Christina Cossich

On July 13, 2020, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency tested, one at a time, the five wells that supplied Bridgeport, a village of about 1,600 people on the Ohio River. Two of them held PFNA, one of the PFAS chemicals, at 21.8 parts per trillion. Ohio’s action level for PFNA was 21. The agency had tested more than 300 public water systems for the chemical, and Bridgeport was the first in the state to come back above that line.

The village learned the results on July 16. Jim Zorbini, the water superintendent, said the two wells were isolated within an hour, and that day the village switched its pumps to the three wells that showed no PFNA. Residents were told not to drink the water until further notice, and cases of bottled water and a tanker for filling containers were available at Bridgeport Water Works. People could still bathe in the water, Zorbini said, but could not ingest it. “We’re the first one in the state of Ohio so being No. 1 isn’t always a good thing,” he said.

The village stopped running its water plant, and in April 2024 its wells were still out of service. Bridgeport now buys water from the city of Martins Ferry for its residents and for the customers it supplies, including the village of Brookside. “So instead of producing, we became a purchaser,” said Bryan May, a consulting engineer for the village.

At a council meeting in June 2025, the village solicitor, Michael Shaheen, handed Mayor Norma Teasdale the village’s first settlement check, for $131,803.39. It came from 3M.

The check came out of In re Aqueous Film-Forming Foams Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2873, the federal multidistrict litigation over firefighting foam and the PFAS chemicals it carried into drinking water, before Judge Richard Mark Gergel of the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina. Christina Cossich, a lawyer in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, has sat on its Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee since April 2019. She and her firm represent hundreds of public water providers and individual well owners across the country, and Bridgeport was one of their clients. The settlements Gergel approved with 3M and with DuPont and its successor companies divide their money among public water systems by a formula built on each system’s own measurements: how much water a contaminated source supplied and how much PFAS that water held.

Two Months After the Blowout

Cossich studied history at Villanova University and law at Loyola University College of Law. She also worked in the London office of Clyde & Co and as a research assistant to the head forensic pediatrician at the CARE Center of Children’s Hospital. She practices in Belle Chasse, in Plaquemines Parish, at Cossich, Sumich, Parsiola & Taylor, a firm founded in 1994 at which her father, Philip Cossich Jr., was the founding partner.

In June 2010, two months after the Deepwater Horizon blowout, Christina Cossich published “OPA and Oil Spill Litigation, An Overview” in Louisiana Advocates. In the litigation over the spill her father represented oystermen and menhaden processors; she now represents coastal Louisiana parishes in suits against oil and gas companies over land loss and contamination.

Thirty Fish a Haul at Empire

The firm’s oil-spill work included fisheries science. In April 2011, soon after the commercial menhaden fishery opened, captains of the purse-seine vessels that worked out of Daybrook Fisheries’ port and processing plant at Empire, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River delta, reported that Gulf menhaden seemed unusually abundant but in poor condition. Beginning in May 2011, a group of scientists that included Jeffrey W. Short, Christine M. Voss and Maria L. Vozzo sampled fish from the Daybrook boats for length and weight.

The scientists divided the Louisiana coast into ten sectors. Daybrook’s boats fished from Breton Sound to Vermilion Bay, and the captains were asked to keep a sample of 30 menhaden from each of the first three purse-seine hauls they set in every sector they fished each week. Samples from near the beginning, middle and end of each season were measured, about 5,400 fish a year from 2011 through 2014. To gauge the fish’s oil content, the scientists divided the fish oil Daybrook produced each year by the wet weight of its catch. Cossich, Sumich, Parsiola & Taylor and the Murray Law Firm helped pay for the study. One employee of each firm arranged storage and processing space for the samples and kept their chain-of-custody records, and three Murray Law Firm employees helped measure fish under the scientists’ direct supervision.

