Residents in two counties in North Carolina fear a wave of serious illnesses, cancers and miscarriages stemming from decades of drinking tap water contaminated with toxic “forever chemicals.”
Brunswick County and Wilmington, located in southeastern North Carolina, have some of the highest concentrations of dangerous PFAS — tiny compounds that neither nature nor the human body breaks down — in their drinking water, with levels up to 155 times higher are experts consider it safe and acceptable.
Activists around the Cape Fear River are pointing fingers at the Fayetteville-based chemical plant Chemours, formerly DuPont, which they say dumped toxic chemicals into the Cape Fear River basin, which serves as the primary drinking water supply for over 1.5 million people in the United States North Carolina serves dates back to the 1980s.
Levels of certain PFAS chemicals that researchers detected in residents’ bloodstreams were up to 66 times higher than the safety threshold set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the full extent of the water damage came to light in 2017, when local residents learned the company had a long history of spilling chemicals into water supplies that have been linked to various types of cancer, liver and thyroid damage, and pregnancy complications.
It wasn’t until a large-scale study conducted by state university researchers later that year that residents came to terms with the many cases of serious and sometimes fatal illnesses they saw. And they actually saw a lot of them, as Emily Donovan, a Brunswick County activist and campaigner, told , “People are sick all the time, desperately sick.”
Analysis of hundreds of blood samples taken from people in the Cape Fear River Basin revealed shocking results, including that people in the area had levels of Forever Chemicals (PFAS) in their blood up to 66 times higher than adopted by the government for sure.
The Chemours plant, which activists say is the origin of the PFAS crisis, is still operational in Fayetteville, about 80 miles from Brunswick County
The cities shown on the map are just a few of many cities that have been found to have higher concentrations of PFAS in public water supplies and in private wells
Brunswick County, North Carolina tops an unfortunate list of US cities with the highest concentrations of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in their drinking water supplies.
According to the Environmental Working Group, which sets stricter harmful limits for PFAS concentration than the federal government, Brunswick County water contains 155 times the amount of PFOA considered safe (1.09 parts per trillion). The national average is 0.945 percentage points for reference.
The water also contained 14 ppt of another PFAS, PFO3OA. The national average is 0.565 ppt. And the concentration of GenX, a newer variant of PFAS, reached 28.1 percentage points compared to the national average of 0.963 percentage points.
The toxic chemicals lurking in the Cape Fear River drainage basin have been linked to various reports of cancer, kidney and liver damage, and birth defects in Wilmington and Brunswick counties.
Also known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS were given that name because of their ability to linger in the body for years or even decades before being broken down and excreted. Because the effects of long-term exposure can take time to manifest, authorities are reluctant to say with certainty that increased rates of disease are due to PFAS.
dr Jamie DeWitt, a toxicologist and PFAS expert at East Carolina University, told that without a comprehensive study, attributing the region’s above-average cancer rates and low birth weight to PFAS would be far-fetched.
But area residents, many of whom are struggling with breast cancer, brain tumors, kidney disease and miscarriages, blame Fayettville-based chemical plant Chemours, a DuPont spinoff.
The company has reached numerous court settlements with companies accused of poisoning the water and air around them, although the company has not expressly admitted wrongdoing.
There have been anecdotal reports of mysterious cancer diagnoses from doctors and patients, including a close friend of Ms Donovan, who died of cancer last autumn.
The ten worst cities for PFAS in drinking water
Concentrations are measured in parts per trillion (PPT).
Information courtesy of a separate report from the Environmental Working Group
Emily Donovan, the driving force behind the Clean Cape Fear advocacy group, told : “What’s disturbing and alarming is that it runs in everyone in my family.”
“I have twins and was seven months pregnant when we moved to this area. And so of course I drank a lot of water until the end of the pregnancy and then throughout breastfeeding and throughout her life up until 2017.”
By this time, news of the contamination of the tap water had broken out and the Donovans stopped drinking tap water as much as possible.
Though her children’s school wasn’t quick to replace the faucet with bottled water, that was a frustrating oversight on the part of Ms Donovan, who had to send her children to class “knowing they didn’t have access to safe drinking water.”
