'We live off the land': Indigenous communities say pollution is cutting off a vital food source

For the Cape Fear Band of Skarure and Woccon Indians, the state’s largest river system has long been a lifeline.

“Fishing is something that's in our family and if you look at most indigenous nations, we live off the land,” said Lovell Pierce Jr., principal chief for the provincial tribal nation.

Ever since last month, though, the Cape Fear River has become a less bountiful food source for his people.

The Department of Environmental Quality tested fish samples from the Cape Fear River last year and found high levels of per- and poly-flouroalkyl substances (PFAS), so-called forever chemicals that have been tied to chronic diseases including cancer, developmental issues, and birth defects.

State health officials last month issued recommendations for residents to limit or eliminate eating some types of fish from a large part of the river after the testing.

“If the fish are contaminated, you're taking the ability for us to go out there and fish for food,” said Pierce, who is known as Chief Eagle Elk.

The Department of Environmental Quality is now working to expand permitting regulations to limit industrial discharges so that his community can count on the river for safe food.

“We’re going to continue to grow and learn and that’s the reason we’re going to try to collect samples as much as we can and build our knowledge base,” said Sushma Masemore, DEQ’s Assistant Secretary for Environment,.

Masemore spoke Wednesday at a Science Advisory Board meeting in Raleigh, where the DEQ findings and resulting advisory were the main topics of discussion.

The Science Advisory Board, a 13-expert group appointed to help government agencies review emerging contaminants, discussed the intricacies of toxicology data and pushed officials to consider how safety regulations would covey an individual’s potential level of risk while keeping guidance simple and easy to understand.

Crafting such consumption advisories is a tricky balancing act. Virginia Guidry, an epidemiologist with the state Department of Health and Human Services helped to craft the Cape Fear River advisory, said she had to weigh the risks of PFAS exposure with the benefits of eating fish. She stressed the consumption advisory is for specific locations and species of fish, after concerns that advisories could spur residents to completely cut fish from their diets.

Guidry also acknowledged the challenge of communicating advisories because the risks aren’t the same for all residents.

“We felt like we needed to have those different advisories for women of childbearing age and children because there is a different risk and wanted to make sure people were aware of that,” Guidry said.

Fayetteville resident Mike Watters is an avid angler who has been consuming fish from the Cape Fear River for years.

Watters lives near the Chemours Fayetteville Works Facility, a chemical manufacturing plant that is entangled in thousands of lawsuits for dumping PFAS into the Cape Fear River. He has been pushing the state for testing and more stringent regulations against polluters.

Chemours Co. has installed a thermal oxidizer and PFAS emission mitigation measures after a 2019 consent order requiring the DuPont subsidiary to stop polluting PFAS from its facility into the air, water, and soil. The legal action came after public outcry resulting from research, including a 2017 NC State study, that found unique Chemours compounds proliferating the environment as much as 90 miles from the facility. The company has since been working with state and local officials to ensure that it is in compliance with cleanup requirements and other provisions of the settlement.

“We've made significant progress and cleaning up Chemours, but there are a number of other facilities in the watershed that DEQ is not putting the same effort into,” said Geoff Gisler, a program director for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has helped several community activist groups negotiate settlements with Chemours to cleanup PFAS.

In the meantime, Watters is changing his habits.

“I’m not eating fish out of the river anymore, and that’s my choice,” Watters said. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to eat fish, but not from a known contaminated area.”