On the afternoon of April 29, the Albany courtroom was almost empty, a quietness that belies the gravity of the decisions being made there. After reviewing the documents in front of her, Judge Mae A. D’Agostino approved something that the people of a small village in Rensselaer County had been pursuing for nearly a decade. a $27 million settlement with DuPont. The conclusion, in essence, of a battle that started when a man by the name of Michael Hickey questioned why cancer was killing so many people in Hoosick Falls.
Hoosick Falls isn’t exactly a place designed for headlines, as anyone who has driven through it can attest. The downtown is brief, consisting of a few blocks of brick shops and a type of diner where patrons wait at the counter without placing an order. The Saint-Gobain factory, which has long been the village’s main source of income, still looms large on the outskirts of town. When the contamination became unavoidable, the state eventually constructed a water treatment plant that is visible from the air. It’s possible that the engineers who created it had no idea how many lives that little grey building would eventually represent.
The PFOA narrative has previously been presented in bits and pieces. production of Teflon. runoff from industry. Blood tests produced results that were difficult for anyone to understand. The issue of accountability is what the courts have been laboriously and slowly resolving. In addition to the more than $65 million already recovered from Saint-Gobain, Honeywell, and 3M back in 2021, the $27 million from DuPont was paid within 75 days under the terms approved this week. It’s real money when combined. It’s also nowhere near what some residents say they lost.
There’s a sense, talking to people in the village over the years, that the settlement was never really about being made whole. You cannot be restored to wholeness. You can only be acknowledged. Stephen Schwarz, the attorney who has carried this case for almost a decade, said as much in his statement after the ruling, noting that every entity responsible has now been held accountable. That wording is important. It took ten years to get a courtroom to say it.
More than 4,000 claims were filed during the enrollment period, according to the court’s order. In a village with about 3,000 residents, that figure is startling. It tells you how widely the contamination spread, how long it lingered, how many former residents still trace illnesses back to the water they grew up drinking. The medical monitoring program is now expanding to include more claimants who can submit blood test results by October 26th, and checks are anticipated to be sent out in August.
It’s difficult to ignore the larger pattern as you watch this develop. In the cases that became the movie Dark Waters, DuPont was previously in Parkersburg, West Virginia. In a sense, Hoosick Falls is that story’s quieter, smaller sibling. less well-known. equally caustic. Depending on which kitchen table you are at, $27 million may or may not be sufficient. It’s a down payment on peace of mind for some families. Others see it as a number that came ten years too late.
The factory is still standing. The water is now purer. Anyone in Hoosick Falls will tell you that the story isn’t truly finished.
