The Wrong Side of Forever

This story is co-published with CityView.

On an overcast April afternoon, a handful of Gray’s Creek residents cluster around Jamie White’s wooden porch for a debrief. It’s warm and breezy, an ideal spring day for the plants that line the edge of the porch, potted in the bottom halves of large plastic water bottles. 

White has so many of those repurposed planters because she and her neighbors have been drinking bottled water for years. Their wells are contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a family of nearly 15,000 chemicals better known as PFAS.

“This was supposed to be my forever home. My porch. My forever spot,” White said. PFAS, sometimes dubbed “forever chemicals” because of their remarkable persistence in the environment, weren’t part of that vision when she moved here in 2008.

White and her neighbors were meeting the day after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced the country’s first drinking water regulations for PFAS. EPA Administrator Michael Regan, along with local and state elected officials, visited the banks of the Cape Fear River outside a water treatment plant in Fayetteville on April 10, proclaiming a new era for the state’s largest river basin.

“We’re holding polluters accountable,” Regan said. “We’re advancing the science around PFAS, and we’re listening to and learning from the very communities that have had to face the fears of contamination.”

Not everyone in Gray’s Creek is convinced. 

“Actions, to me, speak louder than words,” said Vickie Mullins, leaning back into her rocking chair on the porch. “That, yesterday, was a joke.”

It’s not surprising that Mullins is skeptical and frustrated. She’s lived for more than 40 years in this rural community about 20 minutes south of Fayetteville and just a few miles from the Fayetteville Works facility owned by chemical company Chemours. For almost as long as Mullins has called Gray’s Creek home, Chemours discharged contaminated wastewater into the Cape Fear, including a type of PFAS known as GenX. 

Many residents of Gray’s Creek and other communities near the Fayetteville Works plant suffer serious health problems they attribute to its chemical emissions. PFAS have been linked to several kinds of cancer and numerous other adverse health issues. The compounds are ubiquitous in household items like nonstick pans, carpeting, and dental floss, but the levels Chemours emitted into the water before the state suspended its discharge permit in 2017 were much higher than what people would normally be exposed to.

A 2019 court-enforceable consent order between the company, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, and environmental nonprofit Cape Fear River Watch required Chemours to clean up its contamination and curb future emissions. The company is also required to test private wells for PFAS, provide regular deliveries of bottled water to households in need, and install filtration systems for well users when necessary. 

The company says it has “made significant progress” toward achieving its goal of eliminating at least 99 percent of PFAS emissions from manufacturing processes by 2030. “Chemours has taken a broad and unprecedented set of actions, including investing hundreds of millions of dollars, to reduce PFAS discharges from Fayetteville Works,” said Jess Loizeaux, a spokesperson for the company, in an email statement. 

But the company has also missed deadlines and been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for violations of the consent order over the last three years. Several Gray’s Creek residents are part of ongoing lawsuits against Chemours and its former parent company, the chemical giant DuPont. Others are participants in studies measuring how much PFAS resides in their bodies. 

The EPA’s much-touted new drinking water rules don’t address industrial releases, focusing instead on public water systems, which will be required to filter PFAS from sources like the Cape Fear. 

But most people in Gray’s Creek use private wells, and while the Biden administration has promised resources for well owners to test water supplies, too, residents aren’t sure how that will work and the EPA hasn’t provided details around funding beyond fiscal year 2024 for private well users. When it comes to industrial facilities, North Carolina has set disclosure requirements for some users, but not comprehensive limits.

Meanwhile, the Cape Fear watershed is preparing for a new wave of industrial development. Four facilities at so-called “megasites”—aircraft manufacturer Boom Supersonic in Greensboro, Toyota Battery Manufacturing in Liberty, VinFast’s electric vehicle factory in Moncure, and chipmaker Wolfspeed in Siler City—are slated to start production in the next few years. Those industries are all known users of PFAS, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

State leaders have touted the capital investment and job creation tied to those developments, which are also priorities for the Biden administration. And the DEQ says addressing PFAS from current and future industry is a priority, pointing to an “action strategy” released in 2022.

“DEQ works with businesses and industry organizations to make sure they understand that emerging contaminants are a concern for the state and our residents,” said spokesperson Josh Kastrinsky. 

Still, on White’s porch, the Gray’s Creek residents alternate between joking camaraderie and serious, impassioned accounts of living with contaminated water. They can quickly produce a running list of neighbors with cancer. They’ve been fighting this battle for years, and worry the pressure of new development on the watershed will only make their situation worse. 

Adapting in Place

The 200-mile Cape Fear River runs across central and southeastern North Carolina, beginning near Greensboro and flowing through Fayetteville before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean near Wilmington. It serves as the drinking water source for more than 1.5 million people, and as of last December, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill detected 47 different PFAS compounds in the river—eight of which had never previously been found outside of a lab. 

