A small eastern North Carolina town is again providing the people who live there with drinking water, more than four years after its well was found to be contaminated by forever chemicals. “Naturally Welcoming” Maysville is leading a path forward for other communities across the state dealing with PFAS in their wells.
It was a surprise to nearly everyone, including Town Manager Schumata Brown, when, in the summer of 2019, sampling of municipal wells across the state by the North Carolina PFAS Testing Network showed levels in Maysville above the EPA’s health advisory levels of 70 parts per trillion.
"I said to myself, ‘We don't have to worry about anything.’ Even the guy that tested and said, ‘Hey, we gonna come here, we're going to go.’” Brown said, “And to get the e-mail and the phone call to say we had PFAS was detrimental to the town.”
Previous coverage: Maysville Holds Meeting On PFAS In Well Water
Thanks to an intergovernmental relationship, the water plant was shut down right away and the town hooked up to the Jones County water system.
TRC Engineer Steve Gandy, who designed and installed the new state-of-the-art system that filters PFAS from the water supply, said even though shutting down the plant for years created more work, he was impressed by the proactive steps Maysville leaders took when they discovered the water was contaminated with forever chemicals.
"Maysville decided in the very beginning when they found it in their water that they would turn off their water plant,” he said, “So, a lot of bad things happen then; your water plant gets old, things break. We probably spent an extra $200,000 on things that rusted and froze up and stopped, but they did that so they could purchase water from the county and preserve the health of their citizens even before they had to.”
Previous coverage: Maysville Continues To Address PFAS Contamination
By “before they had to” Gandy is referring to a U.S. EPA proposal announced in March to regulate six PFAS compounds for public water systems. Once that rule becomes final, public water systems will have three to five years to meet the guidelines.
USDA State Director Reginald Speight said in recent years, the discovery of forever chemicals in the water in North Carolina has continued to grow.
"Clean drinking water, though it is considered to be a necessity, a basic necessity, it is interesting how many people and how many communities don't have it,” he said.
PRE’s Annette Weston-Riggs asked Speight before the ribbon cutting for the water plant got started how a town like Maysville, with a population of just over 800 people, was able to capture the attention of state and federal agencies so quickly after the water contamination was discovered.
"Why not Maysville? Does Maysville deserve to have clean drinking water? Absolutely. Does any other small town in America deserve to have clean drinking water? Absolutely,” he said, “You know, I said I was raised in Wilson, but I was born in Pitt County. A little place called Farmville. But then I did some work in tobacco fields in Greene County in Walstonburg. And this, what we heard walked through today with all this technology that you heard about, was a far cry from the pump that was out in the backyard that I had the prime and crank with the handle, but it was still clean drinking water.”
Previous coverage: Maysville overhauls water system after 4 years offline, installs PFAS filtration system
East Carolina University researchers said in 2019 that North Carolina has the third-highest number of people exposed to PFAS in the U.S. and Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Elizabeth Biser said Maysville is leading the way on a path forward for other communities facing the same challenges with forever chemicals in their drinking water.
"The story of Maysville plays out in communities across the state as we're learning more about PFAS and we learn more every day,” she said. “We know that we need to do more to support our communities, especially small towns where residents cannot afford to shoulder the burden of these treatment systems on their own and we're going to point to you here in Maysville as a success story, as proof that whenever the community comes together, when all levels of government come together, we can ensure that everyone has clean water to drink because, without that, nothing else matters.”
While manmade chemicals found in the Cape Fear River watershed in southeastern North Carolina have been linked to the Chemours Fayetteville Works plant, and officials with the U.S. Marine Corps say firefighting foam was the largest of many sources of contamination at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune near Jacksonville between the 1950s and 1980s, town manager Brown says they haven’t determined how the Maysville well was contaminated.
"And that's one thing that I wish I could answer and figure out where it came from,” he said, “We got a lot of assumptions, but we just don't know.”
Previous coverage: U.S. EPA head announces grants to address "forever chemical" contamination in small town drinking water
The funding to address the water contamination in Maysville came mainly from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The town received $5 million from ARPA and another $1 million from state and EPA funding.
