Paper’s investigation reveals contaminated drinking water

Greg Barnes
The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer

Fayetteville, N.C., officials seemed dumbfounded when Eric Hendricks stood up at a public forum and asked what the city intended to do about the gasoline that had contaminated private water wells in his neighborhood off Rim and Old Raeford roads.

"A lot of finger pointing is going on, and we have taxpayers dying," Hendricks said that night in July 2007.

The city had recently annexed the area and knew nothing about the contamination. State and county officials knew about it, however. For at least 20 years, they paid only lip service to the high levels of gasoline and other underground contaminants that had found their way into residents' drinking wells.

Hendricks' comment led The Fayetteville Observer to write a number of stories on the contamination. It also begged the larger question: What else lies beneath?

In early November of that year, reporters Greg Barnes, John Ramsey and John Fuquay set out to answer the question. Finding a starting point proved to be the toughest part.

Barnes remembers asking the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources to see all of the documents regarding known groundwater contamination in Cumberland County. He was greeted with hundreds of file folders containing thousands of pages on each site, many as inconsequential as a spill of home heating oil. After a few days, it became apparent that the query would have to be narrowed.

Photo: Spratmackrel via Flickr

During his search, Barnes learned that the state gave each site a priority ranking. He asked a state official to let him see the folders containing information only on the 25 sites with the highest priority rankings. Bingo.

The top-rated site, a poor area referred to as Brooklyn Circle, had a priority ranking of 1,000, double the ranking of the neighborhood that Hendricks' had complained about. Getting the information for Brooklyn Circle again proved difficult because oversight belonged to the state's Underground Storage Tank section in Raleigh.

Reporters interviewed the section official in charge of Brooklyn Circle, and, aided by state and county health documents, began putting the pieces together. They found five private wells that had been contaminated with a gasoline additive. The reporters learned that an expensive filtration system that the state had provided for one of the homes was removed when the house went up for sale. The person who bought the house, and his tenant, were never told of the contaminated well water, and the tenant continued to drink from the tap. The reporters also found that a nearby fire station continued to make ice for the community, despite a warning from the state that the station's well water posed a potential health risk.

A site referred to as Johnson's Grocery received the state's second-highest priority ranking. Reporters used state and county documents to determine that efforts were made years earlier to clean up a large plume of gasoline that had leaked from the store's tanks. The reporters learned that those efforts stopped in the mid 1980s, but many people in the Southpoint subdivision across the street thought the contamination had been removed. That all changed in 2007, when homeowner Cindy Kemmer stepped into her bathtub and smelled gasoline. The Observer spent hundreds of dollars to have an independent laboratory randomly test the water of other homes in the neighborhood. No contamination was found, but the gas plume continues to head toward the subdivision.

The Observer reporters spent four months investigating groundwater contamination in Cumberland County. Some of the contaminated areas chronicled in the series made headlines years before. In almost every case, little or nothing had been done to clean up the contamination or aid affected homeowners, other than supplying bottled water. In one area, a young couple with three children had continued to drink well water containing nitrates that exceeded safe limits because the state failed to notify them.

A lack of communication among state and county officials was among the most glaring problems the reporters found. The state has four agencies that deal with groundwater contamination – a hazardous waste section, an aquifer protection section, an underground storage tank section and the state health department. Those agencies have their own departments that deal with certain types of groundwater contamination. Communication among those agencies and departments and with county health inspectors was rare or nonexistent.

The reporters also found that the state and local officials had little respect for one another. The infighting led to tips that helped the reporters learn more about contaminated sites and why so little was being done about them. For instance, the top two administrators for the city's Public Works Commission said they had no knowledge of the Rim Road contamination before Hendricks complained. A state official told a reporter to look at who signed state environmental documents shortly after the Rim Road contamination was found in the 1980s. Some of those documents were signed by Mick Noland, who headed the state's environmental branch in Fayetteville before becoming the second in command at the city's Public Works Commission.

The Observer began publishing its "What Lies Beneath" series in late February 2008. Before its conclusion, Cumberland County officials announced the formation of the Safe Water Task Force, a group of state and county officials that promised to greatly improve communication between the agencies as it worked to clean up contaminated areas in the county.

About the same time, Cumberland County Manager James Martin, along with county commissioners, declared groundwater contamination the biggest issue facing the county. The commissioners allocated $2.5 million to clean up contaminated sites, starting with Brooklyn Circle and the Southpoint subdivision. Commissioners say the money is the seed toward a long-ignored goal – providing public water throughout the county. Engineering studies have been completed on extending water lines to Brooklyn Circle and Southpoint. The work is expected to begin soon. Meanwhile, the federal government has authorized $3 million to provide public sewer to the Overhills Park subdivision, another area highlighted in the series. The task force has also been working on a Web site that pinpoints many of the county's contaminated areas, allowing the public to easily find out whether they should be concerned.

The reporters learned that the biggest challenge in writing this series was finding a focal point. Initially, reporters spent considerable time trying to determine which areas of the county had serious contamination issues and which governmental agencies were responsible for their oversight. Initially, none of the agencies was particularly forthcoming. Barnes remembers an early conversation with one state official. After poring over hundreds of documents, Barnes asked the official whether there was any smoking gun. "Nah," the official replied. "Everything is being taken care of." Later, when the focus of the series started to take shape, the official became one of Barnes' best sources.

Reporters made this series come to life by not only finding the contaminated areas but by talking to people whose health was jeopardized by it. Kemmer, Craig Brock, Ellie Felton and Kim Voelker were just a few of the people who shared their stories about living with contaminated water – when the simple act of brushing one’s teeth becomes a nightmare.

The Internet also proved an invaluable asset. Reporters were able to use it to access state health laws and public documents of state health inspections. The Internet was also used to uncover an old state document that helped pinpoint some of the contaminated sites.

The best information, however, came from the earliest method ever devised – digging through countless state and county documents and talking to government officials, environmental experts and plain-ol' people.

The best advice to reporters? Don't give up. This series was a daunting task. It required a focus – getting your arms around the beast – before it finally started to take off. Stick with it, before the writing begins and long after the series gets published. Some of The Observer's best reporting followed the series. We asked officials quoted in it what they thought about our work and then published their remarks. The newspaper wrote numerous stories about the Safe Water Task Force and dogged the county's management when it decided the paper couldn't attend task force meetings. Reporters found more contaminated areas, and more indications that communication between the state and county remains inadequate.

After the series, some reporters and editors questioned whether it was too long. "Nobody is going to read that much copy," they said. In this age of sound bites and alternative storytelling, they seemed to have a point. But in the end, the results speak for themselves. The series changed public policy and perceptions. It has led to increased communication between state and local officials. It has opened the public's eyes to just how precious our drinking water is, and how much we take it for granted. And, most important, it is about to lead to public water for a lot of people whose lives are being threatened without it.

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Greg Barnes is the Sunday editor at The Fayetteville(N.C.)  Observer.