Carcinogenic Sea Foam and Silence: The Overlooked Sources of PFAS on the Cape Fear River
By Pat Elder
October 24, 2025
An acclaimed study on PFAS in North Carolina’s coastal waters offers compelling data but avoids identifying the likely sources — a cautionary gap that matters for science, accountability, and public trust.
This map of the lower Cape Fear River in North Carolina shows the Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point (in gray) on both sides of the river.
The Blue X above shows Site 10 where astronomical levels of PFOS were found in sea foam. The Red X is the location of the Carolina Beach Fire Department, and the Black X below is the site of the Carolina Beach Wastewater Treatment Facility.
Researchers analyzed the foam at “Site 10” shown here and reported 8.2 million parts per trillion of PFOS among the 48 compounds tested.
When a team of researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina published their August 2025 study, Detection and Quantitation of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances in North Carolina Sea Foam and the Corresponding Sea Water, their findings drew immediate attention—especially the extraordinarily high PFOS concentrations detected at “Site 10” on the Cape Fear River. The study, designed as a broad survey of PFAS in sea foam and seawater, offered compelling data and valuable insight into how these persistent chemicals accumulate in coastal surf zones. Yet it left one critical question unanswered: what sources were responsible for PFOS levels at Site 10 that were orders of magnitude higher than at other sampling locations?
After reviewing the published results, I recognized a PFAS pattern characteristic of legacy 3M formulations rather than the Chemours-associated chemistry more commonly discussed in the region. That distinction prompted a closer look at potential contributors in the immediate area. A brief search of publicly available mapping tools revealed nearby military infrastructure, firefighting operations, and wastewater discharges—all well-documented pathways for PFOS contamination.
This report documents these findings and examines what the original study did not: the likely sources of PFOS driving the extreme concentrations measured at Site 10.
The site of Sample #10 is located entirely within the 2,100-acre Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point Explosives Safety Clear Zone
The study’s published coordinates (34.048385, −77.921128) place the sampling point on the west shore of Pleasure Island, within the 2,100-plus-acre ESCZ established by the Army to buffer the Military Ocean Terminal at Sunny Point.
Carolina Beach and the State of North Carolina share regulatory oversight with the Department of the Army over the area surrounding Site 10—an important factor when considering liability, planning responsibilities, and persistent regulatory gaps. The study does acknowledge the nearby Army installation, but only in passing. Although the authors include the military site on a map “for proximity considerations with relation to sampling locations,” they do not investigate its relevance to the extreme PFOS levels observed at Site 10. Instead, they reference it alongside the Cape Fear Regional Jetport (12 miles to the south) and Wilmington International Airport (16 miles to the north), treating all three as merely “notable locations.”
This omission is striking given the scale and history of the facility in question. The U.S. Army’s Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point (MOTSU) is the largest military terminal in the world and a major munitions hub for the Department of Defense. It is the East Coast’s strategic ammunition port, transferring rockets, missiles, howitzers, grenades, projectiles, and other ordnance between ship, rail, and truck. The installation has long exerted a profound impact on groundwater quality along the west bank of the Cape Fear River, and its legacy of firefighting operations demonstrates substantial historical use of PFAS—particularly during routine fire training. Given these well-documented pathways, the lack of analysis connecting MOTSU to the PFOS signature at Site 10 represents a major gap in the study’s investigation.
The largest ammunition depots in the United States—including Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point (North Carolina), Hawthorne Army Depot (Nevada), McAlester Army Ammunition Plant (Oklahoma), Anniston Army Depot (Alabama), and Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach (California)—are all profoundly impacted by PFAS contamination. At facilities like these, the public’s attention has traditionally focused on explosion risk, evacuation logistics, and threats to nearby population centers and rail corridors. Those concerns are valid: any major incident involving rail-transported ordnance or a depot-level detonation could trigger mass-casualty outcomes extending well beyond the installation boundary.
Yet there is a second, slower, less visible danger. Because ammunition depots must prevent catastrophic fires and chain-reaction explosions, they became heavy institutional users of PFAS-based AFFF throughout the late 20th century. The same safety logic that justified vast blast-buffer zones also justified decades of routine on-site foam training and equipment testing. The result was widespread, uncontained PFAS releases that are now entrenched in groundwater, sediments, and surrounding waterways.
