State officials have ordered Chemours to provide bottled water to 30 more well owners near the company’s Fayetteville Works facility after the latest results from the company’s expanded private well sampling near the Chemours facility showed concentrations of GenX above the state’s provisional health goal.
“Private well sampling will continue until we find where the contamination ends,” said Michael Scott, director of the Division of Waste Management in the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. “We will ensure that Chemours is providing bottled water to those homeowners’ with elevated concentrations of GenX, and work with Bladen and Cumberland counties to develop long-term solutions for clean water.”
At DEQ’s direction, Chemours has expanded its sampling to 450 parcels one mile from the facility’s property boundary. In this latest set of results for samples collected Oct. 12 through Nov. 15, 101 wells were tested, 30 showed detections of GenX above the state’s health goal, 41 showed detections of GenX below the health goal and 30 wells showed no detection.
The state is still receiving and verifying data from the expanded sampling.
In all, there are 115 private well owners living near Chemours’ Fayetteville Works facility who are receiving bottled water because of GenX detections above the provisional state health goal of 140 parts per trillion. So far, samples from 349 wells have been collected and verified from both the initial sampling by DEQ and Chemours, and the recent expanded sampling. Of those, 144 had detections of GenX below the provisional health goal while 90 showed no detections of GenX.
In November DEQ cited Chemours with violating the conditions of its wastewater discharge permit because of the company’s failure to report an Oct. 6 spill. The spill came to light one month after it occurred when DEQ officials questioned Chemours about state water quality results indicating elevated concentrations of GenX at Chemours’ primary wastewater discharge outfall.
After uncovering the spill, DEQ started the process to revoke Chemours' wastewater permit. In conjunction with moving to revoke Chemours wastewater permit, DEQ officials also notified Chemours the state would suspend its permit to discharge process wastewater from its manufacturing area including the areas where GenX and other fluorinated compounds are produced effective Nov. 30.
This Thursday, state environmental and health officials will be on hand at an information session to answer questions about the private well results and plans for continued sampling. The information session will be held at Gray’s Creek High School Auditorium, 5301 Celebration Drive, Hope Mills, from 6-7:30 p.m.
More information about the state’s investigation can be found at: https://deq.nc.gov/news/hot-topics/genx-investigation.
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