RFK Jr. The Defender - Suing 3M Company with Bill Matsikoudis

Bill Matsakudis, who is an old friend of mine, as well as a colleague, is the co-founder of the Matsakudsis/Fanachullo Law Firm, a public interest law firm in New Jersey. He has represented major cities in lawsuits against corporate polluters, and individuals who have been injured by corporate greed. He s been involved in politics most of his life, and served as the Jersey City Corporation Counsel. He served as Deputy Attorney General, Senior Deputy AG, and as Assistant Counsel to New Jersey s Governor. I wanted to get him here to talk to you about his victory in the 3M Scotchgard Case in Decatur, Alabama for the pollution of the Tennessee River with PFOAs. And as you know, I was part of the legal team that brought the original PFOA case in West Virginia and Ohio that was featured in the Mark Ruffalo film, "Dark Waters." And we had 3,500 clients who were injured by PFOas that were released by DuPont. DuPont denied everything. After 12 years of litigation, we settled the case for $633 million. But why did we sue? Because we thought that chemical represents a health threat. And your lawsuit led to a settlement that led to the health monitoring that led us to that settlement. And it s depicted in the movie, "Dawn of the Dark Waters," and it s been on the front pages of the New York Times and other publications. since then, since then. And since then there s been more and more studies on the dangers of PFOAA s in our bodies of water. And now we know that they re a cancerous compound. And they re in fact. And there s a lot more dangerous than we thought. . In this is a story about a chemical that s been around for a long, long time, and now we re going to find out if it s actually a cancer-causing compound or not and we re gonna get to the bottom line on it. ... in this episode, we re talking about the problem and why we should we be worried about it s in the water supply? is a lot of people s blood, and why it s a problem, not just in the first place it s everywhere else not just on the surface on the ground but in the bodies of fish, and in the fish everywhere else.

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody!

00:00:01.000 My guest today is Bill Matsakudis, who is an old friend of mine, as well as a colleague.

00:00:06.000 He is the co-founder of the law firm Matsakudis& Fanachullo, which is a public interest law firm in New Jersey.

00:00:15.000 He's represented major cities in lawsuits against corporate polluters and individuals who've been injured by corporate greed.

00:00:25.000 He's been involved in politics most of his life.

00:00:28.000 Bill was the Jersey City Corporation Counsel.

00:00:32.000 He served as Deputy Attorney General, Senior Deputy Attorney General in New Jersey, and as Assistant Counsel to New Jersey's Governor.

00:00:42.000 He has been repeatedly named among New Jersey's most influential political figures.

00:00:48.000 I wanted to get you here today, Bill, to talk to you about your victory in the 3M Scotchgard case.

00:00:55.000 In Decatur, Alabama, for the pollution of the Tennessee River with PFOAs. 0.54

00:01:01.000 And as you know, I was part of the legal team that brought the original PFOA case in West Virginia and Ohio.

00:01:09.000 That was featured in the Mark Ruffalo film Dark Waters.

00:01:14.000 And we had 3,500 clients who had been injured by PFOAs that were released by DuPont.

00:01:23.000 DuPont denied everything.

00:01:25.000 That litigation took about 12 years.

00:01:28.000 In the end, we settled the case for $633 million.

00:01:35.000 The most important thing we got out of that case was a mandate for the company to To do medical monitoring and to do a real study on the medical implications of having PFOAs in your blood is now in the blood supply.

00:01:53.000 Almost all Americans now have some level of PFOAs in their blood.

00:01:59.000 And once it gets in you, it's there forever.

00:02:03.000 It's called a forever chemical.

00:02:04.000 It recycles and constantly causing damage and inflammation to your body, and it never leaves.

00:02:11.000 And part of your case in the Scotchgard case kind of was the organic successor to what we did in...

00:02:21.000 Not only were you representing Tennessee Riverkeeper, which is one of 350 waterkeeper organizations, but a lot of the science in your case was based upon this medical monitoring data that came out of the Dark Waters case, the DuPont case.

00:02:39.000 So tell us what happened.

00:02:41.000 Yeah.

00:02:42.000 Well, maybe break it off into some bits because it's a little complex.

00:02:47.000 But first, talk about the importance of that settlement that you were just referring to.

