Diane Cotter and Rob Ballott join me on the show to talk about the dangers of flame retardants in our everyday lives, and how they are linked to cancer, kidney cancer, and many other diseases. They talk about their own personal stories of exposure to these chemicals, and why we should all be worried about them. This episode is brought to you by Kennedy and Madonna, Kennedy and Madonna, and the Water Districts of the United States, representing 200 water districts across the country, including my hometown in Hyannis, MA, and a number of other fire stations also in the country and firefighters who have been the most affected. Thank you, Diane and Rob, for being my two heroes. I m humbled to be able to bring you two of my heroes, and I m proud to call them my two great heroes. Thank you also to my friend and colleague, Bob Ballott, for joining me on this episode. And thank you, Bob, for helping me bring awareness to this issue, and for being a hero in the fight against DuPont. This is a must-listen episode, and you re not going to want to miss it! The Toxic Job of Being a Hero, by David Ferry and Bob Ballard. It s so important that we talk about these chemicals and the dangers they pose to us, not only firefighters, but to the rest of us, and to our families and the people who are most affected by these chemicals in our day-to-day lives. Thanks, Bob and Diane, for your courageously fighting for the fight for our health and our families, and our safety. You are two heroes! - Thank you for being brave, thank you so much, and thank you for standing up for our truth, and fighting for us, we love you, we appreciate you, and we are so much more than we know we can do this, we care about you, you are amazing, we are going to keep fighting for our future, we will keep fighting, we're going to win, we'll keep fighting and we will get it, we won't stop fighting for you, We will keep on fighting, keep on keep on fightin' on, we keep you safe, we all keep on coming back, we get it out here, we believe in you, keep us safe, and keep you strong, we know that we're all in this fight, we don t stop moving forward.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today I have one of my heroes on this show, Diane Cotter, who's been, along with my friend and colleague Rob Ballott, the attorney whose story was featured in the major motion picture, Dark Waters.
00:00:15.000Which was a Mark Ruffalo film about a case that I actually tried with Rob Ballot against DuPont for poisoning tens of thousands of people in Ohio and West Virginia with PFAS, this family of chemicals that's also called There's EFOAs, PFCs, and it's the forever chemicals that are now in many, many products as flame retardants.
00:00:40.000And they're in, you know, water repellents.
00:01:24.000And it was put there to stop them from burning.
00:01:27.000It's meant to protect us, but It was actually hurting us.
00:01:31.000And firefighters now around this country, in the last couple of years, two out of three firefighters' deaths have been caused by cancer.
00:01:40.000And many of those cancers are traced back to PFAS, this family of chemicals.
00:01:46.000And I have been representing people across the country.
00:01:50.000My firm, Kennedy and Madonna, are representing 200 water districts across the country that have water systems, including my hometown in Hyannis, which is contaminated with PFAS, and a number of different fire stations also in the country and firefighters who have been the most affected.
00:02:10.000It's used particularly on airports, and it's used to smother petroleum-related flames.
00:02:17.000If you pour water on a flame on a petroleum fire, it just makes it worse.
00:02:22.000But if you dump these PFAS on it, it smothers and it kills the fire.
00:02:28.000And firefighters were required to train once or twice a year with these materials on those airports.
00:02:36.000And when they drain with it, the foam goes through drains and it gets into local water supplies.
00:02:44.000So I would say probably most water supplies where airports are part of their drainage that they now in this country are contaminated with a very, very dangerous class of chemicals that nobody should be consuming.
00:03:01.000In fighting PFAS in this country, I've been robbed a lot.
00:03:04.000Again, my partner and my colleague, and then Diane Potter, who began her journey, and her husband, who was a lieutenant, one of the firefighting Department in Massachusetts suddenly was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
00:03:22.000And why don't you tell Diane, why don't you tell what happened to Paul and how it had this impact on your life?
00:03:29.000Because you've become a nightmare for this industry, and I thank you for it.
00:04:06.000And for him to get hit and knocked down with prostate cancer that was debilitating because of the after effects of the surgery, which knocked him into a grave depression.
00:04:19.000Paul, before he was sick, was very active.
00:04:22.000What happened to him after he got sick?
00:04:24.000So he had, you know, we never wanted to talk about this, Bob, because it's so humiliating.
00:04:30.000You look at my husband, he's a very, very fit man, very athletic, and he became incontinent to the point that it couldn't be controlled, to the point that it debilitated him from working.
00:04:46.000So while they were able to remove the prostate, It caused the incontinence.
00:04:53.000And we never spoke about that publicly.
