Fourth in a series.

WILMINGTON – When construction wraps at Cape Fear Public Utility Authority’s Sweeney Water Treatment Plant this summer, almost 3 million pounds of carbon will be in place to remove chemical compounds contaminating water pumped from the Cape Fear River and to the homes of tens of thousands of the utility’s customers.

The addition of the granular activated carbon, or GAC, system is expected to filter out on average 90% of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, from water sucked out of the river about 24 miles upstream from the plant at the Kings Bluff Raw Water Pump Station in Bladen County.

Sweeney’s existing filtration system, which includes 14 biological filters that contain GAC, removes about 35% of PFAS from raw, untreated Cape Fear River water, according to Carel Vandermeyden, the utility’s deputy executive director for treatment and engineering.

During a tour of the $43 million plant addition last month, Vandermeyden talked about the challenges the utility has faced since learning the water it’s been supplying to customers since it began operations in 2008 has been contaminated by chemical compounds discharged for decades from a manufacturing company upstream.

“We had already invested in our plant in the past. We already had the best technology here. We just didn’t have the PFAS removal.”

The Sweeney plant sits just off the river banks in downtown Wilmington on a sprawling piece of land dotted by an office building, parking lot, tanks that handle residuals left from the treatment process, and buildings that hold the plant operating room and existing filtration system.

A square-shaped grassy lot along the backside of a building where a series of large, color-coded pipes move water through the treatment process was practically the only space available for the brick and mortar expansion.

On a cool, mid-May day, construction workers bustled inside the space of concrete and pipe where the eight GAC filters are being installed.

Gravel from wheelbarrows was fed down a pipe running down a wall of one of eight large, square cement compartments. Hard-hat-clad workers in the bottom of the compartment evenly raked the gravel along a floor that consists of a perforated plastic underdrain system that collects the filtered water.

Water pumped into the GAC filters will enter at the top, then flow through 12.5 feet of carbon atop 14 inches of gravel. The filtered water will then be collected on the bottom in the underdrain system.

Each filter compartment will contain nearly 370,000 pounds of GAC capable of treating about 5.5 million gallons of water per day.

Vandermeyden said the plant will likely operate five or six GAC filters at a time. One will remain on standby and one will be the spare, used when carbon needs to be replaced in another filter.

“That’s going to be one of the more expensive and maintenance-intense aspects,” he said.

Each filter is expected to run between 250 to 300 days before the carbon in them needs to be replaced, a process that requires the old carbon be vacuumed out before a fresh batch is trucked in.

CFPUA has budgeted $3.7 million this coming fiscal year, which starts July 1, for carbon replacement. The process is expected to cost about $5 million a year in subsequent years.

GAC has been around since the early 1990s, a proven technology that’s been well researched, Vandermeyden said. 

CFPUA officials determined this filtration system was the better fit for the utility over reverse osmosis, or RO, a system the public utility in neighboring Brunswick County opted for to remove PFAS.

Brunswick County was in the midst of a multi-year, three-phase expansion of its Northwest Water Treatment Plant in response to growing demand and the population boom there when news first broke about PFAS contamination in the river.

In early 2018, the Brunswick County Board of Commissioners voted to install an advanced low-pressure reverse osmosis system in the last phase of the plant expansion project.

The county hired an engineering and consulting firm to conduct a pilot low-pressure RO testing program at the Northwest plant. Test results showed the system “reduced most PFAS to undetectable levels,” according to information on the county’s website.

Commissioners in May approved a more than $122 million contract for the construction of the plant expansion and RO upgrades.

Maysville, a small town about 70 miles north of Wilmington, received in late 2020 a little more than $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to install a new filtration system in the town’s well.

After state-conducted tests revealed PFAS from firefighting foam contaminated the well water, the town switched to Jones County for its drinking water.

Cutting it off at the source

Chemours is facing several lawsuits brought on by environmental groups, utilities, including CFPUA, and local governments in North Carolina.

Cumberland County became the latest to file suit in March, alleging Chemours and DuPont, which operated the Fayetteville plant between the 1970s and 2015, has been polluting the air, groundwater and surface water with “blatant disregard.”

As part of the 2019 Consent Order between the company, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, and Cape Fear River Watch, Chemours has to remove more than 99% of PFAS being released into the environment.

Chemours began operating in December 2019 a thermal oxidizer, which proved an average efficiency exceeding 99.999% in removing PFAS during a three-month testing period in early 2020.

But weekly samples CFPUA collects from the river still have Chemours-specific PFAS, Vandermeyden said.

The presence of GenX has greatly declined, but some compounds, specifically PFMOAA, one of the shortest short-chain PFAS, has increased, he said.

PFMOAA (perfluoro-2-methoxyacetic acid) is one of the most difficult to treat because it “doesn’t want to stick to anything,” Vandermeyden said.

