastic material that until 2015 was made from PFOA. It was developed during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s for military use and later transitioned for commercial use in the early 1960s. PFOA is also used in stain resistant fabrics and some food wrappers. Exposure to PFOA is linked to several diseases. Leaked internal documents from DuPont allegedly show that DuPont knew about the dangers of PFOA exposure as early as 1961 and that they knew as early as 1984 that the chemical was in the local water supply of the Ohio River by way of dust from the factory chimneys. But they didn’t tell workers or the surrounding public.

●        The Ohio River originates in Pittsburgh at the convergence of the Monongahela River and the Allegheny River and flows into the Mississippi River south of St Louis some 1,500 km later. And as we know from previous discussion on this podcast, the Mississippi River flows all the way south into the Gulf of Mexico.

●        Further EPA testing has found PFOA in 12 water systems in 10 counties in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.

●        As per a 2004 study by an industry risk assessor, ChemRisk Inc, hired by DuPont, the plant released over 1.7 million pounds of PFOA between 1951 and 2003. And while they may be a third party, nonetheless, they were hired by DuPont, so take that for what it's worth.

So there you have it, PFOA has been poisoning living creatures in the Ohio river basin for decades. One brave lawyer took on a huge corporation in this real life David and Goliath story. It will take many more decades to clean up the water supply and undo the damage that has been done, if that’s even possible.

Thanks for listening to this mini-failure episode. For our regular episodes, check out Failurology wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to chat with us, our Twitter handle is @failurology, you can email us at thefailurologypodcast@gmail.com, you can connect with us on Linked In or you can message us right in the Patreon app. There are links to all of these in the show notes.

Bye everyone, talk soon! See you next year!


Hi, and welcome to Failurology; a podcast about engineering failures. I’m your host, Nicole. And I’m Brian. And we’re both from Calgary, AB. Welcome to our thirty third mini-failure episode. We’re bringing you engineering failures in bite-size pieces. Make no mistake, these are still significant failures, but they either have pretty straightforward causes or not enough information available for a full episode. These episodes are also just the failure, no news and no ads (for now at least). It’s like Failurology-lite.

Happy New Year Failurologists!! 33 is the number of innings in the longest professional baseball game played which happened in 1981 between the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Soxs in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  It is also the number printed on all Rolling Rock beer labels. 

This week’s mini failure is about the Sudbury effect.

●     This is the last in our series about environmental disasters. And we saved it for last because it has a bit of a happy ending. They’ve been calling it the Sudbury re-greening and this is about how Sudbury overcame decades of pollution.

●     Sudbury is a town in Northern Ontario, about 400 km north of Toronto.

●        During the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883, they discovered high concentrations of nickel-copper ore at Murray Mine on the edge of the Sudbury Basin. And the railway itself allowed them to exploit these resources and ship them to markets and ports.

●        The nickel ore is smelted, which entails adding heat to the ore, to extract a base metal, the nickel; to be used for production of various things. Including Canadian nickels which are currently nickel plated; from 1922-1942 and from 1946-1981 nickels were made with 99.9% nickel. In other years they were made of copper, steel, silver, zinc, and chrome of various compositions.

●        The smelting process blanketed the area in sulfur dioxide and metals, emitting upwards of 2.5 million tons per year. The sulfur dioxide acidified the soil, rain, and lakes, resulting in the complete loss of vegetation, leaving barren rolling hills and blackened rock.

●        Soon mining replaced lumber as the primary industry. Local trams also facilitated worker commuting so they could live in one place and work in another.

●        Two mining companies were formed in the early 1900s in Sudbury; Inco (now known as Vale Canada Limited) in 1902 and Falconbridge (now Glencore Xstrata) in 1928, both becoming major employers and two of the world’s leading producers of nickel.

●        Mining went through boom bust cycles, as do other industries, often following wartime demands. Fun fact - Sudbury recovered from the Great Depression faster than almost any other North American city because of the demand for nickel in the 1930s. They actually had more issues keeping up with economic growth than with unemployment or poverty. But Sudbury was actually ordered into receivership by the Ontario Municipal Board from 1936 to 1941. Fortunes rose again during the second world war, with the Frood Mine accounting for 40% of the nickel used in ally artillery during the war and again offering nickel to the US during the cold war stockpile.

●        Along with all that mining came air pollution and acid rain. The pollution and acid rain have caused staining that penetrates up to 75mm (or 3 inches) into the pink-gray granite in the area. Also acidifying the over 300 lakes nearby.

●        Adding to this, Inco built a superstack in 1972 which dispersed sulphuric acid throughout the area. It’s the second tallest structure in Canada after the CN Tower, the tallest chimney in the western hemisphere and the second tallest freestanding chimney in the world after the GRES-2 power station in Kazakhstan. The stack was decommissioned in July 2020, reducing emissions by 85% and cutting the complex’s natural gas consumption in half. It was supposed to be demolished by now, but word on the street is the contract has not been awarded yet.

●        Also in the 1970s, the municipality, province, Inco and academics from Laurentian University started a recovery program called the “regreening” effort. This project included spreading lime over charred soil by hand and aircraft to neutralize the acid. Then they spread seeds for wild grass, trees, and other vegetation.

●        In 1991, the US and Canada signed an Air Quality Agreement, known as the acid rain accord, to reduce threats to forests and fisheries in Canada and the US.

●        As of 2010, 9.2 million new trees were planted. In current day Vale, previously Inco, is rehabilitating slag heaps surrounding the smelter and planted grass and trees as well as used biosolids to stabilize and regreen tailings areas.

●        Restoring the ecosystem has taken decades and remains ongoing. They have planted over 12 million trees and revitalized over 3,400 hectares of land.

●        In addition to revitalizing the area, mining companies also sought to reduce and capture their emissions.

●        Their work is not done, almost a century of mining and smelting have led to millions of tonnes of reactive mine waste materials that can contaminate food and drinking water. This requires additional monitoring and management by industry to avoid undoing the revitalization the community has worked so hard for.

So there you have it, the Sudbury effect. Undoing a century of damage, little by little and what went from green and lush, to black and barren, back to green again. Sudbury is now said to have the cleanest air of any city in Ontario.

Thanks for listening to this mini-failure episode. For our regular episodes, check out Failurology wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to chat with us, our Twitter handle is @failurology, you can email us at thefailurologypodcast@gmail.com, you can connect with us on Linked In or you can message us right in the Patreon app. There are links to all of these in the show notes.

Bye everyone, talk soon!