In 2017 Short and colleagues reported that the 2010 year class of Gulf menhaden had broken every prior record. The stock assessment put recruitment that year at 270 billion fish at the initial juvenile stage, 6.2 standard deviations above the 1977–2009 average of 105.9 billion and nearly 100 billion above the previous record of 174 billion, set in 1984. They tied the surge to the spill in two ways. Oil killed seabirds, bottlenose dolphins, wading birds and other fish-eating marsh birds, all substantial consumers of menhaden; the scientists relied on an estimate of 535,000 dead seabirds that had preyed substantively on forage fish. And to keep oil out of the upper marshes, Louisiana sharply increased the flow of Mississippi River water through freshwater diversions into Barataria Bay and Breton Sound, and the low salinities that followed kept aquatic predators away from juvenile menhaden.

Their 2021 paper in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, the study the two law firms helped fund, followed the surplus fish. With their predators dead, the menhaden competed with one another for food, and fish sampled in 2011 and 2012 were in poor condition and low in lipids, worst around Barataria Bay, west of the river, where the 2010 recruitment had been highest. The authors estimated that about 20 percent of net primary production had flowed through Gulf menhaden before the blowout, about 38 percent in 2011 and about 27 percent in 2012. The hyperabundant fish likely suppressed the zooplankton they ate, and as low-lipid prey they likely became “junk food” for their own predators. The authors argued that food-web analyses based solely on biomass, or on the wrong spatial scale for a dominant species, give an insufficient picture of the ecosystem consequences of oiling, and that damage-assessment models should take in such cascading effects. They dedicated the paper to Charles H. Peterson of the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences, one of its seven authors, who died during the final preparation of the manuscript.

On the compensation side, Daniel Balhoff, a lawyer involved in the case, credited Philip Cossich with helping craft the $2.3 billion settlement for the seafood industry. John Tesvich, a fourth-generation oysterman in Buras, said of that settlement: “It meant they could continue to take care of their families when things were tough.” Philip Cossich died at his home in Belle Chasse on December 29, 2025, at 67.

One-Year Terms in MDL 2873

Gergel filled the plaintiffs’ leadership posts in MDL 2873 with one-year appointments. On April 26, 2019, in Case Management Order No. 3, he added four lawyers to the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee: Gregory A. Cade, Christina Cossich, Gale D. Pearson and Carl Solomon. He had reviewed applications submitted by the co-lead counsel, and he gave his reason in the order: “The Court is committed to developing the future generation of diverse MDL leadership by providing competent candidates with opportunities for substantive participation now.”

Three months later he set a Science Day. His order of July 24, 2019, let the committee on which Cossich now sat, and the defendants’ coordinating committee, each offer up to two experts, kept the questioning under his own control and placed everything said off the record. The first of his six sets of questions concerned parts per trillion. EPA had issued a drinking-water advisory of 70 parts per trillion for PFOS and PFOA combined, while several states and a CDC panel had proposed or adopted limits of 10 to 14. “What are the scientific bases for these numbers and why do they vary so greatly?” Gergel wrote. Hurricane Dorian pushed the session from September 6 to October 4.

Her first term ended in March 2020. Gergel’s order of March 23, 2020, reappointed her with eighteen other committee members. “These designations are of a personal nature,” he wrote; the court looked to its appointees “to undertake personal responsibility to perform the designated functions” and kept the power to replace any who could not. His order of March 24, 2021, named Cossich to the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee again, and when those terms ran out in March 2022 each appointee had to apply to continue. His order of March 30, 2022, kept Michael A. London, Paul J. Napoli and Scott Summy as co-lead counsel and reappointed a 24-member executive committee from firms around the country, among them Robert A. Bilott, as advisory counsel, Elizabeth C. Pritzker and Cossich. Her father worked the same docket, representing cities and water providers in several states.

In October 2022 Gergel gave the co-lead counsel on each side exclusive authority to pursue settlement and appointed retired Judge Layn Phillips as mediator. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, prepared the City of Stuart, Florida’s suit against 3M and other defendants for trial.

“The Largest Drinking Water Crisis in the Country”

On June 1, 2023, four days before the Stuart trial, Chemours, DuPont de Nemours, Corteva and EIDP, the former E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, signed a memorandum of understanding with the plaintiffs under Phillips’s oversight. They agreed to pay $1.185 billion. On June 5 Gergel stayed the trial, and on June 22 3M agreed to pay between $10.5 billion and $12.5 billion.

