Your Honor,

In June of 2017, we woke up to front page headlines stating the same thing DuPont did in Parkersburg, WV with PFOA was the same thing DuPont, now called Chemours, was doing with PFOA’s replacement, GenX, in southeastern NC. We would later learn the situation was much worse than we originally thought. We felt angry, worried, and betrayed. We were desparate for answers.

For two weeks, Chemours was silent and refused to issue a public statement. After immense public outcry, Chemours finally came to Wilmington, NC and agreed to meet with local leaders behind closed doors with only one reporter allowed in the room. Protests erupted all across Wilmington, NC that day.

We had so many questions and little to no access to answers. We heard members of our community ask:

"Is this why my child has autism or developed this rare cancer?"

"Is this why my husband has a brain tumor?"

"Is this why so many of my friends, neighbors, and family members are suffering from major illnesses at ages far too young to pass off as normal?"

We raised our children on this tap water. Our local churches unknowingly baptized babies with PFAS contaminated tap water. School children were forced to drink this contaminated tap water in 49 public schools in New Hanover and Brunswick counties for decades.

Medically fragile or ill residents were unknowingly overexposed to PFAS at their most vulnerable moments in life. Some dying without ever knowing if the PFAS they drank in their tap water caused or worsened their illnesses.

Initially, our local and state leaders were slow to respond to our concerns because they also had limited access to information about the PFAS specific to Chemours. We still do not know the full scope of our contamination crisis. We do not know the health effects of our PFAS exposures from Fayetteville Works.

Many in our community participated in the GenX Exposure Study and learned we had high levels of Chemours-specific PFAS in our blood. Unfortunately, our doctors still cannot tell us what our Chemours-specific PFAS exposures mean because we lack access to the necessary health data to inform preventative medical care.

Many of us relied on reporting we found on the internet, like Sharon Lerner's forever chemical series published in The Intercept. Lerner admits most of her reporting was aided by the release of court documents from the Minnesota attorney general's lawsuit against 3M in 2010. The release of those documents was invaluable to us, and likely to this very case.

It has wrongfully become the burden of the community to seek access to information related to our PFAS contamination crisis. We know this is unjust and violates our basic human rights.

Last year, nine UN experts publicly called out DuPont and Chemours for decades of business-related human rights abuses—especially in North Carolina. They said:

“Shortcomings by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, and the courts undermine community’s right to information and their right to an effective remedy.”

We've found Chemours-specific PFAS in our local honey, backyard vegetable gardens, and rain water. We recently learned our beaches contain toxic levels of PFAS in abnormal sea foam "blooms" occurring along our beloved local beaches.

Two years ago, Chemours filed a permit application to expand production at Fayetteville Works. We do not believe this company has earned the right to make more PFAS at Fayetteville Works while our communities continue to see our water bills go up for a problem we didn't cause.

Chemours has a chronic problem of withholding information. In the nearly eight years since we learned about our PFAS tap water contamination crisis, Chemours has only held one public meeting in our area. We believe, at every turn, the defendants make it nearly impossible for the harmed and faultless community to seek basic forms of justice, remedies, and access to information.

Public outcry and grassroots community activism has been the driving force behind nearly ever PFAS protection our communities currently enjoy. We deserve to know exactly what is going on at Fayetteville Works so we are better equipped to protect health, our loved ones, our property, and our environment.

We're tired of being a PFAS sacrifice zone and we want a fighting chance to learn how to heal our bodies and our ecosystems. We also want to see justice served. We can't do any of this if we aren't well informed.

We just learned DuPont and Chemours wish to seal court documents relating to the lawsuit filed against them by our public water providers. This includes briefs, factual allegations, and the defendants’ internal documents.

We’ve been informed that these court documents cover a range of topics such as Chemours' and DuPont's:

--Past use, manufacture, and studies of C-8--which we know was manufactured at Fayetteville Works for nearly ten years.

--Transition of manufacturing operations to Fayetteville Works.

--Transition from C-8 to GenX--including their knowledge of PFAS control technologies and the timing of their knowledge.

--Current operations at Fayetteville Works, which has been the cause of PFAS contamination in the Cape Fear River basin.

It is very important for communities like ours to have access to the information contained in these documents because, as we stated earlier, this information is critical to our ability to seek remedies, justice, and the necessary information that fully informs our knowledge about when, how, and why we were exposed and with what PFAS coming from Fayetteville Works.

Therefore, we are objecting to the DuPont and Chemours' attempt to seal court documents.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Concerned Residents