Ms Donovan was confronted directly with the ravages of pollution, first with her husband, who developed and survived a brain tumor three years after moving to the county in 2009, and then with her dear friend Tom, who was diagnosed less frequently male breast cancer that has spread to his bones and brain.
Tom died last November without knowing exactly what caused his aggressive cancer.
Ms Donovan said: “Tom always wondered: did the tap water cause his illness?”
And while we’ll never know if the tap water caused his illness, he always insisted that it didn’t help, you know, sure, he shouldn’t drink that water.
The death of her friend shook Ms Donovan’s faith, she said, adding, “You’re just wondering, what is humanity doing?” Because that was totally preventable, and when I say that was totally preventable, then it lies not because of his cancer, but because of the stresses we have been subjected to.”
Since 1980, DuPont produced a special type of PFAS resin called Nafion, which was supplied to General Electric for use in NASA’s Gemini space program in the 1960’s. The company also began manufacturing PFOA, another type of PFAS that stays in the body for years, in 2000.
The company phased out the use of PFOA and replaced it with another type of PFAS called GenX in 2009, four years after DuPont settled a class-action lawsuit for approximately $107 million, arguing that the Companies manufacturing Teflon contaminated beverage supplies in Ohio and West Virginia.
“The settlement with DuPont in West Virginia brought PFAS, particularly PFOA, to the attention of the entire world,” said Ms. Donovan.
“To be honest, when these settlements came about, we weren’t really aware of them. That was eye-opening and caught the nation’s attention. They caught my attention.
“And I was like, ‘Wow, I feel so sorry for the people of West Virginia. It’s good to see that they get a measure of justice, although I didn’t know at the time that I myself was being poisoned over and over again.” “My own children who grew up with this tap water because their pediatrician recommended water for them to drink.”
That sum was the first of several that DuPont, and later its spin-off Chemours, paid either in the form of more than $10 million in fines to the Environmental Protection Agency or in the form of approximately $671 million in alleged wrongdoing settlements -dollars paid in 2017.
In all, Chemours is believed to have manufactured at least 54 different types of PFAS. And scientists have been able to detect a handful of them in people’s blood.
has reached out to DuPont and Chemours for comment but has received no response.
In a landmark report released in 2020, blood samples were taken between 2017 and 2018 from 344 residents of Wilmington, North Carolina, which happens to be the fifth-largest PFAS-polluted water system. While the federal government previously considered two nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) the maximum concentration Wilmington residents may have posed a hazard, and some of their levels were well above that level.
In most cities where the environmental working group finds high levels of PFAS in the water, cancer diagnoses are above the national average of about 439 cases per 100,000 people
Deaths from all cancers were above average in most of the top ten cities. Certain cancers are more strongly associated with PFAS exposure, including kidney and testicular cancer
Blood levels of PFAS broadly reached up to 133 ng/mL, a 66-fold increase over the national recommended upper limit.
The mean PFOS concentration in the blood was 8.6 ng/ml, but in some cases it was as high as 26.8. PFOS, or perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, is extremely persistent, meaning it can take years to break down in the environment and water treatment plants have a hard time breaking it down.
The mean concentration of PFOA, or perfluorooctanoic acid, in the blood of humans was 4.3 ng/mL, ranging from 1.7 to 11 ng/mL. Meanwhile, levels of a chemical called PFHxS ranged from 1.2 to 8.5 ng/mL, although the median was 3.2.
Ms Donovan told her blood counts, as well as those of her husband and twins. She reported her measurements in parts per billion (ppb), which can be used interchangeably with ng/mL to measure the concentration of PFAS compounds in a given substance, such as water or blood.
Her total PFAS was 17.1 ppb and her PFOA was 3.3 ppb. Her husband’s total PFAS score was higher, although they don’t know why. Its value was 26.8 parts per billion. The Donovans’ 14-year-old son measured 7.1 ppb and his twin sister measured 9.6 ppb.
Ms Donovan said, “Thankfully we’re healthy now.” But I think I’m just living with the fear and worry: will that change?
“We see our friends going through it and it just seems like there’s no point in it.”