NEW HANOVER COUNTY — The county is taking legal measures to hold multiple companies accountable that create and sell products containing polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS.
On Friday, New Hanover County filed the suit against more than two dozen companies for contaminating the area’s water, soil and air for years. The county’s lawsuit is another notch to hold mega companies accountable for undue harm and follows in the footsteps of PFAS lawsuits filed by others in the last year or so — including two that Cape Fear Public Utility Authority entered, as well as one filed by AG Josh Stein, and another by multiple residents, represented by Cohen Milstein, seeking damages for health effects, including diagnoses of colon and stomach cancer, among other issues.
The county’s suit lists 27 businesses — and 49 John Does — including DuPont and all of its offshoot entities, such as Chemours’ Fayetteville Works facility. In 2017 it was found the companies had been dumping PFAS into the Cape Fear River for decades from the plant located 100 miles upstream from Wilmington.
The lawsuit also cites corporations like 3M, Tyco Fire Products, Raytheon Technologies Corporation, National Foam Inc., Nation Ford Chemical Company, Chubb Fire, Ltd., and others for products developed with the toxic chemicals that have harmful effects.
“The blatant disregard for the health and well-being of our citizens and the environment is something we as County Commissioners take very seriously and it’s why we have authorized this litigation,” New Hanover County Board of Commissioners Chair Bill Rivenbark said in a press release.
The lawsuit does not state expected damages to be paid out, should New Hanover County win or settle. According to the file, the “plaintiff seeks all legal and equitable relief as allowed by law, including inter alia actual damages in an amount to be proven at trial, and all costs and expenses of suit and pre- and post-judgment interest.”
This includes payouts by individual companies. The county claims companies knowingly continued to work with and release toxic PFAS despite awareness of its detriment on people and the environment. PFAS have been linked to various cancers, liver, immune and thyroid conditions, and impaired fetus development during pregnancy among other health issues.
PFAS also don’t break down in the environment, earning them the moniker “forever chemicals” because their presence and aftereffects are ongoing.
Ward and Smith, P.A., Baron and Budd, P.C., Seagle Law, PLLC, and Cossich, Sumich, Parsiola and Taylor, LLC signed off on the suit, stating the county wants to recover costs it has spent addressing PFAS contamination, remediation and investigation.
To bring PFAS-free water to its customers, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority invested $43 million into Sweeney Water Treatment Plant, which strains out the chemicals per granular activated carbon filters. In addition to its upstart costs, maintenance is $5 million a year.
New Hanover County’s lawsuit names companies such as 3M (CFPUA also entered a lawsuit against 3M in 2023) and Chubb Fire, Ltd. for making aqueous film-forming foam once used in firefighting equipment. It was created with PFAS and has been sprayed at airports — New Hanover County owns the land of ILM — and firefighting stations. New Hanover County has clarified local firefighters no longer utilize products that contain PFAS.
The lawsuit states “hundreds of different types of PFAS have been released into the environment by Defendants.”
For example, Chemours’ Fayetteville Works site manufactures roughly 30 different PFAS, the lawsuit claims. Yet, the company — which creates plastic sheeting, safety glass, fluorochemicals, and intermediates for plastics manufacturing — reported more than 250 previously unknown PFAS in its process and non-process wastewater and stormwater.
One of the most dangerous to come from the facility, when it was owned by DuPont from 1970 to 2015, was PFOA. Since 2016, PFOA and PFOS — fully fluorinated, organic compounds — have been banned from manufacturing processes, and just last year the Environmental Protection Agency announced it will not allow the chemicals to exceed concentrations of 4 parts per trillion in drinking water. However, the regulations won’t go into effect for another three years.
Fayetteville Works continued making PFOA to manufacture its Teflon products until 2013. DuPont had purchased PFOA from 3M, which ceased PFOA production in 2002 due to its human health and environmental threat.
In a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System application in May 2011, the county’s lawsuit said DuPont wrote to the North Carolina DEQ’s division of water quality: “PFOA does not pose a health concern to humans or animals at levels present in the workplace or environment; (2) DuPont had used PFOA for 40 years with no observed health effects on workers; and (3) PFOA is neither a known developmental toxin nor a known carcinogen.”
Though 40 years prior it had evidence otherwise. The lawsuit states the company put forth a monitoring plan to analyze workers’ blood samples in 1978, after learning from 3M that its employees had elevated levels of organic fluorine. DuPont found in 1979 those exposed to PFOA had more health issues than unexposed workers.
