Find out who is killing US firefighters in this episode with Diane Cotter and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A cancer causing chemical sold primarily by two major US corporations is increasing cancer rates among firefighters. Since 2002 cancer has been responsible for the deaths of almost two out of every three firefighters, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters.
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| Hey 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. | |
| Which 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. | |
| And they're in, you know, water repellents. | |
| They're in your roofing tiles. | |
| They're in your dental floss. | |
| They're in your cosmetics. | |
| They're in stick-resistant cookware. | |
| There are many, many other products that you use in your day-to-day life. | |
| And once they get in your body, they don't leave. | |
| And they cause cancer, and they cause other endocrine disruptors. | |
| They cause all kinds of different forms of cancer, kidney cancer, prostate cancer, and many, many others. | |
| And the people who are most affected in this country probably are firefighters because it's in their turnout gear. | |
| It's in our child pajamas. | |
| It's in our furniture. | |
| And it was put there to stop them from burning. | |
| It's meant to protect us, but It was actually hurting us. | |
| And firefighters now around this country, in the last couple of years, two out of three firefighters' deaths have been caused by cancer. | |
| And many of those cancers are traced back to PFAS, this family of chemicals. | |
| And I have been representing people across the country. | |
| My 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. | |
| It's used particularly on airports, and it's used to smother petroleum-related flames. | |
| If you pour water on a flame on a petroleum fire, it just makes it worse. | |
| But if you dump these PFAS on it, it smothers and it kills the fire. | |
| And firefighters were required to train once or twice a year with these materials on those airports. | |
| And when they drain with it, the foam goes through drains and it gets into local water supplies. | |
| So 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. | |
| The two great heroes... | |
| In fighting PFAS in this country, I've been robbed a lot. | |
| Again, 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. | |
| And why don't you tell Diane, why don't you tell what happened to Paul and how it had this impact on your life? | |
| Because you've become a nightmare for this industry, and I thank you for it. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Bobby, I'm humbled to be here today with you and to be in the same sentence with Rob Ballard. | |
| You know, my two heroes. | |
| Growing up in Worcester, I feel like we're neighbors and we have so many things in common. | |
| But I'll get right to the point. | |
| What happened with Paul was stunning because he had no symptoms. | |
| He was such a fit firefighter, bodybuilder. | |
| Very athletic. | |
| And 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. | |
| Paul, before he was sick, was very active. | |
| What happened to him after he got sick? | |
| So he had, you know, we never wanted to talk about this, Bob, because it's so humiliating. | |
| You 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. | |
| So while they were able to remove the prostate, It caused the incontinence. | |
| And we never spoke about that publicly. | |
| I never knew he spoke about that until we saw... | |
| I read when I first read David Ferry's article in Men's Health, The Toxic Job of Being a Hero. | |
| It took my breath away that he actually discussed that with David Ferry. | |
| It's debilitating. | |
| You look at my husband. | |
| He looks very fit, but there are broken pieces. | |
| And he was confined, really, almost to an easy chair for... | |
| Oh, for months. | |
| For months. | |
| He wears a high and tight. | |
| He looks like the rock. | |
| He wears a high and tight. | |
| Perfectly built man. | |
| He always had been. | |
| That's, you know, when I was 17, I laid eyes on him and fell in love with him instantly. | |
| And I truly loved him that same way. | |
| We've been married 40 years, 41 years. | |
| Love of my life. | |
| And he never suffered from depression, but he couldn't combat this. | |
| He just began drifting away. | |
| The hair grew long. | |
| The beard grew long. | |
| He was attached to a catheter bag that he just sat for hours and hours at a day, just... | |
| Staring at TV and see the depression hit him hard that he wasn't going back to the job. | |
| You know, once it was truly obvious that the stress incontinence could not be corrected. | |
| And 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. | |
| I truly got a call one day after hundreds of emails when I found the gear does degrade. | |
| I thought it was related to products of combustion because we'd always been aware of that in the fire community. | |
| It was Erin Brockovich who said to me one day, I've gotten a call from a New Hampshire fire chief. | |
| He has 13 firefighters with cancer. | |
| Do you know if the gear has PFOA or PFOS? Never heard of it. | |
| And that literally took one minute to see that Europe was already beginning the discussion of transitioning to non-PFOA filled turnout gear. | |
| We hadn't been discussing it in the United States before. | |
| And that is literally when the rabbit hole opened when we tried to discuss it. | |
| When 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. | |
| And I can remember Reading about Ra a lot, reading about you, reading about the river keepers. | |
| I was then researching the chemical companies. | |
| I 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. | |
| I began following David Whiteside from Tennessee Riverkeepers. | |
| He had just started his own lawsuit against 3M. I had already been following Rob, who came into our picture early on in this. | |
| And became friends with Cape Fear, Riverkeeper, because one of the folks there had a brother who had succumbed on the Chicago Fire Department. | |
| She was following me on social media, Dana Sargent. | |
| And she wondered if her brother Grant hadn't succumbed because of the PFAS and his turnout gear. | |
