Rob Blatt, co-counsel on the PFAS cases against DuPont and West Virginia, talks about how he went from a corporate lawyer to one of the most important plaintiff s lawyers in America, and how he did it by helping a farmer in West Virginia whose cows were dying and he didn't have a clue who to turn to for help. Rob Blatt's story is a great one, and I'm sure you'll agree that he's a great friend. Thanks to our sponsor, West Virginia University, for sponsoring this episode and for supporting this podcast. Thanks also to our supporters, and thank you to everyone who has been working with us to make this podcast possible. Thank you to our sponsors, and thanks to everyone else who has supported this podcast and made it possible for us to do what we do. We hope you enjoy this episode, and we look forward to hearing from you in 2020. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - The story behind the case 3:30 - How Rob became a lawyer 4:15 - How he became a plaintiff s lawyer 5:40 - What was it like working with Mark Ruffalo 6:00 - How a farmer got his name out of it 7:20 - Rob s story 8:40 9:30 - What's next? 11:15 12:20 What would you like to see in a movie about the case? 13:00 | 14:15 | What do you think of the movie Dark Waters? 15: What are you looking for? 16:30 | What s your thoughts on the movie? 17:40 | What are your favorite part of the film? 18:20 | How do you feel about it? 19:00 + 16:00 // 17:00 / 17:10 | How did you think it s better than the film Dark Waters ? 21:10 22:40 // 15:30 + 17:35 | How does he feel about the movie 15,000 / 16:50 | What is your answer to that question? 26:40 +16:30 & 17: What s the worst thing you ve ever seen me think about the film ? 19,000 25:00 & 16:10 + 17,000 + 26,000/16,000,000+
00:00:30.000Largely because Mark Ruffalo played him in the film Dark Waters, which is the film that Ruffalo made about the case.
00:00:38.000And Rob and I met for the first time, I think it was in 2016, at the federal courthouse in Cincinnati.
00:00:45.000When we were about to begin trying that first case, I was lucky enough to be part of the legal team.
00:00:54.000But you actually had a, before I met you, you had a 16-year saga That took you from being a corporate lawyer in one of the most hardcore white shoe pro-corporate law firms in America.
00:01:11.000Robert Taft, the president's old law firm.
00:01:14.000It took you to being one of the major, most important plaintiff's lawyers in America and disrupted your life and pissed off your partners.
00:01:24.000I think pretty much stood by you throughout, despite the Pain and acne that you caused in their business.
00:01:32.000It started with a farmer writing you a letter about his cows dying.
00:01:37.000Yeah, actually started, gosh, 22, 23 years ago in the fall of 1998.
00:01:44.000I get a phone call from a guy on the other end of the line who tells me he's got dying cows in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and I need to help him.
00:01:53.000And, you know, I was about to hang the phone up.
00:01:57.000You know, I was at the time, as you mentioned, working at the TAF law firm in Cincinnati, working for primarily big corporate clients and a lot of big chemical companies.
00:02:08.000And so helping with dying cows was not really something, you know, that I was accustomed to.
00:02:14.000At that time, you were about, I think, one or two months, I recall, away from being named partner in the firm, which is another thing that happened.
00:02:25.000Every lawyer in that kind of track, that partnership track, is waiting for.
00:02:31.000And you have, part of your background, we shared this at one time, was very different than the rest of the people in that firm.
00:02:37.000Most of the people in that firm were Ivy League lawyers.
00:02:41.000And you had come from a very different background.
00:03:31.000So when I heard this guy was calling me from that town, I paid a little closer attention and wanted to see if there was something I could do to help him.
00:03:39.000And he actually knew your grandmother.
00:03:42.000Yeah, he had actually been on the phone with his neighbor.
00:03:46.000And the neighbor was longtime friends with my grandmother.
00:03:49.000In fact, as a kid, I had spent time on that next door farm, milking the cows and riding the horses as a kid.
00:03:57.000And he had been trying to find local lawyers that would help him.
00:04:01.000And was complaining to his neighbor that day, you know, that he couldn't get anybody to help him out because of who he thought was causing the problem.
00:04:08.000And so he needed somebody from out of town to help him.
00:04:11.000And his neighbor had just been on the phone earlier that day with my grandmother, who was bragging about her grandson, who was an environmental lawyer in Cincinnati.