“It is going to drive our costs. If there’s less PFAS in the river, which we’re hoping for, the lower our operating costs will be.”

Chemours regional communications lead Lisa Randall said in an email response that the company had since March 2020 been sampling the river twice a week downstream from the Fayetteville facility at Tar Heel Ferry Road bridge. The bridge spans the Cape Fear River in Bladen County.

“The data (Appendix B of the Cape Fear River PFAS Mass Loading Assessment – Fourth Quarter 2021 Report (Geosyntec, 2022)) shows the concentrations of PFMOAA downstream in the river have an overall decreasing trend since April 2021 and have shown a consistent decrease since October 2021,” Randall said.

Chemours is in the early stages of an onsite project designed to stop contaminated groundwater from flowing into the river.

The wall will span 70 feet deep and stretch more than a mile long along the Fayetteville Works Facility’s entire river shoreline.

“The remedy will intercept groundwater presently heading to the Cape Fear River using groundwater extraction wells,” Randall said in the email. “The extracted groundwater will be treated using ultrafiltration pre-treatment followed by PFAS removal by granular activated carbon (GAC). This is the same system design that is currently successfully removing PFAS at Chemours’ Outfall 003 treat system.”

It is expected to be complete in the first quarter of 2023 “pending receipt of approvals and permits from NCDEQ and other government agencies.”

Last month, Chemours began mailing letters to properties with private wells in New Hanover, Brunswick, Pender and Columbus counties in a process to determine which wells qualify for sampling under criteria laid out in the Interim Drinking Water Plan.

The company had planned to mail out about 60,000 letters by the end of May.

During her update to the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission last month, Sushma Masemore, DEQ assistant secretary for environment, explained that private wells with water exceeding 140 parts per trillion, the current state health goal, will be provided alternative drinking water options on Chemours’ dime.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected in the coming weeks to release a health advisory level for GenX.

“We’re expecting that level to be much lower than 140 based on the reference dose that they had released in the fall of last year,” Masemore told the commission, adding that state officials expect more private well owners to be brought into the Interim Drinking Water Plan if the threshold is lowered.

PFAS are largely unregulated and therefore do not have a minimum reference dose, or a determination of at what level the health effect is so negative consumption should be reduced, to establish a drinking water standard, a surface water standard or advisory level.

Last October, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, former NCDEQ secretary, released the PFAS Strategic Roadmap, an agency-wide approach designed to increase investments in research, leverage authorities to restrict the release of PFAS into the environment, and accelerate cleanup of PFAS contamination.

“Most recently the road map did announce enforceable drinking water limits for PFOA and PFAS,” Masemore said. “EPA plans to propose that in the fall of this year and finalize next year. We want to focus on PFAS that are found in North Carolina. EPA strategy is broad and large and they’re looking at a national approach. We in North Carolina will need to examine what is prevalent and what is of most importance in our state.”

Such a move could be valuable in a state whose population depends on surface water as its drinking water source.

“North Carolina has its fair share of problems when it comes to PFAS,” said Heather Stapleton, a Duke University environmental science professor and environmental chemist who studies peoples’ exposure to chemicals. 

Stapleton is part of a collaboratory of North Carolina-based university researchers formed in 2018 to study PFAS.

Based on the data they’ve gathered these past few years, researchers estimated that at least 10% of North Carolina’s population, about 1 million people, has elevated exposure to PFAS, she said.

“I think we’re very vulnerable in this state for this type of contamination largely because we have a heavy reliance on surface water as a drinking water source in North Carolina and we have a lot of manufacturing,” Stapleton said. “While it’s not clear what the exact source of PFAS are north of the Haw River, I know there are a lot of textile manufacturing facilities up in that area. I think we need to do what we can to really understand the source of these problems, the source of the PFAS contamination, to help inform other areas and other states that might also be vulnerable, but to prevent things like this from happening again in the future.”

Setting standards

At the end of her presentation to the commission, Masemore broached the possibility of the state establishing its own maximum contaminant level, or MCL, for chemical compounds.

“We have rarely established our own MCLs at a state level,” she said. “If we wait for EPA, the earliest MCL we will have is for PFA and PFAS, that’s spring or fall next year. So, there’s an opportunity for us as North Carolinians to decide, how much of this do we take on ourselves to be proactive?”

She said a handful of other states have set their own MCLs and therefore could serve as models for how North Carolina might go about doing the same.

A little more than three weeks after Masemore spoke to the commission, DEQ Secretary Elizabeth Biser announced the department’s plans to propose MCLs for PFAS specific to North Carolina.

“DEQ is committing to proposing standards for groundwater, surface water and drinking water for North Carolina’s priority PFAS compounds,” she said. “Science-based, enforceable standards are critically needed to reduce the PFAS pollution affecting North Carolinians around our state. Drinking water standards also create regulatory certainty for industry and public water systems, allowing them to design treatment methods that are protective of human health.”