00:02:53.000 Let me just give people background on BFOAs.

00:02:56.000 In our case, DuPont really developed BFOAs to make Teflon and invented pans that were stick-free.

00:03:06.000 And it turned out that people who used Teflon pans were getting these terrible headaches, and it actually was from breathing the BFOAs that were volatilizing while they cooked, but also the factory where they were manufacturing it was releasing it into the water supply, and that's what we sued about.

00:03:25.000 3M and other companies also use different forms of that chemical compound to create waterproofing and flame retardants and a bunch of other products.

00:03:37.000 I didn't mean to interrupt you.

00:03:42.000 No, free-flowing discussion, yeah.

00:03:44.000 The PFAS now is the general grouping.

00:03:46.000 They used to call it back in the day when you had that case, PFC, you know, peripheral arachyl substances, and they used to call PFOA more than C8, right?

00:03:57.000 Because it's got eight carbons in the chemical compound.

00:04:00.000 So...

00:04:01.000 3M was really the brain, if you will, behind the discovery of these chemicals, which had a lot of good chemical uses, but the cost of the health consequences far outweighed it.

00:04:14.000 And 3M In addition to PFOA, in fact, they actually use PFOS more than PFOA, but they use both.

00:04:23.000 And they used it and made it there for many, many years on a plant that is 900 acres that sits right on the Tennessee River.

00:04:34.000 And the Tennessee River is a beautiful river, and you wouldn't know it by looking at it, but it's got A lot of these chemicals, unfortunately, continuing to flow in it from this site.

00:04:45.000 But why did we sue?

00:04:47.000 Because we thought that the PFOS and PFOA and other PFAS, because there's actually many, many PFAS that were used at that site in lesser amounts.

00:04:56.000 And there's really so many different subcategories now of PFAS. But the first thing we had to, the reason why we sued is because while we thought that This chemical represents a health threat.

00:05:08.000 And your lawsuit, and it's depicted in dark waters, led to that settlement that led to the health monitoring health tests that did correlate, really, for the first time, cancers to this, and especially in the workers in that area.

00:05:24.000 I think that I've heard some people say that had DuPont understood that that was the result, they would have tripled the $600 million maybe, because instead of letting that health study take place, because that has been far more consequential to them on the bottom line.

00:05:40.000 And, you know, since then, there's been a lot of academic studies to ascertain the impact of PFAS, no surprise that the companies still reject the peer-reviewed science that's been out there in so many different universities across the world.

00:05:59.000 This is not a problem limited to the United States by any stretch of the imagination.

00:06:04.000 You have major PFAS problems throughout Europe.

00:06:07.000 In Australia and such, yet nonetheless, you know, the EPA, although they're in the process of fully regulating PFAS, so far it's not a regulation.

00:06:20.000 There's nothing with the power of law that says that this is a hazardous chemical.

00:06:25.000 That sets a minimum, what they call an MCL, a minimum contaminant level.

00:06:30.000 Although there are advisory levels for some years with regard to PFOS and PFOA. I mean, in our case, EPA is a captive agency.

00:06:40.000 And when it comes to companies with these politically powerful companies like DuPont and 3M, EPA is just a subsidiary of those companies.

00:06:51.000 And throughout our case, EPA was really the enemy.

00:06:56.000 EPA, just like it was in the Monsanto case, EPA was clearly on the side of the polluters.

00:07:04.000 And, you know, it just complicates these, makes these cases much, much more difficult.

00:07:08.000 Because that's something, that relationship is very, very difficult to explain to a judge.

00:07:15.000 It's not that the judges don't understand it.

00:07:18.000 It's just that that kind of evidence is easy to get excluded and very, very difficult to get included.

00:07:25.000 Yeah, and look...

00:07:27.000 I'd like to think that the EPA, although there is what some people might call a deep state, there's a bureaucracy and you have a mixture of people that I think are well intended and other people that may not be.

00:07:39.000 The person at the helm does change, right?

00:07:42.000 And you would think that hopefully, consequentially, the direction of the agency We know that in certain departments that there's a culture that can develop.

00:07:52.000 But nonetheless, there's a new EPA administrator right now.

00:07:55.000 We'll see what he does.

00:07:56.000 He was in North Carolina.