00:04:22.000You were the wrong kind of environmental lawyer.
00:04:36.000Well, yeah, we were representing a lot of big chemical companies.
00:04:39.000DuPont was never actually a firm client, but I knew their lawyers because we were doing a lot of Superfund work, a lot of work for hazardous waste cleanup sites all over the country where all the big chemical companies would be fighting about who gets to pay to clean these sites up.
00:04:56.000So I'd be there representing our chemical company clients.
00:05:00.000And typically, the lawyers for DuPont would be there because DuPont had cleanup sites and hazardous waste spread all over the country.
00:05:08.000So I knew the company, but they were not a client of our firm.
00:05:13.000So then Wilbur Tennant, who is the farmer, comes into your law firm and he brings all of these boxes of videotapes, which I later became very familiar with, of cows dying.
00:05:28.000Just to set the stage, DuPont completely owned this town.
00:05:32.000They owned every vet in the district, they owned every lawyer, they owned the judges, they owned everybody.
00:05:39.000Yeah, you know, Parkersburg happened to have a massive DuPont plant.
00:05:43.000In fact, a lot of the folks in town either worked for DuPont or they had family members who worked for DuPont or knew somebody that worked at the plant.
00:05:54.000Tennant was his name, when the farmer started complaining that he thought a landfill owned by DuPont was causing the problem, Nobody wanted to get involved.
00:06:03.000You know, none of the local lawyers really wanted to take on the town's biggest employer.
00:06:07.000This was sort of synonymous with the whole town's identity.
00:06:11.000So that was how that call came to me, you know, looking for somebody who would be willing to take on DuPont.
00:06:18.000And he comes into your white shoe law firm with a thick Appalachian accent that nobody can understand, and I think a John Deere hat or something and a blad shirt.
00:06:31.000And these big boxes and your partners are saying, who the heck is this guy?
00:06:35.000Because they've never had somebody going to TAF who wasn't wearing a suit and tie before.
00:06:43.000And I was fortunate that the partner who was the head of our environmental group at the time, Tom Turp, happened to be walking down the aisle as Mr.
00:06:53.000Tennant came into the office with all of these boxes and videotapes.
00:06:57.000And so I invited him to come sit in and look at this.
00:07:04.000Because he was able to see what was on the videotapes and to look at these photographs that I was seeing as well and seeing the massive problem that was evident.
00:07:14.000When you looked at these videotapes, you could see white foaming water coming out of this landfill Owned by DuPont.
00:07:21.000It had a big DuPont label on the discharge pipe.
00:07:24.000And you could see cows standing in the white foaming water with tumors.
00:07:43.000Very fortunate that Tom became managing partner of the whole firm as the years went on and as this case dragged on.
00:07:50.000A lot of things aligned the right way for this case to have developed and to have worked out the way it did.
00:07:57.000One of those was having Tom, my partner, be there on that day and be the one to help make that decision and And eventually ended up being the lead of the firm for many, many years while the case was dragging on.
00:08:10.000I remember looking at those videos, the most horrific one to me was, I think he had already, I think maybe two or 300 cows on his arm.
00:08:25.000He's really this grim inventory of horrible, horrible diseases.
00:08:32.000And the cows, which used to kind of come up and approach them, you know, him and his wife and children, whenever they see any member of the tenant family, instead would attack them like a wild bull.
00:08:44.000And there's one of those videos where a cow is charging him and he shoots it.
00:08:48.000And he's very, very upset and emotional because it's almost like a pet for dairy cows.
00:08:56.000And it's, you know, it's organs are black.
00:08:59.000It's just like opening up a horror movie.
00:09:03.000Yeah, you know, those folks who were able to see the movie Dark Waters or the documentary The Devil We Know, a lot of those actual videotape clips that you were mentioning are in those films.
00:09:15.000And we used the actual videotape because it was so powerful.
00:09:18.000It was pretty obvious when you could see what was going on there, particularly, as you mentioned, Mr.
00:09:24.000Tennant would cut into some of these animals and videotape what he was seeing, you know, the deformed organs, the discolored organs, the black teeth, dead, stillborn calves, and, you know, very, very powerful stuff.
00:09:37.000And, you know, after I saw those videos and we saw those photographs, and after listening to Mr.