| But 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. | |
| We just couldn't get answers. | |
| Finally, I found nuclear physicist Graham Peasley at Notre Dame University. | |
| He tested the gear. | |
| I had to have a yard sale, and I was selling sweatshirts so that I could come up with enough money to test gear. | |
| And I partnered with the Last Call Foundation, honoring firefighter Michael Kennedy in Boston, and they funded our study with Graham Peasley. | |
| That study was produced in June 2020. | |
| And prior to that, it was the first peer-reviewed study ever done on the chemicals used in turnout gear. | |
| And 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. | |
| I mean, it was just opening such a can of worms. | |
| It was very difficult even within the union for five years. | |
| You 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. | |
| My husband and other firefighters are now suing for their cancers. | |
| Oh, and you are... | |
| You weren't really trained for this, were you? | |
| Oh, God, no. | |
| What was your, and your education was, you were a high school graduate. | |
| Barely. | |
| I used to leave school at, we used to have what's called work experience, if you remember that, Bobby. | |
| We 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. | |
| Yeah, so that was my degree of education. | |
| And your first reaction was to go into the basement and look at Paul's turnout gear. | |
| And what did you find? | |
| Well, 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. | |
| I thought, could that be what happened to Paul? | |
| Did the crotch area degrade? | |
| I flew down the basement stairs. | |
| I pulled open a box where his gear had been stowed away. | |
| I took his flashlight and I shined through the three layers of his gear. | |
| It's very technical equipment. | |
| And I could see these queen-size pieces of fabric missing, although it looked fine from the outside. | |
| So if you looked at an oven mitt, it looks fine, but imagine all of the inside missing. | |
| And that's when I ran back upstairs and started to research the makers of the gear. | |
| The 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. | |
| We had stacks and stacks of magazines in the basement on these, and they were all saying the same thing. | |
| We've got your back. | |
| The best thing that can happen to you is your turnout gear. | |
| So anything that was either contradictory to that, I couldn't quite process. | |
| I began processing it, however, when we got Rob a lot involved, because Rob emptied the fray in 2017. | |
| I think I had gone through trying to find at least five attorneys that knew anything about this. | |
| And one day I Googled PFOA turnout, PFOA DuPont, and out came DuPont's worst nightmare. | |
| And at that time, you folks were still embroiled in your lawsuit against 3M. So I could read so much information about that. | |
| And I was able to find David Whiteside's lawsuit for Tennessee Riverkeepers. | |
| And I kept thinking, what are all these lawsuits against these corporations? | |
| And it just was beginning to show me more and more. | |
| Words to Google and research. | |
| And it was Rob who wrote a 195-page letter to the EPA, CDC, ATSDR, and U.S. Attorney General, threatening to sue them. | |
| If they didn't start medical monitoring and health studies for firefighters. | |
| And 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. | |
| He brought one of the big lawsuits against PFOAs, against 3M, on the Tennessee River for contaminating the fish in the Tennessee River. | |
| My 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. | |
| A 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. | |
| But as it turns out, every time that you burn that, use that pan, it's poisoning you. | |
| You know, a lot of Americans now have PFOAs in their blood system and their organs, but nobody like the firefighters. | |
| The firefighters are because of the foam and because of the turnout gear. | |
| And I think it's two-thirds of firefighter deaths in this country are now from cancer. | |
| Yes. | |
| And the other thing, Bobby, is last year it was IARC that designated firefighting, the job of firefighting. | |
| As a carcinogen. | |
| And when you talk about Teflon, my mind goes right to the moisture barrier because they're encased from neck to ankle in Teflon. | |
| And that's what we've been fighting to get out of. | |
| You 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. | |
| So the only thing that can meet that UV light test is Teflon. | |
| We have a Teflon moisture barrier, but you see policy pressure and lawsuits have paved the way for us to get change. | |
| You 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. | |
| My husband can't get a career back. | |
| Financial restitution that you lose when you lose a career. | |
| I can't tell you how many... | |
| Widows that I talk to that are suffering so badly because they've lost a full income. | |
| A lot of our firefighters, most firefighters are volunteer firefighters, not career firefighters with great pensions and great benefits. | |
| And we have firefighters dying of cancer in the volunteer service Just as much, if not more, than our career firefighters. | |
| They're not protected with these benefits. | |
| Yeah, and the firefighters get it, as I said, from the foam, the AFFF foam that they use at the airports. | |
| They 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. | |
| And 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. | |
| And the much greater danger to the much larger number of Americans is that these materials, they volatilize during the daytime. | |
| You'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. | |
| Tell us what you think the solution is. | |
| Oh, gosh. | |
| Well, the solution has to be in so many areas. | |
| I mean, there's not one simple paintbrush fix for this. | |
| First of all, there has to be PFAS-free turnout gear. | |
| That's the quick fix. | |
| And industry is changing, but then are we going to reward the industry by purchasing all new PFAS-free turnout gear? | |
| Because now we're just paying them for poisoning us. | |
| And 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. | |
