Leland North Carolina

Southport discusses hot button issues in community workshop

January 11, 2022 

 Peyton Furtado

The Drinking Water Crisis That North Carolina Ignored

For decades, DuPont dumped toxic PFAS into North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. Today, the local community is suffering the health consequences—and fighting back.

June 07, 2021 Nicole Greenfield 

When the Wilmington, North Carolina, StarNews broke a story in 2017 about the rampant contamination of the region’s drinking water supply by a chemical called GenX, Tom Kennedy had just finished four months of chemotherapy for his stage 2 breast cancer. During the radiation treatment that followed, Kennedy, then 45, learned that the cancer had metastasized to his brain, newly classifying him as a stage 4 terminal patient with 6 to 12 months to live. Four years later, with some 60 rounds of chemotherapy under his belt, he’s still going strong.

But also four years later, the Cape Fear River watershed—which supplies drinking water for Kennedy’s family and around 350,000 other North Carolinians—remains contaminated with the perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that DuPont, and its spin-off, Chemours, dumped into the river for more than four decades.