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Sierra Club Productions
Sierra Club Chronicles
Episode 3: Dioxin, Duplicity & Dupont
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About this Episode
The DuPont plant in DeLisle, Mississippi has been releasing large amounts of dioxin and heavy metals for nearly 20 years. This film explores health problems being experienced by residents and former workers, and evidence that oysters in the area exported for sale around the U.S. have been contaminated by DuPont's poisonous discharges. About 2,000 people have filed lawsuits against DuPont alleging pollution from this facility has harmed their health.
Delisle, Mississippi: For nearly 20 years, the DuPont plant in DeLisle, Mississippi, has released high levels of toxic dioxin and other heavy metals into the air and water. Despite alarming illnesses and cancer clusters surrounding the plant, DuPont has maintained that it upholds a strong public safety record.
"It didn't take a doctor or scientist to figure out - hey, us guys are all working here - there's got to be something here. In two generations the only thing that has changed is the [DuPont] chemical plant built down there - it's not hard to make a connection if you live here and watch it going on and see it," questions Greg Cuevas, a former employee of the Dupont plant in DeLisle, who lost his own kidneys due to the dioxins. Myra Marsh, a Delisle resident, now wonders if in her eagerness to work for the new plant it ended up costing her the use of her legs and put her in a wheelchair for life.
After four years of interviews and tireless researching of the environmental abuses of DuPont the first in a massive lawsuit against DuPont brought by over 2,000 people who worked in, or lived by, the plant is followed in the episode.
With unprecedented access to this Southern court room, we follow the lives of the people who have been directly affected by the pollution as they tell about living with DuPont for years, cope with terminal illnesses suffered by themselves and family members, and as they prepare and then testify - some of them with only months to live.