The department will implement drinking water standards through its permitting program.

Biser said the department is moving forward expeditiously with establishing MCLs for compounds “we already have data for and we’re also working with our academic partners to identify the needs for toxicity assessments and reference doses for the other compounds that we don’t quite have yet,.”

DEQ is looking to initially prioritize 10 to 15 compounds specific to North Carolina, she said.

Gov. Roy Cooper and Biser set forth the DEQ Action Strategy for PFAS  at a press conference Tuesday on the riverfront in downtown Wilmington.

The strategy details steps the state will take to protect communities, protect drinking water and continue focusing on cleanup and remediation of PFAS contaminated ground, surface and drinking waters.

“We will continue to prioritize and address highest exposure risks, especially for our vulnerable and disadvantaged communities,” Biser said. “We will continue to update and evolve this strategy as we move forward and I expect all of you to hold us accountable as we do that. We want to ensure that in the future no community experiences what you have already been through.”

Cooper noted during Tuesday’s press conference that his budget proposal includes funding for DEQ to have an established team to analyze emerging science and provide technical assistance to aid in protecting drinking water sources.

He also touched on House Bill 1095, proposed legislation that would authorize the Environmental Management Commission to adopt MCLs. The bill also would require any company that releases PFAS above health thresholds to pay costs public utilities incur to remove chemicals from their raw drinking water sources.

“Those who made money off of polluting the water should be the ones to pay to clean it up,” Cooper said, his remark followed by applause.

“We’ve come a long way in the last few years in identifying these chemicals, stopping the polluters and charting a path forward, but there is still much work to do. The challenge for us is bigger than any one company or any one chemical. This is a state-wide and a national issue that demands our attention and our action.”

Third in a series.

Official efforts to communicate the health risks of certain man-made compounds in heavily contaminated communities are falling short, according to a recent analysis.

PFAS is a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals found practically everywhere, such as in firefighting foams, stain-resistant carpets and furniture, nonstick cookware, takeout containers and microwave popcorn bags.

While most humans have a detectable amount of PFAS in their bodies from multiple sources including food, food contact materials and indoor products, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are millions in the United States that have been subject to significant contamination, either through work exposure or drinking water.

For the report, “Official health communications are failing PFAS-contaminated communities,” published May 10 in Environmental Health, researchers reviewed information produced by local, state and national agencies, professional societies and nongovernmental organizations geared toward the public and healthcare providers on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

The analysis found that most official information does not evaluate the risks highly exposed communities face compared to the general population. Researchers also found that the official information doesn’t fully explain how strong scientific evidence is for certain health outcomes, though most or nearly all studies have found harm from PFAS exposure for immune, liver, reproductive, and cancer, such as kidney or testicular cancer, according to researchers. Researchers also found that the language used is often unqualified, misleading or unclear. Finally, there is a lack of material on how to reduce exposure and risk of harm.

The study concludes that immediate action needs to be taken to review and improve this messaging “intended to inform the public and health providers about the risks of PFAS exposure and guide community and medical decisions.”

Motivation for the study

Lead author Alan Ducatman, a physician and professor emeritus at West Virginia University, responded to Coastal Review by email, saying that during the first Northeastern University PFAS conference in Boston in 2018 is when he first heard a community leader express concern about how “public PFAS communications intended for clinicians or for the public were doing (unintended) harm.”

Once the concern was pointed out to him, he said it came from more directions. “It could be heard in lots of places, from different kinds of people.”

About three years ago, Ducatman said he began thinking about whether there was a useful way to consider the topic. “My first questions were what is in those public facing health communications? What message is said to clinicians specifically? How well do the communications align with the current scientific knowledge?”

The initial goal was to assess whether there was a problem, and if so, how to shed light on it, he continued. “Progress was slow at first. Clinician training is wonderful, but no one of us is as smart as all of us.”

He said that once he was joined by coauthors for the study, the pace of progress increased and led to the creation of the freely accessible online paper. Coauthors who joined him were Dr. Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University, health communicator Rebecca Fuoco and Jonas LaPier, who focused on research and data.

Fuoco, science communications officer at the Green Science Policy Institute, added that last year the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a series of online town hall meetings to discuss clinical guidance for PFAS exposure.

“Members of PFAS-contaminated communities voiced concerns that current government fact sheets and webpages unreasonably minimize PFAS health risks. Dismissive language in these materials can influence the attitudes of healthcare providers and policymakers and create more hurdles for affected communities to get the help they deserve,” Fuoco said.

DeWitt told Coastal Review that she became involved in the study because she had known Ducatman for some time and they serve as liaisons to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, PFAS clinical guidance committee.

