Court approves $34 million settlement in Bennington-area PFOA lawsuit ahead of case’s sixth anniversary

RUTLAND — After the end of a half-hour hearing in federal court on Monday, the presiding judge removed his black robe, stepped down from the bench and chatted with the attorneys and the plaintiffs who were present. 

After nearly six years, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Geoffrey Crawford said he wanted to personally say goodbye to the people involved in the high-profile case, which had just finally been resolved.

Indeed, the hearing made it official: Bennington-area residents who sued a multinational plastics company for contaminating their soil and water will receive financial compensation and medical monitoring.

On Monday morning, Crawford approved the $34 million settlement agreement that the complainants and Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corporation reached in November. The final approval came three weeks before the class-action suit’s sixth anniversary.

“There were times in the past six years when it felt that today would never come,” Marie-Pierre Huguet, the widow of one of the plaintiffs, Sandy Sumner, said at the hearing in Rutland.

“I am very grateful that today finally came,” she said. “That both parties managed to come to an agreement. Not a perfect one, I’ll grant you that, but an agreement all the same. Today will allow us to move forward.”

The settlement calls for Saint-Gobain to pay $26.2 million to eligible property owners affected by PFOA contamination. PFOA, or perfluorooctanoic acid, was used to coat fiberglass fabrics at its shuttered factories in Bennington and North Bennington.

The French multinational will also spend up to $6 million to screen for certain diseases among residents adversely exposed to PFOA, a variant of the PFAS group of chemicals that has been linked to harmful health outcomes. The rest of the money would cover a portion of the attorneys’ fees.

Bennington-area residents alleged that the factories — previously owned by ChemFab — emitted PFOA through their smokestacks, thereby contaminating drinking water, groundwater and soil in the surrounding areas. They believe the contamination affected nearly 2,400 properties and an estimated 8,000 residents in the towns of Bennington and Shaftsbury, and in the village of North Bennington. 

Saint-Gobain denies the accusations and any wrongdoing under the case settlement.

Crawford commended the plaintiffs for their “perseverance” as the litigation played out for more than half a decade. He said it was evident from the beginning that the residents pursued the lawsuit out of “civic duty” to their neighbors and their community.

Crawford also highlighted the work of Burlington-based mediator John Schraven, whom the judge described as “tireless in his devotion to the process of compromise.” He thanked Schraven for “bringing the ship into the dock.”

Crawford told the seven attorneys involved in the lawsuit that he enjoyed working with them and acknowledged their keeping the court out of the more contentious moments in the civil case.

Five of the eight plaintiffs attended: Linda Crawford and her husband, Ted Crawford; Gordon Garrison; Bill Knight; and Jim Sullivan, who has served as the group’s spokesperson.

Sumner died in August of a rare and aggressive cancer. Huguet, his widow, said Sumner believed his illness was due to PFOA exposure, though there is currently no data or science to support his claim.

One of Saint-Gobain’s lawyers said the company is glad that the lawsuit has come to an end. “This is something they are pleased to put behind,” New York-based attorney Mark Cheffo told the court. “They are not in the litigation business.”

Now that the settlement agreement has cleared the court, plaintiff attorney Emily Joselson told VTDigger she is hoping approved claims could be paid starting in May and medical monitoring can begin this fall. 

Claims under settlement

Property owners within the “zone of concern” are eligible to claim compensation if they meet the qualifications: They either owned residential real estate within the zone as of March 14, 2016, or after this date bought property that was later added to the zone.

Some 2,365 households have been notified of the settlement and none chose to be excluded, said plaintiff attorney Gary Davis, of the North Carolina-based firm Davis and Whitlock.

The payment amounts will vary depending on the property, said plaintiff attorney David Silver. That includes at least $4,000 for owners of property in the zone that were already hooked up to the Bennington municipal water system. Payments of at least $30,000 will be paid to property owners whose water wells have PFOA levels beyond 20 parts per billion and who had no way to connect to the town water system.

Medical monitoring will be available to residents who ingested PFOA-contaminated water and who have more than 2.1 parts per billion of PFOA in their blood. The median blood concentration of PFOA for the U.S. general population is 2.08 parts per billion, according to one study.

The free monitoring service will be run by Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, the hospital in Bennington. Arrangements would also be made for eligible claimants who have moved away from the area.

The Saint-Gobain factories, which closed in 2002, became famous for fiberglass fabrics used on structures such as sports stadium domes. These products were coated in Teflon, which was manufactured using PFOA.

In 2016, many Bennington-area residents learned that their drinking water wells were contaminated with PFOA. Some have discovered elevated levels of the industrial chemical in their blood and are not sure whether to connect an array of illnesses to the contamination. 

PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are often described as “forever chemicals” because they are believed capable of lingering indefinitely in the environment.

In 2017 and 2019, the state reached separate agreements with Saint-Gobain, in which the company would pay for access to municipal drinking water for residents with contaminated properties. 

That process wrapped up in October, with 445 homes in Bennington, North Bennington and Shaftsbury having been connected to the Bennington town water system.