The EPA’s new guidelines, which don’t start taking effect until 2027, set legally enforceable standards for six of those chemicals in drinking water. For two, PFOS and PFOA, the maximum permitted contamination level is 4 parts per trillion (ppt)—equivalent to a single drop of ink in five Olympic-sized swimming pools. 

An analysis from the nonprofit Environmental Working Group estimated that over 2.5 million North Carolina residents rely on public water systems that exceed the new standards, including in Greensboro and Fayetteville. The EPA’s previous standard for PFOS and PFOA, which was strictly advisory, was much higher, at 70 ppt. 

The agency also finalized non-enforceable “maximum contaminant level goals” for PFAS—measurements at which there are no known adverse health effects. For PFOS and PFOA, that goal is zero.

Mike Watters, a Special Forces veteran, moved to the area in 2012. As founder of the activist group Gray’s Creek Residents United Against PFAS, he’s become one of the region’s most vocal advocates for clean water. 

In 2021, Watters was diagnosed with polycythemia, a kind of cancer that thickens his blood and puts him at greater risk for clotting. In April 2023, he suffered a heart attack. 

Results from a North Carolina State University blood study showed that in 2019, Watters’ blood had 29.2 nanograms per milliliter across seven types of PFAS. Guidance from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says levels above 20 are “associated with higher risk of adverse effects.” In 2023, his levels dropped to 10.59, which he attributes to his cancer treatment. 

Watters said he feels Chemours is the reason for his health problems. Research shows that exposure to PFAS is linked to greater risk of cardiovascular disease, as well as kidney, prostate, and testicular cancers. Still, scientists have called for more research examining the human health impacts of PFAS. Specific health effects are challenging to pinpoint for various reasons, including because there are thousands of PFAS chemicals and the ways in which they have been manufactured has changed over the past several decades.

When Watters moved to the neighborhood, he’d bought his home from a senior chemist at DuPont. At the time, Watters believed he got a good deal on the house. “And now I’m paying for it,” he said.

Watters and other clean water advocates who spoke with The Assembly and CityView applaud the new EPA rules. But they also worry the standards place a disproportionate burden on public utilities and private well owners to address contamination, rather than on the corporations that release the chemicals into the environment.

The Biden administration has promised $1 billion for states and territories to test and treat PFAS. The funding includes assistance for public utility systems and private well owners, with an allocation formula that weighs a community’s population, contaminant figures, and number of water systems. North Carolina received over $29 million in fiscal year 2024.

However, the full cost of adhering to the new standards will likely be much higher. The EPA estimates the annual cost of the rules at over $1.5 billion; the American Water Works Association (AWWA), a professional organization for utilities, projects a yearly cost of $2.5 to $3.2 billion, based on an analysis by Black & Veatch, a company specializing in infrastructure development. (On June 7, the AWWA and Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies sued the EPA over the new rules, citing what they called underestimated costs and inappropriate use of data.) 

Two days after the EPA’s April announcement, Cumberland County and the Public Works Commission, Fayetteville’s public utilities system, vowed to build out public water lines to Gray’s Creek, beginning with two elementary schools. While the North Carolina legislature will contribute an initial $12 million appropriated in last year’s budget, commission officials say the project could cost up to $100 million.

“It is our intent that Chemours and DuPont pay for all of this, and that’s why we sued them [for groundwater well contamination],” Cumberland County Chairperson Glenn Adams said. “The citizens should not have to bear the brunt of this disaster.” 

Chemours did not address allegations in the county’s lawsuit in response to an email inquiry from CityView and The Assembly. The company previously expressed disappointment about the county’s lawsuit, telling Carolina Public Press in 2022, “Our discussions with the county have included offering different alternative water systems to qualifying county properties.”

The extended public water lines would, in theory, offer new protections to Gray’s Creek because the utilities will have to filter out PFAS. But the conversation around extending water lines to the rural community has been ongoing for six years. In 2018, county commissioners hired an engineering firm to explore options for public water installation, and two years later, voted to allocate $10.5 million for the expansion. 

But as residents point out, those changes won’t stop contamination from happening in the first place.

Rivets and the River

Jennifer Guelfo hadn’t expected to find herself traversing the iced-over Mississippi River. But sometimes scientific opportunity knocks in the middle of a frigid Minnesota winter.

The Texas Tech University professor of environmental engineering had traveled to the Minneapolis area in January 2022 with Lee Ferguson, a professor of environmental chemistry and engineering at Duke University and member of the North Carolina PFAS Testing Network. The two hoped to gather water samples close to a chemical manufacturing plant 3M owns in nearby Cottage Grove.

