Federal Mandate Targets ‘Forever Chemicals’ Driving Black Communities’ Water Woes

Belinda Joyner, a former schoolteacher in North Carolina, a state where cancer clusters born from water contamination have formed, wonders if it is enough to regulate future contamination without working to repair communities that have lived with the pollution for generations.

“We’ve been saying this for so many years,” Joyner said, “and it ticks me off because what about the harm to us that has made it hard to lay down and sleep at night.”

Read More: The Water Crisis Is Disrupting Black Americans’ Lives

In the fall of 2020, after protests spread across the country, Joyner saw Michael Regan, then the head of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, at a community event and asked a simple question: “When are y’all gonna start applying these laws?”

“I asked the question because when we go out and we say these things, leaders say they’re listening, but are they actually hearing us?” she said.

It was apparent, she said, how Black communities throughout the state were “dumping grounds for everything they don’t want to put where [white and wealthy residents] live.” In North Carolina, where the nation’s first protests against environmental racism were ever held, communities of color are exposed to roughly twice the amount of pollution and contamination as white neighborhoods.

This past week, nearly four years after his conversation with Joyner, Regan, now the first Black man to head the nation’s Environmental Protection Agency, announced the first-ever federally mandated plan for the nation’s water systems to remove six synthetic chemicals linked to several cancer types, decreased fertility in women, and developmental delays in children.

It comes four months after the United Nations alleged that the chemical contamination of drinking water throughout North Carolina is a human rights violation. Yet, it’s an issue that impacts every corner of the country; the so-called “forever chemicals” are found in nearly half of the country’s tap water.

Read More: Jackson Water Crisis is Just One of Many Impacting Black Communities

As water crises drown Black communities from Flint, Michigan, to Jackson, Mississippi, this move underscores just how pervasive issues around water quality are nationwide and the serious work that needs to be done to rectify harm. While bigger cities, including some of those in North Carolina, have the workers and infrastructure to clean up contamination, residents in rural Black towns across the South, in places like Alabama and Louisiana, don’t have the infrastructure and may be tasked with the cleanup work themselves.

Several studies have shown nationwide that Black communities are most exposed to these chemicals, as more than 200 million Americans are estimated to have these chemicals, commonly referred to as PFAS, in their drinking water. PFAS are found in everything from firefighting foams to children’s toys and are called “forever chemicals” because they can never be fully broken down and can accumulate in the body and environment.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PFAS can be detected in the blood of nearly every American as industrial usage of PFAS began in the 1940s and persisted because it extended the use of dozens of household items. The negative effects of the chemicals have been known since the 1960s.

“I call it profit over people,” Joyner explained. “The greed for money has put people’s lives in jeopardy.”

Standing in front of a water treatment facility in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a predominantly Black town where the drinking water source, the Cape Fear River, had been polluted with toxic chemicals for years, Regan said, “Folks across this country deserve real solutions.”

In 1982, Black leaders in North Carolina screamed “environmental racism,” for the first time in U.S. history as they protested the placing of a hazardous waste landfill in a Black community. Forty years later, it’s an issue that still afflicts the state’s – and nation’s – Black residents. Last year it was announced that the groundwater and several drinking water wells for Black families near a landfill in Sampson County, North Carolina, was contaminated with PFAS at a rate that was 50 times higher than federal limits.

Weeks later, the U.N. accused three chemical companies along North Carolina’s Cape Fear River of violating neighboring residents’ human rights by polluting the river with PFAS. Studies showed that as many as 97% of residents had PFAS in their blood. The Cape Fear River provides water to 1.5 million people, and in the five major cities that receive its drinking water from the river, 35% of the residents are Black – nearly three times the national average.

The new rule mandates that water providers reduce PFAS to near-zero levels. In North Carolina, which has the third highest rate of PFAS contamination in the country, Joyner ultimately welcomes the new rules, which are expected to prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious illnesses.

“It’s finally here, and we love it, even if it is all overdue and something that should have happened years ago.”

The ‘real solutions’

Regan’s announcement was coupled with nearly $1 billion in funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which is expected to help public water system operators and private well owners test for and clean up contamination. This adds to the $9 billion already allocated for PFAS cleanup, which was a piece of the $21 billion that Congress already made available nearly three years ago to improve drinking water systems.

However, as Capital B reported last year, the record investment in fixing America’s water systems has not seemed to trickle down toward Black communities. In addition to the pollution and infrastructure issues exacerbating water woes, water bills have exponentially increased over the last half-century while Black Americans’ trust in the water running through their homes has increasingly faltered.

Read More: Record Investment Merely Scratches the Surface of Fixing Black America’s Water Crisis

In Donaldsonville, Louisiana, Travis London believes PFAS contamination has contributed to high miscarriage rates in his community. The nonprofit water rights organization Environmental Working Group has designated the city a PFAS hotspot. (You can check your community’s PFAS levels here.)

“Trust is still going to be the issue now, and education. How will people know the water is safe?” said London, who Capital B first interviewed last year after a white city employee was caught urinating in a tank at the water treatment facility in his hometown, a majority Black city in Louisiana.

Since then, London has moved away partially because of how water contamination negatively affected his life. But it’s hard to escape: A study published last week found that 31% of groundwater sources worldwide have PFAS levels considered harmful to human health by the EPA.

“At this point, it’s like we’re going to have to keep on using bottled water all our lives,” said London.

Under the new federal rule, water utilities must increase chemical monitoring and notify the public and reduce contamination if levels exceed 4 parts PFAS chemical per trillion parts water. This is down from 70 parts per trillion before. Public water systems will have three years to complete their monitoring and another two years to purchase and install equipment designed to filter out contaminants.

The EPA says it will cost water utilities about $1.5 billion annually to comply with the rule.

For poorer water districts, where Black communities most often are located, this presents unique challenges. Some utilities believe that the individual costs to comply could as much as double annual spending, which may trickle down to increased water bills for residents.

In Opelousas, Louisiana, a Capital B analysis found that an increase in water bills to bring the city’s water system up to code was also used as a predatory tool that drove debt for residents in the town where 40% of people live in poverty.

Between 2018 and 2022, the city turned off the water in 1,075 homes, but they reconnected water accounts nearly 14,000 times over that same period — meaning many families were paying fees to reconnect their water every few months. On average, delinquent account holders were only $38 in debt when their accounts were initially disconnected, but then had to pay another $40 on average to reconnect their water on top of their debts. In all, the city collected more than half a million dollars in reconnection fees, including $164,000 in 2020.

Ultimately, Joyner hopes elected officials and water district managers will use this new rule to start centering people in their decision-making.

“When you live in a community – you’re born and raised in the community – if something comes up, it’s going to affect you, you don’t always have that privilege of getting up and saying I gotta move,” she said. “A lot of times, it’s not something you can just jump up and escape either.”

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