00:10:57.000You actually, they handed you, I don't know how many boxes, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands of documents, and they were all disordered.
00:11:05.000And they just thought that you would never be able to go through them.
00:11:08.000And you sat on the floor of your office for, I think, eight or nine months and read all of those documents and put that story together.
00:11:19.000Yeah, it was pretty mind-opening, to put it mildly, you know, getting all of these documents.
00:11:25.000And at the end of the day, I think it was millions of pages of documents that we had to go through.
00:11:30.000And as you said, I mean, these were the days before things were on computers.
00:11:33.000It was hard copy paper, just sitting through, organizing it, reading through, trying to figure out, what is this chemical?
00:11:40.000Because we found out that this chemical was, you mentioned, called PFOA. Was in the water that these cows were drinking.
00:11:47.000Massive quantity of it, like 7,000 tons of sludge soaked with this chemical had been put into this landfill and was in the water that the cows were drinking.
00:11:57.000Well, we started digging through these files from DuPont when we brought the lawsuit from Mr.
00:12:19.000But as we dug into the DuPont documents, They had been doing testings and studies going back into the 1950s, toxicity testing on rats and monkeys and all kinds of animals showing all kinds of toxic effects.
00:12:32.000And as you indicated, some of the most disturbing information was the ability of this completely man-made chemical.
00:12:40.000It didn't exist on the planet until man created this weird carbon-fluorine bonded chemical.
00:12:47.000Had the ability, once it got out into the environment, to never break down.
00:12:53.000It would virtually stay there forever.
00:12:55.000That's why, as you indicated, they're called forever chemicals now.
00:12:58.000Because this stuff, when it gets into the soil, when it gets into the water, it stays there.
00:13:03.000So for the last 70 years, this stuff was pumped out into our air, into our soil, into our water.
00:13:20.000And to coat pans, and people, you know, if you cook with a Teflon pan, people still have them in their homes.
00:13:30.000And it started smoking while you were cooking, and you were breathing this stuff, and people were getting something they called Teflon flu.
00:13:38.000So what we found out is not only through this manufacturing process, but through all of these other ways in which this chemical and related chemicals, also man-made with this carbon fluorine bond, been used in all kinds of things, not only cookware, nonstick cookware, but stain-resistant, waterproof clothing, carpeting, fast food wrappers and packaging, firefighting foams.
00:14:01.000All of this stuff has got out into the environment through these manufacturing processes and releases.
00:14:06.000Got into the air and the water, and not only does it stay in the environment, it gets into living things, into people, and it stays in our blood and builds up.
00:14:15.000And the companies have been doing testing and were aware that this stuff would result and was associated with all kinds of adverse human health effects going back decades as well.
00:14:27.000Yet we're denying it and telling everybody, don't worry about it.
00:14:30.000And as you pointed out, new, the stuff was getting into drinking water around the West Virginia plant in Parkersburg going back into the 80s and didn't tell anybody about it.
00:14:41.000And all of that was in these internal files.
00:14:44.000And so we tried to find ways to bring that out to the public, get it out so that the community knew what they were drinking, what they were being exposed to, and importantly, Tell the US EPA, tell the regulators, tell the scientists so they can start delving into what is this stuff and how do we deal with it now that we know it's out there?
00:15:03.000One of the most, to me, one of the most interesting depositions that I was involved in was, I forgot the name of the guy, nobody will remember.
00:15:40.000And he was complaining to his son, who was serving our country in Iraq, on trying to get them to act You know, behave in a way that's honorable.
00:15:50.000And those were really powerful documents.
00:15:53.000And that deposition, which we videotaped and showed to the jury, was one of the amazing kind of turning points of the trial.
00:16:01.000Yeah, you know, it was a really unusual turn of events that, you know, in this case, we ended up getting copies of emails, as you mentioned, from one of the in-house attorneys, Mr.
00:16:11.000Riley, you know, who worked in-house and didn't realize that these emails were being captured by the company's computer server.
00:16:20.000This is the early days of BlackBerrys and things.
00:16:23.000And so those emails ended up getting turned over because they weren't privileged.
00:16:27.000It wasn't like the lawyers were giving advice, but it gave us a great insight into what was going on with the company.
00:16:34.000You had the scientists and lawyers trying to warn the company to do the right thing, to go out and take care of this issue.
