.
That’s 40 percent of the state’s residents.
But the claim isn’t true, PolitiFact North Carolina found.
“There are 250,000 rivers in this country,” Rep. Billy Richardson, a Fayetteville Democrat, said as he urged fellow lawmakers to commit more funding to the state Department of Environmental Quality to research the pollutant GenX in the Cape Fear River.
The Cape Fear and the Neuse do appear on a list that no one would want their local river to show up on. To find out more about what threatens those rivers, and why PolitiFact North Carolina still rated Richardson’s claim False, go to PolitiFact.com.
Ruling: There’s evidence that the Neuse River and Cape Fear River are threatened not only by waste from local farms but by a chemical that state regulators want to investigate. However, PolitiFact found no basis for Richardson’s claim that North Carolina rivers rank among the top five most polluted in the United States.
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