Amherst PFOA Verdict: NH Jury Awards Homeowner Class $4.36 Million Against Textiles Coated

A New Hampshire jury on Friday, November 6, 2026 found Textiles Coated International (TCI) liable to a class of Amherst property owners whose private wells were contaminated with PFOA, and awarded the class $4.36 million for the lost value of their homes. The Amherst PFOA verdict, returned in Hillsborough County Superior Court after a roughly three-week trial, ends the liability phase of a case filed in 2017 and is being described by Law.com as the first class action over a "forever chemical" to reach a jury verdict.

The award is modest by mass tort standards, but the route the case took to trial matters more than the number. The homeowners lost their medical monitoring claims when the New Hampshire Supreme Court refused to recognize that remedy in 2023, and TCI then argued that the failed monitoring case barred the property case too. The state's high court rejected that argument in 2025. What survived, and what a jury has now validated, is a property-based theory that can be tried class-wide without proof of anyone's illness. That is the template other PFAS plaintiffs, and the companies they sue, will study.

What the jury decided in the Amherst PFOA class action

Jurors sitting in the Northern District of Hillsborough County Superior Court in Manchester found TCI liable on all four counts submitted to them: negligence, negligent failure to warn, trespass and nuisance. They then fixed damages for diminution in property value at $4.36 million for the class as a whole. Law.com rounded the figure to $4.3 million in its November 10 report; the plaintiffs' firm, Singleton Schreiber, uses $4.36 million.

According to plaintiffs' counsel, Judge Amy B. Messer presided, jury selection began on October 19, and the verdict came after about three weeks of trial. Kevin Hannon of Singleton Schreiber, who has represented the Amherst residents since the original filing, tried the case with Morgan & Morgan, including John Yanchunis. The Hannon Law Firm's 2017 announcement of the suit lists Gottesman and Hollis, P.A. as the original local co-counsel.

The verdict does not end the case. Singleton Schreiber says additional proceedings on non-economic damages will follow. The property class's pleaded remedies were broader than lost value alone: they included the cost of remediation and mitigation, annoyance and discomfort, and loss of use and enjoyment of property. Those annoyance and loss-of-use components are the kind of damages a nuisance and trespass verdict typically supports, and they remain open.

No public statement from TCI or its trial counsel had surfaced in coverage of the verdict as of November 11, 2026.

How much was the Textiles Coated PFOA verdict?

The jury awarded $4.36 million, all of it compensatory and all of it for diminished property value. There is no punitive component, and none was possible in the ordinary sense: New Hampshire abolished punitive damages by statute (RSA 507:16) except where another statute authorizes them, though its courts allow "enhanced compensatory damages" where a defendant's conduct is wanton, malicious or oppressive. Nothing reported so far indicates whether the plaintiffs will seek enhancement in the next phase.

Because Law.com describes the class as more than 200 homeowners, a straight division of the award across 200 properties would yield an average below about $21,800 per property, before fees and costs. That is rough arithmetic, not an allocation: the jury's figure is an aggregate, and the distribution plan, attorney fee award and any offsets have not been set.

Element	What is known
Verdict date	Friday, November 6, 2026
Court	Hillsborough County Superior Court, Northern District (Manchester, N.H.)
Judge	Amy B. Messer (per plaintiffs' counsel)
Defendant	Textiles Coated International (TCI)
Class	Amherst residential property owners with private wells near the former TCI plant; more than 200 homeowners (per Law.com)
Claims found	Negligence; negligent failure to warn; trespass; nuisance
Award	$4.36 million, diminution in property value
Still to be tried	Non-economic damages (annoyance, discomfort, loss of use and enjoyment), per plaintiffs' counsel
Punitive damages	Not available under RSA 507:16; enhanced compensatory damages possible in principle
Lead class counsel	Kevin Hannon (Singleton Schreiber); Morgan & Morgan

Diminution-only verdicts tend to run small because the measure is the gap between a home's market value with and without the stigma or physical impact of contamination. Where, as in Amherst, a defendant has already paid to connect many affected homes to public water, the defense can argue that the remediation shrank that gap. The jury's number suggests it accepted a real but bounded market loss.

