UPDATE FEB 23, 2025 – Despite being sued in 2020 for excessive 1,4 DIOXANE releases by the Haw River Assembly and Fayetteville Public Works, the cities of Greensboro, Asheboro and Reidsville are at it again – allowing massive discharges of 1,4-DIOXANE into tributaries of Deep River and Haw River (waterways that form the Cape Fear River), water supply for millions of North Carolinians. Read about the lawsuit, and Asheboro’s highest recorded 1,4 DIOXANE SLUG to date (3,520 ppb on January 25, 2025) HERE. The state and federal health limit for 1,4 DIOXANE in drinking water supplies is 0.35 ppb.
UPDATE JUNE 14, 2024 – Go HERE for our most up to date list of 1,4-Dioxane test sampling results for local surface waters, groundwater and public drinking water systems.
This post consists of clips from a two-part story written in 2020 by Lisa Sorg for NC Newsline – about how Greensboro and Reidsville’s 1,4-Dioxane water contamination led to a lawsuit by the Haw River Assembly and Fayetteville Public Works. Click on the headlines for a link to the full online stories:
PART ONE: While toxic chemical polluted Cape Fear River Basin, some utilities officials dismissed public health risk [Lisa Sorg, July 22, 2020, NC Newsline]
“… a review of five years’ of emails obtained under the Public Records Act show that, to keep state regulators at bay, Reidsville utilities officials, with tacit approval from their Greensboro counterparts, went over the head of DEQ staff and sought help from people at the highest levels of the agency, as well as Sen. Phil Berger’s office.
“Greensboro officials shielded industry from scrutiny. They buried 1,4-Dioxane data in public reports. Some upstream utilities officials even pooh-poohed the dangers of 1,4-Dioxane; another falsely accused an NC State scientist of scaring the public for personal gain.
“Greensboro officials’ reliance on industry to self-regulate ultimately backfired. DEQ cited Greensboro with a Notice of Violation over last summer’s 1,4-Dioxane spike; now the two parties have negotiated a Special Order by Consent that would assess a fine and legally limit the amount of 1,4-Dioxane the utility can discharge into waterways.
“Meanwhile, the contamination was barreling down South Buffalo Creek en route to the Haw River, a drinking water supply for Pittsboro. Soon that town would detect 1,4-Dioxane in drinking water flowing from the taps of thousands of customers at levels up to 300 times the lifetime cancer risk.
“Yet, provided with these alarming lab results — and knowledge of the potential consequences for people living downstream — Greensboro utilities officials told no one for a month.
“‘Myself and others downstream are dismayed that something this significant occurred and no one downstream was advised,’ wrote Mick Noland, chief operations officer for the City of Fayetteville’s Water Resources Department, to DEQ. ‘Why does ‘confidentiality’ of an industry rank as a higher priority than notifying citizens that their drinking water has become seriously contaminated? To say this is flawed is an understatement.’
“At the time, Greensboro officials justified the lack of notification, saying DEQ had not established a ‘trigger level’ for the utility to immediately inform anyone.
“But a Policy Watch investigation found that behind the scenes, in the years leading up to the 1,4-Dioxane emergency in the summer of 2019, Greensboro utilities officials, as well as those in Reidsville, felt threatened by DEQ to rein in their 1,4-Dioxane levels in wastewater.”
Part Two: Lax local regulation allows toxic carcinogen to infiltrate drinking water across the Cape Fear River Basin [by Lisa Sorg, July 23, 2020, NC Policy Watch]
“It took a little more than two weeks for the wastewater contaminated with the toxic chemical 1,4-Dioxane to travel the 50 miles from Greensboro to Pittsboro. On Aug. 23, 2019, thousands of taps in the small Chatham County town flowed with water containing levels of the compound up to 300 times greater than the health goal set by the EPA.
“An industrial user had discharged 1,4-Dioxane into Greensboro’s TZ Osborne wastewater treatment plant on Aug. 7. Since traditional technologies can’t remove the compound, it escaped and continued downstream.
“After Pittsboro, the compound flowed to Jordan Lake, a drinking water supply for hundreds of thousands of people in the Triangle; to the Cape Fear River, which serves dozens of communities in Johnston and Harnett counties; on to Fayetteville, and all the way to Wilmington, in New Hanover County.
“Meanwhile, Greensboro utility officials, who knew there had been a spike in 1,4-Dioxane levels at the treatment plant, failed to immediately notify the state or any of their counterparts downstream. There was no numerical ‘trigger’ that required them to do so, Greensboro officials later said.
“By the time Greensboro officials notified the NC DEQ of the 1,4-Dioxane spike on Sept. 27, as part of the utility’s required monthly discharge report, most of the contamination had moved down the Cape Fear River and been swept out to sea.
“Greensboro’s discharge and ensuing contamination more than 170 miles away exemplifies how downstream utilities and communities are at the mercy of upstream industry and utilities. These effects also show how the lack of strict regulation of these emerging compounds shields industry, and even the utilities themselves, from significant consequences.
