Source of Pittsboro’s Water Woes?

In the June/July 2021 Chatham County Line, the woes of Pittsboro’s polluted drinking water are discussed.  More than once the wording produced, by innuendo, the notion that the Greensboro City wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) is not the source of the contamination and that Greensboro is trying to find the source. I hope this letter makes it unambiguously clear that from the standpoint of all those who receive (and pay for) “potable water” that is actually contaminated, and in terms of the federal Water Pollution Control Act and its implementing regulations (the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) Greensboro City is absolutely the source. Their NPDES discharge permit details the limits of what they may discharge to the Haw River. They are grossly out of compliance with their permit and are therefore exposed (properly so) to huge liabilities.  You may (should) sue them for polluting the waters of the state.  The State of NC should be all over their case.  The Consent Order with Greensboro isn’t getting clean water.

A condition of Greensboro’s operating permit should be that they monitor their influent streams so they can assure that no contributor to their system will cause the WWTP to violate its NPDES permit.  By suitable tracking of the incoming waste streams they should be able to quickly find and cut off the main source or sources of their woes.  Is Shamrock Environmental not an ongoing source?

For all of you receiving polluted tap water; put together a committee, get a lawyer and sue Greensboro.  And of course while you’re at it, sue your water company for passing the dirty water on to you, and sue North Carolina for its failure to adequately address these matters on your behalf. All this toxic water and the failures to remedy it are unacceptable if we are to be able to consider ourselves civilized.

Oh, and once the origins of the 1,4-dioxane are identified, those polluters must be prosecuted.  It’s not nice to over-burden a public WWTP, followed by ruining a public drinking water source all for the cause of private profit.  Oh, and then there’s the added risk of cancer.

David Zebuhr
The Preserve, Chatham County

Best Wishes to the Chatham County Line

I’m a 7-year resident of Chatham County, and I’m writing to tell you how impressed I am with your newspaper, Chatham County Line, especially the recent June/July issue. 

Of special note were the stories regarding the county budget, infrastructure problems, Main Street Pittsboro, the dioxane discharge, the structural problems within our democracy that cause it to lean heavily toward minority rule, the problems inherent in private sewage systems, and the deadly consequences of climate change. These are all meaningful and informative choices of stories to report to residents of the county, and they’re written with the level of professionalism one would expect of newspapers many times its size and distribution. 

I also applaud the fact that the Chatham County Line welcomes a variety of opinions although I may disagree. Bill Crawford’s Grassroots Counter Revolution, for example, speaks of Democrat’s “mask mandates” as “denying any possibility of herd immunity in a trade for further control” which is a confused ideological response to a national and world-wide pandemic. Mr. Crawford, it seems, prefers a path littered with hundreds of thousands of deaths on the way to herd immunity rather than suffocating it by denying the virus transmissibility through mask wearing. I wonder where he stands on COVID vaccines which could be described as biological masks?

My best wishes to you and all the people involved in serving the residents of Chatham County with such relevant, informative, and thought-provoking journalism. 

John DiMiceli

Briar Chapel, Chatham County