GenX water crisis: Could we face another toxic water disaster? Experts say danger is still there

Jul. 29—Editor's Note: Four years ago, a StarNews investigation revealed toxic levels of GenX in Wilmington's drinking water. This is the second in a series of stories that will take a deep dive into what's happened since then. In the coming weeks, we will explore what we know about health effects, chemical dumping regulations and the status of lawsuits, among other topics.

In 2017, more than 300,000 people found out they had been drinking toxic water for decades, all stemming from a chemical manufacturing plant almost 100 miles up the Cape Fear River. Positive steps have been taken in the aftermath, and yet nothing stops the same disaster from happening again tomorrow.

In critical areas, such as regulations governing chemical dumping and enforcement of those rules, experts say nothing has changed, meaning residents in Wilmington, Fayetteville and beyond face a very real chance of enduring the same disaster all over again.

In the four years since the crisis began, PFAS levels in the drinking water around the Wilmington area and in Brunswick and Pender counties have come down dramatically, more than 99%, according to Detlef Knappe, a professor focused on drinking water quality and treatment at North Carolina State University.

The crisis in North Carolina has brought a lot of attention to the larger issue of PFAS, though no amount of progress can make up for the 30-plus years of pollution and exposure thousands had to experience, Knappe added.

"The concern I have is really there's nothing in our regulatory system now to prevent something similar with a pollutant that we don't yet know about," Knappe said. "In my view, we need to really rethink the way we regulate industries and especially industries that produce high volumes of chemicals."

For more than 30 years, PFAS, including GenX, leaked into the Cape Fear River from a chemical plant owned by DuPont until 2015, when it was taken over by Chemours. The Cape Fear River is the main drinking water source to more than 300,000 people in southeastern North Carolina. PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of thousands of chemical compounds that are largely toxic to humans.

Chemours has made a "sizable investment" at its Fayetteville Works plant since 2017 to eliminate 97% of its PFAS and GenX emissions, according to a statement from the company. Chemours has installed GAC (granular activated carbon) filters, an emissions control facility, water treatment center and is planning to build an underground barrier wall around its property to contain the remaining 3% of PFAS emissions.

"Chemours has made significant investments in emissions control technology and remediation activity at its Fayetteville Works site," according to the statement. "The company has taken numerous actions over the past four years that have dramatically decreased emissions of PFAS and loading to the Cape Fear River."

While quite a lot of progress has been made, scientists are also finding that the disaster is larger than previously thought, said Dana Sargent, executive director of Cape Fear River Watch, who along with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, is supervising Chemours' cleanup activities.

As part of a court order reached in 2019, Chemours funded water sampling tests around the region, Sargent said. Those tests found that there were an additional 257 types of PFAS leaking from Chemours' facility into the Cape Fear River that weren't previously known about.

"Chemours and its predecessor had more than 40 years to show honorable commitment to the community and the environment," Sargent said. "They chose profit instead. Their so-called 'commitment' to reducing PFAS in the environment began in 2019 — by court order."

The consent order was an excellent step forward to preventing the disaster from getting worse, but it took several years to negotiate, said Geoff Gisler, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. The SELC represented Cape Fear River Watch during negotiations with the state and Chemours.

Beyond the consent order, little else in terms of regulations has changed since the crisis began, Gisler said.

More frustrating than that, Gisler said, is that the regulatory tools that could've prevented the contamination in the first place have existed for 50 years. The state and federal government just aren't using them, he said.

"This situation was not a failure of the law," Gisler said. "The way the law is written is good enough to prevent this. It's a failure of the agencies that we trust to enforce the law."

In Wilmington, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, the primary water provider in the area, immediately instituted interim solutions to filter out the PFAS while it constructs a $46 million filtration system at its Sweeney Water Treatment Plant, said Carel Vandermeyden, CFPUA's deputy executive director.

CFPUA is using its 14 existing filters at Sweeney to filter out PFAS, Vandermeyden said. The solution isn't meant to work long-term, but on average it removes 30% to 40% of the toxic chemicals.

The public utility's testing capabilities for PFAS have come a long way since 2017, Vandermeyden said. Four years ago, the utility tested for approximately 20 compounds, but now it looks for more than 50.

At least half of the PFAS chemicals CFPUA looks for today, it didn't know about in 2017, Vandermeyden said. The utility continues to add more compounds to its list as testing methods are created for the massive class of chemicals.