Announcing the 3M agreement, Cossich called PFAS contamination “the largest drinking water crisis in the country.” Her statement opened with the words “Everyone deserves access to clean drinking water” and said the settlement would help millions of Americans “finally achieve this basic right.” Speaking to WGNO in New Orleans, she described what the chemicals do. “They’re forever chemicals. They never break down,” she said. “They get into the drinking water and never go away and they migrate pretty far.” She said southeast Louisiana had seen no major PFAS contamination. Once Gergel approved the deal, she said, a claims facility would allocate the money to the water providers that filed claims.

Gergel granted final approval to the DuPont settlement on February 8, 2024, after a fairness hearing on December 14, 2023, and to the 3M settlement on March 29, 2024. In the DuPont opinion he described four and a half years of work by the MDL plaintiffs, “led by Plaintiffs’ Co-Lead Counsel and the PEC.” Objectors to the DuPont agreement argued that $1.185 billion paled beside the PFAS damage the companies had caused across the country. Gergel answered with class counsel’s estimate that the DuPont companies were responsible for only three to seven percent of the MDL defendants’ total alleged PFAS liabilities, and with the Fourth Circuit’s rule that a cash settlement that “may only amount to a fraction of the potential recovery” is not for that reason inadequate or unfair. Without the settlement, he wrote, class members “would be years, if not a decade, away from litigating and reaching finality in their own cases.”

Flow, Concentration and Bridgeport’s Wells

The 3M agreement put 55 percent of its money into Phase One, for every active public water system with a source where PFAS had been measured by June 22, 2023, and 45 percent into Phase Two, for systems without such a source that had to test for certain PFAS under the federal UCMR 5 program or that served more than 3,300 people. For each Phase One source, the Claims Administrator scored the flow rate and PFAS concentrations the system documented on its claim form, then raised the score where concentrations exceeded the proposed federal or an applicable state maximum contaminant level, where the system had sued, or where it had carried a bellwether case. Each source’s share of all the adjusted scores, multiplied by the Phase One Action Fund, set its award. The DuPont settlement, whose class was projected to include more than 14,000 public water systems, divided its money by the same measurements and adjustments, with a court-appointed Special Master approving the awards. Gergel described the Claims Administrator entering each system’s test results into “the mathematical formula set forth in the Allocation Procedures” and the resulting base scores being adjusted or “bumped.” Phase One claims under both agreements were due July 26, 2024.

Bridgeport had joined the litigation about three years before its first check. To bring the village into the case Shaheen worked with Cossich, Sumich, Parsiola & Taylor. He said the source of the contamination remained unclear but had to lie somewhere to the north, upstream on the Ohio River. In April 2024 he described PFAS as “the type of contaminant that settles in the basin and continues to contaminate the water.” “You would think if you poured something in a drain it washes through,” he said. “That doesn’t work this way.”

The village administrator, Jesse Kosegi, gathered the contamination and water-usage data that Shaheen called critical to Bridgeport’s success. The village’s wells had tested positive almost three years before the June 22, 2023 date that defined Phase One. “It’s been kind of a long process to make sure we fit the group, but ultimately we did,” Shaheen said.

Eight Years of 3M Installments

The first check came from 3M. Shaheen expected a second 3M check within 90 days; together the two would cover about 65 percent of what 3M owed the village, and 3M would pay the balance in equal installments over eight years, within a settlement the company funds over 13 years. DuPont’s share would follow in one or two payments no later than the first quarter of 2026, and Tyco and BASF, which settled separately, would pay amounts Shaheen described as “much less” within the year. He expected the village to gross “well in excess of $1 million” and to keep about $750,000 after attorneys’ fees and expenses.

Shaheen said the money came with no restrictions, in part because $1 million would not be enough to replace the village’s water system. Street paving and repairs were already “in the hopper,” with grant funding being sought. “It’s a godsend,” he said. “We can do a lot of good with it.” He thanked the mayor and council for letting him pursue the claim: “Everyone was fully cooperative, and it really worked out well.” Where the money would go remained to be decided. “We will set this money aside and very cautiously figure out where to place it,” he said.