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Plastic sewer pipe installation © D Friedman at InspectApedia.com JM Eagle Plastic Piping Leaks & Whistleblower Lawsuit Update
Reports of defective plastic pipe produced by JM Eagle, litigation, company comments

Leaks in plastic water supply or drain piping produced by JM Eagle:

This article describes claims of defective piping sold by JM Eagle, summarizes the status of claims against the company involved in a whistleblower lawsuit, and includes response comments by the company.

This article series describes the causes of damaged or leaky buried plastic water pipe & resulting poor water pressure, poor water flow, or water leaks in water piping between a well or municipal water service main & the building. Knowing just what kind of leak is occurring in a building helps pinpoint the problem and also helps specify the necessary plumbing repair.

Page top photo - not JM Eagle pipe - a PVC plastic sewer pipe during installation at a New York home.

InspectAPedia tolerates no conflicts of interest. We have no relationship with advertisers, products, or services discussed at this website.

- Daniel Friedman, Publisher/Editor/Author - See WHO ARE WE?

Defective PVC Polyvinyl Chloride Pipe Production, Leaks, Explosions, & Whistle Blower Lawsuit - JM Eagle

JM Eagle facebook page image

JM Eagle produces roughly 60 percent of plastic water piping sold in the U.S. and also distributes its products in Canada and Mexico and describes itself as

JM Eagle is the leading manufacturer of PVC and PE plastic pipe.... JM Eagle recently announced a 50-year warranty on its products*. Plastic-pipe products from JM Eagle will maintain their performance for the next 50 years or the company will replace them.

Photo at left: freeze-caused water main breakage report cited at Facebook. - JMEagle Facebook page, retrieved 22 March 2015, original source: https://www.facebook.com/JMEaglePipe

[Click to enlarge any image]

Reports of JM Eagle PVC Piping Failure & Litigation

Early in 2010 New York Times reported that John Hendrix has accused PVC piping manufacturer JM Eagle of falsifying PVC pipe quality testing results, covering up the discovery that pipes that should last 50 years are failing as early as in one year, risking costly leaks and dangerous explosions.

In a review of news reports through March 2015, the failure rate and extent of failure of JM Eagle's PVC piping raised some troubling questions about the actual extent of and occurrence of damage - see our citations below.

Hendrix, former overseer of certification of a manufacturing process that tested PVC piping produced by JM Eagle said that the company had been selling substandard polyvinyl chloride or PVC piping since 1996 and that the company had manipulated pipe testing results.

Hendrix said, according to the Times report, that less than half of JM Eagle's PVC pipe production met the required quality standards.

Indeed the same Times article reported that some U.S. municipalities have already found leaking, cracking, and exploding PVC pipes made by JM Eagle, and some are joining the "whistle blower" lawsuit as a result.

Litigation has been filed in the U.S. District Court for Central District of California, and has been joined by California, Delaware, Nevada, Tennessee, and Virginia

. The Nevada state attorney general cited JM Eagle pipe that had been rupturing several times a year.

The article reports that Hendrix asserts having been trained to look for ways to blame PVC polyvinyl chloride piping leaks and breaks on the installing or maintaining contractors, but after being assigned to oversee pipe testing Hendrix found that the company was using lower grade raw materials (from Formosa) and had sped up pipe production without reporting these changes to pipe certifying agencies as required. He was fired.

JM Eagle disputed the allegations and said that tests were properly conducted and that the company stands 100% behind its products. JM Eagle Corporation is successor to Johns Manville Corp. and was created in 1982 after Johns Manville Corp. filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from asbestos claims.

In 1982 Johns Manville Corp's pipe division was bought by Formosa Plastics Group, a Taiwanese industrial group owned by Wang Yung-Ching, and at that time renamed JM Manufacturing, later renamed again to JM Eagle in 2007.

In April 2010, again reported in the NY Times, JM Eagle promised to guarantee its products for 50 years, including pipe that is already in the ground. "The warranty covers the pipe based on standards that were in effect at the time of the installation," the times reported. Links to and excepts from the JM Eagle pipe warranty are provided below.

Watch out: the same April 2010 Times article points out that municipalities had already reported pipe failures that "... may not qualify for a claim against the new guarantee..."

In November 2013 Plastics News reported that JM Eagle was found liable for sellling faulty PVC piping. Exccerpting from that article:

A California jury found J-M Manufacturing Inc. knowingly manufactured and sold substandard PVC pipes to government entities for water and sewage systems across the country from 1996 to 2006.