00:07:59.000 I'm not an expert on what he did there, but the word is that he did a lot of good work on PFAS because there's a lot of PFAS issues in North Carolina.

00:08:06.000 But yeah, he let the hog industry, industrial hog farms like Smithfield and Murphy farms, pollute every waterway in the state.

00:08:16.000 He gave free range to the coal industry and coal burning power plants.

00:08:21.000 Duke Energy is the worst record of any utility in this country.

00:08:25.000 And the Southern Company are in water pollution.

00:08:29.000 So I and and by the way, The EPA has a very corrupt institutional culture.

00:08:35.000 When we did the Monsanto case, The head of the pesticide division was secretly working for Monsanto and we ended up getting their emails in which he said that he killed a study by another agency and then he wrote a note to Monsanto saying, I ought to get a medal for this because I saved you once again.

00:08:57.000 So the head of that division and the agency that was literally working for Or the polluter.

00:09:04.000 And in this case, in our case, in DuPont, EPA had to do a study in which they said, you know, we had a Mr.

00:09:15.000 Tennant, who was our original plaintiff, whose cows all died.

00:09:19.000 And the cows, you know, when they opened up the cows, their guts were literally liquefied.

00:09:26.000 And the EPA study came and said he was a bad farmer.

00:09:30.000 That's why the cows died. 0.99

00:09:32.000 And of course, the reason they died is because they were drinking from the creek.

00:09:36.000 That was contaminated with BFOAs.

00:09:39.000 Yeah, well, look, there's, to me, even the EPA state and as part of the process of regulating, it's no question taking too long.

00:09:49.000 But even on the EPA website and in the Federal Register, they talk about the evidence of Of the correlation between both PFOA and PFOS and a variety of human diseases.

00:10:03.000 Not only cancers, like testicular cancer, kidney cancer, but also birth defects, autoimmune diseases.

00:10:12.000 And this is still what they call an emerging chemical.

00:10:15.000 The science on it is still developing.

00:10:19.000 But the evidence is, I think, pretty clear to most regulated agencies, if you will, even though they may be slow to it for a variety of reasons.

00:10:30.000 New states, some states, not the one we're dealing with in this case, have been ahead of the curve and have set standards that are even above and beyond the standard that you're dealing with at the EPA level.

00:10:42.000 So an interesting thing about our case is Which is, you know, filed underneath the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which enables citizens and like the members of the Tennessee Riverkeeper to sort of serve as private attorneys general, can by law file a lawsuit to seek a cleanup or remediation or other injunctive relief.

00:11:05.000 So, you know, our lawsuit was different than your lawsuit, for example, and Almost the great overwhelming majority of cases, now there's so many, so many cases, dealing with PFAS because most cases are seeking money or medical monitoring of some sort, where our case did not.

00:11:27.000 Our case sought injunctive relief.

00:11:30.000 Our case sought a process to bring about a remediation so that the PFAS no longer continues to Represent a threat to human health and the environment.

00:11:43.000 I mean, right now, although the Alabama Department of Environmental Management hasn't created a standard for PFAS like other states have, they have limited the amount of fish you can eat and barred it to an extent because they know that people will get sick from this stuff.

00:12:00.000 Even they have caught on to that.

00:12:02.000 Let me say something about that because I lived in Alabama for two years and In that Tennessee watershed, you have among the highest concentration of people who are fishermen who are fishing all the fishers, people who are recreational fishing, and among them is the highest percentage of subsistence fishermen.

00:12:24.000 In other words, the people who are fishing are also eating the fish.

00:12:27.000 And we live in this kind of science fiction nightmare today where regulatory agencies that are supposed to stop this pollution from getting into the water and contaminating the fish think they have done their job when they just tell people don't eat the fish anymore.

00:12:44.000 And what I would say to you is that's the opposite of a good result. 0.95

00:12:49.000 A good result is to tell the company, listen, if you want to add Beef ass to your fish. 0.97

00:12:59.000 Your executives like that idea and they should add it themselves at home. 0.98

00:13:05.000 Don't put it in our fish.

00:13:07.000 I hear you.

00:13:08.000 The public owns the Constitution of the state of Alabama says that the fisheries of the state and the waters of the state are owned by the people of the state.

00:13:18.000 They're not owned by the corporations.

