In December 2016, Bobby Goins was diagnosed with colon cancer.
Although his mother died after battling glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, he said doctors couldn’t find a cause for his disease. He lived a healthy life, didn’t smoke cigarettes, only drank alcohol sporadically, and had regular medical checkups that didn’t raise any suspicions.
“It's it's been really, really tough year,” he said. “Life was wonderful. You know, everything seemed to be going good.”
After moving from his hometown of Thomasville to Carolina Beach in 2002, he spent his weekends fishing on the Cape Fear River. While his friends chose beer, his beverage of choice to cool down in the blazing sun was water. He estimates he drank three or four gallons every day.
Now Goins worries that water made him sick.
In June, residents of Wilmington learned there was a newly discovered fluorochemical in their drinking water. For 40 years, the compound known as GenX, had been released from a Chemours plant what into the Cape Fear River and bypassed the filters of the Sweeney Water Treatment Plant.
There isn’t conclusive research to suggest GenX causes disease in humans; in fact, very little research has been done on the chemical at all, and it is unregulated. Yet similar chemicals have been linked to cancer and other negative health effects, and the contamination has left many residents of Wilmington so concerned about their contact with the compound that they have stopped drinking the water from their faucets.
“You get to the point where you're scared of a glass of water,” said Goins, who only drinks bottled water now.
Chemours is a spin off of DuPont, one of the largest chemical manufacturing companies in the world. GenX is a byproduct of Teflon, a material used for nonstick coating in pans and pots. GenX replaced C8, a compound known to accumulate in the blood and cause high cholesterol, thyroid disease, as well as testicular and kidney cancers, among other illnesses.
In 2013 Detlef Knappe, a scientist from North Carolina State University, discovered GenX in the Cape Fear River and a year later, in finished water in the Wilmington area. A study that compared the health effects of GenX and C8 on mice came out in January 2016. The mice showed liver enlargement, and other effects common of perfluorinated compounds. Knappe said it’s possible that in humans, GenX acts in a similar fashion.
“I think people react much more strongly to the unknown risk than to a maybe more well-quantified risk,” Knappe said.
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services released a memo in June stating the concentration of GenX in drinking water would have to be greater than 70,000 parts per trillion to have the same effects in humans as it did on the mice, which is more than 100 times greater than the 631 parts per trillion Knappe’s study found.
Last July, Gov. Roy Cooper denied the company’s request to keep on releasing GenX into the river. Since then, the concentration of the compound has remained below the DHHS limit of 140 parts per trillion.
Yet residents are still enraged about their constant, inevitable exposure to the compound.
“When they put that stuff in the water...with the attitude of ‘We don't really care,’ and they do it for that long, it shows how much remorse they've got for the people,” Goins said.
A woman from Brunswick County filed a lawsuit against Chemours in October after test results of her tap water showed the presence of GenX. She claims the compound caused her and her husband to develop the same thyroid disorder. They drank tap water in the area for 15 years.
More research on GenX is underway at UNC Wilmington. In November, the state gave $250,000 to fund four different studies. The Department of Environmental Quality installed equipment that takes random water samples from the discharge point of the Fayetteville Works facility down the river. Bridget Munger, a DEQ spokeswoman, said it provides a better idea of chemical levels in the water.
Aside from weekly testing, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority is trying two different technologies to filter GenX and other fluorochemicals in the water, according to Lindsey Hallock, the assistant to the executive director at the CFPUA. The utility is paying for the costs of the pilot program, but if a new filtering system is implemented in the plant, residents might have to pay larger fees for the treatment service.
But like Goins, Beth Kline-Markesino, who moved to Wilmington three years ago, is still relying on bottled water.
She learned about the GenX contamination less than a year after suffering a stillbirth.
Her son, Samuel, didn’t develop kidneys, a bladder or bowels, and his heart was enlarged. Though her age, 38, made it was a higher-risk pregnancy, she now worries exposure to GenX could have been the cause.
“My doctors just kept saying, just drink more water, just drink more water,” she said in tears. “I didn’t know the water I was drinking all along was contaminated water.”
The experience has turned Kline-Markesino into an activist. She founded a GenX Facebook group with more than 10,000 members who regularly post thoughts, questions and new information. She’s working to establish Wilmington’s Stop Gen-X In Our Water group as a non-profit.
At food establishments, things have changed too.
Samantha Aviles, who works as a barista in a Wilmington coffee shop, said since June some customers ask for cups of water straight from the Espresso machine, which comes out at 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I understand the precautions, but the people that are taking it over the top, I don't get it," she said.
Goins called the tap water restaurants in Wilmington served “poison.”
Knappe, who is now part of the Drinking Water Committee of the EPA’s science advisory board, thinks there’s only one conclusion that can be drawn at this point.
“What we can say is that this kind of pollution raises the level of anxiety in our community,” he said. “But I can neither prove nor disprove whether an individual person’s cancer comes from.”