From private wells to a class trial: the Amherst timeline

TCI coated fabrics and films with fluoropolymers at a plant at 105 Route 101A in Amherst from about 1985 to 2006, using ammonium perfluorooctanoate (APFO), the salt form of PFOA, according to the New Hampshire Supreme Court's 2025 order and the plaintiffs' account. PFOA is persistent in soil and groundwater, which is why contamination from a plant that closed in 2006 was still being found in wells a decade later.

Date	Event
~1985–2006	TCI operates a fluoropolymer coating plant at 105 Route 101A, Amherst
May 2016	New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) reports PFOA in 11 private wells near the former site, from non-detect to 620 parts per trillion; four exceed 100 ppt
October 2016	Expanded sampling of 198 wells finds 16 above the EPA health advisory level, per the Nashua Telegraph
July 21, 2017	Residents file two class actions against TCI: one for medical monitoring, one for property damage
October 6, 2017	NHDES and TCI announce TCI will fund about 9,500 feet of water main and public water connections for about 102 Amherst properties, served by Pennichuck
March 21, 2023	Brown v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., No. 2022-0132: New Hampshire Supreme Court rejects medical monitoring absent present physical injury
After Brown	Trial court dismisses the TCI medical monitoring case with prejudice as to its class members
May 30, 2025	Hermens v. Textiles Coated, No. 2024-0189: unanimous court holds the monitoring dismissal does not preclude the property class
October 19, 2026	Jury selection begins in Hillsborough County Superior Court
November 6, 2026	Jury finds TCI liable on four claims; $4.36 million for diminished property value
November 10, 2026	Law.com reports the verdict as the first class trial over a "forever chemical"

In 2016, the federal benchmark was EPA's lifetime health advisory of 70 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS combined. Standards have since tightened sharply: New Hampshire adopted an enforceable PFOA limit of 12 ppt in 2020, and EPA's 2024 national drinking water rule set PFOA at 4 ppt. Wells testing in the hundreds of parts per trillion were far outside any of those lines.

Why couldn't the Amherst homeowners get medical monitoring?

The homeowners could not recover medical monitoring because New Hampshire law does not allow it for people who have no present physical injury. In Brown v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., decided March 21, 2023 on a certified question from the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, the state Supreme Court held that an increased risk of future disease is not a legal injury and that a tort claim accrues only when a plaintiff is actually harmed. The court also leaned on separation-of-powers reasoning, noting that the Legislature had passed a bill to create a medical monitoring remedy that was vetoed, and declined to create one judicially.

Brown arose from Saint-Gobain's plant in neighboring Merrimack, but it controlled the Amherst monitoring class, which had been defined to include people who occupied residential properties in Amherst with private wells within three-fourths of a mile of the TCI site. After Brown, the trial court dismissed that case with prejudice as to its class members.

How the property claims survived: Hermens v. Textiles Coated

TCI then moved for summary judgment in the property case on res judicata grounds, arguing that the two class actions were in substance one litigation and that the dismissal of the first barred the second. The Superior Court denied the motion, and on May 30, 2025 the New Hampshire Supreme Court unanimously affirmed in Hermens v. Textiles Coated International, No. 2024-0189.

The court treated the two suits as involving distinct legal claims and different class definitions. The monitoring class was defined by occupancy and exposure; the property class was defined by ownership of residential property with a private well. The court also concluded that precluding the property claims would be inconsistent with justice and judicial efficiency. Commentary on the decision has read it to mean that plaintiffs foreclosed from monitoring under Brown may still pursue property-based claims arising from the same contamination.

That holding is the hinge of the case. Without it, there would have been no trial and no Amherst PFOA verdict.

Is the Amherst PFOA verdict the first PFAS class action trial?

Law.com's headline calls it the "first-ever class trial over 'forever chemical'," and no contrary example surfaced in research for this article, but the claim is a reporter's characterization rather than a court finding. What is clear is that PFAS litigation has overwhelmingly resolved through settlement, single-plaintiff personal injury trials or bellwethers rather than class trials. The best-known PFOA jury verdicts, such as the DuPont cancer trials arising from the Ohio and West Virginia Leach class, were individual personal injury cases. Water-contamination class actions elsewhere, including the Hoosick Falls, New York litigation, settled: 3M, Saint-Gobain and Honeywell paid $65 million in 2021, and DuPont agreed to a $27 million settlement in 2025.

