What’s Really in Our Drinking Water?
Charleston Gazette
27 March 2014
By Ken Ward Jr.
In the wake of the January chemical spill on the Elk River, West
Virginians have been lectured a time or two by water company
representatives and state officials who tout how much they say is
done to protect our drinking water from contamination. One of the
refrains is to remind us how many chemicals water utilities have
to test the water for before they pump it to our homes and
businesses.
The state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management
helpfully posted a list of these chemicals on its website
here. And
during one public meeting in Huntington , West Virginia
American Water President Jeff McIntyre explained:
… That West Virginia American Water keeps in line with standards
set forth in state and federal regulations, noting that the
federal Safe Drinking Water Act requires monitor and control for
100 different parameters and there are more than 85,000 chemicals
that are regulated through the Toxic Substance Control Act of
1976.
First, it’s worth noting — as
has been reported many times before — that terribly few of
those 85,000 chemicals that Mr. McIntyre talked about being
“regulated” by TSCA have actually had complete safety
testing. As Jennifer Sass, a Ph.D. scientist with the
Natural Resources Defense Council, testified
to Congress last month:
… In the nearly forty years of TSCA, EPA has required a full set
of testing on only a few hundred chemicals of the 62,000
grandfathered under the law in 1976.
Sass went on to explain how the Elk River chemical spill
highlighted these concerns:
The leaking of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) and other
chemicals into the Elk River in West Virginia brought home –
literally into people’s homes – some of the ways that timely
access to updated and accurate information is a basic requirement
for both informing and protecting the public. The Elk River spill
presented an acute situation: the public drinking water supply for
thousands of people was suddenly contaminated with a chemical
about which virtually nothing was known, other than it smelled and
tasted so badly that people found the water undrinkable in many
cases. Contamination of a tap water supply – and of course the
water was being used for drinking, cooking, bathing, laundry and
other uses leading to direct skin contact and consumption – is one
of the starkest situations any community may face. It was
surprising to many people – and wholly unacceptable – that
thousands of gallons of a hazardous chemical could be stored and
spill upstream of a drinking water intake – and that there was
essentially no useful information available for the public,
drinking water system operators, state or federal public health
officials, or medical professionals and first responders, as to
the safety or potential health and environmental effects of the
substance.
In a
story a few years ago, Charles Duhigg of The New York Times
explained:
Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act,
yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States,
according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government
and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those
chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated
with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations
in drinking water … But not one chemical has been added to the
list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.
Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated
by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than
previously known. However, many of the act’s standards for those
chemicals have not been updated since the 1980s, and some remain
essentially unchanged since the law was passed in 1974.
And just yesterday, Elizabeth Shogren of NPR News reported:
West Virginia’s drinking water crisis earlier this year
highlighted an unsettling truth about tap water: Treatment plants
test for only a fraction of the chemicals in use.