Feet-thick ice sheets stymied their plans to snag water from the riverbank, so the scientists improvised. With help from local collaborators trained in ice safety, they found a public access point and proceeded on foot atop the frozen river to reach their sampling sites.

“It’s not the only time I’ve cored through ice to get samples, but it’s definitely the only time I’ve walked up and down a river,” Guelfo recalled with a laugh. “It was an experience, a story to tell my grandkids one day. Maybe.”

The persistence of the scientists on the Mississippi could shed light on the possible future of the Cape Fear. Guelfo and Ferguson were searching for a subset of PFAS the 3M plant produces called bis-perfluoroalkyl sulfonimides (bis-FASIs). These chemicals have extremely strong bonds between fluorine and carbon, and that stability makes them attractive for applications involving lots of energy and heat—particularly for the lithium-ion batteries now ubiquitous in cell phones and electric vehicles.

As the two researchers report in a paper currently undergoing peer review, bis-FASIs are finding their way into the wild. Water, snow, and soil samples from near the 3M plant and other industrial sites in Kentucky and Europe all contained the chemicals, pointing to emissions from both wastewater and industrial exhaust to the atmosphere. Runoff from North Carolina landfills Ferguson analyzed suggests that improperly disposed batteries are leaching the compounds into the ground here, too. 

“The more that we study these alternative energy strategies, the more that we realize that there are risks associated with the advanced materials that are being used for these technologies,” Ferguson said. “I think there are a lot of scientific questions around the implications of these materials for release, during their production, use, and eventual disposal.”

Ferguson said no one has yet looked for the chemicals downstream of battery or EV makers, such as the Toyota and VinFast facilities planned for the Cape Fear watershed. The two companies haven’t explicitly disclosed whether they plan to use the chemicals at their new plants. The NC PFAS Testing Network has received funding from the General Assembly to carry out measurements near megasites and plans to begin work in the fall.

“Could we get caught by surprise again like we did with GenX? I would say, for PFAS, probably not,” Ferguson said. “We have so much attention focused on this issue right now, and we’re so hyper-aware of the fact that industries need to be vetted, down to the very list of materials that they’re using in their processes, before they start their production.”

DEQ’s approach to industrial permitting has evolved in response to the Chemours revelations, said spokesperson Kastrinsky. Its Division of Air Quality asks screening questions about “fluorinated chemicals” early in the process, while its Division of Water Resources offers a similar questionnaire and technical support for use by the municipal water treatment systems responsible for wastewater permitting. 

“Based on those discussions, permits for air quality, wastewater discharges and stormwater may include conditions for disclosure and monitoring as appropriate,” Kastrinsky said. Such conditions are included in the air quality permits for VinFast, Wolfspeed, and Toyota; the companies are required to share information about any materials “that have the potential to result in the emission of fluorinated chemicals to the environment.”

Yet records of the megasite developers’ interactions with DEQ show that the companies haven’t always been forthcoming. Toyota, for example, did not list the use of PFAS in batteries in its initial responses to the questionnaire in 2022, and claimed that no EV battery makers anywhere were aware of PFAS in their manufacturing process—even as industry groups openly advocate for use of the chemicals. Only after multiple rounds of emails with the state did the company acknowledge plans to use almost 5 million pounds of an unspecified “fluorinated chemical” in its battery electrolyte each year.

Toyota declined to answer a list of follow-up questions from The Assembly and CityView. “The information you are seeking is either in the NCDEQ questionnaire or it’s proprietary,” wrote company spokesperson Emily Holland.

VinFast didn’t complete DEQ’s questionnaire, stating only that “the substance is not present” in any of its materials. While the company did provide a list of paints and coatings after further prodding from the state, none of which contained any PFAS, it did not provide information about its battery chemistry. Wolfspeed listed two PFAS substances in its responses to the state, a tubing material known as PFA and a refrigerant called R-134a, and received its air quality permit in June.

Representatives from Vinfast and Wolfspeed did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Aubrey Scanlan, a spokesperson for Boom Supersonic, said that the company had not submitted air or wastewater permit applications to DEQ and that any decisions regarding PFAS “would be made in the future once we have fully defined site operations.”

Kastrinsky said the questionnaire was “intended to capture all components of the manufacturing process and components that pass through the operation,” including batteries. Nonetheless, both VinFast and Toyota received air quality permits from the state in February 2023.

“The questionnaire is a starting point,” Kastrinsky said. “DEQ’s focus on PFAS continues throughout the processes and discussions with permit applicants.”

Limits of Progress

Critics say North Carolina regulators and lawmakers have focused too much on understanding how businesses use the chemicals and not enough on preventing emissions in the first place.

