Third in a series

A chemical manufacturer that discharged pollutants directly into the Cape Fear River for decades has asked a judge to keep thousands of documents out of the public eye.

Attorneys for Chemours and its predecessor company DuPont requested the court keep under seal mostly internal communications between company employees about “non-public facts” that largely pertain to chemical production, according to the motion filed Feb. 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

“The court has recognized that this exact type of information is competitively sensitive because, in the hands of a competitor, it could be used to disadvantage Defendants,” Chemours’ attorneys argue.

Their appeal to the court aims to shield from the public between 5,000 and 10,000 pages of documents the plaintiffs’ lawyers submitted in their case against the companies, according to an attorney representing public utilities and local governments downstream of Chemours’ Bladen County plant.

“We do not believe there is a good basis for the vast majority, if not all, of those documents to be under seal,” said attorney Bill Cary of Brooks Pierce Law Firm.

The firm represents Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, Brunswick County, Lower Cape Fear Water & Sewer Authority, and Wrightsville Beach, which sued the companies in October 2017.

The lawsuit aims to recover costs and damages associated with the Fayetteville Works’ plant’s discharges of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, for decades into the Cape Fear River, the drinking water source for tens of thousands of residents in the region.

PFAS are a group of more than 14,000 chemicals used in everyday consumer products including food containers, stain-resistant carpet and water-repellant gear. These man-made chemical compounds are persistent in the environment and have been found to accumulate in humans and animals. Exposure to these substances has been linked to weakened immune function, reproductive and developmental issues and increased risk of some cancers.

Included in the 25,000 pages Brooks Pierce has submitted to the court is a history of dealings Chemours’ West Virginia-based Washington Works Facility has had with PFAS, Cary said.

“Many of the documents that they have identified as wanting to be sealed are already on the public record, which means that there is no reason to seal them,” he said. “They’re already public knowledge. They are either part of the (Environmental Protection Agency) public record or they have been exhibits in other files.”

The Washington Works’ plant historically used synthetic compounds perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, commonly referred to as C8, and GenX, in its manufacturing processes. The plant produces resin used to make the semiconductors that power cellular phones, computers and other electronic systems.

For decades, the plant’s owners knowingly discharged C8 into the Ohio River, the drinking water supply for an estimated 5 million people. High levels of the chemical were found in public drinking water supplies and private drinking water wells downstream of the facility, prompting government intervention and a slew of lawsuits.

Earlier this year, the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, a statewide nonprofit, filed a federal lawsuit seeking a temporary court order for Chemours’ Washington Works facility to reduce its discharges of GenX into the Ohio River. The lawsuit alleges the company is exceeding its permitted discharge limits.

As part of a 2019 consent order with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and Cape Fear River Watch, Chemours has spent millions taking steps to reduce its emissions of PFAS into the Cape Fear, the ground and the air. The consent agreement also charges the company with testing thousands of private water wells in the region and providing a means of uncontaminated drinking water to households with private wells that contain elevated levels of PFAS.

The brunt of costs associated with removing PFAS from raw water sources has fallen on downstream drinking water suppliers, including Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, or CFPUA. The utility has spent millions in upgrades to filtrate PFAS out of the drinking water it provides to customers in the Wilmington area. The average customer bill includes a $7.50 charge associated with the utility’s filtration system.

A CFPUA spokesperson referred questions to Cary.

An upgrade and expansion of Brunswick County’s Northwest Water Treatment Plant totaling more than $120 million is expected to go online late this spring. The project includes the installation of an advanced low-pressure reverse-osmosis treatment system to remove compounds including PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, the latter of which is a likely carcinogen that is also being discharged into the Cape Fear River by upstream polluters.

“The health of the Cape Fear River is of importance to everybody in the watershed and they should be informed about it,” Cary said.

Emily Donovon, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, said in a telephone interview earlier this week Chemours and DuPont had spent decades “hiding” its discharges of PFAS into the Cape Fear River at the expense of residents living downstream of the Fayetteville Works plant.

“We’re not just talking about monetary expenses,” she said. “We’re not talking about utility costs. We’re talking about the fact that people are dying. People have died. People died not knowing if what that company did and that facility did caused their illness to accelerate or cause them to get sick in the first place. We deserve to know everything that this company did. Out of basic human decency, we deserve to be able to see those files and we deserve to be able to know exactly what was going on. History needs to know this.”