00:13:20.000 They're not owned by the government.

00:13:22.000 Everybody has a right to use them.

00:13:24.000 Nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others.

00:13:29.000 That's what the law says.

00:13:31.000 So when that company wins 3M, Puts pollution in your order.

00:13:37.000 They are committing an act of theft.

00:13:40.000 They are privatizing a publicly owned resource and they're stealing it from the public.

00:13:46.000 It's just like a thief robbing your bank.

00:13:49.000 And that's how they ought to be punished.

00:13:51.000 And instead, you have an agency that just tells people, well, don't go to the bank anymore.

00:13:58.000 You know, don't take your money out of the bank anymore because it's been stolen by somebody else.

00:14:03.000 And now we've done our job.

00:14:05.000 That's what ADEM does.

00:14:07.000 And by the way, I one time sued 20 companies in the state of Alabama.

00:14:13.000 I spent two weeks in the files up at ADEM. And as soon as I filed those lawsuits against U.S. Steel, against some of the worst polluters in the country, ADEM came in and filed on top of me, which preempted all my cases.

00:14:32.000 And then they made sweetheart deals with those companies where none of them paid a dime and none of them did clean up.

00:14:37.000 So that agency is there to protect the polluters, not to protect the public.

00:14:42.000 And everybody in Alabama knows that.

00:14:45.000 There's not a single person living in Alabama who thinks ADEM is there to protect the public with a fish.

00:14:52.000 Yeah.

00:14:53.000 It's a criminal enterprise, all of it.

00:14:56.000 And this is, you know, these were some of the issues that we were, you know, struggling and dealing with.

00:15:00.000 We had some similar sort of situations going on.

00:15:03.000 And, you know, that's just to say that, look, here you have a company, 3M, sitting literally on the Tennessee River for...

00:15:13.000 Decades and decades, creating these chemicals that are now rendered the fish uneatable.

00:15:18.000 So, you know, our goal in the lawsuit was to try to bring about a day when you could eat the fish, right?

00:15:26.000 And so our lawsuit underneath the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act basically, like I said, enables private individuals to act as private attorney generals and to sue in federal court, which is where we sued.

00:15:38.000 And What you have to prove is that there's imminent and substantial endangerment of human health or the environment.

00:15:45.000 That's the sort of the buzz phrase of the statute.

00:15:48.000 So one of the issues that you have there, it was sort of assisted by your previous work, was, well, how do you prove that there's hazardous waste that creates a health threat if It's not regulated by the state or by the federal government.

00:16:05.000 And you're able to point to different studies.

00:16:09.000 You're able to bring in experts to talk about this.

00:16:11.000 And the fact that a company at gunpoint did a study and an analysis that demonstrates that there's correlations to cancer is very helpful to that.

00:16:22.000 When we first came into this case, We didn't just sue 3M, by the way, because it's not just 3M that created the PFAS or that has the PFAS in that area.

00:16:33.000 There's a company right next to it that's based in Japan, Daikin Industries.

00:16:39.000 And Daikin used PFOA as well.

00:16:43.000 They didn't make it, obviously, but they used substantial amounts.

00:16:47.000 They actually now have a If you're going to like this one, they have a replacement chemical, known to be a PFAS, if you will, one of the family of PFASs, that they're able to keep proprietary.

00:17:03.000 In other words, no one knows exactly what it is by an agreement that they have with the federal government.

00:17:09.000 And they're using that now instead of PFOA. All these companies stopped using the PFOS and the PFOA now, going back to...

00:17:18.000 And what they do is, They're just like drug dealers who are selling synthetic heroin or something, and Congress will say, or the regulatory agency will say, okay, now that drug is illegal, and they just change one molecule on it, and they go back on the street the next day.

00:17:35.000 And that's what these companies do.

00:17:37.000 They take the PFOA chain, they change a single molecule, and they say, this isn't a problem.

00:17:44.000 And it's innocent until proven guilty.

00:17:46.000 And it took them 50 years to prove BFOA is guilty.

00:17:50.000 And that's what they keep doing.

00:17:52.000 And then they have another barrier where they say, and by the way, it's proprietary, so we're not going to tell you what's in it.

00:17:58.000 And meanwhile, you know, they're poisoning everybody.