Sunny Point illustrates the scale of the problem. Groundwater between 15.5 and 19.5 feet below the surface at MOTSU has been reported to contain PFOS concentrations as high as 23,000 ppt, (Table 7-1) while surface-water discharges have measured 290 ppt of PFOS entering Nigis Creek, which flows into the Cape Fear River roughly six miles south of Site 10. The contamination functions like a subterranean sponge, slowly releasing PFOS along the west bank of the Cape Fear River, long after the original discharges occurred.
The researchers behind the sea-foam study calculated “Enrichment Factors” by dividing foam concentrations by paired seawater concentrations. At Site 10, seawater contained 530.45 ppt of PFOS while foam measured 8,252,706.77 ppt, yielding an Enrichment Factor of 15,557—an astonishing amplification. While multiple sources may contribute to PFOS accumulation in the river, the scale and signature of contamination from Sunny Point cannot be dismissed.
The terminal spans somewhere between 8,500 and 16,000 acres on the west bank of the Cape Fear River, with an additional 2,100-acre buffer zone on the east bank. The total acreage is obscured under national security concerns. Despite serving as a safety perimeter intended to shield the public from blast effects, portions of the buffer are open to civilian uses, including parks, trails, and public infrastructure.
A very large detonation at an ammunition terminal like Sunny Point could produce devastating consequences: a powerful shockwave and thermal blast capable of leveling structures and causing mass fatalities; cascading fires and secondary detonations; and the dispersal of hazardous materials that would leave lasting environmental and human health impacts. That same installation—built to prevent such a catastrophe—has already created a slower and quieter crisis in the form of persistent PFAS contamination migrating into the river and the coastal food web.
The delicate boundaries of academic publishing
Aside from the massive military installation, the nearby Carolina Beach Fire Department and the Carolina Beach Wastewater Treatment Plant are also likely contributors to the PFOS signature at Site 10. Yet neither appears anywhere in the North Carolina sea-foam study. Their absence is difficult to ignore given what is publicly known about PFAS-laden AFFF use at fire stations, and PFAS discharges from wastewater systems across the country.
This omission reflects the cautious boundaries of academic publishing—studies designed to describe rather than attribute, bounded by funding constraints, peer-review conservatism, and an institutional reluctance to implicate local polluters other than the already-vilified Chemours. The result is a technically solid paper that documents extreme contamination while leaving its most plausible local sources unexamined.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health supported this project.
The study says, “North Carolina has been especially affected by PFAS contamination due to chemical manufacturing and other industries that occur along the Cape Fear River.”
They write, “Recently, nine United Nations human rights experts called out major PFAS producers, as well as state and federal regulators, for failing to protect residents, especially in North Carolina, from business-related human rights abuses. These studies, combined with community advocacy efforts have influenced legislature at the federal level as GenX (sometimes referred to as Hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid [HFPO−DA]), a PFAS found primarily in NC, has been assigned an U.S. EPA Maximum Contaminant Level of 10 parts per trillion (ppt).”
They continue, “Some of the PFAS identified in these studies are particularly pertinent to North Carolina as these compounds are predominantly produced/discharged from chemical manufacturing plants located in this area. These compounds include (but are not limited to) GenX, PFMOAA, PEPA, PMPA, PFO2HxA, PFO3OA, PFO4DA,11 PFO5DoA,11 Nafion Byproduct 1 (PS Acid), Nafion Byproduct 2, NVHOS, and Hydro-EVE.12.”
Researchers identified 42 PFAS compounds at Site 10, many with especially high concentrations in condensed sea-foam samples. The PFAS mixture at this location does not resemble a Chemours-driven profile, and the study’s own data point in other directions the authors did not follow.
Let’s examine these particular compounds in the foam at Site 10:
ND - not detected.
<LOQ – less than the level of quantitation.
Here are the full results from Site 10:
49 PFAS compounds were analyzed from the foam at Site 10.
Total PFAS 8,427,050.88; PFOS - 8,252,706.77 ppt. 97.9%
All of the other compounds - 174,344.11 ppt. 2.1%
Site 10 exhibits a clear AFFF fingerprint consistent with legacy PFOS-based formulations, not the Cape Fear chemical blend associated with Chemours emissions. Key Chemours-linked species—GenX, PFMOAA, PEPA, PFO3OA, PFO4DA, Nafion byproducts, NVHOS, Hydro-EVE—are either absent, below quantitation limits, or present only in trace amounts. These compounds are hallmarks of discharges from the Chemours Fayetteville Works facility nearly 100 miles upstream. Their absence at Site 10 points to a different source entirely.