“We also both interact with community members who express their frustration to us about health guidance,” she said, adding she also teaches medical students and know that they receive very little toxicological education.

Researchers on the results

Ducatman said that at first, he was disappointed with the results of the study.

“Surprise was a part of it, as the extent of the problem in public-facing communications was at least as great and maybe more than I had been led to expect from the expressed concern,” he said.

“Gradually, a few better health communications also became available. Those we found helpful during our review are prominently mentioned in the article,” Ducatman continued, suggesting these more useful documents be used as templates.

“They are the most important part of the article because It is much more useful to emphasize what is helpful. What remains a little surprising is that the vast majority have not yet improved that much, despite the gradual appearance of better examples to emulate,” Ducatman said.

One residual surprise, Ducatman added, is that the pace of improvement in state and federal public-facing documents remains slow, and the expressed science in so many documents greatly trails the advances in what we know about PFAS. “We naturally wonder how the most prominent problematic communications got to be the way they are. We may never know how they got that way. The key goal is to improve them.”

What stuck out most to DeWitt from the results has been emphasized in the commentary. “Uncertainty about risks tends toward language that minimizes risks. I think in other situations uncertainty leads to greater appreciation of risks.”

In North Carolina

The state has been investigating PFAS in the Cape Fear River since June 2017 and identified Chemours in Fayetteville as the company that produces the compound.

In the five years since the public got word of contaminants in the region’s drinking water, advocacy groups and state officials have responded in various ways. There have been missteps along the way.

DeWitt said North Carolina is like other states, “where I think officials try to balance fear of the risks of PFAS exposure on health with uncertainties. It’s a challenge to develop thoughtful messaging, and I think our officials did what they could given that they needed to get information out quickly after PFAS contamination became well known to the public.”

Fuoco noted that the state Department of Health and Human Services issued a letter to doctors in 2018 that discouraged blood testing for PFAS, even though the state had a wide region affected by drinking water contamination.

“Fortunately, this letter was taken offline in 2020 and replaced with an updated letter. The new letter has better messaging about blood testing, but still frames its discussion of health outcomes with language suggesting the science is preliminary or inconsistent across the board: ‘The potential for health effects from PFAS in humans is still being studied. Researchers are working to better understand how exposure to PFAS might affect people’s health. Although more research is needed, some studies of people have shown that certain PFAS may…,’” she said.

But how would busy clinicians come to know the “some studies” statement would actually be “most” or “nearly all” studies for outcomes like liver damage and reduced childhood vaccine response? Fuoco said that North Carolina residents in areas with high levels of contamination should feel empowered to advocate for themselves and their communities.

For example, they can share the accurate and helpful materials identified in the paper, such as from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials Clinician FAQ and the clinician guidance on Silent Spring Institute’s PFAS-REACH Exchange website, with their doctors to make sure their concerns aren’t dismissed.

Benefits of the paper

For patients in high-exposure communities and the clinicians who serve them, Ducatman said he hopes the paper will empower them to do two things: “Avoid or at least recognize the worst problems in current agency documents, and, more importantly, identify useful sources they can access right now. We do provide a list. For health communicators, I hope the paper triggers reflection and honest conversations with agency leaders, leading to better official documents.”

He added its encouraging that federal agencies have asked the National Academies to convene a committee that will examine current guidance and make recommendations.

“An implication of the request is that there must be internal agency recognition that the usefulness of current communications is being questioned,” Ducatman said. “However, problems are also sufficiently evident that one wonders why obvious problematic parts are not already being removed.”

DeWitt said her hope is that the commentary will lead to better guidance for people who are worried about their health.

“I hope such guidance includes messages about what sorts of questions people could ask their physicians as well as questions that physicians could ask patients who live in PFAS-contaminated communities,” she said. “I also I hope that it leads to physicians talking more with one another to potentially discover additional associated health risks.”

Fuoco added that she hoped the study moves state and federal health officials to improve their public communications on PFAS.

“Our paper provides examples from some state agencies and nonprofit groups that are great models, so this shouldn’t be a huge undertaking,” Fuoco said. “Health communication is hard. Agencies need to walk a tightrope to convey accurate and actionable information without engendering undue fear. Often, they overcorrect and tip the balance toward understating the risks.”

Ducatman noted that the paper acknowledges that health communications are truly difficult.

“Public health agencies have ever-expanding jobs, multiple demands on resources and priorities, and shrinking funds in terms of constant dollars for most missions. The authors understand that. There is no goal to increase agency burdens at a time of too much mission and too little support,” he said. “The agencies should know that they have potential partners to help out. That is to say, it is an important problem, and public health agencies are generally good at finding allies who can help with important problems.”

He added that the quotations from different agency materials become criticisms only because they speak for themselves in ways that are problematic and have not helped affected communities, including exposed workers, whose needs are often ignored. The opportunity of recognizing the problems is that improvements are achievable, that there are good templates already available, and that both stakeholders and scientists can be engaged for support.

After the National Academies’ guidance on current federal communications comes out, “it is likely to be analytic and useful, but it is less likely to tell agencies exactly what to do. I hope agency leaders will look for ways to improve now,” he said. “A strong consideration is partnership with community leaders and scientists who can help.”

State, federal reactions

Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Press Secretary Tim Carroll told Coastal Review that the agency understands that for far too long, communities across the United States had suffered from exposure to PFAS pollution.

“That’s why EPA is taking action through our PFAS Strategic Roadmap – EPA’s bold, strategic, and whole-of-Agency approach to protect public health and the environment from the impact of these chemicals. The Roadmap sets timelines by which EPA plans to take specific actions and commits to bolder new policies to safeguard public health, protect the environment, and hold polluters accountable,” Carroll said in an email response.

“Addressing PFAS contamination is a critical part of EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment. This important mission cannot be achieved without effectively communicating with communities, individuals, businesses, the media, and Tribal, state, and local partners about the known and potential health risks associated with these chemicals. When EPA communicates risk, it is the Agency’s goal to provide meaningful, understandable, and actionable information to many audiences. EPA looks forward to reviewing this new study to ensure the Agency continues to meet this goal,” Carroll continued.

“New scientific information increasingly highlights that negative health effects may occur at much lower levels of exposure to the PFAS chemicals PFOA and PFOS than previously understood. EPA is committed to science-based approaches to protect public health from exposure to these chemicals, including by quickly updating drinking water health advisories with new peer-reviewed approaches and expeditiously developing National Primary Drinking Water Regulations for these contaminants,” he said.

Bailey Pennington, a spokesperson with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, told Coastal Review that DeWitt and her colleagues’ paper included important points.

“Communicating about health effects of PFAS exposure is challenging, but it is important to clearly state that there is a substantial and growing body of research indicating that PFAS are harmful to human health. This includes the list of studies provided on our PFAS webpage,” Pennington said. “We also appreciate the need to have different communications for the general public versus more highly exposed communities, such as those near the Chemours plant and downstream of the plant in the lower Cape Fear Region.”

She added that the department would continue reviewing and updating its communications “as we learn more and will consider the recommendations in this article as we do so.”

Although more research is needed, some human health studies have shown that certain PFAS may affect growth, learning, and behavior of infants and older children, lower a woman’s chance of getting pregnant, interfere with the body’s natural hormones, increase cholesterol levels, affect the immune system and increase the risk of certain types of cancer.

“Whether or not you develop health problems after being exposed to PFAS depends on how much, how often, and for how long you are exposed, as well as which PFAS you are exposed to. Personal factors including age, lifestyle, and overall health can impact your body’s ability to respond to chemical exposures,” she said. “Scientists are actively studying the health effects of PFAS to learn more.”

The department continues to work with various federal and state partners to review all new health and toxicity information about these compounds and shares new information with communities as it becomes available, Pennington added. The work includes the ongoing Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) Exposure Assessments and Multi-Site Health Studies and North Carolina State University’s GenX Exposure Study.

Laura Leonard, public information officer for the state Department of Environmental Quality, told Coastal Review that the department worked closely with the Department of Health and Human Services to provide PFAS information to the public. “We are continuously working to provide the most relevant, accessible information to help impacted communities understand their options and make decisions.”

Second in a series.

Vaughn Hagerty was Trista Talton’s editor during her last year and a half as a reporter at the Wilmington StarNews.

This report was updated to clarify Hagerty’s career history.

You have to wonder how much longer Chemours would have gotten away with discharging unregulated contaminants into the Cape Fear River if he did not break the story.

What if Vaughn Hagerty hadn’t had the luxury of time usually lacking in bare-bones-staffed newsrooms fighting for survival in this age of social media and the 24-hour television news cycle?

What if he had missed the story by one fewer clicks of the mouse?

Would we have yet heard the now all-too-familiar term GenX?

Would tens of thousands of residents of the Cape Fear region be made aware that Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant had for decades been releasing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, into their drinking water source, the air, and ground?

The story behind the story that ran five years ago Tuesday and ripped back the curtain on synthetic chemical waste being released into the Cape Fear River is about one man’s career that, like the river itself, features a series of twists and turns guiding the water to its destination.

A little too corny? Hey, Hagerty himself recently told Coastal Review that he was living a “charmed life.”

Just another web developer ‘Googling around’

The news editor turned media web developer turned editor again turned back again to web developer had been dabbling as a freelance journalist a few months when, browsing websites in the spring of 2017, he came across something called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule.

“It was entirely by chance,” said Hagerty.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, implements the rule every five years to gather data on unregulated contaminants by sampling water utilities throughout the country.