00:04:56.000I never knew he spoke about that until we saw...
00:05:00.000I read when I first read David Ferry's article in Men's Health, The Toxic Job of Being a Hero.
00:05:09.000It took my breath away that he actually discussed that with David Ferry.
00:06:01.000He was attached to a catheter bag that he just sat for hours and hours at a day, just...
00:06:08.000Staring at TV and see the depression hit him hard that he wasn't going back to the job.
00:06:15.000You know, once it was truly obvious that the stress incontinence could not be corrected.
00:06:23.000And what happened was while he was slipping away from me, I truly began researching in earnest for anything that I could find about the turnout year.
00:06:34.000I truly got a call one day after hundreds of emails when I found the gear does degrade.
00:06:41.000I thought it was related to products of combustion because we'd always been aware of that in the fire community.
00:06:48.000It was Erin Brockovich who said to me one day, I've gotten a call from a New Hampshire fire chief.
00:06:59.000Do you know if the gear has PFOA or PFOS? Never heard of it.
00:07:05.000And that literally took one minute to see that Europe was already beginning the discussion of transitioning to non-PFOA filled turnout gear.
00:07:18.000We hadn't been discussing it in the United States before.
00:07:22.000And that is literally when the rabbit hole opened when we tried to discuss it.
00:07:28.000When I tried to discuss it with the institutions that I was familiar with, from having my husband on the job for 27 years in Worcester, and I had to resort to the Google to find out all I could about these chemicals.
00:07:48.000And I can remember Reading about Ra a lot, reading about you, reading about the river keepers.
00:07:56.000I was then researching the chemical companies.
00:08:00.000I can remember looking on Google Earth one day and going down the East Coast rivers and I would find all of the plants like Tenkara that makes Aguirre, DuPont that makes Aguirre, Camus that makes Aguirre and they're all on these beautiful rivers.
00:08:20.000I began following David Whiteside from Tennessee Riverkeepers.
00:08:26.000He had just started his own lawsuit against 3M. I had already been following Rob, who came into our picture early on in this.
00:08:37.000And became friends with Cape Fear, Riverkeeper, because one of the folks there had a brother who had succumbed on the Chicago Fire Department.
00:08:49.000She was following me on social media, Dana Sargent.
00:08:54.000And she wondered if her brother Grant hadn't succumbed because of the PFAS and his turnout gear.
00:09:00.000But because I couldn't get answers from industry, from institutions, from my husband's own union, from the National Fire Protection Association, which is the huge non-governmental organization in Massachusetts, Quincy, Mass.
00:09:27.000I had to have a yard sale, and I was selling sweatshirts so that I could come up with enough money to test gear.
00:09:34.000And I partnered with the Last Call Foundation, honoring firefighter Michael Kennedy in Boston, and they funded our study with Graham Peasley.
00:09:49.000And prior to that, it was the first peer-reviewed study ever done on the chemicals used in turnout gear.
00:09:57.000And I think it's so fascinating, Bobby, because the National Fire Protection Association, which just writes the standards for all of the safety mechanisms in turnout gear, They have voting members that decide the standards, and these are all the manufacturers from Lion Gear, DuPont, Chemours.
00:10:18.000I mean, it was just opening such a can of worms.
00:10:22.000It was very difficult even within the union for five years.
00:10:26.000You know, I literally battled the head of a powerful union who was quite captured by the perks and incentives and the advertising of the parties.
00:10:40.000My husband and other firefighters are now suing for their cancers.
00:11:00.000I used to leave school at, we used to have what's called work experience, if you remember that, Bobby.
00:11:07.000We could leave high school at noontime and I would, you know, go to my counter waitressing job at Liggett's Drugstore, downtown Worcester, and I would waitress.
00:11:18.000Yeah, so that was my degree of education.
00:11:20.000And your first reaction was to go into the basement and look at Paul's turnout gear.
00:11:29.000Well, what drove me down the basement was after reading about Degradation in the gear of a New Jersey firefighter that had succumbed to steam burns, I think it was in 2004, that horrified me so much.
00:11:48.000I thought, could that be what happened to Paul?
00:12:09.000And I could see these queen-size pieces of fabric missing, although it looked fine from the outside.
00:12:19.000So if you looked at an oven mitt, it looks fine, but imagine all of the inside missing.
00:12:25.000And that's when I ran back upstairs and started to research the makers of the gear.
00:12:33.000The makers of the gear are DuPont, 3M, Gore, all of these names that I had been familiar with because I had seen years of material in our newspapers that would come in our firefighting magazines and firehouse fire engineering, all the periodicals.
