Jack Hoggard - Cape Fear River Watch

Florence

Florence: What We’ve Learned

On September 13th, 2018, Category 1 Hurricane Florence began to batter the North Carolina Coast.

Wilmington, North Carolina sits right in between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River. Cape Fear River Watch documented and responded to several events before, during and after the storm.

Here is our story.

More ADVOCACY items

Wednesday, Sept. 12: Pre-storm flights. The Waterkeeper Alliance team documents and confirms CAFOs spraying in violation of permit by air. Also patrolled areas by car.

Thursday, Sept. 13 – Saturday, Sept. 15: Wilmington was brutally battered by over 100 mph winds, inundated with 20 – 30 inches of rains and thrashed by several tornadoes. Major damage and flooding occur during this lashing of our coastline.

Thursday, Sept. 13 – Monday, Sept. 17: 17.17 millions of treated and untreated wastewater discharged into the Cape Fear River according to Carolina Beach town officials (discharges were coordinated with the State of North Carolina Division of Water Resources).

Friday, Sept. 14: Cape Fear Public Utility Authority discharges 5.25 million gallons of “partially untreated” wastewater into the Cape Fear River

Monday, Sept. 17: Waterkeeper Alliance’s rapid response team was in the air to photograph Sutton Lake and CAFOs.

View the CAFO shots here courtesy of our volunteer photographer Alan Cradick.

Wednesday, Sept. 19: CFRW and WKA took to the air and documented two total failures of swine lagoons which breached and emptied their contents. One was into the South River and the other into the Northeast Cape Fear River. Numerous lagoons were completely inundated by floodwaters. Dozens of barns, both swine and poultry, were underwater.

Friday, Sept. 21: Documented failure of Sutton Coal Ash Landfill by ground and notified NCDEQ. CFRW launched a boat into Sutton Lake to investigate where and if there were failures in the lake at that point. Also, documented ash flowing into Sutton Lake from multiple locations. CFRW was on the water before Duke Energy or the State. The State wasn’t even on site at the facility when we were on the water taking samples at the landfill breach with colleagues from Earth Justice and Sound Rivers. Two teams made up of CFRW staff Patrick Connell and representatives from Waterkeeper Alliance were simultaneously on the ground taking water samples from creeks around breached and inundated CAFO facilities. Sutton was then overtopped by the river. The lake filled and overtopped the coffer dam surrounding the coal ash pond, turning the river, lake, and pond into one body of water. Then Sutton Lake breached the berm as well as overtopped the berm for hundreds of yards, along the western side of the lake. Coal ash is leaving the lake at all those locations.

Samples were taken and analyzed by commercial labs and scientists at NC State. It is probable that Sutton Lake will now drain leaving the operation of the Sutton Plant in question and releasing an enormous amount of water polluted with coal ash into the Cape Fear.

Saturday, Sept. 22: CFRW hosted reporters at our downtown Wilmington headquarters before members of the Waterkeeper Alliance Rapid Response Team took them to Sutton Lake to document the coal ash contamination.

Saturday, Sept. 22 – Sunday, Sept. 23: CFRW responded to Greenfield Lake fish kill. Documented depleted dissolved oxygen from excess organic material entering the lake.

Monday, Sept. 24: CFRW staff, as part of a statewide rapid Response team, traveled to South Carolina to aid other the Waccamaw Riverkeeper with Winyah Rivers Foundation responding to contamination in their watersheds.

As this was all transpiring we gave countless media interviews. Rachel Maddow, NBC with Lester Holt, Wall Street, New Yorker, Bloomberg, NY Times, AP, Canadian Broadcasting. NPR Morning Edition. The Take Away, etc.

Tuesday, Sept. 25 – Current: CFRW staff locate, document, track and map fish kills in our basin. Reports have come in from Southport, Greenfield Lake, NC Battleship, Castle Hayne Boat Ramp, Rockfish Creek & more.

With your help, Clean Water is possible.

Cape Fear River Watch | 617 Surry Street | Wilmington, NC 28401 | Phone: 910.762.5606

Cape Fear River Watch is a 501c3 nonprofit and donations are tax deductible. Tax ID# 58-2121884

International Coastal Cleanup 2019

Americorps

On September 14th I attended the cleanup of Greenfield Lake, my first event with CFRW! The cleanup was part of a larger event called International Coastal CleanUp – in addition to CFRW’s cleanup at Greenfield Lake, there were six other locations in the Wilmington area, such as at Wrightsville Beach, along the River to Sea bike trail, and at Carolina Beach. At Greenfield Lake we had 44 volunteers and together we picked up 140 pounds of recycling and 150 pounds of trash.

