WILMINGTON — The company responsible for the contamination of the Cape Fear River with the chemical known as GenX has proposed a ‘corrective action plan’ to the state — a plan that the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority says falls short.
“Chemours’ proposed corrective action plan (CAP) to address decades of PFAS releases from its chemical plant on the Cape Fear River consists largely of vague promises of PFAS reductions to be realized years into the future and is inadequate to protect downstream water users, CFPUA wrote in comments submitted today to state regulators,” according to a CFPUA press release.
The plan was submitted at the end of 2019 as part of the consent order between the state, Chemours, and the Cape Fear River Watch. The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) is accepting public comments on the plan until April 6, you can submit comments to the DEQ via email at publiccomments@ncdenr.gov.
In its comments on the CAP, CFPUA wrote:
“What we find in the CAP are promises to attempt to reduce PFAS loading in the Cape Fear River sometime in the next five years or more from Chemours, a company that, along with its creator DuPont, spent almost four decades making a profit while quietly releasing these same PFAS. We find promises based on untested models and models built with inconsistent, incomplete data, confounding attempts at independent verification. We find several obvious, significant sources of contamination ignored or set aside because addressing them would cost too much or otherwise be too difficult for the company responsible for this contamination. We find gaps in calculations of the potential risks to human health posed by Chemours’ pollution. Overall, for the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on CFPUA for drinking water, we find this plan falls far short of the actions needed to meaningfully correct the damages done by Chemours and DuPont.”
“In reviewing Chemours’ CAP, CFPUA enlisted the assistance of Tetra Tech, a Pasadena, California-based consulting and engineering services firm, and Dr. Jamie DeWitt, a professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University. CFPUA’s full comments on the CAP and supporting reports by Tetra Tech and Dr. DeWitt may be found here,” the release concludes.