00:16:43.000And their client, the business people within the company, just weren't listening to them.
00:16:47.000So yeah, that was a powerful deposition.
00:16:50.000In their own email, they were calling it devil's piss.
00:16:55.000And in fact, you see some of that deposition excerpt in the documentary, The Devil We Know.
00:17:00.000You see some of that very deposition where you and I were there and this lawyer was asked about these emails that were going back and forth.
00:17:09.000And then in the end, DuPont's best friend turned out to be the West Virginia EPA. And basically, they brought West Virginia EPA, I think at the time, DuPont's internal documents The maximum safe amount of exposure was one part per billion.
00:17:30.000And then our experts came in and said, no, it's one-tenth that.
00:17:55.000And that was a big blow to your, you know, strategy from the beginning.
00:18:00.000It was very disturbing because what we saw was even though this chemical wasn't regulated because information had been withheld from the regulatory agencies, so they couldn't regulate something they didn't know even existed.
00:18:12.000But the company itself, DuPont's own scientists, had sat down back in the 80s when the first cancer results came back, showing that the chemical caused testicular tumors in the rats.
00:18:23.000They sat down and developed a drinking water guide, 0.6 parts per billion, which they rounded up to one.
00:18:30.000And that was basically the lowest level you could detect in the water back then.
00:18:34.000So their own scientists were saying, if we can find it, we're concerned about it.
00:18:38.000So that was the standard they had set.
00:18:40.000They found levels three, four times, five times higher than that in the local water supply.
00:18:45.000But when our litigation was filed, we pointed to their own internal standard, since there were no government standards, and said, you're above even your own standard here.
00:18:54.000That's when they went, as you pointed out, they went to the state of West Virginia's EPA. And asked them to come up with a government-approved safety guideline.
00:19:03.000And they came back with 150 parts per billion.
00:19:06.000150 times higher than DuPont's own standard.
00:19:10.000DuPont never changed its internal standard.
00:19:13.000Yet they went to the state and used the state to try to tell the public, oh, nothing to worry about here, no problem.
00:19:19.000So when that happened, that's when the US EPA got involved and said, we're going to do our own priority review of this chemical.
00:19:28.000They ended up then suing DuPont a couple years later, saying, you withheld all kinds of risk information from us that maybe if we had gotten a long time ago, we could have begun regulating this.
00:19:41.000So the US EPA got involved, and then when they finally came out with their drinking water guideline, it took 10 years.
00:19:48.000Parts per trillion is what US EPA said.
00:20:09.000US EPA brought this lawsuit saying information had been withheld, you violated federal law.
00:20:14.000DuPont ended up settling that for what EPA at the time claimed was the largest civil administrative penalty in the history of the US EPA. Sixteen million dollars, you know, which is not much to a company of DuPont's size and volume, but for EPA, that was, at least it showed you how seriously they were worried about what they were seeing in the science that they were finally getting.
00:20:39.000Talk about, just about, kind of, because you were sitting with this for 18 years, and you were Really just a, I would say, a template for sheer anxiety during that period, because you had your partners who were being supportive,
00:20:57.000but you knew you were costing them money, and you had your clients who were never happy with what you were doing because it was taking so long, and they were watching their neighbors, their friends, their relatives die.
00:21:11.000And they were saying to you, we have cancer, we need money to treat my sister, etc.
00:21:18.000You know, you were just slugging it out for 18 years.
00:21:25.000It was incredibly stressful, to put it mildly, and this is something I tried to really explore in the book, exposure that I did, trying to summarize what was going on here, because really what was happening was this community and these people, and this is something that's really affecting everybody across the U.S., The community was told it's their burden to come forward with enough evidence to confirm that this chemical was actually making them sick before they could get any relief.
00:21:54.000Under our legal system, they were told they've got to come forward with enough evidence to prove that the chemical was causing these problems, despite everything we had seen in the company's own documents showing this problem.
00:22:09.000They were going to have to prove this.
00:22:10.000We had set up this process to try to do that and to try to do it in a way with independent scientists that could confirm what we'd been seeing in DuPont's own documents.
00:22:20.000And as you indicated, that process ended up confirming links with six diseases.
00:23:06.000You know, at the end of the day, We were able to finally confirm through independent scientists that the chemical did, in fact, have these risks.
00:23:15.000You know, one of the few times in U.S. history, the community has been able to do that and confirm that, yet it took so long.
00:23:23.000So it was very stressful watching that process unfold and not being able to do much about it.
00:23:29.000The science took what it took because we had 60 29,000 people who came forward and gave blood, who provided medical information.
00:23:40.000So all of that had to be analyzed and all of these different epidemiology studies.
00:23:44.000So it took an incredible amount of time and, you know, happened during one of the worst times in the economy to be wondering whether or not all of this expense and all of this time that we're sinking into these cases will ever, ever be reimbursed and these people will ever get the relief they're entitled to.
00:24:04.000Eventually, the science panel, these independent scientists, were able to confirm by the end of 2012 that those six diseases were linked.
00:24:13.000So that kind of finally brought us to this next phase in the litigation where everybody in that community then was entitled to free medical testing and monitoring, paid for by DuPont, up to $235 million.
00:24:28.000So they're going to get free testing to look for these diseases.
00:24:31.000We had thousands of people came forward and are now getting that free testing.
00:24:35.000But everybody in that community that already had one of these six diseases, they were told they were able to now finally move forward and bring damage claims against DuPont.
00:24:49.000Yes, DuPont could not dispute that the chemical could cause those six diseases.
00:24:54.000Those are the cases that you were talking about earlier, where we were getting ready for trial in Columbus, and the first one went to trial in 2016.
00:25:05.000So I think we won 1.6 million, as I recall, in that first trial.
00:25:11.000The second trial, I think we had a little less, and then the third trial, I think we had three or three million something.
00:25:19.000And at that point, Blunt came back and said, okay, we want to sell it all.
00:26:47.000He is a Tennessee riverkeeper, and he's in Nashville, and he, 3M, which is a manufacturer of PFA, has, I think David found a new landfill this weekend that had this stuff pouring out of it.
00:27:03.000Tell people briefly what you've been doing.
00:27:08.000Tennessee Riverkeeper is suing the 3M company and other polluters for dumping PFAS chemicals and the related contamination in the Tennessee River Valley.
00:27:17.0003M operates a problematic factory on the river And these polluters have poisoned the fish and negatively impacted the drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people in the area.
00:27:30.000Riverkeeper's mission is to protect the drinking water for 6.3 million Southerners.
00:27:35.000So we sued 3M and these polluters to fulfill that mission to clean up the mess.
00:27:42.000The PFOA chemical was made by 3M and DuPont purchased it to use in making Teflon.
00:27:49.000So it was a material they used in the manufacturing process to make things like Teflon pans and things like that.
00:27:55.000The PFOS and the PFOA, which are two specific types of these PFAS chemicals, have been banned.
00:28:02.000And what 3M and DuPont and these other companies did, they added or removed a molecule here or there and And created this new secret confidential chemical as it's declared in the business world.
00:28:16.000And there's all sorts of variants of this chemical out there that have not been banned.
00:28:21.000So by moving the molecule, they have essentially the same chemical.
00:28:24.000That's a different name that has not been banned.
00:28:26.000And one of the hardest parts is figuring out which of these secret chemicals they've dumped out.
00:28:32.000And there's hundreds, if not thousands, of variants.
00:28:34.000And what are the chemicals used in today?
00:28:38.000Yeah, I mean, it's rather disturbing, because as you've mentioned, as the information finally...
00:28:43.000I think they're in the 3N medical masks, too.
00:28:47.000I have seen reports about that, that they're now finding that possibly these PFOS chemicals might be in some of that as well.
00:28:55.000Because what happened is as that information finally came out about PFOA and PFOS, activity finally started happening to restrict those, phase them out in the U.S., not make those anymore.
00:29:06.000But as you said, what happened, the companies tweaked them just a bit.
00:29:11.000DuPont, for example, had been making PFOA, which has C8, eight carbons attached to fluorine.
00:29:17.000They knocked two off, making a C6 and calling it Gen X, something new.
00:29:23.000And they said, well, all of that information about PFOA, all those health effects, that's irrelevant because now this is a new chemical and you have no evidence that this one causes any problems.
00:29:33.000And it's now showing up in the drinking water where they're making right outside of their plant in North Carolina.