| And what we're seeking is for the deceptions that they use, the practices. | |
| I think it was for the 3M earplugs, deceptive practices. | |
| And that's what I'd like to see Massachusetts go for. | |
| Immediately upon entering that plea by Senator Mike Moore, 100 lawmakers signed on in one week. | |
| Now, 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. | |
| That not even she would touch this, unfortunately. | |
| What happened was in January of 2021, we have a new leader in the International Association of Firefighters, and that's Boston's Ed Kelly. | |
| He could not be more opposite than the previous administration. | |
| He's taken us on with a vengeance. | |
| He's made it job one. | |
| And that's what we need because the voices need to come from the firefighters, not just this woman. | |
| But 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. | |
| So 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. | |
| So 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. | |
| And 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. | |
| And I know Ed Kelly well, and I have nothing but admiration. | |
| He'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. | |
| Another one from Boston is Sean O'Brien from the... | |
| Teamsters Union, really, really wonderful leaders who are trying to do the right thing. | |
| I 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... | |
| Association of Firefighters, the IAFF, and has really stood fast on this issue. | |
| So I'm glad that you've been able to get to him and to educate him about this. | |
| I talked to him about this issue. | |
| When I spoke to him recently, it was the first issue he brought up, and it's the one he's most passionate about. | |
| He's a go-getter. | |
| Yes, he'll get this done. | |
| He'll get this done. | |
| I know that there's so much legislation that is being pushed across the finish lines now as well. | |
| But I'm a housewife, so the things that matter to me is my son, who is a firefighter right now. | |
| In the same city on the same truck as my husband. | |
| And it was with such pride that he went into this when we didn't even know about this issue. | |
| But 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. | |
| And our male firefighters that have just staggering amounts of testicular cancer and prostate cancer. | |
| And 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. | |
| And I can remember how stunning it was. | |
| I was with a group of women and one of the women asked me what type of cancer Paul has. | |
| And I said, prostate cancer. | |
| Every woman at my table lifted her head to say mine too. | |
| I mean, it just, the common denominator is the gear. | |
| But we are combating still the unavailable access to the PFAS free turnout because it's coming in drips and drabs. | |
| And 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. | |
| So 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. | |
| The dialogue of firefighter cancer was either from products of combustion Which we know, nobody's ever disputed that. | |
| Or 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. | |
| Firefighters were breathing that as well. | |
| But I think serendipity, and I always say God's driving this bus. | |
| I know he is with me. | |
| But what happened in 2016 or 2017, I introduced Graham Peasley to Kathy Crosby Bell of Last Call Foundation inside a Boston firehouse. | |
| He 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. | |
| And 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. | |
| That began the PFAS dust study of 16 Boston firehouses. | |
| And that's where they found all of the dust in the eating area and the sleeping area. | |
| Like you said, Bobby, it degrades, it gear degrades, etc. | |
| But I also want to paint a picture of you For you, if you'll allow me, of how much resistance we faced. | |
| In 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. | |
| From the chief. | |
| Again, this was 2018. | |
| And while we were in the middle of filming, Paul receives a call from the fire chief. | |
| And the fire chief says, Paul, you gotta leave. | |
| Legal is nervous. | |
| We had to wrap up and leave at that moment. | |
| And that's the type of resistance we faced from day one in this fight. | |
| It never got easier after that day. | |
| It only got hotter. | |
| And it came from all angles. | |
| Thank you so much for your perseverance, your persistence, your courage, Diane. | |
| I know you'll continue to fight this until all the PFAS is removed from the gear and we can protect the firefighters who protect us. | |
| We're grateful to all of them for their courage. | |
| We're grateful to your husband, Paul, for his service to our communities and all the firefighters. | |
| And we need to, as a society, We need to protect them, too. | |
| Thank you very, very much for being a spearhead of that movement to give them the protection they deserve. | |
| Thank you, Bobby. | |
| What an honor. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Before we go, how can people support you, Diane? | |
| Oh, gosh. | |
| Well, the best way to support me is to support those that supported me. | |
| And truly, you can support Last Call Foundation honoring firefighter Michael Kennedy. | |
| Of Boston. | |
| Thank you. | |
| You can watch our film, Burn, Protecting the Protectors, as well as our new series by Sandra Bartlett, The Poisoned Detectives. | |
| Diane, thank you. | |
| Thank you, Bobby. | |
| What a pleasure. | |
| God bless. | |
| Stay safe. | |
| You know, David, hey, David, did I do okay? | |
| You were amazing. | |
| You did so well. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I made a promise to David. | |
| Good. | |
| Bobby, you know, I told you, I think I told you two years ago, you got my vote. | |
| Oh, thank you. | |
| Thanks, Diane. | |
| Thanks so much. | |
| That's a huge honor for me, because you're one of my heroes. | |
| Oh, God, I couldn't believe you said that in the same sentence. | |
| My God, I can't believe that. | |
| You made me cry. | |
| Thank you, Bobby. | |
| God bless. | |
| God bless. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Bye, David. | |
| Bye. | |
| Be safe, you guys. | |
| I'll be in touch. | |
| This was great. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. |