Guilford County to sample private wells near airport area

About 100 letters went to homes that may be affected by PFAS testing near Piedmont Triad International Airport, as Guilford County asked permission to sample private well water in the airport area. The county’s Water Quality Program sits inside its public-health and environmental-health system and handles the construction, repair and abandonment of water supply wells in Guilford County.

Greensboro keeps a Guilford County Private Wells PFAS updates page for residents, and the county’s PFAS Information page says it is working closely with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and additional partners. That matters in the airport corridor because private-well owners, unlike city water customers, are responsible for the water coming out of their own taps.

The contaminants tied to the sampling are PFAS, the family of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances often called forever chemicals. In earlier airport-area testing, officials sampled wells near PTI for chemicals in 2018, and a Greensboro page says 42 wells were sampled that year. Three of those wells showed the presence of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, and perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS.

Those results are measured in micrograms per liter, written as µg/L, which is the same as parts per billion. For residents trying to compare sample results, that unit is the standard used in the county’s well-water materials and in the UNC Guilford County well-water contaminants resource.

North Carolina’s health department says newly constructed private wells should be tested, and private-well owners should test when contamination is suspected or conditions change. For homes near PTI Airport, that means the county’s letters and the PFAS updates pages are the main checkpoints for whether a property is included in sampling and how results are tracked.

Statewide, the testing effort has already been wide-ranging. UNC resources note that the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services collected well-water sampling data from October 1998 through May 2019 for private wells across the state, and NC Newsline reported that since 2007 state regulators had sampled more than 5,500 private wells under a special fund. In Guilford County, the airport-area work fits into that longer pattern of public-health monitoring near PTI, where officials were already keeping close watch on well water in 2022.