One particular set of data that focused on legacy PFAS caught Hagerty’s attention.

Armed with his curious-by-nature journalistic instinct and background as a web developer, he loaded the data to see what would pop up for the Wilmington area. There were some local hits, enough that might make for interesting story, he thought.

He continued to “Google around,” eventually coming across a paper written by North Carolina university-based professors about legacy and emerging perfluoroalkyl substances, including one called GenX, contaminating drinking water in the Cape Fear River watershed

“At that point I knew I had probably a much better story than just this story that, ‘Hey, there’s a little bit of PFOA and PFAS in the water,’ and that’s when I started focusing on the story,” Hagerty said.

He knew nothing about the complexities of which he was to write. If memory serves, he earned a C in college chemistry.

Like any true-grit journalist, Hagerty used what he could to his advantage – people in the know and time.

“I’m definitely pretty persistent and some people might say a little obsessive,” he said. “But, also I was fortunate during this time to have access to a number of very smart and knowledgeable people who were very generous with their time and patient with my complete ignorance of this incredibly complicated topic. I think that what I had that very few other journalists had — or even have — is I could spend as much time as I needed really diving into the story without having to worry about things like covering the school board or meeting my tweet quota.”

He pitched the story early on to the Wilmington StarNews, the daily newspaper for which he’d freelanced some stories in early 2017. It’s also the paper Hagerty, as metro editor, managed the newsroom’s day-to-day operations – assigning reporters stories, editing stories and deciding what stories went where – for three years starting back in 2005.

The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, or CFPUA, in Wilmington and other utilities that supply drinking water to residents in New Hanover, Pender, Brunswick and Columbus counties were, in particular, affected by the story about a company discharging toxins into the river.

“It really seemed like the StarNews was going to be the best place for me to do the first story,” Hagerty said.

A chance conversation in a gym

“Toxin taints CFPUA drinking water” ran front page Wednesday, June 7, 2017.

Five years before, Hagerty was working in web development for the paper when he was laid off.

He did pretty well as a freelance web developer after that, but he missed journalism.

Hagerty had continued reporting on PFAS, GenX and Chemours through 2018, including for Coastal Review.

“But, the thing is, it’s very difficult to make a decent living as a freelance journalist or a journalist in general sometimes,” he said. “So, as a result, I’d eaten into a lot of savings. A whole lot. I’d already started thinking that I was probably going to need to get a full-time job.”

Where, he did not know.

Then, call it happenstance, maybe fate, a health-conscious Hagerty was working out at a local gym when fellow gym member and CFPUA’s then-executive director Jim Flechtner offhandedly asked Hagerty if he knew anyone who might be interested in applying for the job of public information officer for the authority.

“The more I thought about it, it just seemed like the perfect transition for me that would not only allow me to get a full-time job, but also to continue really being pretty engaged in the story going forward,” Hagerty said.

He got the job, a move that made local news and spurred some negative reaction on social media. The latter frustrated him.

People who didn’t know him were calling his integrity into question, insinuating bribery landed him the job he started in January 2019.

“If you go back and look at the stories I wrote, I think you’ll see that I wasn’t ever critical of CFPUA,” he said. “What did CFPUA know at the time about this stuff at which pretty much nobody knows anything is in the water? I came to CFPUA knowing full well what this organization is and who the staff are and I know that they are focused really, truly on doing what’s best for this community, and that was important to me.”

Hagerty is now the authority’s director of communications.

The journalist and the web developer

Hagerty’s reaction when he first learned contaminants were being discharged into the Cape Fear River was likely similar to that of those who read that first story about what was in their drinking water source.

“Shock, exasperation, frustration. I think the thing for many people that continues to be so frustrating is the lack of information about the health risks for all but really a tiny fraction of the thousands of PFAS compounds, particularly when what’s known about those few is generally sort of troubling. Researchers are beginning to add to that knowledge, but I think it’s still a pretty steep climb. I’m pretty sure I have some level of PFAS in my body like about 98% of the world. I assume that that’s a fact.”

Hagerty continues to comb through the latest documents, discussing their content with coworkers in a place that 10 years earlier when he was metro editor at the StarNews, he would never have guessed he’d be working.

He’s called Wilmington home since taking that position in May 2005, leaving the West Coast where he worked as managing editor and later division director at a magazine in Santa Barbara, California.

By then he’d gone from editor early in his career, which began at a little weekly in San Antonio, Texas, to his first “real” job in journalism as an editorial assistant at the San Antonio Light, to assistant city editor, then city editor at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

A one-line email from his executive editor at the Caller-Times shifted slightly his career path.

“All it said was, ‘What’s the delay in getting us on the Internet?’ I remember that word for word,” Hagerty said.

That question spurred him to learn web design and a number of programming languages. He eventually became a web developer, mainly for media companies, including the Miami Herald.

