By Greg Barnes
State regulators and Greensboro officials refuse to identify an industry they say accidentally released a large amount of a likely carcinogen into the Cape Fear River basin, temporarily fouling drinking water for Pittsboro, Fayetteville and perhaps other cities downstream.
Greensboro officials and the state Department of Environmental Quality also won’t say how the release of 1,4 dioxane happened and how much of the chemical was discharged.
Both entities called the release “a mistake,” one that caused the level of 1,4 dioxane in Pittsboro’s drinking water to temporarily spike in August to more than 300 times the lifetime cancer risk level set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The release is believed to have happened in early August. It took weeks before the contamination made its way downstream to Fayetteville and Wilmington, where it was detected at elevated levels.
Officials in those cities, which together provide drinking water for roughly 300,000 people, said they were never notified of the release before it reached their intake sites.
Wilmington was able to keep most of the contaminant out of its drinking water because its utility is one of only a few in the state with a filtration system capable of removing 1,4 dioxane. It is extremely difficult to remove the contaminant from drinking water. For most municipalities, the level going into their water treatment plants is close to the level going back out.
A Fayetteville official said Thursday he still had not been notified of the contamination, more than a week after asking the state Department of Environmental Quality for an explanation.
The DEQ acknowledges that a release happened but says it learned about the discharge in late September. By then, DEQ spokeswoman Sarah Young said, the contamination had dissipated.
Young said Greensboro told the DEQ about the release in late September and never revealed the industry that was responsible. She did not directly answer questions about whether DEQ knows the company’s name and whether it would release that information.
“The Division of Water Resources oversees Greensboro’s pretreatment program,” Young said in an email. “We continue to work with Greensboro to understand the cause, conditions and remedies implemented by their industry’s discharge.”
Keeping track of such small quantities can be tricky.
- A part per million is like diluting four drops of ink into a 55-gallon drum of water.
- A part per billion is like diluting two drops of ink into large gasoline tanker truck filled with water.
- A part per trillion is like diluting less than half a drop of ink into an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
2,700 times higher than cancer risk advisory
The release happened on or before Aug 7. That’s the date Greensboro officials took a water sample that was later found to contain 1,4 dioxane at a concentration of 957 parts per billion. That level was 2,700 times higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s cancer risk assessment of 0.35 parts per billion in raw surface water.
According to the EPA, a person who drinks water containing 1,4 dioxane at that concentration over a lifetime faces a 1 in 1 million chance of developing cancer. The EPA’s health advisory level for the contaminant when it’s present in drinking water is 35 parts per billion. At that level, the cancer risk rises to 1 in 10,000.
There remains little research on the health effects of 1,4 dioxane to humans, but laboratory studies on animals show that repeated exposure to large amounts in drinking water, in the air or on the skin causes liver and kidney damage.
Industries primarily use 1,4 dioxane as a solvent to make other chemicals. It can be found in some cosmetics, detergents and shampoos, and in paints, varnishes and adhesives. It is often used in the textile and plastic-recycling industries.
Greensboro officials learned of the release of 1,4 dioxane about two weeks after the Aug. 7 sample was taken, said Elijah Williams, the city’s water reclamation manager. Williams said it took that long for the samples to come back from an independent laboratory that did the testing.
Williams acknowledged that Greensboro did not attempt to notify municipalities downstream after it learned about the release. The DEQ said Greensboro officials notified state regulators about the release on Sept. 27, a month or more after discovering that it had occurred.
The 1,4 dioxane flowed from Greensboro into the Haw River, where Pittsboro draws its drinking water, and then continued on into the southern end of Jordan Lake, the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people. Jordan Lake is the headwaters of the Cape Fear River, where more than 1.5 million people get their drinking water, including Fayetteville, Sanford, Lillington and Wilmington.
On Aug. 23, tests showed that the level of 1,4 dioxane in Pittsboro’s treated drinking water had spiked to 107 parts per billion — or 306 times higher than the EPA’s cancer risk assessment level of 0.35 parts per billion. Pittsboro is the only municipality drawing its drinking water directly from the Haw River.
