Dear Whirlpool execs and board:

Dear Mr. Jeff Fettig and members of the Board of Directors of the Whirlpool Corporation:

I am a CPA and it is tax season. Between January 1st and April 15th of each year, life ends except for work.

So when I received a notice in the mail a few weeks back that a city ordinance was being proposed to prohibit the drilling of water wells on the property where my CPA firm is located, I dropped the notice in the trash. I had no plans to drill a water well. Filtered water from the municipal water supply of Dallas, Texas, transported in plastic bottles that could be purchased at Wal-Mart has always been good enough for me and my co-workers. (Read your bottled water label sometime.)

Fast forward several weeks and a few hundred tax returns. My wife asked me if I was going to the meeting at the Fort Smith Senior Center the next night where Erin Brockovich was meeting with people concerned about the chemical spill that had leeched into the neighborhood where I work. Considering I had invested a bit of money in a building that might be affected, I decided it would be prudent if I attended.

This meeting provided my first introduction to the environmental problem at hand. A nasty chemical named trichloroethylene (TCE) had been spilled years ago at Whirlpool’s manufacturing facility and over time had migrated onto neighboring properties.

My building sits approximately 75 yards away from the mapped location of the high TCE concentrations. However, Mr. Bob Bowcock, a member of the Brockovich team, had taken water samples around the Fort Smith facility and raised concerns that the TCE might have migrated to a much wider area than previously published. Whatever the “truth” is, damage has been done.

For the area where Whirlpool has asked for an ordinance to be passed to forbid the drilling of water wells, property values have been decimated. If any property owner on Jacobs and Brazil Streets due north of Whirlpool’s closed manufacturing facility put their house up for sale today, only a brash speculator would even think of purchasing the property and the owner would have to settle for pennies on the dollar.

If a resident had an emergency and needed to borrow money on their homes, a bank or mortgage company would turn them down. Their homes and properties aren’t worth anything today and any bank would run from this real estate as collateral. It would be foolish for a bank to add environmentally contaminated property to their portfolio in the event of a foreclosure. You don’t have to be a real estate appraiser to understand this.

The value lost by the residents in this neighborhood is more than the monetary value of their real estate. Many of the residents have lived there for decades. It is their home. And every American has the right to feel safe in their home. I think this incident has stripped this right away from them. The knowledge that they live with a poisonous chemical just a few feet below their dining room is unsettling.

I know the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality says there are no health risks. But really, do you expect people in the affected area to place their health in the hands of geologists, hydrologists, and ecologists?

I have always had a great appreciation for Whirlpool. Whirlpool provided a large number of families in and around Fort Smith a decent living for decades, not only for people employed directly by Whirlpool, but for people employed by a great many businesses that were in business primarily to support Whirlpool.

I currently have a Whirlpool refrigerator in my kitchen, my Mom does, and I bet if you took a survey of the people living on Jacobs and Brazil Streets, their refrigerator was made by Whirlpool.

Whirlpool brought many great people to town as part of their management team, who after they retired chose to stay in Fort Smith as part as our community, like Fort Smith Mayor Sandy Sanders. As a college student, I worked for Whirlpool during the summer as did many college students over the years.

I was greatly disappointed when Whirlpool closed their manufacturing plant in Fort Smith, but I understand our economy is changing. As of now, Whirlpool’s legacy to Fort Smith is positive but that could turn on a dime.

I was born and raised in Fort Smith and I love my town. A week ago, I expected that eventually Whirlpool would sell its Fort Smith facility to some group that would bring with it new economic energy. Today my expectation is that the facility will just sit there for years, rusting day by day, a huge eye sore and blight on the community.

With knowledge of the property’s environmental issue, the already small market of interested buyers just got smaller. Just owning real estate close to a contaminated facility will eliminate hope our now decimated real estate values could recover in the near future.

With the Brockovich Firm getting involved, I fear years of litigation will begin where everybody will become enriched except those people actually injured. During this period, those of us invested in the neighborhood would live in uncertainty, economically damaged, not necessarily destroyed but severely injured.

Down at the bottom of Whirlpool’s website, there is a section titled “Whirlpool Brand Cares.”

Momma always told me that actions speak louder than words. Show Whirlpool does care by doing the right thing, and not just the bare minimum. It would be right to repair the damage inflicted and make any injured party whole before everybody on your board of directors retire and most of the people injured die (due to old age). If you have to leave Fort Smith, leave behind a good legacy and a good name.

To put a bit a perspective on this, I bet you could fix the problem for less than 25 cents per share of outstanding common stock; not enough to even nudge your stock price. It might take 2% of your total cash balance. The money it takes to fix this problem would make your auditors yawn at its lack of impact on your financial statements. But the goodwill you generate and the protection of your brand name would be priceless.

The longer you wait to solve a problem, the more it usually costs down the road.

I would personally like to thank you in advance for doing the right thing.

Sincerely,
T. David Potts