A litigated class verdict on liability and property damages therefore gives both sides something they have rarely had: a jury's valuation of a PFAS property class.

What happens next in the Textiles Coated case?

Two things are pending. First, the trial court must handle the non-economic damages phase that plaintiffs' counsel says will follow. Second, TCI can file post-trial motions, such as a motion to set aside the verdict or for a new trial, and then appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court once a final judgment enters.

Can Textiles Coated appeal the verdict?

Yes. TCI can appeal after final judgment, and its likely targets are predictable even though it has not announced its plans. They include whether diminution in value was properly proven on a class-wide basis rather than property by property, whether the jury instructions on trespass and nuisance fit migrating groundwater contamination, and causation for wells at the outer edge of the class area. The res judicata argument has already been decided against TCI in Hermens, so it is unlikely to return in the same form. On appeal, the 2017 water-main connections may also feature in arguments about whether any lasting loss in value has been proven.

How the Amherst PFOA verdict fits the wider PFAS docket

Most PFAS dollars are flowing through the federal aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) MDL in South Carolina, where 3M announced a $7.35 billion personal injury settlement on November 3, 2026. That litigation is built around personal injury and water-provider claims against manufacturers, not neighborhood property classes against a local user of PFOA.

The Amherst case runs on a different track: a state-court class, a single former plant, and property torts that do not require proof that any resident is sick. That structure fits states that, like New Hampshire, reject no-injury medical monitoring, and it can also run alongside monitoring claims in states that allow them. The jury's willingness to award class-wide diminution damages gives plaintiffs a data point to cite in settlement talks over other legacy industrial sites. The size of the award gives defendants a data point too.

What it means for practitioners

For plaintiffs' firms. The Amherst PFOA verdict shows that a PFAS property class can be certified, tried and won on traditional torts when personal injury and monitoring theories are unavailable. Drafting separate classes with separate definitions, as counsel did in 2017, preserved the property claims when the monitoring case failed. The economics are thin: a nine-year case producing a $4.36 million liability-phase award, with the non-economic phase still pending, will shape how firms value similar neighborhood cases.

For defendants and their insurers. Preclusion arguments built on a failed companion class may not hold where class definitions and claims differ. Early remediation, such as funding public water connections, did not prevent liability, though it may have helped hold damages down. Carriers writing or litigating historic general liability coverage for pre-2006 operations should expect trespass and nuisance theories to remain live for decades-old releases.

For litigation funders. The case illustrates long duration and modest recovery in property-only PFAS classes. Underwriting depends on the non-economic phase, any enhanced compensatory damages and appellate risk.

For homeowners near other sites. Owners whose wells were contaminated can watch whether the Amherst model is copied in their state, but recovery depends on local law on monitoring, nuisance and limitations.

FAQ

What did the jury decide in the Amherst PFOA class action?

The jury found Textiles Coated International liable for negligence, negligent failure to warn, trespass and nuisance for PFOA contamination of private wells in Amherst, New Hampshire, and awarded the property-owner class $4.36 million on November 6, 2026.

How much was the Textiles Coated PFOA verdict?

$4.36 million for diminished property value, sometimes rounded to $4.3 million. Non-economic damages are to be decided in a later phase, and New Hampshire does not allow ordinary punitive damages.

Who is in the Amherst PFOA class?

Owners of residential property in Amherst with private groundwater wells near TCI's former plant at 105 Route 101A. Law.com reports the class includes more than 200 homeowners.

Why couldn't the Amherst homeowners get medical monitoring?

Because Brown v. Saint-Gobain (N.H. 2023) held that New Hampshire does not recognize medical monitoring for people without a present physical injury, so the parallel monitoring class was dismissed.

Does the Amherst verdict affect other PFAS property damage lawsuits?

It is not binding outside the case, but it is a rare jury valuation of a PFAS property class and, together with Hermens, shows that property claims can survive the loss of monitoring claims in New Hampshire.

Can Textiles Coated appeal the verdict?

Yes. After post-trial motions and final judgment, TCI can appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court; it has not publicly announced its plans.