North Carolina Stopped Being Your Fayetteville Risk

Fayetteville Works has been running beside the Cape Fear River since the 1970s.

In February 2019 the North Carolina Superior Court for Bladen County approved a consent order that told the site to put a thermal oxidizer on its process streams and destroy 99.99% of the PFAS moving through them, to cut total PFAS loading to the river by at least 75% from baseline, and to keep delivering bottled water to qualifying neighbours until permanent supplies were installed. Chemours paid $13 million that March for the civil penalty and the state's investigative costs.

Seven years on, the state came back with a number about thirty-five times larger.

On September 9 Chemours, DuPont, Corteva and EIDP signed a settlement agreement with the State of North Carolina and eleven local entities, and announced it the following morning. The eleven are Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, Cumberland, New Hanover, Robeson and Sampson counties, the Town of Wrightsville Beach, the City of Lumberton, the Village of Bald Head Island, and the Lower Cape Fear Water and Sewer Authority. Every one of them sat outside the 2024 U.S. Public Water System class settlement, which is why they were still in court.

$455 million, paid over fifteen years, with the first money moving within thirty days of signature.

"Which of those numbers actually constrains the plant?"

What the Money Actually Is

The same settlement has four defensible sizes, and which one you quote depends on whose ledger you are reading (chart below).