“I would say that I have lived, in general, what some people might call a charmed life, but some of that, I think, is being presented opportunities and then recognizing those opportunities and then acting on them,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate in my life that that has happened enough times, whether it’s an editor saying what’s the delay in getting us on the internet and just happen to meet some guy at the local university to help me learn programming languages and then ending up at the Miami Herald. That’s sort of charmed, right?”

Later in the series: What is being done?

First in a series

WILMINGTON – Raise your hand if you had heard about GenX before the summer of 2017.

Five years have passed since we first learned that the lower Cape Fear River, the drinking water source for more than 300,000 people, was being contaminated by GenX and a host of other man-made chemical compounds called PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

The news sent residents of communities in and around this area reeling. They had questions for which there were few to no answers, particularly when it came to how they could protect themselves against something they could not see, taste or smell in their water.

Perhaps even more frustrating, no one — not the government, not scientists — could tell them whether or how GenX and other PFAS discharging from a chemical manufacturing company some 80 miles upstream might affect their health.

North Carolina-based researchers have worked diligently to find some answers to these questions these past five years.

There have been tests to determine the most effective PFAS-removing water filtration systems. Blood samples collected from more than 300 willing participants in New Hanover County have been examined for the presence of GenX and other PFAS.

Studies exploring the potential health effects in living organisms dosed with some of the PFAS flowing into Cape Fear River have taken place in university laboratories from Greenville to Wilmington to the Triangle to Charlotte.

Meanwhile, public utilities in New Hanover and Brunswick counties are investing millions in upgrades, the costs of which have inevitably trickled down to their customers through nominal fee increases that, during a time when inflation is at a 40-year high, makes it no less painful on the purse.

Related: Measure would hold Chemours liable for contamination

Under a 2019 consent order between the state and Cape Fear River Watch, Chemours Co. must reduce at least 99% of PFAS it releases into the river, ground and air from its Fayetteville Works facility in Bladen County.

DuPont started using PFOA to make Teflon in the early 1950s. In 1980, the company began making vinyl ethers at its Fayetteville Works facility, emitting PFAS into the river, air and ground. Chemours Co. was founded in 2015 as a spinoff from DuPont.

The company has been mailing thousands of letters to addresses of private drinking water well owners in New Hanover, Brunswick, Pender and Columbus counties. The letters are kicking off a process, also required by the consent order, to identify which wells are eligible to be sampled.

There’s more to be done.

Emerging answers about emerging compounds

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency keeps track of the number of individual PFAS.

At last count, that number was around the order of 10,000.

“We’ve studied a fraction,” said Jamie DeWitt, a professor in East Carolina University’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. “That’s why I’ve been part of a group of scientists who have been calling for regulating PFAS as a class because there’s just so many different PFAS out there that we can’t possibly study them all in order to create regulation.”

Her research of PFAS stretches back to 2005 when she began looking into the health effects of legacy PFAS, chemical compounds that have been around the longest and largely phased out in developed countries. These include perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS, which was used to make things like stain-resistant fabrics, fire-fighting foams and food packaging.

It wasn’t until 2014 she learned about GenX. Back then it was called something else.

“I didn’t know about all of the other compounds. I didn’t realize that there were thousands of individual PFAS until I worked on with some folks a paper in 2017. I didn’t realize that there were so many different subgroups of PFAS and that this class of chemicals was so huge. It’s overwhelming.”

DeWitt is among a group 20 researchers from universities across the state who received funding from the North Carolina General Assembly in 2018 to study PFAS found in the Cape Fear.

The collaboration of researchers, known as the North Carolina PFAS Testing Network, or PFAST, launched studies examining water filtration systems effective in removing PFAS, analyzing water samples from drinking water sources across the state, determining the risks of PFAS to private water wells, how PFAS travels through air emissions and gaining an understanding of how PFAS impact human health and the environment.

In one study, North Carolina State University researchers collected blood samples from more than 300 New Hanover County residents in November 2017.

GenX was not detected in those samples, but 99% contained Nafion byproduct 2, 98% showed PFO4DA, 87% had PFDoDA, and 76% contained hydro-eve, all of which were discharged at the Chemours plant.

DeWitt’s lab has been researching how understudied PFAS like Nafion by-product 2 and perfluoro-2-methoxyacetic acid, or PMOAA, affect basic responses of the immune system.

Researchers administered doses of such short-chain PFAS to experimental models — mice.

“When we see changes in this response in our model, that makes us very concerned that we may also see changes in that response to people,” DeWitt said. “What we do know is that the PFAS that we’ve studied are persistent and or mobile and or bioaccumulative and or toxic, so PFAS have these characteristics of concern in common.”

Heather Stapleton, a Duke University environmental science professor, is part of a team working with Pittsboro, a town about 17 miles southwest of Chapel Hill, since discovering a couple of years ago that concentrations of PFAS were two to four times higher in the blood of that town’s residents than the U.S. population.

