SILER CITY — Siler City’s wastewater treatment plant continued to violate the Clean Water Act last year, bringing total fines to more than $267,000 for chronic water quality issues since 2016, state records show.
The latest fine of $28,000 was assessed by the N.C. Dept. of Environmental Quality for violations incurred last July. At that time, average monthly levels of total nitrogen, which includes nitrites and ammonia, in the plant’s discharge exceeded legal limits by 206%. That discharge enters Loves Creek, a tributary of the Rocky River.
The source of the nitrogen and ammonia is the Mountaire poultry slaughter facility, which sends as much as 1 million gallons of wastewater each day to the plant in western Chatham County. Because Mountaire doesn’t adequately pre-treat its wastewater, Siler City bears the burden of doing so — a burden the wastewater treatment plant, as currently built, can’t handle.
The plant in July also violated its monthly permit limits for cadmium by 43% and its Biological Oxygen Demand by 15%. BOD, as it’s known, is a way to measure dissolved oxygen in a water body, which is essential for the health of fish and other aquatic life.
The plant has a long history of violations — 90 since 2019, prompting the EPA to flag it as a “significant non-complier.” In May 2022, the plant reported total nitrogen exceedances of 159%, and state regulators finally imposed a moratorium on new wastewater connections. That would include the Wolfspeed silicon carbide factory, which promises to create 1,800 new jobs.
The planned Chatham County-Siler City megasite would also strain the capacity of the wastewater treatment plant unless it is upgraded.
Those upgrades, worth millions of dollars, are central to a draft Special Order by Consent between DEQ and the town.
SOCs are legal agreements between the state and a facility that can’t meet their permit requirements. Under an SOC, a facility is still required to eventually comply, but is often given additional time to do so, with benchmarks along the way.
The draft SOC focuses on a schedule of improvements and overhauls over the next two and a half years. If the town meets these milestones, the state would lift the moratorium. Failure to adhere to the schedule or to file progress reports carries fines of $1,000 to $2,000 per day.
The state can still enforce limits on nitrogen, cadmium and other pollutants currently in the discharge permit.
The public can comment on the draft SOC through Saturday, March 25.
Comments may be submitted by email to: publiccomments@ncdenr.gov. Please include “Siler City SOC” in the email subject line. Written comments may be sent to N.C. Division of Water Resources, Attn: Sydney Carpenter, Compliance and Expedited Unit, 1617 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, N.C. 27699-1617.
This story was first published in The Pulse, a nonpartisan blog about the issues, debates, and people that affect North Carolina public policy. Follow N.C. Policy Watch news at www.ncpolicywatch.com.