00:29:40.000It's now showing up in the drinking water down the Ohio River because they ship it up to the plant in Parkersburg now and use it there.
00:29:48.000So it's almost like this whack-a-mole game where you finally address one of these PFAS chemicals.
00:29:55.000They simply change it a little bit, call it something new, and you're told you have to start all over again.
00:30:02.000The people that are exposed, being the guinea pigs, are told, you're going to have to wait and you're going to have to come forward with enough evidence to show you're actually being made sick.
00:30:12.000Let's wait and see how much cancer you get, how many people die, then we might address it.
00:30:17.000So I think you're seeing a lot of folks that are saying, we can't do it this way anymore.
00:30:22.000There's got to be a different way to approach this.
00:30:24.000I have a nonprofit organization, Tennessee Riverkeeper.
00:30:28.000When we have to look at abandoned landfills and other sites where they may have dumped these invisible chemicals, we really only know a handful that they have admitted that they've dumped, and the other we have to figure out on our own.
00:30:45.000That's the cheap price from a certified lab, and they test for about 40 different PFAS chemicals, and 26 of them show up.
00:30:54.000They've only admitted to dumping a few of those.
00:30:57.000So the burden, not only do I have to raise the money to pay for those lab costs, but then the burden is on my staff and I to figure out which one of these chemicals are dangerous, if any, or all of them, and where they come from, what they're used for.
00:31:14.000They're completely hidden under this confidential business information.
00:31:19.000You know, that's one of the biggest problems is there's not much information available to the public or even to the regulators, frankly, or scientists about which chemicals are even out there.
00:31:37.000And now we've even had a situation come up in New Jersey where somebody has finally identified that there was one of these new unknown chemicals We're good to go.
00:32:04.000So it's just mind-blowing when you think about it.
00:32:06.000First, we won't tell you what's out there.
00:32:08.000Then when you find one of these, we won't give you the information you need to even look for it.
00:32:13.000So it's a system that needs a lot of fixing right now.
00:32:25.000Well, right now we're working with states.
00:32:27.000We're working with water providers all over the country that are facing the problem of how do we address the fact that we now have this massive PFAS contamination throughout our state.
00:32:38.000State attorney generals that are trying to deal with Cleaning up the natural resources, the soil, the fish, the wildlife in the state.
00:32:46.000Water providers all over the country that are being told, this stuff's in your water, now you're going to have to put in million dollar, multi-million dollar treatment systems that may cost you millions of dollars a year to run, that are saying, we don't have the money to do this.
00:33:01.000So I'm working with these people trying to make sure that the companies that put the chemicals out there, the manufacturers, are held liable and responsible for those costs.
00:33:12.000There's a lot of that litigation going on in federal court in South Carolina, a lot of it involving contamination from firefighting foams.
00:33:20.000I'm also working on a new case where we are seeking to bring a nationwide class action On behalf of everyone that has this bigger group of PFAS chemicals in their blood.
00:33:33.000What it is for is to require the companies that are putting all these different PFAS chemicals out there To pay for the independent scientists to confirm and tell us exactly what they're doing to us, what those health effects are.
00:33:48.000In other words, you can't sit back, put this stuff out into the environment and say, there's no evidence that they cause harm, but we won't do the studies either.
00:33:56.000They should be paying for independent scientists to do that.
00:33:59.000As you can imagine, the companies tried to get the case thrown out saying you can't bring claims like this under U.S. law.
00:34:07.000We're now fighting about whether or not it can go forward on a class on behalf of everyone that has this stuff in their blood in the country.
00:34:17.000On my firm, Kennedy Madonna, Is working with you on many of these cases, and we represent water districts in New York and New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
00:34:28.000But if you have PFOAs in your local waterway, contact us and we will help put Rob to work cleaning up the mess in your backyard.
00:34:42.000It's an amazing book, and you will really enjoy it if you care about children, children's health, and chemical exposure in this country, and also the capture of our government, of our democracy by these big corporations who are trying to liquidate our landscapes for cash, commoditize our people, poison our children for profit.
00:35:10.000Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for your extraordinary commitment to making this country a cleaner, safer, healthier place for our children.
00:35:19.000Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for having this discussion.
00:35:24.000To me, this is incredibly important to have venues like this where we talk about these issues and actually let people know what needs to be done to get these things fixed.