“Basically, we detected them in everyone’s blood sample and they were higher than what we see in the general population and actually were pretty similar to what has been observed in the population in Wilmington,” she said.

Legacy PFAS, including PFOA and PFOS and at least one newer chemical compound, have been found in the Haw River, Pittsboro’s drinking water source.

Researchers are looking into the potential health effects of the chemicals found in the Haw River, which flows southeast where it empties into Jordan Lake, which empties into the Cape Fear River.

Working to uncovering the effects of emerging environmental contaminants to humans and animals faces a unique set of challenges.

That’s because, in many cases, researchers start out with “absolutely no information about what the chemical might do to living organisms,” DeWitt said.

“For example, when we first started asking questions about PFMOAA, one of the compounds found in the Cape Fear River, we had no idea what it might do to living organisms and so where do you start? What questions do you ask? How do you start to figure out what these compounds do?”

A way to get at those initial questions is by gaining access to toxicological data gathered by the companies that make these compounds.

One of DeWitt’s students was able to do just that after finding a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, permit application DuPont filed in West Virginia to discharge GenX into one of that state’s rivers.

Through public records, researchers were able to get toxicological data from that permit application, which included some of the doses the company had administered to experimental models.

“That allowed us to guide our study and say, ‘OK, if this dose does this in this organism then we’re going to give this dose in this organism.’ Those toxicological databases are really important in helping to guide future studies and helping to really cement understanding about what chemicals do.”

For her, the past five years have been peppered with opportunities she did not have before: access to compounds to dose experimental models, access to resources and instrumentation, and working closely with colleagues she might not have had the opportunity to work with prior to 2017.

That kind of access to those resources has equated to some pretty big strides for researchers of PFAS in North Carolina.

“I know that individuals, especially those who live in the Wilmington area, are frustrated with what seems to be the slow pace of scientific research, but I think we here in the state of North Carolina have really moved forward in a very rapid pace,” DeWitt said. “For some researchers, this could be a lifetime endeavor, but we’ve accomplished it in five years. Although it may appear to be slow, on a scientific timescale, we’ve moved really, really quickly.”

Home sweet home filtration

By early 2020, researchers within the PFAST Network released the results of a study examining which home filtration systems are most effective in removing PFAS from drinking water.

Stapleton was part of the research team that discovered the most effective systems in removing 13 different PFAS molecules found in the Cape Fear River to be reverse osmosis (RO) and dual-stage filters, which typically include one carbon and one sediment filter.

“The (reverse osmosis) and the dual stage did work well for all the different PFAS that we tested, which included short-chain and long-chain PFAS and some of the novel ether-based compounds as well,” Stapleton said.

Until that study was completed, most of the literature and information on the effectiveness of various filtration systems were either from the manufacturers of those systems or from experiments conducted in labs, Stapleton said.

“In reality, how we use some of these filters in our homes can be very different.”

For example, not everyone remembers to change the cartridge in their filter on a regular basis.

“The type of water can make a difference because water here in North Carolina often comes from surface waters, but there’s some places it comes from groundwater and water from different areas will have different types and levels of organic carbon and other molecules so the filtration can be different in different areas,” Stapleton said. “If you look at the upper Cape Fear along the Haw River, it’s really dominated by some of the short-chain PFAS molecules and there has not been a lot of research on how well those have been removed by certain water filters. And then you get down to the lower Cape Fear near the Chemours facility and it’s dominated by the ether compounds like GenX, so there’s a number of reasons we wanted to do this study.”

The filtration systems found to work best removed more than 95% of PFAS. Those systems, however, are the most expensive, running anywhere from more than $100 to well over $300.

But some filtration, Stapleton said, is better than none.

She thinks about worried residents in Pittsboro paying for expensive filtration systems to reduce their exposure to the man-made chemicals being released into their drinking water source.

“They’re bearing the burden of exposure and the costs of these water filters when it’s likely from some manufacturer or industry upstream that may or may not even know they’re contaminating the water all because our system is so lax.”

Detlef Knappe, a professor at North Carolina State University and one of the researchers who discovered GenX in the Cape Fear River, was a panelist at Cape Fear River Watch’s State of the River forum last week in downtown Wilmington.

He said that, while PFAS levels in the river have “dramatically decreased” compared to five years ago, the chemicals will probably be in the river for decades.

In his remarks during the forum, Knappe joined a chorus of researchers calling for government regulation of PFAS as a class of chemicals rather than one chemical at a time.

Managing PFAS at the source is important to breaking the cycle, he said.

“In my opinion that’s an important aspect that really needs to be part of regulations and legislation. While there’s been improvement in water quality, there’s still a lot that needs to be done.”

Later in the series: What is being done?