In 2005 the EPA learned DuPont had concealed the harm PFOA causes and fined the company $16.5 million for violating the Toxic Substances Control Act.
The lawsuit states “the defendants designed, manufactured, formulated, distributed, marketed, or sold fluorosurfactant products with the knowledge that these compounds were toxic and that they would be released into the environment.”
It says 3M was aware since 1980, according to peer-reviewed literature, that PFOS would remain in the human body for years. The lawsuit points to data stating it would take roughly one-and-a-half years to expel half of the accumulated PFOS from the body after ceasing exposure.
The lawsuit adds that DuPont’s scientists had published an internal warning about PFOA toxicity in 1961 after studying the chemical in rats and dogs and learning it led to adverse effects on the liver. According to the lawsuit, “DuPont’s Toxicology Section Chief opined that such products should be ‘handled with extreme care’ and that contact with the skin should be ‘strictly avoided.’”
Eighteen years later, the Delaware company’s data indicated a higher rate of health issues among workers exposed to PFOA than those who were not. Yet, it did not report risks to the government or reveal it to the community-at-large at the time, according to the lawsuit.
In 2015, DuPont spun off its chemical division into the offshoot Chemours. It’s located in the same facility DuPont owned and, according to the lawsuit, dumped “millions of pounds of PFAS” from the plant.
The lawsuit said DuPont instructed disposing chemicals from the making of fluorosurfactant products by washing the foam into the soil or wastewater system — “thus improperly permitting PFOS, PFOA and/or their precursor chemicals to contaminate the County, including its property and natural resources.”
The contamination continued with the manufacturing of GenX, also known as HFPO Dimer Acid, in production since 2008. However, the lawsuit said the company had been making GenX as a byproduct for years. DuPont and Chemours failed to disclose the discharge to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s water division, claiming it was being produced in a “closed-loop system.”
Cape Fear area residents only learned seven years ago — via a study conducted by Detlef Knapp of N.C. State University — that PFAS were in the river due to Chemours’ illegal dumping. The chemicals were showing up at levels 30 times higher than the health goal later set by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
In 2019, a consent order required Chemours to pay the state $12 million and provide free, clean drinking water to residents with private groundwater wells if PFAS concentrations were greater than 10 ng/L. However, it only mandated the company issue supplies to residents for 12 of 30 PFAS Chemours manufactures.
The same consent order mandated air emissions be reduced 99.9%, which was done by the installation of thermal oxidizers. The lawsuit said the technology has been around for decades, but Chemours and DuPont never utilized it.
“Defendants understood the need for technology to control air emissions,” the lawsuit said. “When it spun Chemours off in 2015, DuPont knew that the Fayetteville Works Plant had been discharging PFAS into the nearby environment through air emissions for decades. In 2010, DuPont commissioned a ‘Blue Ribbon Panel’ of company managers, scientists and engineers to identify solutions. The Panel provided several recommendations to reduce environmental emissions, one of which would have resulted in nearly the same — if not the exact same — technology required by the 2019 Consent Order to control air emissions.”
DuPont, instead, decided to install a $2.3 million gas permeator system, which would handle one waste stream — though there were multiple, the suit noted — of certain fluorinated compounds.
The ongoing pollution, the county claims, has affected more than its residents and operations of its water facilities. It also has impacted property values and tax revenues.
In 2021, tax revaluations increased 30% according to previous Port City Daily reporting. The county’s lawsuit states: “Taxable values of many County properties are lower than they would be, had Defendants’ not caused PFAS contamination in the County.”
It also indicates future losses from the fallout: “As a result of Defendants’ PFAS, the County has lost and will continue to lose property tax revenue.”
The county said it could not answer how much in property tax revenue was lost due to PFAS contamination, by how much taxable values of properties decreased and how those numbers were determined.
“This litigation is ongoing and much of the requested information is being used in the developing legal strategy,” spokesperson Alex Riley said. “Once additional information is available, we will work to provide it.”
Its lawsuit is asking the courts to require DuPont and Chemours’ to give up profits gained by alleged illegal acts. DuPont restructured its companies into Chemours, Dow Chemical Company, and Corteva, in effect shielding itself from liability in contaminating the Cape Fear River. The lawsuit requests for DuPont to be barred from transferring assets once belonging to the company before its reorganization and for a constructive trust over those proceeds be created to benefit New Hanover County.
Chemours did not respond to Port City Daily for comment by press.
[Ed. note: Residents with well water can have it tested for free as mandated by the Chemours Consent Order. If contamination meets threshold levels, residents are entitled to receive replacement drinking water for free.]
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