Clean Cape Fear on Thursday afternoon posted an online petition for members of the community to sign in support of unsealing the documents.

Cary described information in the documents the companies want to remain sealed as “embarrassing” internal documents that include communications among Chemours employees.

“Or I would be embarrassed if I was Chemours,” he said.

An attorney with Miami-based Shook, Hardy and Bacon, LLP, the law firm representing The Chemours Co. FC, E. I. Du Pont De Nemours and Co., and The Chemours Co., did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

In their request to keep documents sealed, the attorneys argue Brooks Pierce violated electronic filing rules, writing, in part, that the plaintiff’s “indiscriminate inclusion of large swathes of immaterial documents” place “an undue burden on Defendants in responding and preparing this motion.”

Chemours’ attorneys go on to write that it would be impractical to redact the “enormous volume” of documents Brooks Pierce included in its Jan. 17 motion for summary judgment, or a request of the court to rule for one party against another party without a full trial.

Brooks Pierce has until April 14 to respond to the motion.

“We will respond to the motion that day,” Cary said.

In 2023, CFPUA filed a separate lawsuit in Delaware’s Court of Chancery to stop DuPont, Chemours and their related spinoff companies from financial restructuring, a move that would allow the companies to avoid liability for damages resulting from PFAS contamination. The case has been stayed pending the outcome of the 2017 lawsuit.

Second in a series

WILMINGTON – Without a state-set limit for 1,4-dioxane, a public utility that serves an estimated 200,000 people here will have to invest millions of dollars to remove the federally deemed “likely carcinogen” from its raw drinking water source.

The projected cost for Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, or CFPUA, to make additional upgrades to its Sweeney Water Treatment Plant is in the area of $17- $24 million, authority Executive Director Kenneth Waldroup said.

Annual additional costs associated with treating the chemical being discharged into the Cape Fear River upstream of the city are between $1 million and $3 million.

Such costs could be avoided if upstream polluters would reduce the amount of 1,4-dioxane from their effluent by 60-65%, Waldroup said.

But prospects that industry will voluntarily reduce discharges of the chemical are slim.

And efforts to get the state’s rule makers – both the North Carolina General Assembly and the Environmental Management Commission – to set a water quality standard for 1,4-dioxane are not making much headway. The commission is charged with adopting rules to protect the state’s air and water resources.

CFPUA will continue advocating for solutions, Waldroup said to a crowd of about 100 people Saturday.

The World Water Day event, hosted by Clean Cape Fear in partnership with St. Andrews-Covenant Presbyterian Church’s women’s ministry team, highlighted ongoing problems downstream water users face from upstream polluters.

It’s an issue that spans the country, where an estimated 6-10% of 66,000 drinking water systems throughout the country must figure out how to treat certain chemical compounds from their raw water sources.

The Cape Fear River is the drinking water source for tens of thousands of residents in the Cape Fear Region, one rocked nearly eight years ago when the public was first informed Chemours’ Fayetteville Works Facility had been discharging PFAS into the river, air and ground for decades.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there are more than 14,000 of these chemical compounds, which are used to make a host of everyday consumer goods from food packaging to water-resistant gear.

PFAS exposure has been linked to a number of adverse health impacts to people, including thyroid disease, increased cholesterol, liver damage, and different types of cancers.

More than two years have passed since CFPUA completed a multi-million-dollar upgrade to its Sweeney plant, which included the addition of a filtration system to remove PFAS, including GenX, from its raw water source.

Today, the average CFPUA customer bill includes a $7.50 charge Waldroup referred to Saturday as the “Chemours correction surcharge,” one associated with the utility’s annual operation costs associated with the filtration system upgrade.

That upgrade entailed the installation of eight granular activated carbon filters.

The system effectively removes PFAS for which the EPA in the spring of 2024 made the move to set enforceable limits on nearly a half-dozen individual compounds in public water systems.

The cost the utility incurs each year to remove PFAS is about $4.3 million, Waldroup said. The utility’s legal fees have surpassed $10 million in its ongoing lawsuit against Chemours and parent company Dupont to pay for costs and damages related to the companies’ actions.

A trial is not expected until next year.

CFPUA monitors up to 70 types of PFAS, including GenX and other chemical compounds specific to Chemours. The utility is now looking at ultra-short chain PFAS, Waldroup said. Those are compounds with carbon chain lengths of 3 or fewer carbon atoms in sequence

The utility is able to treat “some” 1,4-dioxane from its raw water source, he said, but the activated carbon system does not remove the chemical.