00:18:01.000 But let me ask you this.

00:18:03.000 Shouldn't the law act like this?

00:18:06.000 Since the people of the state of Alabama own those fish, Shouldn't they be able to say, as a remedy, shouldn't they be able to say, every time they catch a fish, take a picture of the fish, weigh the fish, send the picture to 3M, and then get a free delivery of fish that are uncontaminated?

00:18:31.000 Shouldn't that be part of the remedy to these cases?

00:18:36.000 I completely support that as part of the remedy.

00:18:40.000 Maybe we can get a progressive legislator in Alabama.

00:18:44.000 I don't think so.

00:18:46.000 A bill.

00:18:48.000 There's been a couple over the years.

00:18:50.000 No, I think that would be great.

00:18:52.000 I mean, look, our goal is, even though they stopped making PFOS, PFOA, they stopped using it at these facilities.

00:19:00.000 There's so much of it there.

00:19:01.000 It's astounding.

00:19:03.000 Now, they've taken...

00:19:04.000 And, you know, we were lucky to deal with some leading experts on the chemistry of PFAS, leading experts on the hydrology and how it relates from Stanford University, Colorado School of Mines.

00:19:18.000 You know, people have been involved in some of your case, like Chris Higgins from Stanford.

00:19:22.000 Why is it there?

00:19:24.000 Why is it there?

00:19:25.000 It's there because this company, these criminals, because they didn't want to properly dispose of it, they took it out back and just dumped it into the ground, or they dumped it into the river, right?

00:19:37.000 They had leaky pits.

00:19:39.000 They were cheap, and they were lazy, and they knew they could externalize the cost.

00:19:45.000 They didn't care that they were poisoning everybody in Alabama. 0.65

00:19:49.000 They were poisoning the Tennessee River.

00:19:51.000 They just didn't care because they could make money by doing it. 0.91

00:19:54.000 And now they're saying, oh, we shouldn't have to clean up.

00:19:57.000 My attitude is...

00:20:00.000 Clean it up.

00:20:01.000 Clean it all up.

00:20:02.000 Clean up the last molecule because you had no permission.

00:20:05.000 What you did was illegal.

00:20:07.000 We do not want it in our fish.

00:20:09.000 We own the river.

00:20:10.000 You don't. 0.88

00:20:11.000 If 3M backed a truck full of PFOAs up to my backyard and dumped all their crap into my backyard, what do you think I would do? 0.97

00:20:23.000 I would tell them, clean it up. 0.95

00:20:25.000 And they'd say, here's what they'll do.

00:20:27.000 They'll come back and they'll say, well, we can clean up 90% of it.

00:20:31.000 The last 10% is going to cost us $100 million.

00:20:35.000 And I would say to them, clean it up anyway.

00:20:39.000 You're going to create jobs by cleaning it up.

00:20:41.000 There's a whole industry that we're now going to create.

00:20:44.000 And you know that.

00:20:46.000 People that are going to come in and clean it up and restore the river to what it used to be, what it's supposed to be before.

00:20:52.000 Because we own that river the same as I own my backyard.

00:20:57.000 The public owns that river.

00:20:58.000 And we ought to be acting the same way and telling this company, You poisoned it.

00:21:04.000 Our kids play there.

00:21:06.000 You clean it up.

00:21:07.000 Even the last molecule.

00:21:10.000 Yeah, well, hey, that's what the Tennessee River Keeper did.

00:21:13.000 And that's what we're doing, right?

00:21:14.000 And it's first and foremost, we filed a lawsuit and said, you dumped this stuff.

00:21:20.000 You did so in a way that now it's an ongoing threat every single day to human health and the environment, okay?

00:21:28.000 Because we know that there's pathways from the way they've dumped it on their site.

00:21:32.000 There's so much of it, the readings of it in the groundwater are...

00:21:38.000 You don't have to be a so-called expert or a scientist to know that when you have 70 parts per trillion is the standard and you've got millions of parts per trillion, millions of parts per trillion in the groundwater, and you know that the groundwater is flowing in a direction toward the river, okay?

00:21:55.000 And you know that the monitoring wells around the river are picking up high numbers.

00:22:01.000 You know that there's an ongoing Contamination.