The event was planned by Patrick (Greenfield Lake’s boathouse manager and an all-around helpful staff member of CFRW) in partnership with Keep New Hanover Beautiful (KNHB), a non-profit organization whose mission is to reduce litter, improve recycling, and beautify New Hanover County with the help of volunteers. Patrick coordinated the cleanups all over the Wilmington area, and he personally managed the cleanup of Greenfield Lake. I helped him with some tasks like setting up the sign-in area, checking people in, sorting trash, and taking tons of photos.

Why are these cleanups so important? Aside from the obvious aesthetic reasons, they’re also important because litter can cause huge problems for our environment! Litter is a type of nonpoint source pollution (pollution that comes from many different sources, so you can’t pinpoint exactly where it’s coming from) that can enter into our waterways via stormwater runoff (rainwater that picks up pollutants as it drains from streets and properties into creeks and waterways, polluting them). In addition to clogging storm drains and causing flooding, litter that has made its way into our waterways can be really harmful for wildlife. For example, plastic bags floating in the water can resemble jellyfish, so sea turtles eat them and then suffocate. Birds also sometimes eat plastic litter, thinking it’s food, and then they can die. Cigarette butts are a particularly harmful form of litter, making up 50% of all roadway litter! They contain harmful chemicals that can leach into our waterways.

It’s not all bad, though! At the cleanup, I was able to meet and talk to likeminded individuals who care about keeping our community and our environment healthy for ourselves and for the future. I particularly enjoyed meeting some board members of KNHB and learning about what they’re doing for our community. One of their really cool projects is a cigarette litter recycling initiative: they work with businesses, property owners, and organizations across the county to get cigarette butts recycled. To date they’ve recycled over 680 pounds of cigarette butts, helping to keep those harmful chemicals from polluting our waterways!

Patrick coordinates a cleanup of one of our local waterways every second Saturday of the month. So far this year, volunteers have picked up 1700 pounds of trash and 696 pounds of recycling from 6.03 miles of streams. Our next cleanup is on October 12th at McCumber’s Ditch, a tributary of Burnt Mill Creek. If you’re interested in volunteering on a cleanup and would like some more information, let me know, all ages are welcome! Shoot me an e-mail at audrey@cfrw.us, I would love to see you out there!

Genx Read More

Uncategorized

Well here we are, with a toxic compound in the Cape Fear River -GenX. How did it all go down? What is GenX? How are they allowed to do this? What is CFRW doing about it?

Let’s talk about how it all went down – in June of 2017 the local news broke the story – GenX found in the drinking water of parts of New Hanover and Brunswick Counties. The GenX was coming from Chemours, a DuPont spinoff on the Cape Fear River. We understood that 300,000 citizens in our community were drinking toxic water since the GenX was able to make it through our water filtration system and into our homes. We also heard that there was a toxic cocktail of other similar compounds in our river. We responded with a letter asking to be present in a closed door meeting with Chemours and our local officials. We were DENIED, but you can read that letter here.

Next Chemours announced that they would voluntarily cease discharging GenX in to the river which was encouraging. But, it also raised questions. Why stop a discharge that company officials assured the public was safe just as an EPA investigation, including river sampling, was commencing? If it was so easy to stop discharging GenX why hadn’t the company stopped long ago, especially given the 16 reports they filed under the Toxic Substance Control Act, acknowledging the strong potential for significant impacts on human health related to GenX? What prevents Chemours from deciding later that they will simply begin discharging again? What are the impacts of decades of dumping perfluorinated compounds into our drinking water supply? How will the company ensure us that our drinking water is safe, now and in the future?

The day after the announcement we hosted a Public Forum to address some of your questions, chat about the issue at hand and hear your concerns. Your Riverkeeper made a powerful statement. Read it here. We teamed up with Clean Cape Fear to reach more citizens in our community. Check out Clean Cape Fear here. Clean Cape Fear has a petition asking Chemours to stop all discharges and pay for the clean up, sign it here today.

One June 19th DEQ began their investigation into GenX and samples were taken in the Cape Fear and sent to be tested for GenX – VIEW THOSE RESULTS HERE.

On June 27th the NC Department of Environmental Quality found that Chemours was capturing wastewater into storage tanks for shipment and burning in Arkansas, we hope this continues long into the future and all of the impacts to our health and environment are addressed and mitigated. We want to know that there are ZERO toxins flowing into our river.

Your Riverkeeper has been working very hard during this water crisis. He has been going to a lot of meetings, (we said a lot right?) talking to a lot of scientists, professionals, experts and anyone else who can lead us in the right direction. We are fighting for you Wilmington, you deserve clean water. We will keep the pressure on big industry – they should not have a green light to pollute your water.

Fast forward to today – we still have a lot of questions that are unanswered and we know you do too. Let’s chat about a few of the questions we hear most:

What is this stuff? Chemours website says its “a patented, more sustainable technology” that was “developed by DuPont and now enables Chemours to manufacture high-performance fluoropolymers without the use of PFOA.” Leaves you asking… more sustainable that what? Answer – C8, GenX’s predecessor. GenX was the more sustainable than C8, a toxic chemical that Dupont is reportedly paying out to the tune of $670 million (so far). They even created a Science Panel to study C8 as part of one of the suits. The website outright links several health issues to C8. See that website here. Don’t miss the probable links reports.

