“The company that makes GenX has told state officials that it is not feasible to provide municipal water to most of the homes with wells that are contaminated with the potentially harmful compound.
Chemours, which makes GenX at its Bladen County plant, submitted a plan Friday for providing a permanent water supply to the homes around the plant with an elevated level of the chemical. GenX also is a byproduct of some processes at the facility…
Christel Compton, a program manager at Chemours, told Scott in a letter dated Friday that the company believes that granulated activated carbon filter systems ‘are a highly effective, readily implementable and long term solution to the underlying concerns here.’
‘Our view has been reinforced by unequivocally positive results of pilot testing to date,’ she said.
Tests from the pilot project of six filtration systems on wells at homes around the plant showed no detection of GenX or about a dozen similar compounds, according to state records.
State officials have said they see the filter system as an intermediate fix until municipal water lines can be run to the area.
Chemours asked Parsons, a Charlotte engineering firm, to study the feasibility of providing municipal water to the homes, Compton said.
The analysis found that running the water lines to homes in Bladen County that are east of the Cape Fear River would be expensive, but not cost prohibitive if 90 percent of property owners agreed to hook up to the the county’s water system. Providing municipal water to homes in Bladen County west of the river and in Cumberland County on both sides of the river is not technically feasible and would be cost prohibitive, Compton said.
The report estimated that running water lines to the Bladen County homes east of the river would cost an average of about $74,000 per home. The average cost per home for the other areas would be $442,500 for Bladen County homes west of the river; $209,733 for Cumberland County east of the river if Fayetteville’s Public Works Commission provided the water and $96,400 if a new well in Bladen County’s water system provided the water; and $341,714 for Cumberland County homes west of the river.
Running the municipal water lines would take two to four years in Bladen County and five to 10 years in Cumberland County, the report said.
‘Carbon filtration systems can be installed much more quickly and cost-effectively at all locations in Cumberland County and east of the Cape Fear River in Bladen County,’ Compton said in her letter.
The company estimates that the filtration systems cost about $10,000 each.”
Read the full article by Steve DeVane