He explained that there is a debate in the scientific community as to the appropriate exposure rate of 1,4-dioxane, specifically whether that rate is 35 parts per billion, or 0.35 ppb. The federal drinking water health advisory level is 0.35 ppb.

“The difference is a one in 10,000 cancer risk a 70-year lifetime exposure and a one in a million,” Waldroup said. “As the downstream water provider, we think one in a million is the right standard.”

Known polluters

In January, CFPUA and other water utilities, including Pender County Utilities, were notified by the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality that a city-operated wastewater treatment plant in Randolph County discharged substantially high levels of 1,4-dixoane into a tributary of the Cape Fear River that month.

The notice came months after a state chief administrative law judge last September revoked 1,4-dioxane limits included in Asheboro’s discharge permit. DEQ appealed the judge’s decision and is awaiting a ruling.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC, on Wednesday notified Asheboro and its industrial customers, StarPet and Waste Management’s Great Oak Landfill, it plans to sue for failing to stop 1,4-dioxane from “flowing into the drinking water supplies for about 900,000 North Carolinians,” according to a release. The intended lawsuit is being filed on behalf of Cape Fear River Watch and Haw River Assembly.

“Asheboro and cities like it have the ability and responsibility to stop this illegal 1,4-dioxane pollution before it contaminates people’s drinking water,” SELC senior attorney Jean Zhuang stated in the release. “Emboldened by its fight to dismantle North Carolinian’s drinking water protections, Asheboro’s 1,4-dioxane pollution has skyrocketed in recent months. Asheboro’s industries don’t want to pay to treat their own chemical pollution, so the city is protecting their profits over the health and safety of North Carolinians downstream and making their untreated, toxic industrial waste a costly problem for communities who get their drinking water downstream.”

Asheboro discharges upstream of the drinking water supply for Sanford, Fayetteville, Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender counties, and municipalities that buy drinking water from Sanford, according to the release.

Asheboro’s wastewater treatment plant is one of six known 1,4-dioxane upstream polluters, Waldroup said. Of those, the Alpek Polyester USA plant just upstream of Chemours is the highest source of 1,4-dixoane release into the Cape Fear River, he said.

In May, the Environmental Management Commission is expected to be presented with a draft rule to establish monitoring and minimization requirements of PFAS dischargers in the state. The proposed rule was written largely from input provided by a utility association, which has drawn backlash from one of its own members – CFPUA – and environmental groups.

Hannah Nelson, a Southern Environmental Law Center staff attorney and speaker at Saturday’s event, called the proposed rule “offensive” to residents who live downstream of industry polluters.

“This rule was written by polluters and it shows,” she said. “There is no requirement under this draft rule for polluters to reduce PFAS pollution. Polluters will use this rule to hide behind it.”

The commission has instructed DEQ to put together a similar proposed rule for 1,4-dioxane, Nelson said.

That does not prevent DEQ from requiring industries include pretreatment programs in their discharge permits and placing the burden on the polluters, she said.

And the onus of establishing rules that hold the polluter, not water utilities and their customers, may fall even more on the state under the Trump administration, which recently announced plans to dismantle the EPA’s Office of Research and Development.

The EPA’s Research Triangle Park campus is home to labs that study PFAS contamination, air pollution and industrial emissions.

North Carolina also has a group of academic researchers within the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory’s PFAS Testing Network who specifically perform PFAS-related studies in the state. The General Assembly has appropriated tens of millions of dollars for the Collaboratory.

Dr. Jeffrey Enders, a senior research scholar and research assistant professor with North Carolina State University, shared last Saturday the results of a study he conducted on PFAS in sea foam collected along the state’s southern coastal shorelines.

A majority of the 10 foam samples he studied had been 10,000 – 10 million parts per trillion of total PFAS.

People are advised to avoid contact with sea foam on area beaches.

Next in the series: Polluter asks court to keep records under seal

First in a series on legacy and emerging water supply pollutants.

RALEIGH — Addressing PFAS and other emerging compounds is a “top priority” for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, Secretary Reid Wilson told the more than 300 attending the N.C. Water Resources Research Institute’s annual conference.

“We are spending a lot of time and energy” working on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, because it’s important, Wilson continued Thursday, adding the department wants to work with all stakeholders in addressing PFAS through a comprehensive approach in a systematic, organized way.

