The head of the agency providing drinking water to more than 200,000 people in and around Wilmington said Tuesday that unregulated and little-studied chemicals in the Cape Fear River aren’t a hazard — as far as he knows.
Cape Fear Public Utility Authority Executive Director Jim Flechtner told North Carolina legislators that the agency’s water meets all state and federal standards for drinking water. The problem is that too little is known about emerging pollutants to know whether they’re unhealthy or OK, he said.
"There is a question mark of what else is in the river," Flechtner said.
A state Senate committee is investigating chemicals in the state’s rivers, especially the chemical GenX, which is used in making Teflon and was released from a Chemours Co. plant near Fayetteville. A company spokesman didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
There are no federal health standards for GenX. The chemical is related to other fluorinated chemicals including PFOA, which has been blamed for causing health problems.
Only a fraction of the tens of thousands of chemicals used by U.S. industries have been studied enough to establish the health risks they pose for humans, Duke University professor Lee Ferguson told a similar House hearing last week.
Ensuring public drinking water supplies are safe is complicated by the lack of requirements to notify water treatment plants when a new factory or other operation begins releasing chemicals upstream, Flechtner said.