In contrast, elevated concentrations of FOSA, NEtFOSAA, and NMeFOSAA indicate PFOS precursor residues typical of legacy AFFF. The co-occurrence of PFDA, PFNA, PFDS, and PFUdA alongside PFOS further aligns with the compositional profile of historic 3M PFOS-based formulations.
My familiarity with these AFFF signatures is not academic. For years, I have documented PFAS-laden sea foam washing ashore at my home in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, where it drifts from the fire-training area at the Webster Field Annex of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station just 1,800 feet away. Laboratory analyses of those samples repeatedly show the same PFOS-based markers seen at Site 10—FOSA, NEtFOSAA, NMeFOSAA, PFDA, PFNA, PFDS, PFUdA—the unmistakable fingerprint of legacy 3M AFFF rather than contemporary Chemours chemistry.
Meanwhile, many of these same PFAS compounds have been documented in the foam, seawater, oysters, crabs, finfish, and human blood serum surrounding my community. Despite this consistency in the data, the Navy has denied responsibility, and the State of Maryland has echoed the federal stance.
North Carolina now finds itself in a familiar position. The analytical data clearly identify toxic PFAS constituents, yet official narratives steer public attention away from the military and municipal origins that drive chronic contamination.
Chemours
The Chemours Company was founded ten years ago as a spin-off from DuPont.
Chemours has rightly faced intense scrutiny and enforcement for discharges of GenX and related emerging PFAS compounds into the Cape Fear River. Those chemicals have contaminated drinking water, harmed public trust, and left downstream communities feeling misled and unprotected. Chemours deserves continued accountability for those impacts. But the PFAS released from the Fayetteville Works facility—primarily short-chain fluorochemicals—do not pose the same long-term ecological threat to marine life as the legacy PFOS-based contamination now dominating Site 10.
Unlike the highly bioaccumulative PFAS historically used in aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), the Chemours-derived compounds accumulate only minimally in fish, crabs, marine mammals, and human tissue. Focusing public outrage and regulatory pressure on Chemours alone therefore distorts the actual risk landscape in the lower Cape Fear watershed.
The dominant ecological threat to the Cape Fear estuary comes from legacy and ongoing military and municipal PFAS sources that have largely escaped equivalent scrutiny and enforcement. Until those sources are confronted with the same rigor now applied to Chemours, the river—and the communities that rely on it—will remain contaminated, even as the spotlight stays fixed on the more politically convenient villain.
Not drawn to scale.
Site 10 is shown here on the east side of the Cape Fear River.
Site 10 is about 13 miles south of downtown Wilmington. Although the fire department and the wastewater facility appear to be “downsteam” of Site 10, the tides on the Cape Fear River cause water to flow north on an incoming tide and south on an outgoing tide.
The Carolina Beach Fire Department
The Carolina Beach Fire Department is believed to have used AFFF in routine practice exercises since the 1970’s. Like the Army’s giant subterranean sponge, the contamination is still squeezing out into the Cape Fear River. Across North Carolina, municipal fire departments used AFFF for decades in Class-B fuel-fire training. Historically, many such trainings occurred in open burn pits or unlined areas—standard practice documented by technical guidance and mirrored in North Carolina’s own record.
The Carolina Beach Fire Department is located 3,000 feet east of the Cape Fear River at a spot that is just 4,000 feet south of Site 10. The residual PFOS and sulfonamide precursors have likely persisted in soils and drainage systems to this day - and may forever. Stormwater and seepage would carry them into the Cape Fear River - and may continue to do so forever.
The Carolina Beach Wastewater Treatment Plant
The outflow from the Town of Carolina Beach Wastewater Treatment Facility discharges directly into the Cape Fear River, roughly 6,000 feet south of Site 10. Any PFAS entering this system—whether from firefighting activities, maintenance operations, or industrial and municipal users—ultimately flows into the same estuarine corridor where the sea foam was collected. This discharge stream is almost certainly contributing to the PFOS and related compounds detected in the Site 10 samples.