00:22:05.000 So it's not like any given day, you know, you just turn off the switch and it's stopped, okay?

00:22:11.000 And look, over 20 years, don't mistake this for me saying anything laudatory, because this is before we sued and we still sued, they've undertaken a variety of different band-aids, if you will, to address the problem.

00:22:25.000 And The problem is not solved.

00:22:28.000 We can see that in readings from the surface water.

00:22:31.000 We can see that in the fish, right?

00:22:33.000 The fact that there's still in the fish.

00:22:35.000 So yes, we went out and said, you know, you have to clean this issue up, clean this contamination up.

00:22:44.000 That's a question though, all right?

00:22:46.000 Now it may seem sort of A simple thing to say, let's clean up every last molecule, and what does that really mean?

00:22:54.000 I'll tell you what it means, because I've brought these gun laws, and I know you've done an amazing job on this, and you're working within these limitations, and When I'm talking about this, I'm not working within the limitations of, you know, the political limitations and, you know, the protection racket that these guys are running and the political power they have and even the judicial corruption.

00:23:20.000 I'm not dealing with it, but I'm just talking about how life ought to work and you can reverse the direction of groundwater.

00:23:31.000 You just put in a pump house and you create a depression in the groundwater.

00:23:37.000 You pump the water out, clean it up, and you can dump the clean stuff into the river.

00:23:41.000 Respectfully, I don't think that that's enough here because they're doing some of that stuff.

00:23:45.000 There's so much groundwater.

00:23:49.000 Let me say a couple of things.

00:23:51.000 The first thing when we filed this law Lawsuit, 3M. But the first thing they did was they tried to dismiss the lawsuit.

00:23:57.000 So we made a little bit of news.

00:23:59.000 One of the things that they said, and not only then, because Daikin said it, we also sued a big concern that owns a landfill where a lot of this stuff was dumped.

00:24:08.000 There's a couple of landfills that are targets of our lawsuit, multiple.

00:24:12.000 Some of this, you know, look, there's one right on the 3M plant site, still the 903 acre plant site.

00:24:16.000 There's one that's owned by the county a little bit away.

00:24:19.000 And there's one that's pretty far away that's actually much better than the other ones as far as Technologically speaking, and the protections around it, it's much further away from the river.

00:24:29.000 But nonetheless, not to get into too many details, but I will say this, leachate from that landfill, which some people say is like gutter juice, it's the stuff that's sort of the liquid that seeps out, they bring that to the Decatur utility and it gets some modest treatment and then goes right into the river.

00:24:47.000 So we suit all these people.

00:24:49.000 And the first thing they did was they made a motion to dismiss all of them.

00:24:54.000 And they said, well, if there's PFAS going into the river, they sought a loophole out.

00:25:03.000 They said it's going through what they call point source discharges, which don't fall underneath the legal rubric of your statute that you're suing them.

00:25:11.000 And we said, first of all, We disagree.

00:25:14.000 Secondly, we think a lot of this stuff is getting into the river through other sources, namely the groundwater that's bringing in.

00:25:20.000 And, you know, thankfully, we had a judge who saw it our way.

00:25:24.000 I think that the defendants were pretty surprised when we had a victory on that motion, and we proceeded.

00:25:30.000 I tried, as a lawyer who likes to believe in an independent judiciary, you know, I try not to believe what one politician said, that there are, you know, Bush judges and Clinton judges and Obama judges and Trump judges.

00:25:43.000 But, you know, there may be something to that.

00:25:45.000 You know, we had a really good judge who was appointed by Barack Obama at that point in time.

00:25:50.000 It got shifted over to a different judge.

00:25:53.000 But, you know, we had to keep on fighting back things like that.

00:25:57.000 They tried to mix our case into one of these multidisciplinary litigation, which is mainly for personal injuries, which would have just slowed down the entire process.

00:26:06.000 And, you know, we beat them back on that.

00:26:08.000 And then finally, we entered into, they switched their counsel.

00:26:11.000 I think you had some interactions with their old counsel, a little brewery guy.

00:26:15.000 Then we entered into a mediation and we were lucky to have some of these great experts, but this discussion came about is, so how do you clean it up?

00:26:23.000 And you talked about like, you know, the treating of the groundwater.