The unanimous verdict reached Thursday comes seven years after whistle-blower John Hendrix alleged J-M, which is now called JM Eagle, violated the False Claims Act by selling products with shorter life spans than promised.

Hendrix is a plaintiff along with the states of Nevada, New Mexico and Virginia, 21 cities in California and 21 water districts in California. Originally filed by Hendrix in 2006, the suit was unsealed Feb. 8, 2010, in Los Angeles in U.S. District Court, when the government entities formally joined the suit.

Los Angeles-based JM Eagle, which is the largest pipe extruder in North America according to Plastics News' ranking, plans to appeal the verdict. It said the lawsuit was brought by a disgruntled former employee.

JM Eagle is on the line for paying a yet-to-be-determined amount of damages to the plaintiffs, as well as dozens of other states, cities and water districts that bought the company's pipe products but didn't join the lawsuit. 

...
JM Eagle officials respect but strongly disagree with the jury, according to Neal Gordon, the company's vice president of marketing and waterworks sales. - Kavanaugh (2013)

IBusiness Ethics Case Analyses reported in 2013 these additional details and comments:

Originally Formosa Plastics before 1982, the company became J-M Manufacturing after purchasing plastic-pipe operations of Johns Manville. In 2007, the company expanded and acquired the second largest pipe-plastic manufacturer PW Eagle. With this acquired company, they changed their name again to JM Eagle

... Because of their long history, size and standards, they continue to be the leader in plastic piping.

... The pipes were supposed to last up to 50 years, as guaranteed and listed as the standard from JM Eagle. However, the pipes sold in the last decade had been prematurely bursting or failing, some as early as within the first year of installation.

... This particular case is actually not a problem of selling defective products, but of defrauding customers.

The pipes that JM Eagle sell are stamped with a certain standard that they have to reach.

Since the time JM Eagle acquired this stamp and set this standard, they had cut costs. The new pipes they were selling under their previous standards did not hold up to what the pipes were graded to do.

... witnesses called also recounted that “reject” stickers were removed from pipes identified as substandard and shipped them to customers - Business Ethics Case Analyses (2013)

Really? However at the same time (November 2013) Daniel Fisher, a Forbes Magazine reporter raised some troubling questions about this litigation and posed that the actual failure rates of JM Eagle's PVC piping may have been over-stated.

Excerpts from that article:

A federal jury in California today found manufacturer JM Eagle liable for defrauding government purchasers in a whistleblower case where the whistleblower himself never made an appearance and the main evidence consisted of internal documents suggesting the company may have shipped pipe that failed to meet industry standards.
...
M Eagle said it would appeal the verdict, which it said came despite “irrefutable evidence” that its pipe did meet national standards. Due to tactical decisions by the parties and rulings by the trial judge, the jury never heard evidence that the whistleblower, a former employee named John Hendrix who stands to make 15-30% of any judgment, was fired for allegedly seeking kickbacks from customer; or that government-commissioned tests by an independent laboratory showed that JM Eagle pipe met standards.

Hendrix, who connected with Phillips & Cohen around the time he was fired, claims he lost his job in retaliation for a memo criticizing the company’s management.

“While we respect and thank the jury members for their service, we disagree strongly with the verdict,” said Neal Gordon, JM Eagle’s Vice President of Marketing and Waterworks Sales

. “We believe we have valid grounds for an appeal, which we will file as immediately as possible, and we look forward to having this verdict reviewed and set aside.
...
Only one of the five cities and water agencies serving as representative plaintiffs in the first phase of the trial even reported a significant failure, however, and that one, the City of Reno, submitted a claim and was paid by JM Eagle for the damage.
...
The jury didn’t hear evidence that the government pulled random samples from JM Eagle factories and had them tested by a lab called Microbac , later confirming to JM Eagle the samples had “passed.”

In December 2014 on the company's Facebook page, JM Eagle noted that cold weather can explain plastic water main breakage.

Excerpt:

Cold weather dramatically increases the chance of a break as pipes expand and contract with temperature changes. On average, 400 to 500 water main breaks occur each year in the city [Washington D.C.], mostly during the winter, ... - JMEagle Facebook page, retrieved 22 March 2015, original source: https://www.facebook.com/JMEaglePipe

JM Eagle References, JM Eagle PVC Pipe Failure, Litigation Research


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