Two significant users of the Carolina Beach sewer system illustrate the scale of potential inputs. The state-run North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher and the North Carolina’s Southport–Fort Fisher Ferry are both large, high-volume water facilities tied into the same wastewater network. Their operations include wash racks, degreasing bays, maintenance shops, and equipment rinse-down areas—all historically associated with PFAS-bearing detergents, surfactants, and coatings. If any firefighting foam testing ever occurred at these facilities, those residues would also be routed through the wastewater system.
Wastewater treatment plants were never engineered to remove PFAS. They simply receive it, concentrate it, and release it, turning ordinary sewer systems into contamination engines that deliver PFAS into rivers, bays, and estuaries. In this context, the Carolina Beach facility is not a mystery source—it is an expected one. Yet, like the fire department, it went unmentioned in the sea-foam study.
It is unclear how the Carolina Beach Wastewater Treatment Plant disposes of its sewage sludge. It may be applied to farmland, incinerated, or sent to a landfill, and each of these disposal pathways carries the potential to further contaminate the Cape Fear River watershed.
Health impact of the PFOS and the foam
This segment from the study is problematic:
“This analysis of sea foam may serve not only as an indicator of which PFAS have migrated from upstream waterways into the ocean, but also as a warning of the potential health risks associated with contact particularly given that such foams are often mistaken for harmless, playful features of the beach that children and pets are encouraged to interact with.”
First, the tides dictate the north and south flow of tidal water, so this is not simply a case of witnessing toxins flowing from the Fayetteville plant out to the ocean. The tides act like a giant washing machine, perpetually churning the compounds to create foams.
More importantly - dermal contact with the foam is a health concern, but it is among the least of our worries. The dangerously high levels of PFOS and other PFAS compounds contaminate the sediment, the invertebrates, and the entire food chain, especially the fish.
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) issued an advisory in 2023 for freshwater fish caught in the Cape Fear River from the Fayetteville Boat Ramp downstream toward Wilmington. The advisory is based only on PFOS levels. Pregnant women, women of child-bearing age, nursing mothers, and children are told not to eat Bluegill, Flathead Catfish, Largemouth Bass, Striped Bass, and Redear. They are advised to eat no more than 1 meal/year combined of species: American Shad, Blue Catfish, and Channel Catfish. PFOS is known to interfere with fetal development at tiny levels.
What’s in your Striped Bass, North Carolina?
Although the state has not tested saltwater fish for PFAS in the lower Cape Fear River, a study in Environ Int. 2020, Feb 7 showed saltwater Striped Bass with a blood serum level of PFOS alone at 977,000 ppt. Meanwhile, the EPA is set to enforce PFOS in drinking water at 4 ppt.
The results below show the average levels of 12 PFAS compounds in Largemouth Bass for the freshwater portion of the river north of Wilmington.
The average concentrations of twelve PFAS compounds measured in Largemouth Bass form a textbook 3M/AFFF fingerprint. The dominance of PFOS and long-chain sulfonated precursors—PFUnA, PFDoA, PFDS, FOSAA, PFOSA, and related compounds—clearly indicates legacy military or firefighter-foam contamination. This chemical profile does not match the fluoroether signature associated with Chemours, and it cannot be credibly attributed to discharges from the Fayetteville Works facility.
The authors do not follow the basic implications of their own findings. There is no exploration of bioaccumulation, even though PFOS—the dominant surfactant in legacy AFFF—is one of the most persistent and biomagnifying chemicals on earth, known to contaminate fish, crabs, and shellfish throughout the Cape Fear region.
Nor does the paper address the wind-borne transport of PFAS-rich sea foam and dried sediment. The foams can aerosolize, drift, and deposit PFAS onto surrounding neighborhoods, where inhalation and household dust ingestion become chronic exposure pathways. When PFOS-contaminated sediment dries along the Cape Fear shoreline, the chemical binds to fine dust particles in the soil. The wind can lift these particles into the air, where they can be inhaled or settle as dust inside nearby homes. By restricting the discussion to immediate contact hazards, the study bypasses the more insidious—and widely documented—mechanisms by which PFAS enter human bodies and ecological systems.
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I acknowledge a conflict of interest! I am an advocate for public health, and I am depleting my family’s retirement account. I promised my wife Nell I would pay as I go. I spend about $400 monthly, so I won’t publish another paper in the next month until I raise the cash. I still have not received full results from our trip to collect environmental samples from the Fort Ord region. When I do, I will provide an accounting and privately acknowledge donors.
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