Next time, the movie's about us. It's not a pleasant prospect. And it won't be a fun movie. Forget about the popcorn — the movie's going to ruin your appetite.

One of the hot documentaries at this year's Sundance Film Festival was called "The Devil We Know," produced, directed and written by award-winning documentary filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig. The films hasn't been picked up by a distributor yet, so we can't see any more of it than a trailer on YouTube, but that's plenty depressing itself. The film played to a packed house at Sundance and got a standing ovation.

Not that it was uplifting. The film chronicled the painful ordeal of Parkersburg, West Virginia, and other little towns around it as residents, their pets and livestock were devastated by a little-known chemical called PFOA, or C8. It came from the DuPont plant in Parkersburg, called the Washington Works. C8 was long used in the manufacture of Teflon and related products, which had revolutionized the world of cookware, food-wrap coatings and waterproofing. Trouble is, the Washington Works was hardly a tightly sealed environment. The C8 leaked out, and was dumped out, including into unlined pits in an area also used for farming. The film reports on the health problems caused to the human and animal neighbors, and chronicles residents' efforts to win compensation from DuPont — which they eventually got in a nearly $700 million settlement of hundreds of lawsuits.

Some of that may ring a bell, because C8 production was shifted to DuPont's Fayetteville Works about 20 years ago after Parkersburg residents began stepping up legal action against the chemical giant. It was made in our backyard until DuPont came up with a substitute for C8 that the company touted as safer (a claim that some scientists find dubious). That would be the stuff we know as GenX, which may have contaminated the area around the Fayetteville Works just as thoroughly as C8 contaminated Parkersburg. GenX has become a terrifying household word here in the Cape Fear River Basin since its presence in the water supply was revealed last June. Since then, we've learned, through startling and frequent revelations, that's it's everywhere. It's under the plant, it's in the groundwater, it's in lakes, it's in beekeepers' honey, it's in the air. We're likely going to learn at some point that it's in crops and farm animals — and at some level in our bodies.

Two underfunded and understaffed state agencies — the Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Health and Human Services — are straining to measure and monitor the stuff. They need millions of dollars more in funding just to figure out how GenX has affected the region, its water and its residents. For starters, they need the restoration of staff and resources that our lawmakers have relentlessly cut as they fight what they call over-regulation. Those of us who live in this region and drink Cape Fear River water would more likely call it abdication of government's most fundamental responsibility to protect the lives, health and safety of the people.

So far, all the state has been able to do is track contamination and force Chemours to stop dumping GenX into the river. There's a big missing piece, though, something critical that we need to know, and don't: Do we have a health problem because of the GenX? It's impossible to make a definitive connection now, because there's been so little research on GenX's effects on the human body. But a good study could tell us if residents who are drinking GenX-laden water are experiencing health problems in greater numbers than a typical population. We need to know that, just as we need to know more about the extent of the contamination.

Too much of our information about the GenX pollution so far has come from Chemours, the DuPont spinoff that has taken over some of DuPont's chemical business, including production of GenX. In an interview with a Florida weekly newspaper, Pensacola lawyer Mike Papantonio, who was part of the trial team in West Virginia and involved in the documentary, said the lawsuits haven't changed DuPont's corporate behavior. "The behavior not only hasn't changed, it's gotten worse," he said. "They've contaminated the drinking water up in Cape Fear by dumping something called GenX into the waterways. And GenX is just as dangerous as C8." Papantonio has a harsh description of the corporate forces that unleashed GenX, and C8 before it. "They have a criminal mind," he said. "That's the best way I can tell you. They're a criminal enterprise, and they simply get away with their criminal conduct."

That may or may not be what we experience here. But it sets the table for understanding just what kind of fight we're in for. If our lawmakers don't get serious soon about dealing with the threats we're discovering almost every day, we'll be the reluctant stars of a movie every bit as depressing as "The Devil We Know."

 

Tim White is the Observer’s editorial page editor. Follow him on Twitter @WhatTimSaid. He can be reached at 486-3504 or twhite@fayobserver.com. You can discuss this column online by going to fayobserver.com/opinion and clicking on today’s column.