Last February, DuPont and Chemours agreed to pay $670 million to settle thousands of lawsuits related to their decades-long release of tons of C8, a toxic chemical used in the production of Teflon, into the Ohio River.
In a strikingly similar case in June of this year, North Carolinians discovered that Chemours, a spin-off of DuPont, had been releasing GenX, another chemical used in the production of Teflon, into the Cape Fear River for 37 years.
It seems that every week brings another dire warning about chemical substances in the Cape Fear, which is the source of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians. The names are scary enough — GenX, Nafion, 1,4-dioxane. Scarier still is that these chemicals are coming from approved industrial sites, and no one seems to know how dangerous they really are.