Scott Summy

From Private Wells to Public Water Systems

A North Carolina family called Scott Summy after a gasoline additive entered its well. Three decades later, he helped turn the cost of testing and treating contaminated water into national settlement programs for public utilities.

A 1995 Call From North Carolina

The call came in August 1995, when Scott Summy was a young lawyer. A North Carolina man said his family and neighbors had been drinking from private wells contaminated with methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or MTBE, an additive blended into gasoline. The question at the kitchen tap reached backward through groundwater, storage and sale to the companies responsible for the fuel.

Summy pursued Conoco for the residents in Ashcraft v. Conoco. The litigation continued through discovery and trial before settlement. An appellate opinion later preserved part of the record surrounding access to the contaminated property. The gasoline additive imposed years of testing and treatment costs on households that relied on the affected wells.

Public utilities soon faced the same costs on a larger scale. Santa Monica’s MTBE litigation produced agreements valued by the court at $315.5 million, including treatment needed to restore municipal wells. Summy’s firm reports more than $1 billion in MTBE settlements for over two hundred public water providers. Sampling, replacement wells, engineering, and continued operation made the cost of contamination measurable as a municipal expense.

In 2002, Summy formed Baron & Budd’s Environmental Litigation Group. He now leads a team of about thirty lawyers and staff. Its clients commonly own the infrastructure between a contaminated source and a household faucet: cities, towns, counties, water districts and authorities required to keep serving water while liability is contested.

A Class Sized to Water Systems

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances carried that model into multidistrict litigation. Claims arising from aqueous film-forming foam were centralized in the District of South Carolina as MDL No. 2873. Airports, military facilities and firefighting sites were among the alleged release points. Public systems faced a separate problem downstream: determine whether PFAS had reached a source, then pay for removal while continuing to deliver water.

The court appointed Summy co-lead counsel for the public-water plaintiffs. He also co-chaired general-liability and science work and later served as class counsel. The settlements divided eligible public water systems into groups that included systems with qualifying detections and systems subject to required testing. Allocation formulas connect such matters as flow and measured concentration to the testing and treatment burden claimed by each utility.

That structure confined the class to drinking-water system claims and resolved them without adjudicating individual personal-injury claims or establishing liability; 3M and the DuPont-related companies continued to deny wrongdoing. Systems that did not exclude themselves became bound by the applicable release even if they ultimately filed no claim or received no payment.

A utility may need laboratory work before it knows whether it qualifies, capital construction before a filter can operate, and recurring funds to replace media and dispose of captured material. The allocation rules determine how national settlement funds reach those local costs.

Four Settlements, One Administrator

Judge Richard Gergel entered final approval of the 3M public-water settlement on March 29, 2024. 3M valued its obligation at a present value of $10.3 billion, with scheduled payments carrying a nominal value as high as $12.5 billion through 2036. DuPont de Nemours, Chemours and Corteva had agreed to a separate $1.185 billion fund. The court-authorized settlement administrator now treats both agreements as finally approved.

Two later agreements expanded the program. Tyco Fire Products and Chemguard agreed to $750 million. BASF’s settlement amount was $312.5 million, with an additional initial payment designated for notice and administration. The court gave both final approval in November 2024. Claims against other manufacturers remained outside those resolutions.

The City of Stuart, Florida, had been selected for an early water-provider trial before the first agreements displaced that immediate contest. The eventual class extended beyond the systems that had already filed suit. It allowed thousands of eligible providers to seek money for testing and treatment without trying the same product and causation questions one utility at a time.

Summy described the 3M settlement in practical terms: helping public systems remove PFAS from drinking water. The legal scale is measured in billions; each utility’s work is concrete—samples, engineering drawings, granular activated carbon, ion-exchange resin, membranes, construction schedules, and years of operation.

July 2026 Filing Deadlines

By July 2026, the work had shifted from obtaining approval orders to administering the settlements. The settlement program required active Phase Two systems to submit test results by July 1, 2026. Its Action Fund claim deadline was July 31. Those dates governed whether current testing and treatment needs reached the administrator in time for consideration under the agreements.

The deadlines also governed whether a covered system could receive money after becoming bound by a settlement release. Counsel had to identify affected systems, distinguish phases and funds, assemble analytical results, and match each submission to the administrator’s requirements.

Approval established the fund, class, and rules; claims administrators determine utility allocations, engineers specify the necessary equipment, and operators maintain it after construction. The payment schedule through 2036 recognizes PFAS treatment as a continuing public-service cost extending beyond a single repair.

MTBE, Atrazine, PCB, and PFAS

PFAS belongs to a longer sequence in Summy’s practice. Litigation over Monsanto’s polychlorinated biphenyls produced a $648 million nationwide class settlement for municipal stormwater systems discharging to waters impaired by PCBs. Separate resolutions with Washington, the District of Columbia and New Mexico totaled $167.6 million. The liabilities arose decades after domestic PCB production ended because the compounds remained in buildings, soil, sediment and stormwater.

Atrazine presented another route to the source: agricultural herbicide detected in water supplies. A $105 million settlement covered more than two thousand community water systems and addressed expenses associated with monitoring and treatment. MTBE traveled from gasoline releases; PCBs persisted in urban runoff; PFAS moved from foam and industrial facilities. Each required its own science, defendants and allocation terms.

Summy also represents North Carolina public entities and private-well owners in litigation concerning GenX and other PFAS associated with the Fayetteville Works facility. His clients include Brunswick and Cumberland Counties, the Lower Cape Fear Water and Sewer Authority, Wrightsville Beach and nearby well owners. Those claims remain pending.

Across MTBE, atrazine, PCB, and PFAS matters, Summy’s cases have relied on laboratory results, utility records, engineering evidence, and settlement administration to identify contamination, treatment needs, and payment responsibility.