MAY 13, 2025 – This FOIA REQUEST remains open. We have received no response from NCDEQ, and there is nothing in the NCDEQ digital public records about this spill. The City of High Point has discharge monitoring oversight for Alberdingk Boley:
OCT 17, 2024 – This FOIA REQUEST remains open. We have received no response from NCDEQ, and there is nothing in the NCDEQ digital public records about this spill.
NOV 14, 2023 – Alberdingk Boley had another spill last week – on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023. News of the spill (into Bull Run, a Class IV water supply feeder to Deep River) was shared in a post on the Jamestown News Facebook page at 2:40 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023, as follows:
Approximately two hours later, a Jamestown council member reported on a personal social media page that the 6,000-gallon industrial wastewater spill had already been cleaned up:
The “press release” amounted to this short post and stated that at 11:25 am that morning (Nov. 9), the NC Division of Water Resources was notified of, and “is reviewing the matter of” the 6,000 gallon spill. The press release was posted at 2:40 p.m. At 4:50 p.m., the council member posted “the spill has been cleaned up per DEQ but they required them to issue a press release.”
Check out the difference in clean up time (from the DEQ notification to the time of completion).
Last October’s spill of 16,000 gallons took 72 hours from the time the DEQ was notified, and last week’s spill of 6,000 gallons took FIVE hours from the time the DEQ was notified (at 11:25 am on Nov 9th).
Alberdingk Boley is addressed in Greensboro, it discharges out the back door to Jamestown, and it sits on a contaminated Brownfield site – a 65-acre former Burlington Industries property it shares with a GTCC facility.
N.C. Statute 143-215 requires a press release be published within 24 hours of any spill or discharge of “1,000 gallons or more of untreated wastewater to the surface waters of the State of North Carolina … to all print and electronic news media that provide general coverage in the county where the discharge occurred.”
It appears that only the Jamestown News – a once-a-week newspaper – received the press release. It is unclear who deployed the press release – Alberdingk Boley, or the Town of Jamestown.
Further, if 6,000 gallons is the correct assessment (last October, the number of gallons fluctuated from “a few thousand” to 16,000, depending on who was reporting it), then a cleanup should have taken at LEAST 24 hours of flushing and pumping.
Among the chemicals in Alberdingk Boley’s wastewater is 1,4-Dioxane – three samples of Alberdingk’s pretreated wastewater was tested in 2022 and 2023, and it measured at 60.3 PPB (parts per billion), 87.2 ppb and 99ppb. The state and federal maximum for surface water supply sources (like Bull Run) is 0.35 ppb:
More chemicals are listed in Alberdingk Boley’s 2023 annual Brownfields Land Use Restrictions Update, shown below (tap the arrows to scroll through):
No public notice was given for Alberdingk’s October 2022 spill. A FOIA request to the NCDEQ returned a detailed memorandum by NC Division of Water Resources employees who were on site for the cleanup. They said they were notified of the spill at 1:42 pm on Oct. 27, 2022, but didn’t arrive on scene at Alberdingk Boley to assess the situation until the next day, Oct. 28, 2022.
Conversations with a Fox Hollow resident indicated that the spill began as early as Oct. 25, 2022, when the resident photographed a milky white substance flowing from Alberdingk Boley’s outfall into a pond on Watercourse Court. The spill was estimated by the onsite employees to be somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000 gallons, based on the facility’s daily flow rate of 4,000 gallons per day. The notes report that the cleanup lasted through Sunday afternoon, Oct. 30, and required the pumping of 60,000 gallons of water to “flush” the creek, and 40,000 gallons of water pumped to the sewer (Eastside WWTP) and Watercourse Court pond.
Read our August story and updates for more info on the October 2022 spill.