In September, a test of Fayetteville’s treated drinking water detected 1,4 dioxane at 5.9 parts per billion. In Wilmington, a test found the chemical measured 6.3 parts per billion in water before treatment. Both measurements were elevated from what is typically detected in those cities.
The levels in the Cape Fear River at Wilmington and Fayetteville have since decreased considerably, though they remain above North Carolina’s 0.35 parts per billion health advisory for 1,4 dioxane in waterways used for drinking water.
Refusing to name the company
Williams, the Greensboro water official, and Julie Grzyb, supervisor of complex permitting for the State Department of Environmental Quality, called the release of 1,4 dioxane “a mistake” made by a Greensboro company.
Grzyb said she was “confident it was a one-time problem” and referred other questions to Greensboro officials. Young, the DEQ spokeswoman, also directed questions to Greensboro after being asked repeatedly to name the company.
Williams declined to identify the company or say how much 1,4 dioxane was released or how the accident happened.
Williams said he was bound by city policy not to release the company’s name or details surrounding the release.
He said the company has been working voluntarily and proactively with the city for several years to curtail the release of 1,4 dioxane into surface waters.
“We would like to keep that relationship where it’s at,” Williams said, noting that 1,4 dioxane is not a federally regulated chemical and that the company is therefore not bound by law to prohibit its release.
It’s happened before
This is not the first time NC Health News has sought to identify a Greensboro company accused of releasing 1,4 dioxane into a public waterway.
In 2016, Greensboro officials refused requests by former NC Health News reporter Catherine Clabby to identify a company that had been discharging the contaminant. Clabby then filed a freedom of information inquiry with city officials.
In September 2016, the city responded in a letter (see below) to Clabby from Assistant City Attorney Jennifer Schneier, who said state law excludes public access to customer billing information. The city bills the company for water and sewer use.
“To expose the customer would serve no purpose, especially in light of the fact that the Water Resources Department has oversight of this matter and is capable of contacting any customer to discuss the situation,” Schneier wrote. “There is no legal reason or public policy reason for the City to alter its long-standing position on the release of customer billing information to accommodate this journalist’s request.”
Mike Tadych, a lawyer for the North Carolina Press Association, disagrees.
While public enterprise billing information is not a public record, Tadych said in an email, the company’s identity should be released under other provisions of the same law that pertain to concerns of public safety, law enforcement and emergency management.
“The notion that there’s no purpose in releasing the name of the entity releasing the toxin is, in my opinion, nonsense,” Tadych said. “Public awareness/pressure and accountability go hand in hand not to mention awareness and related public safety concerns.”
NC Health News has filed a new request under the state’s open records laws seeking all emails since Aug. 1 to and from Grzyb and Greensboro officials that mention 1,4 dioxane.
Officials in Asheboro and Reidsville have revealed the names of companies in their cities that have released 1,4 dioxane.
‘Of course it upsets me’
Mick Noland, the chief operations officer for the Fayetteville Public Works Commission’s Water Resources Division, said in an email Tuesday that he had sent the DEQ a message on Oct. 3 asking why 1,4 dioxane spiked in Fayetteville in September. He said he had heard that a Greensboro industry may have been responsible, but he had yet to get an official response from the state.
“Of course it upsets me,” Noland said of not being notified that a spill had occurred. Noland is among utility leaders in the Cape Fear River basin who have been fighting for years to stop the release of 1,4 dioxane upstream.
Melanie Benesh, the legislative attorney for the Environmental Working Group in Washington, said in an email that “Greensboro should absolutely notify residents in the vicinity and downstream from this accidental spill.”
“The company should voluntarily step forward to address any public health concerns from citizens,” Benesh said.
Vaughn Hagerty, a spokesman for the Cape Fear Public Utilities Authority in New Hanover County, said the DEQ in late September notified the authority that a discharge of 1,4 dioxane may have happened in Greensboro.
Hagerty said the authority tested for 1,4 dioxane on Sept. 9. The results came back on Sept. 23 showing elevated levels of the contaminant. Greensboro told the DEQ about the release four days after that.
“In general,” Hagerty said in an email, “we would expect any discharger that knows about something that has entered our source water to report that to the state, which would convey that information to downstream water users who may be affected.”
Hagerty said the DEQ told the authority that the discharge appeared to have come from an industry that sends its wastewater into Greensboro’s collection system.
It was the fourth time this year that the authority has detected a spike of 1,4 dioxane.
Seeking the sources
Researchers have found that concentrations of 1,4 dioxane are highest immediately below municipal wastewater treatment plants in Reidsville, Asheboro and Greensboro. The reason is that many industries discharge their waste into those sewage treatment systems, which are incapable of filtering out 1,4 dioxane.
In an effort to identify the polluters, the DEQ in May ordered 25 municipalities in the Cape Fear River basin with wastewater pretreatment programs to begin monthly monitoring for 1,4 dioxane and fluorinated chemical substances, collectively known as PFAS.
The purpose is to determine which municipalities are receiving these pollutants at their wastewater treatment plants and to work with them to reduce the contaminants at their industrial source, said Young, the DEQ spokeswoman. Municipalities have pretreatment programs that are designed to control the discharge of industrial wastewater into the treatment plants.
Testing for the chemicals began in July and ended Sept. 30. The municipalities have until Oct. 31 to submit their test results, Young said.
She said the DEQ anticipates that the data will help municipalities identify the industries responsible for discharging the chemicals and develop methods to get them to stop.
Years of research
Wilmington, Fayetteville and some other cities have been monitoring 1,4 dioxane at least since the EPA required the testing for three years beginning in 2013. That year, a sample in Fayetteville found 1,4 dioxane at a concentration of 8.8 parts per billion, or 25 times higher than the state’s health advisory for surface water used for drinking.
The levels have retreated in more recent years, but they still regularly remain above the state health advisory in the basin, and spikes are common.
Noland said Fayetteville is considering installing a granular activated carbon filtration system, which is effective at eliminating PFAS and most other contaminants, but not 1,4 dioxane.
He also said he continues to drink the tap water in his home because he doesn’t believe he consumes enough 1,4 dioxane to do him harm.
The DEQ and a research team led by Detlef Knappe at N.C. State University have been monitoring 1,4 dioxane in the Cape Fear River basin for years. The highest sample recorded was 1,030 parts per billion in the Haw River near Reidsville in 2014.
Besides industries discharging 1,4 dioxane into municipal wastewater treatment plants, other sources include runoff from landfills and fields where sludge from the treatment plants is applied.
In the absence of a federal maximum contaminant level, other states have been setting their own level for 1,4 dioxane, some as low as 1 part per billion.
Noland said municipalities have to work together to stop the pollution.
“You can’t let this continue to happen,” he said. “We’re trying to work on this collaboratively. I really think the people in Greensboro and Asheboro and Reidsville don’t want us drinking this stuff. I really think they are committed to getting this problem fixed, but it is not an easy one to fix.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Great article! Thank you! Sorry to hear of the situation though.
The explanation of parts per million, billion and trillion was/is very helpful. I got the link to the article from Environmental Health News. Living in Oregon, we have lots of environmental damage too. I appreciate having a better handle on understanding. Hopefully your article will MOVE the powers-that-be.
NC’s environmental problems and healthcare problems are scarier than a Stephen King movie for me. Excellent investigative reporting, but I wish my state’s politicians could work together for a better state.
They finally released the corporation – Shamrock Environmental. From DEQ today:
RALEIGH – The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is investigating the discharge of 1,4 dioxane reported by the City of Greensboro. According to city officials, the chemical came from Shamrock Environmental Corporation. However, the discharge permit for the pretreatment program is held by the City of Greensboro and DEQ is pursuing appropriate enforcement for all identified permit violations.
DEQ was notified by Greensboro on September 27 that an unspecified amount of 1,4 dioxane was released in August by an unnamed industrial discharger under the city’s pretreatment program. The city indicated that the discharge was detected and ceased and city officials are cooperating with the investigation. As a result, DEQ has initiated weekly sampling for 1,4 dioxane at Greensboro’s wastewater treatment plant.