The water company that supplies water to the Roanoke Valley has settled with a chemical company. Chemours has agreed to pay up to $12 million to help the Western Virginia Water Authority filter GenX from their reservoirs.
Michael McEvoy is the executive director of the Western Virginia Water Authority. He says they’d already been in informal conversations with Chemours, for help with technical advice on how to filter GenX from their water.
“We were kind of on a trajectory where we might end up going to court, some litigation,” McEvoy said.
He said Chemours asked them if they could sit down and talk about a settlement to avoid that. “To their credit, they said, ‘Well, what is it you guys need?’ And we said, ‘Well, we don’t think this is something our ratepayers should bear.’”
McEvoy said both parties wanted to avoid a costly legal case.
Chemours has already been involved in several other settlements and legal cases with other water systems in North Carolina over GenX contamination in that state.
An investigation by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality last year traced the source of the Roanoke River contamination to a water treatment facility in Montgomery County. Chemours had been sending equipment there for cleaning.
GenX is a PFAS compound, and the Environmental Protection has proposed new rules that would limit how much PFAS is allowed in drinking water.
The water authority is currently filtering all their drinking water to ensure that no unsafe levels of GenX are reaching customers.
But, permanently filtering GenX out of their reservoirs requires a substantial upgrade of their system, and could take as long as five years, McEvoy says. The authority estimates this will cost between nine and 12 million dollars, which Chemours has agreed to pay.