At the General Assembly, Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison of Greensboro said, lawmakers have been very generous with funding for PFAS research through the NC Collaboratory, the research group that houses the NC PFAS Testing Network. In the state’s most recent budget, for example, the initiative received $26 million for research projects and programs on PFAS-containing firefighting foam, airborne PFAS, and the health impacts of exposure. NC Health News reported that the state will spend at least $50 million on PFAS research through 2025.

Harrison’s efforts to ban the manufacture of PFAS in the state or forbid its release into the environment, however, have failed to gain traction. A bipartisan bill introduced in 2022 that focused on holding industry liable for pollution died after a contentious hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, though a similar bipartisan proposal from Reps. Ted Davis Jr. and Frank Iler, Republicans from Wilmington and Shallotte, respectively, passed the House Environment Committee on June 11 and continues to move through the legislature.

Harrison blames the lobbying efforts of powerful business groups for the slow pace of legislative progress. Organizations like the NC Chamber and NC Manufacturers Alliance have challenged PFAS regulation as a potential threat to North Carolina’s economic competitiveness.

“Amazingly, it got shot down right away,” Harrison recalled about the 2022 hearing. “All these groups just jumped on board and said, ‘This is bad for business. Nobody’s going to come here if we regulate like this.’”

Davis and Iler did not respond to multiple requests for comment about their bill. Elizabeth Lane, a spokesperson for the NC Chamber, pointed to a page on the group’s website titled “Beyond the Noise on PFAS,” which outlines its opposition to polluter liability and claims without providing evidence that PFAS rulemaking has been unduly influenced by “the nature of politics and election-year pressures.” Jimmy Carter, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, said his organization’s leadership declined to comment. 

Somewhat more movement is taking place on the regulatory side. The DEQ is developing enforceable limits for eight PFAS chemicals in groundwater and surface waters, including the six that the EPA’s drinking water rules also target. If approved, the new standards would require private industry and publicly owned wastewater treatment plants to comply with the limits by 2027 and 2028, respectively.

Those efforts, however, have been beset by industry pushback and procedural delays. The NC Chamber said in an April 22 letter to DEQ Secretary Elizabeth Biser that the state should conduct more research and “not hastily pass regulations without fully accounting for both the positive benefits and potential negative impacts.”

Shortly after that letter, the Environmental Management Commission, a group appointed by state lawmakers to approve DEQ’s proposed rules, postponed a key vote to begin the formal rulemaking process at the behest of Republican-appointed members Tim Baumgartner and Joseph Reardon, who said the commission hadn’t received enough information to proceed.

Biser said she was “deeply disappointed” by the move in a May 1 response, noting that the board had heard three informational presentations on the PFAS proposals over the last six months. “Absent further and immediate action by the commission, residents and local utilities will continue to shoulder the burden of treatment cost while groundwater cleanup is delayed,” she wrote.

Some advocates believe that the federal Clean Water Act should actually be enough to allow state regulators to bar all PFAS discharges.

Companies are constantly developing proprietary chemicals, notes Geoff Gisler, a lawyer with the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center. Gisler argues that the wording of the 1972 law empowered state regulators to keep new pollutants out of the water by default.

“That’s way too risky and way too long of a process for something as essential as clean water,” he said. “The reason we are where we are is because the EPA and state agencies lost track of the goal.”

‘The Damage is Done’

Without comprehensive rules, people living with PFAS-contaminated water have taken matters into their own hands, often becoming combination community activists, journalists, and researchers. 

Debra Stewart lives on a nearly 10-acre property in Gray’s Creek, tucked down a gravel lane. Cases of bottled water are stacked outside her home. On her property is a shed with a fake Grim Reaper and other props used to decorate floats in local community parades she helped organize over the years in protest of PFAS contamination. 

On a bright May morning, Stewart makes her rounds feeding the horses, chickens, rabbits, dogs, and cats settled across her property. 

One of her horses, Whisper, was a participant in a recent N.C. State blood study that found concentrations of the chemicals in her blood. While Stewart’s been giving bottled water to some of her pets, her horses still drink well water. 

Of the Gray’s Creek neighbors who gathered to dissect the EPA announcement back in April, Stewart is the most somber. She said she persists in her advocacy work on water contamination because she believes “we have entered into the first phase of an extinction-level event.”

“We have no place else to go,” she said. “PFAS is in our system. The damage is done.”

Maydha Devarajan is managing editor at CityView in Fayetteville. She was previously a reporter for Facing South and for the Chatham News & Record. She is a graduate of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Contact her at mdevarajan@cityviewnc.com. 

Daniel Walton is an Asheville-based freelance reporter covering science, sustainability, and political news. He was previously the news editor of Mountain Xpress and has written for The Guardian, Civil Eats, and Sierra. Contact him at danielwwalton@live.com.