So GenX is different right – well they say it is. It’s two carbons less – C8 is an eight carbon chain and GenX is a six carbon chain. Our very own Madi Polera discusses just that here.

Why have this toxic compound around in the first place? To make products like teflons, rain jackets, fire foam and most of all – to make money.

Is it bad for us? Well C8 has been proven to be, which is only different by 2 carbons. The truth is that GenX has not been around long enough for sufficient scientific study. We will unfortunately be the human lab rats in a sad money driven experiment. For nonstick pans and rain jackets. Is it worth it?

Here is the 2016 EPA information on contaminants similar to GenX- EPAdrinkingwaterhealthadvisories_pfoa_pfos_updated_5.31.16

What about the toxic cocktail? Yes you heard that right, GenX might just be the tip of the iceberg. There are several other compounds in the Cape Fear. Read more about some of them here – PFECAs_Sun_ESTL2016 and here – CFR_Knappe_052417. How do these compounds interact with each other and their environment now that they are in the river? We would like to find out.
Check out the table below, this is from a drinking water contaminants study in the Cape Fear Watershed. Look at all the PF compounds in the Cape Fear – how do you feel about being the community in a study about chemicals in our water? Sure hits home.
Read more about this table and what it means here.

*Mei Sun1,2, *, Elisa Arevalo2 , Mark Strynar3 , Andrew Lindstrom3 , Michael Richardson4 , Ben Kearns4 , Adam Pickett5 , Chris Smith6 , and Detlef R.U. Knappe2

How is Chemours allowed to discharge a hazardous chemical into our drinking water supply? How is this legal? Chemours is exploiting a loophole in their permit. They are gaming the system because they are powerful and they have an army of attorneys looking for ways to increase profits no matter the consequences for the rest of us. They chose not to tell downstream water providers that GenX was in the water. But, do not confuse legality with morality. Do not forget that just because Chemours claims that their discharge of GenX is technically legal, that it is ethical. It is not. Dupont and their spin-off Chemours have proven that morality and ethics do not guide their actions – rather they are motivated by profits. Yet another story of polluters over people. They get richer, we get sicker.

What kind of treatment can I buy to make sure the water is safe for my family and I to drink? Folks, we should not have to buy expensive water treatment systems to filter out toxic pollutants from industrial discharges that are in our drinking water. Don’t lose sight of that simple fact. Clean water is our right. No industry has a right to rake in profits by willfully neglecting to treat their waste stream. I don’t care if it’s Chemours, or Duke Energy, or the thousands of factory farms in our watershed. Putting the cost of treating industrial waste on the backs of citizens is 100% wrong, everytime. Further, there are many people in our community who do not have the ability to buy additional water treatment systems. This is environmental injustice – when poor people or people of color do not have the same level of protection from environmental pollution as rich people, that’s is not right either. When it comes to environmental protection, those of us with the ability and the power to fight are obligated to fight for those of us that do not.

For those lucky enough to be able to afford it – most are drinking bottled water (remember to recycle!) or RO water. CFRW has no direct knowledge that any method works the best, if we do we will let you know. It’s still early and the details of this case are still unraveling.

Our stance is that the best way to keep these toxins out of our water is not to put them in in the first place. Read a powerful Op-Ed that states just such here.

Where is my water coming from? Clean Cape Fear addresses that for you here!

Here is a resource we found so you can make an informed decision on your water intake:
Study from New Jersey where they analyzed best ways to remove some of these contaminants including PFOC and PFOS. Read here – pfna-pfc-treatment

What is Cape Fear River Watch doing to protect me? Cape Fear River Watch takes this issue very seriously and there is much work to be done. The issue is made more complex by the many unknowns but here is where we are going to start.

We are going to push for a binding agreement that Chemours will not ever discharge GenX into our drinking water supply again.
We are going to push DEQ to add restrictions on the release of perfluorinated compounds like GenX in Chemours’ permit, which is currently up for review.
We are going to urge the EPA to thoroughly investigate Chemours past discharges into the Cape Fear and hold the company accountable for any and all illegal activity.
We are going to push the state to carefully study water quality and sediment in the river downstream of Chemours to ensure that our water is safe and we will investigate opportunities for independent sampling to confirm the State’s results.
We are going to dig into the lack of transparency at the CFPUA in an effort to ensure that citizens will never again be kept in the dark about an issue as important as our drinking water.

What can I do to support Cape Fear River Watch? We’re glad you asked. You can become a member of CFRW, join our mailing list our donate to or cause. JOIN here. Donate here. Join our mailing list here. We do thank you!