State sets temporary allowable PFAS limits in groundwater

The state’s environmental regulatory agency has established temporary caps on the amounts of several PFAS that industries will be allowed to release into groundwater.

Until permanent limits are set, interim maximum allowable concentrations introduced by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources allows officials to set cleanup targets for groundwater contaminated with high levels of the chemical compounds.

The division’s announcement last week came on the heels of a study that found per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, including some of those for which the state has set interim allowable limits, have remained in groundwater offsite of Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant for up to more than 40 years.

Water resources division Director Richard Rogers will, within a year, recommend to the state Environmental Management Commission, or EMC, whether any of the interim maximum allowable concentrations, or IMACs, should be replaced or terminated.

That 15-member commission, whose role is to adopt rules that protect, preserve and enhance the state’s water and air resources, voted earlier this fall to move forward with a proposed draft rule outlining health standards for three PFAS in groundwater.

The proposed rule includes PFOA and PFOS, which are classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as likely carcinogens, and GenX, a compound specific to Chemours’ plant on the banks of the Cape Fear River.

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The Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, announced Monday that public comments on the proposed draft rule will be accepted from Nov. 1 – Dec. 31 by email to [email protected] or by mail to Bridget Shelton, N.C. DEQ Division of Water Resources, Planning Section 1611 Mail Service Center Raleigh, N.C. 27699-1611. The EMC and DEQ will also host three public hearings on the proposed draft rule beginning next month.

The commission is expected to vote on the draft rule next year. If approved, the rule is anticipated to be effective by mid-2025.

The commission omitted five other compounds state environmental quality officials sought to include in proposed groundwater limits.

Those five – PFBS, PFNA, PFHxS, PFBA and PFHxA – were specifically listed along with PFOA, PFOS and GenX in a July request by an Alamance County couple asking Rogers to establish interim maximum allowable concentrations in groundwater for all eight compounds.

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State groundwater rules grant any person the right to request the water resources director establish an IMAC for a substance for which a groundwater standard has not been set.

Graham residents Jonathan and Stephanie Gordon wrote that at least a half-dozen drinking water wells in their community tested for “extremely high levels of PFAS.”

“Issuing an IMAC will only be one step towards the relief we need, but it will at least give us greater clarity about the risk we face and the eventual obligations for unknown responsible parties to address the contamination they have visited upon us,” they wrote.

The EMC’s decision to move forward with only three of the eight PFAS recommended by DEQ was met with swift backlash from residents and environmental groups fighting for protections from PFAS for both groundwater and surface water.

Groundwater supports about 50% of drinking water in North Carolina.

Environmental justice organization Democracy Green has launched the campaign “Ban the Eight,” which includes an open petition urging the EMC to include all eight compounds in the draft proposed rule.

“We want all eight because if you’re going to do it for one you do it for all because that reaches more of the 100 counties of North Carolina that are dealing with PFAS, whether it’s from military bases, whether it’s from airports, both small and large, the Haw River all the way down to the Cape Fear,” said Democracy Green cofounder, La’Meshia Whittington. “They’re piecemealing it. People in North Carolina can’t afford that. This is a big deal for DEQ to set this precedence to say we’re going to use the EPA’s fullest authority because EMC keeps dragging their feet.”

The EMC is scheduled to meet Nov. 13-14 in Raleigh. An agenda for that meeting has not been published.

PFAS have been observed in more than 7,000 private drinking water wells within about a 13-mile radius of the Chemours plant, according to DEQ.

The chemistry company and other industries are responsible for emitting PFAS into the environment in the Cape Fear River basin, the largest in the state and one with surface water resources that are the drinking source for about 1.5 million people.

A recently published study headed by researchers at N.C. State University found it may take decades before PFAS flushes from groundwater around the Chemours plant and into the Cape Fear River.

Dr. David Genereux, a professor with the university’s Department of Marine, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, and coauthor of the study said PFAS emitted into the environment up to more than 40 years ago were found in groundwater within a test site immediately surrounding Chemours’ Fayetteville Works Facility in Bladen County.

Researchers collected samples beneath streams, which is where groundwater directly flows into surface waters.

Genereux said that a great deal of work is being done by researchers documenting the current state of PFAS by measuring it in groundwater and defining what’s there now.

“What’s different in this new paper is that we’re looking ahead to the future and not just the way things are right now,” he said. “We’re specifically looking ahead to estimate how long that PFAS would be in groundwater up near Fayetteville Works and how long it would take for that PFAS to flush out of the ground and into streams by the natural flow of the groundwater because that really is its ultimate fate.”

Instead of degrading in the ground, PFAS flows toward streams. Once the compounds make into the streams, they then flow into the Cape Fear River.

Genereux said researchers estimate it will take until about at least 2060 “possibly much longer” for PFAS currently in the ground to flush into tributaries of the Cape Fear. If compounds diffuse into clays, “that would really slow it down,” he said.

“That means that PFAS could continue to affect the river water users downstream for some decades to come,” he said.

PFAS targeted in the study are those released during the so-called high emission years from roughly the 1980s to 2019, the year Chemours, DEQ and Cape Fear River Watch entered into a Consent Order that requires the plant reduce its PFAS emissions into the air, ground and river.

The company has, through various emission controls, reduced the amount of PFAS it releases into the environment in recent years, but not at net-zero, Genereux said.

That means PFAS released into the air and hitting the ground continues to feed into the groundwater.

“There’s no time horizon for when that will flush because that source is still ongoing,” Genereux said.

If PFAS diffuse into and then back out of clays, that can significantly slow the flushing process of a compound through a groundwater system. It’s a phenomenon studied for chemicals in other places, but not the private land and agriculture fields around the Fayetteville Works plant.

Researchers have large proposal pending to try and additional funding to study clay diffusion in that area and other aspects of PFAS, including health outcomes of private well water users exposed to decades of contamination.

They’re also working on a study focusing on a small number of drinking water wells to try and estimate how long PFAS might remain persistent in wells.

“The conclusions we reached in the paper about the groundwater system broadly, as a whole, are not necessarily directly applicable to each individual drinking water well,” Genereux said. “Some drinking water wells might clear up faster than the groundwater systems as a whole, especially shallower wells. But, overall, it could be a problem at individual wells for decades.”

Reprinted from CoastalReview.org. The original article, published Oct. 22, 2024, can be accessed here.

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Trista Talton joined Coastal Review as staff writer Feb. 1, 2022, but she has covered coastal issues for Coastal Review since the publication’s inception. She is a native North Carolinian and graduate of Appalachian State University. Her career as a journalist spans more than 20 years, most of which has been reporting on issues in southeastern North Carolina. Her reporting experience includes more than 10 years of covering the military, including an embed with Marines in Kuwait leading up to the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, time in New Orleans with North Carolina National Guardsmen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and offshore patrols of New York and New Jersey aboard a Coast Guard cutter following the Sept. 11 attacks. She lives with her husband and two sons in Jacksonville.