John Hendrix, a former quality-control engineer with JM Eagle, the world's largest maker of PVC pipe, claims that his former employer has been flagrantly lying about the condition of its products.
Hendrix was an engineer in JM Eagle's Product Assurance Division.
In his first TV interview, he says his own company cut corners for profit and hid internal tests allegedly showing some pipe had a high failure rate and was too weak to meet industry standards.
He says tests had "anywhere from 50 to 80 percent failure rates. ... When you're at 50-80 percent, you're buying a lottery ticket that's going with odds in the wrong way."
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In one of the higher-profile instances, pipe exploded in the faces of installation workers in Reno twice in two days. One of those failures sent a 220-pound worker flying 15 feet.
Hendrix claims that when customers filed claims that pipes broke, he was told to blame contractor error. When he tried to tell superiors about it, the company accused him of masterminding a kickback scheme and fired him. But 46 government entities don't buy that story, and have joined Hendrix in suing JM Eagle for fraud.
One of the plaintiffs is Nevada. State attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto is concerned not only about the incidents in Reno, but 17 failures in seven years at a state prison.
Masto says public budgets are already stretched to the limit, and taxpayers can't afford to spend millions repairing pipe that's supposed to last 50 years.
"It was really about pushing these pipes out the door," she asserts. "They didn't care whether they were defective or not, and their only concern was if somebody found out they were defective. That's what's so troubling about this."
The plaintiffs want JM Eagle to foot the bill for future pipe failures, since it will cost too much to simply dig the pipe up.
More information on the lawsuit here.