00:26:27.000 So, you know, one of the analogies that I've used to try to explain this, you know, to the public in Alabama and even for myself is, you know, the Tennessee River is like a sick patient.

00:26:38.000 And if a doctor has a patient come walking into their office and they can see, oh, wow, this patient is dawned this.

00:26:47.000 You know, they're skinny, they're limping.

00:26:49.000 They know that something's going on.

00:26:50.000 So how do you resolve it?

00:26:52.000 Let's say they suspect a cancer.

00:26:54.000 They don't just say, we're going to do chemo, radiation, whatever they're going to do in operation before they can do some diagnostic studies.

00:27:02.000 They might want a CAT scan.

00:27:04.000 They might want a PET scan.

00:27:05.000 They may want a biopsy, blood test, all these things.

00:27:09.000 All the experts involved in this case said, look, before we can clean it up, right?

00:27:14.000 To me, some of this stuff seemed almost simplistic.

00:27:18.000 Like I was thinking, for example, we're probably going to have to do something with some sediments.

00:27:24.000 Maybe.

00:27:24.000 You know, for one thing, sediment there, this type of chemical may be different than like a PCB or mercury where they stick, they're heavier, they may stick in the sediment.

00:27:34.000 But more importantly, if you clean up the sediment today and tomorrow the groundwater is still recharging it with pollutants, what have you accomplished?

00:27:42.000 So they said that before we really come up with a cleanup analysis here, the first thing you have to do is get a better understanding of how the PFAS is getting into the river from this massive site and from all the different sources on that site.

00:28:00.000 There's different areas where they used to test firefighting foam.

00:28:04.000 It was one of the main things that they used.

00:28:07.000 One of the things, you know, we achieved in the settlement is there's a very expensive, a very detailed investigation that we're getting split samples on to double check to understand how the PFAS is still getting into the river.

00:28:20.000 That's sort of step number one.

00:28:22.000 If this case had, you know, gone to trial as opposed to the settlement that we achieved, you know, we would have had to have proven that, yes, in the first instance, that PFAS is a health risk.

00:28:33.000 But that also it's got an exposure pathway to the environment and to the fish and such.

00:28:38.000 And there's different ways of proving that.

00:28:39.000 But if we wanted to then demonstrate the cleanup, we would have had to have this study done.

00:28:43.000 We would have almost had to have asked the judge to order the relief of, A, do this study, and then B, let's figure out the cleanup.

00:28:52.000 So the first step is being done here, which is this thorough investigation.

00:28:57.000 Then that's the first step.

00:28:58.000 And then the big question is, which I think is going to be one of the most important environmental questions in the United States of America in the next year and change, Coming months, a lot of stuff is going to be happening.

00:29:10.000 What will the cleanup be?

00:29:12.000 You know, thankfully, Riverkeeper is going to have a voice in that as part of the settlement.

00:29:16.000 3M is funding a team of experts to work on that.

00:29:20.000 It's going to be a public, transparent thing.

00:29:21.000 God willing, we're going to get to the final good results so that someday we won't need the Bobby Kennedy Jr.

00:29:28.000 bill of 3M, I just caught this fish.

00:29:31.000 Send me a clean one.

00:29:33.000 That's what we need to get to, Bill.

00:29:38.000 That's the only intermediate measure.

00:29:40.000 I'm hoping that my friends, Dave Whiteside, Mark Martin and I can go out there, catch the fish and eat it down the road.

00:29:47.000 Even if we get the best possible cleanup done, it's probably going to take some time before that happens.

00:29:53.000 Bill Mazzacudas, thank you so much for joining us.

00:29:56.000 Bobby, thank you for having me on.

00:29:58.000 And thanks for everything that you do, Bill.

00:30:01.000 Keep fighting until you get those free fish being sent to those guys.

00:30:05.000 And you and I are going to eat a largemouth bass one day from the river itself.

00:30:11.000 All right.

00:30:12.000 Okay.

00:30:13.000 Take care.

00:30:13.000 Thank you, Bill.

00:30:14.000 Bye-bye.

00:30:14.000 Thank you all.

00:30:15.000 Good job, Bill.

00:30:16.000 Thank you.

RFK Jr. The Defender - April 28, 2022

Suing 3M Company with Bill Matsikoudis

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