Statewide, the North Carolina legislature formed the North Carolina PFAS Testing Network, a consortium of researchers, in 2018 as a result of the ongoing contamination, according to Lee Ferguson, a professor at Duke University and co-chair of the Network's executive advisory committee.

The program and state have become a national leader in terms of monitoring programs related to PFAS, Ferguson said. Few other states have programs made up of academic researchers using cutting-edge technology to find PFAS compounds in drinking water.

Ferguson and Knappe are part of a team within the PFAS Testing Network that's assessing every municipal drinking water source in North Carolina for PFAS contamination.

The researchers were surprised by just how much PFAS there is in the water across North Carolina and the various sources it comes from, Ferguson said. In Southeastern North Carolina, the primary source is Chemours, but in the central part of the state the team found high concentrations of legacy PFAS.

The issue will continue to jeopardize people's safety because "we live in a universe of chemistry," Ferguson said. With tens of thousands of different chemical compounds, and more being created every year, no monitoring network can possibly keep up.

"We're left with these problems of unregulated and unmonitored emerging contaminants, which come to our attention only when a researcher either thinks to look for them, or the problem becomes so acute downstream that people have health impacts," Ferguson said.

Right now, the United States takes a reactive approach to PFAS chemicals rather than a proactive one, Sargent said. Manufacturers create the substances, discharge it into the environment and if people start to get sick then maybe the government will monitor it and possibly regulate it years after it became a problem.

"I have a brother who is a Chicago firefighter and a U.S. Marine. He was diagnosed with Glioblastoma in the winter of 2017 just a few months after we found out about our contamination here," Sargent said. "He died in the winter of 2019 at 47 years old. We don't know if his exposure to PFAS, which was excessive because of his career, was what caused his death. That's completely unacceptable."

The government should do more to protect Americans and stop these industries and companies such as Chemours or DuPont from creating toxic messes that can cause serious health issues, Sargent said.

If a chemical isn't regulated in the U.S., like most PFAS, there's very little any entity can do to stop industries or companies from discharging it into the environment, Knappe said.

The U.S. needs a new framework on how it regulates chemicals, Knappe said. There are thousands of PFAS compounds, new ones being invented all the time and there's no realistic way for any regulatory agency to keep up.

The weak links in this situation, according to Knappe, are the policy and enforcement. It's one thing to create a standard to limit a chemical, but it's a totally different thing to put that regulation into practice.

Every few years the EPA surveys drinking water across the country for 30 unregulated contaminants, Knappe said. It's a "very, very small drop in the bucket" compared to the number of chemicals on the market, Knappe admitted.

The science surrounding PFAS has "progressed rapidly" in the past few years and the EPA is using that new understanding to create new actions, according to an emailed statement from an EPA spokesperson.

"Under the Biden-Harris administration, EPA has made addressing PFAS a top priority and is working together with communities across the country to effectively address these dangerous chemicals and protect public health," according to the statement.

EPA is in the midst of developing a multi-year strategy to create more public health protections around PFAS, according to the statement. The spokesperson added, "Our goal is to move as expeditiously as possible, while grounding all of our decisions in the law and a strong scientific foundation."

Regulatory change could be on the horizon after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the PFAS Action Act on July 21. The legislation would address PFAS on several levels by introducing new regulations and safeguards.

The bill would require the EPA to designate PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which is a federal law that governs how the EPA responds to environmental contaminations.

The act would also propose national drinking water standards for PFAS, create clearer penalties for violations, create grant programs to help communities affected by PFAS contamination, designate PFAS as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and numerous other actions.

Despite the bill's new protections against PFAS, six out of 13 members of North Carolina's delegation to the House voted against the legislation, including six of the state's eight Republican representatives. Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC07) and Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC08), who represent the areas affected, voted in favor of the bill in addition to their Democratic colleagues.

The baseline rule in the Clean Water Act is unless a group gets permission to dump substances into waterways, it's illegal, Gisler said. Yet companies get around this rule because states and the EPA don't enforce it.

Companies come up with a new chemical, don't tell anyone about it and simply start dumping it into waterways, Gisler said. If regulatory agencies don't enforce the rules, then it doesn't matter what regulations are passed.

"If there were no police, then what would stop bank robbers? Nothing," Gisler said. "Here we have laws, and we have the system. What we don't have are agencies that are willing to enforce it."

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality has taken "proactive steps" to address the impacts of PFAS contamination across the state, according to a statement from the agency in response to Gisler and others' comments.

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