The Drinking Water Crisis That North Carolina Ignored.

For decades, DuPont dumped toxic PFAS into North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. Today, the local community is suffering the health consequences—and fighting back. Four years later, the Cape Fear River watershed—which supplies drinking water for Kennedy’s family and around 350,000 other North Carolinians—remains contaminated with the perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that DuPont, and its spin-off, Chemours, dumped into the river for more than four decades.

How is North Carolina handling the PFAS crisis today?

North Carolina has been a national leader on PFAS since 2017 when the public became aware that GenX, a PFAS produced at the Chemours Fayetteville Works Facility, had been discovered in the Cape Fear River. Since then Chemours-related compounds have been found in an expanding radius around the facility and as far downstream as New Hanover and Brunswick Counties. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services developed a state provisional health goal for GenX based on the best available science at the time. Residents with impacted drinking water wells have received alternate water supplies to reduce their exposure to PFAS contamination.

While the spotlight on PFAS in North Carolina arose through GenX and Chemours-related compounds, the issue of PFAS is larger than one compound or one company. DEQ has done significant work responding to PFAS contamination in specific sites, including those related to aqueous film-forming foam or AFFF use.

Conclusion

It's truly great that North Carolina after a slow start began to take the problem seriously. Several things need to be done, destruction at a large scale is one, and most likely the most important one.

The State PFAS roadmap says: DEQ will continue to focus on remediation to address known sites of PFAS contamination, prioritizing those that impact communities. DEQ will set remediation goals for sites with PFAS contamination and ensure cleanup results in health-protective outcomes. DEQ will also continue to hold polluters accountable and require responsible parties to clean up PFAS contamination. The agency will use the State’s ability to recover costs from responsible parties when possible.

How the remediation will be addressed, it doesn't say. We recommend that DEC contact The Oaktree to discuss "how" PFAS destruction can be handled without increased cost.