CFPUA: Costs of GenX treatment surpass $1 million
NEW HANOVER COUNTY, NC (WWAY) — The latest update from the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority sheds light on the ticket price of GenX so far.
The authority released an update Wednesday saying:
CFPUA continues taking extra steps to ensure our customers receive the highest quality drinking water possible. As our response to unregulated compounds increases, so do our costs. The lack of information surrounding unregulated compounds makes water treatment more complex and associated research costly.
The release continues to detail the costs listing them out as:
- Fees to private labs for testing of GenX and other compounds.
- Our contract with Black & Veatch – this contract allows CFPUA to work with a global leader in water infrastructure design to conduct a pilot test. The pilot test program provides useful data on the potential of Granular Activated Carbon and Ion Exchange treatments to remove emerging and unregulated contaminants.
- CFPUA’s partnership and contract with UNCW to identify other unregulated contaminates and to include them in the pilot study.
- Environmental engineering services related to pumping water out of the Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) well to remove nearly 50 million gallons of water that contained GenX.
- Legal action against Chemours.
CFPUA, with all of that, says the cost of contract services related to GenX is $ 1,773,816.04.
As of December 13, 2017, CFPUA has spent $ 843,115.30 related to these contracts. Additional costs were incurred associated with the water in the ASR well. These costs include the initial cost to treat that water ($ 147,500) and then treatment costs related to running the water through our wastewater process to discharge it out to the river ($ 166,000).
The release also made note that, “these costs do not include staff time spent on GenX related activities.”
The authority says it has received support in the form of the $185,000 from the NC General Assembly that was allocated through House Bill 56 to offset costs related to our UNCW partnership and pilot testing.
CFPUA says they are attempting to counterbalance costs by continuing legal action towards Chemours.
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