This is the Catch-22, ignore it all and deal with the consequences or take action, even if by a state agency. I'm sure the local residents are happier to know the water is unsafe than be told "don't worry" or to be simply ignored.
That Duke or some other company gets strapped with paying cleanup... better them than the taxpayer.
My point is if there were health implications they would have manifested themselves by now. If there are no health problems then I am wary of the motivations behind forcing a cleanup. I think this will be nothing but a shakedown of Duke Energy.
The EPA ran one of these scams in my hometown. We had a copper smelter that had operated for the last 100 years and the EPA comes in and says the soil is contaminated with “dangerous” levels of lead and arsenic. Now keep in mind there have been no health anomalies, lead/arsenic related or otherwise and people have lived around it for 60 years. So the smelter is forced to pay clean up the site using EPA approved remediation companies (gee I bet there’s no corruption there) AND directly paying the EPA to fund salaries of EPA employees to “supervise.” I know the second part because one of the federal scum would slime around my local watering hole and bragged about his great works. The smelter shut down when copper prices dropped and then thanks in part to EPA scaremongering the City fought tooth and nail to keep it closed. This bankrupted the company that owned the smelter.
Now here is where it gets fun. As soon as the company money dried up this super urgent cleanup ground to a halt. Eventually the city took over the land and still no clean up. They even knocked over the smoke stacks kicking up untold amounts of supposedly lead laden dust and not a peep from the Feds. The whole thing was nothing more than extortion of the smelter company.