00:12:52.000We had stacks and stacks of magazines in the basement on these, and they were all saying the same thing.
00:14:12.000And it was Rob who wrote a 195-page letter to the EPA, CDC, ATSDR, and U.S. Attorney General, threatening to sue them.
00:14:25.000If they didn't start medical monitoring and health studies for firefighters.
00:14:31.000And David Whiteside, you mentioned, who produces this podcast now, but he is also the Tennessee Riverkeeper, and he's started a number of Riverkeepers down in Alabama, Tennessee, and California.
00:14:46.000He brought one of the big lawsuits against PFOAs, against 3M, on the Tennessee River for contaminating the fish in the Tennessee River.
00:14:56.000My lawsuit was up on the Ohio River, on both sides of the Ohio, Where about 10,000 people had been poisoned by DuPont, who was making PFOAs and PFASs.
00:15:09.000A form of it called CA. They called CA. And it was used to make Teflon, you know, for their pots and pans, which was this miracle nonstick surface that we all grew up with.
00:15:21.000But as it turns out, every time that you burn that, use that pan, it's poisoning you.
00:15:27.000You know, a lot of Americans now have PFOAs in their blood system and their organs, but nobody like the firefighters.
00:15:36.000The firefighters are because of the foam and because of the turnout gear.
00:15:41.000And I think it's two-thirds of firefighter deaths in this country are now from cancer.
00:15:57.000And when you talk about Teflon, my mind goes right to the moisture barrier because they're encased from neck to ankle in Teflon.
00:16:08.000And that's what we've been fighting to get out of.
00:16:12.000You see that standard organization that I told you a little bit about that influence was so profound By industry that the actual provisions state that the only thing that can be used to meet the standards for the moisture barrier has to meet 40 hours of what's called a UV light test.
00:16:36.000So the only thing that can meet that UV light test is Teflon.
00:16:40.000We have a Teflon moisture barrier, but you see policy pressure and lawsuits have paved the way for us to get change.
00:16:52.000You know, I think about the lawsuits that you and Rob Ballot have worked so diligently on, and they open the door for folks like the River Keepers, for folks like us that are suffering from personal injury, that we have the opportunity to go in and Claim the damages that are due to us because we can't get that time back or those lives back.
00:17:28.000Widows that I talk to that are suffering so badly because they've lost a full income.
00:17:36.000A lot of our firefighters, most firefighters are volunteer firefighters, not career firefighters with great pensions and great benefits.
00:17:47.000And we have firefighters dying of cancer in the volunteer service Just as much, if not more, than our career firefighters.
00:17:58.000They're not protected with these benefits.
00:18:01.000Yeah, and the firefighters get it, as I said, from the foam, the AFFF foam that they use at the airports.
00:18:09.000They get it worse, probably the worst exposure is from their turnout gear, where it is directly in contact with their skin while they are training, while they're fighting fires.
00:18:20.000And they get it from burning sofas, from carpets, all of these materials now in our home, the beds, et cetera, that are inundated with PFOAs allegedly to protect us from our house burning down.
00:18:37.000And the much greater danger to the much larger number of Americans is that these materials, they volatilize during the daytime.
00:18:45.000You're sitting on your sofa in a hot day, and that stuff is going into the air around you, and you're breathing it, and it's getting into all of us, and it's driving a chronic disease, it's driving cancers in this country, and it's one of the things we've got to end.
00:19:00.000Tell us what you think the solution is.
00:19:19.000And industry is changing, but then are we going to reward the industry by purchasing all new PFAS-free turnout gear?
00:19:28.000Because now we're just paying them for poisoning us.
00:19:32.000And in January of 2023, I began working with Senator Mike Moore from Worcester to get the Attorney General of Massachusetts, Andrea Campbell, to sue the gear manufacturers along with my husband and thousands of other firefighters.
00:19:52.000And what we're seeking is for the deceptions that they use, the practices.
00:20:02.000I think it was for the 3M earplugs, deceptive practices.
00:20:07.000And that's what I'd like to see Massachusetts go for.
00:20:11.000Immediately upon entering that plea by Senator Mike Moore, 100 lawmakers signed on in one week.
00:20:20.000Now, that contrasts the five years that I worked with then Attorney General Mara Healey, Bobby, because the union was so powerful and was led by such a powerful leader at that time that was sending signals to not touch this.
00:20:40.000That not even she would touch this, unfortunately.
00:20:44.000What happened was in January of 2021, we have a new leader in the International Association of Firefighters, and that's Boston's Ed Kelly.