“’It takes courage for a downstream utility to raise their hand and say our water isn’t safe,’ said Geoff Gisler, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center and leader of the firm’s Clean Water Program. ‘They’re given this black box. The river doesn’t come with an ingredient label.’
“Roughly 40 industries send their wastewater to TZ Osborne, and little of that discharge information is public record. State law makes customer billing data confidential, ostensibly to prevent third parties from gathering personal information. … But companies have exploited the law to try to keep secret the contents of their wastewater discharge, under the pretense that to disclose them would give away their trade secrets. Only the regulators, including the utilities, know all of the details.
“In a 2018 email, Elijah Williams, Greensboro’s water reclamation manager, alerted industrial customers to a public records request from several media outlets asking for data summaries and permits: ‘The Industrial Waste section will continue to work with our legal department to review our practices, policies and requirements to ensure that we protect your industry’s safety, trade secrets, and means of operation. In the near future we might have requests of you to help us insure those protections.’
“The city eventually agreed to provide the permits … It’s important to be transparent not only about what industry is permitted to discharge, but what it’s actually discharging. Mike Borchers, director of Greensboro’s Water Resources Department, said the utility ‘understands and demonstrates the importance of transparency both internally and externally with our customers and stakeholders. We view transparency as the key to strengthening relationships and it ensures accountability across our organization.‘
“But a lot happens behind the scenes — not included in the monthly billing inserts or posted on a city website — that raises questions about what the public is allowed to know.
“In November 2014, Rick Moody, site environmental leader for Proctor & Gamble, a discharger into Greensboro’s wastewater treatment system, asked a utility about a voluntary sampling protocol. In his response, William Burdick, an industrial compliance coordinator, seemed to tell the company not only how to report the contaminants in its wastewater, but also how not to report:
‘Hi Rick, If you sample from the designated sampling point described in your permit you are required to report it and I would have to put in your database and file (whether the parameter is on your permit or not). However if you are able to remove the sample hose (if there is slack in the hose or just add an extension to the hose) and move it upstream from the designated sample location, just one or two feet, you could use the same composite sampler and you would not be required to report it.‘
“Mike Borchers, director of water resources, said the context for Burdick’s email was an annual industry meeting held the day before. There, the utility presentation included information on 1,4-Dioxane and ‘procedures for facilities that wanted to sample their process waste stream voluntarily for their own information.‘ Burdick’s email was a ‘clarification of the discussion,’ Borchers said.
“In June 2019, Borchers shared 1,4-Dioxane data from PTRWA (Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority/Randleman Lake) with Jana Stewart, an engineering supervisor in the Greensboro Water Resources department. … Stewart was to send the 1,4-Dioxane data to a city contractor to be included in a voluminous report assessing the Greensboro utility’s ‘vulnerabilities and operational concerns.‘
“PTRWA gets its water from Randleman Lake, which is part of the Cape Fear River Basin. In turn, the authority sells it to Greensboro and other communities. The regional water authority has detected 1,4-Dioxane in the lake, the source of which is an abandoned Seaboard Chemical plant. PTRWA data showed that in 2017 and 2018, High Point’s effluent routinely exceeded surface water standards, and twice it was 125 to 150 times higher.
‘”Please mention to [the engineering firm Black & Veatch] that the [PTRWA] 1,4-Dioxane results should not be shared outside their organization,’ Borchers wrote to Stewart. Stewart replied: ‘So how does that work in the report? The report will be public record eventually.’
“‘It’s okay buried in the report. Just don’t want it to stick out like a sore thumb,’ Borchers replied.
“Even though utilities are in charge of regulating their industrial users, the companies have an advantage: The utilities’ revenues, in part, depend on the amount and type of wastewater the companies send them. The larger economic fortunes of the city or a region can hinge on whether industry locates or stays there.
“The basis of the Clean Water Act is ‘not how much can we let them pollute but how much can we keep out,’ Gisler said.
“‘That’s why pretreatment matters,’ Gisler added. ‘The law is written to avoid this problem entirely. If you require municipalities to investigate their discharges, then they can force companies like Shamrock to install technology and the contaminants never get into the water.’
Since 2020…
In December 2022, the EPA sent a five-page memorandum to all state water divisions telling them to use their authority under existing laws to stop PFASs pollution at its source WITHOUT WAITING for future regulations.
Jamestown’s town manager downplayed 1,4 Dioxane contamination at the March 21, 2023 Council meeting, telling the Council, “it’s not really fair to get people excited about something that the federal government and state government hasn’t given us direction on yet.”
Actually, direction was given in the form of a detailed 5-page December 2022 memorandum from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (shown below, or view it at this LINK).
Although 1,4 Dioxane is a “Contaminant of Emerging Concern,” (see Wikipedia definition here), this does NOT mean that 1,4 Dioxane is a new or problem for Jamestown, High Point, Guilford County and our public water system. This area’s history with 1,4 Dioxane goes back more than 30 years, and remediation attempts have cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Here’s the story:
