The sounds of people excitedly talking fill the echoing chambers of the new Granular Activated Carbon filters at the Sweeney Water Treatment Plant just north of Downtown Wilmington.
Radhika Fox, the assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency, toured the plant with representatives of the state DEQ to see the new GAC filters, which should come online by the end of the summer, and to promote recent actions by the EPA to eventually make those filters less necessary.
“Absolutely, a core priority for the Environmental Protection Agency, is to restrict PFAS, from entering our air, land, and water in the first place. So that we don't have communities like Cape Fear, and what you all have had to figure out through local determination through state action.”
Three million pounds of GAC media are expected to be delivered sometime next month. The combined surface area of all that GAC would be enough to cover the State of North Carolina three times over, and it will all be replaced about every 270 days to ensure the filters keep removing PFAS from the drinking water. The chemicals, which form a brown foam on top of untreated water, are correlated with negative health impacts, like cancer.
The overall construction cost of the facility sits at about $36 million, with total project costs totaling $43 million — plus several million dollars in additional annual operational costs.
CFPUA rates for consumers have gone up about 8.5% recently to help offset this cost; construction accounts for 70% of that rise.
But CFPUA is suing PFAS polluter Chemours to pay for the cost of that construction. And the recently proposed legislation, House Bill 1095 may legally mandate polluters, not consumers, to pay for cleanup of the water.