WRRI is a multi-campus program of the University of North Carolina System that provides resources, and supports junior faculty, and undergraduate and graduate students.

The 2025 conference was held March 19-20 in the McKimmon Center and featured talks about the latest research on stream restoration, water supply planning, stormwater management, water quality, groundwater dynamics, community engagement and other water-related issues.

Wilson began his remarks by thanking the room full of researchers, educators, students, nonprofit representatives, academics and others for their contribution to science.

“I’ve been in North Carolina for 22 years,” Wilson said, explaining that he and his family moved from Maryland. “My work in these last 22 years has taken me to all corners of the state, and as I travel around, it just reminds me of the importance of making sure that everybody who lives here has clean air, clean water, healthy land from which their food comes and that they can roam around on, if it’s a park or a trail.”

NCDEQ has made “great strides over the years to collaborate with the research community to better understand the state of science a range of issues,” he said, and to ensure residents are better informed and better protected.

“We can’t make good decisions without sound, solid and unbiased scientific data. If we don’t rely on science, we will make bad decisions, and people’s health will be harmed. We don’t want that. It’s that simple,” Wilson said. “We have to base our decisions on science.”

When it comes to the emerging compounds in North Carolina’s water, programs like the PFAS Testing Network Applied Research Fellowship bring together DEQ and leading scientific experts “as we work to improve our understanding of these forever chemicals and generate the data needed to protect our communities.”

There have been several rounds of cohorts each semester working with nationally recognized experts from Duke University, the UNC system and its schools.

“We’re also partnering with Duke University Medical Center to conduct cutting edge research on how PFAS breaks down in our bodies. So we are working relentlessly to learn about these chemicals, protect our environment and safeguard our public health,” Wilson said.

NCDEQ launched its PFAS action strategy in 2022 to clean up contamination, protect drinking water and to take action to limit discharges of PFAS, into air and waterways.

“Part of that is we are sampling water systems to determine the extent of PFAS contamination, and that includes not only larger water systems, but smaller ones, like schools and daycares as well. And we have just deployed a robust set of ambient monitors that sample PFAS in the air, groundwater, lakes, rivers, streams, land, everything we can do,” he said, adding they’re really trying to “determine the extent of contamination of these chemicals.”

Wilson explained that, earlier this month at the department’s direction, Chemours, the company linked to discharging PFAS into the Cape Fear River, agreed to “significantly expand testing” of private wells in a larger area around their Fayetteville Works facility. 

“In terms of infrastructure,” Wilson said the department has “significant funds available” for towns, cities, counties, and water and sewer authorities for construction and planning projects that address PFAS contamination, and other water infrastructure needs.

“This funding makes it possible to assess options, design a solution to address PFAS contamination, implement treatment and develop with necessary alternative sources of drinking water,” Wilson said.

And last month, the department announced $265 million in drinking water and wastewater infrastructure grants that included $13 million for PFAS-related projects.

“Over the recent years, we have allocated $345 million to PFAS-related water infrastructure projects,” Wilson said. These investments are important, and will help improve lives and safeguard public health.

In Gov. Stein’s budget proposal released Wednesday for the next two fiscal years, Wilson said that it “includes an additional $1.5 million and three more employees to work on PFAS issues, to expand our capacity to address this problem, which affects lots of people in North Carolina.”

Wilson said that in addition to protecting people from PFAS and other water quality issues, “another huge priority for us is helping western North Carolina clean up, recover, rebuild from Helene.”

Millions in state and federal assistance have been provided since the September 2024 storm decimated the North Carolina mountains to restore and rebuild the region. “I think we all know that this recovery will continue to take years,” Wilson said.

“I know probably everyone in this room is trying to figure out what happens next in terms of recovery and rebuilding. We really must raise our sights beyond the immediate recovery to rebuild more resiliently, because we know these storms will keep coming with increasing frequency severity,” he said.

“Obviously, planning and public engagement will be key to this process in the mountain communities as they recover and rebuild, but that’s equally true for all over the state,” Wilson said. “We have to engage the public. We have to plan for the future, and again, plan for more severe storms.”

In an interview with Coastal Review, Wilson encouraged all stakeholders to weigh in and share their thoughts with decisionmakers, whether that’s an agency like NCDEQ, or the legislature or Congress, as environmental regulations undergo changes.

“We want to hear what people think to make sure that we’re making the best possible decisions to help people be healthy,” Wilson said.

Next in the series: Ultra-short chain PFAS