00:20:56.000He could not be more opposite than the previous administration.
00:21:06.000And that's what we need because the voices need to come from the firefighters, not just this woman.
00:21:14.000But we also need Capitol Hill to follow suit because now we've got Department of Defense that we've worked with EWG and Senator Shaheen and many others to write legislation into the NDAA that the turnout gear has to be PFAS free.
00:21:34.000So there again, now you have these contracts that you'll award and these same manufacturers will be rewarded because we're going to purchase new gear from them.
00:21:44.000So recently when Jimmy McGovern, Congressman McGovern, My longtime friend and ally, he premiered Burned with us with EWG and President Kelly, the Capitol Hill Theater.
00:21:58.000And I asked at that moment that he also sue the gear manufacturers for deceptive practices, because I'm pretty sure that what they've done was obstruction and deceptive.
00:22:12.000And I know Ed Kelly well, and I have nothing but admiration.
00:22:16.000He's part of this new generation of union leaders who are really trying to democratize our country and who are trying to represent the little guys who are incorruptible.
00:22:27.000Another one from Boston is Sean O'Brien from the...
00:22:30.000Teamsters Union, really, really wonderful leaders who are trying to do the right thing.
00:22:36.000I really admire Ed for standing up against PFAS, and that, I think, is likely to spell the end of it in this country because he runs the international...
00:22:46.000Association of Firefighters, the IAFF, and has really stood fast on this issue.
00:22:52.000So I'm glad that you've been able to get to him and to educate him about this.
00:23:15.000I know that there's so much legislation that is being pushed across the finish lines now as well.
00:23:22.000But I'm a housewife, so the things that matter to me is my son, who is a firefighter right now.
00:23:32.000In the same city on the same truck as my husband.
00:23:35.000And it was with such pride that he went into this when we didn't even know about this issue.
00:23:43.000But I think of all those young people like him And, you know, we've got so many female firefighters that are suffering from these rare reproductive disorders.
00:23:55.000And our male firefighters that have just staggering amounts of testicular cancer and prostate cancer.
00:24:03.000And I always tell the story of one day when I was asked, we were making braids for the anniversary, the 20 year anniversary of the W6. Six firefighters that we lost December 3rd, 1999.
00:24:19.000And I can remember how stunning it was.
00:24:22.000I was with a group of women and one of the women asked me what type of cancer Paul has.
00:24:32.000Every woman at my table lifted her head to say mine too.
00:24:36.000I mean, it just, the common denominator is the gear.
00:24:41.000But we are combating still the unavailable access to the PFAS free turnout because it's coming in drips and drabs.
00:24:52.000And then there are some holdbacks because of labeling that has to go through the Standards Committee within the NFPA. So say you have just a bit of PFAS on the reflective tape of the turnout gear, that may not get the label, the coveted PFAS-free label.
00:25:12.000So we're still waiting for a All of these things to iron out but it's just such new territory for the NFPA as well because they never had to deal with this issue before my husband's cancer.
00:25:29.000The dialogue of firefighter cancer was either from products of combustion Which we know, nobody's ever disputed that.
00:25:38.000Or the diesel smoke, because maybe your followers don't know, but those rigs that the fire engines, fire trucks, ladders, those are literally in the bays and start up in the bay and before they had the Correct attachments to the hoses to exhaust systems.
00:25:58.000Firefighters were breathing that as well.
00:26:00.000But I think serendipity, and I always say God's driving this bus.
00:26:07.000But what happened in 2016 or 2017, I introduced Graham Peasley to Kathy Crosby Bell of Last Call Foundation inside a Boston firehouse.
00:26:21.000He looked over and he saw this collection box and it was on top of a cabinet, maybe a soda cabinet inside the firehouse on Commonwealth, I think it was.
00:26:32.000And he said, oh, this Emily Spirofine's collection box, I wonder if she's collecting for PFAS. And I said, well, I don't know, but she's one of the scientists I talked to.
00:26:43.000That began the PFAS dust study of 16 Boston firehouses.
00:26:50.000And that's where they found all of the dust in the eating area and the sleeping area.
00:26:56.000Like you said, Bobby, it degrades, it gear degrades, etc.
00:27:02.000But I also want to paint a picture of you For you, if you'll allow me, of how much resistance we faced.
00:27:11.000In Massachusetts, when we brought this forward in Worcester, Mass., we were filming then with NBC's Karen Hansel, one of our news reporters, investigative journalism, and we had permission to film inside a Worcester firehouse.