Access to clean, safe drinking water is so necessary to life that it should be considered a fundamental human right. Here in the United States it's also the law.
Yet, over the past five years, 20 percent of U.S. water treatment systems--including systems in all 50 states--violated the Safe Drinking Water Act and sent tap water laced with illegal concentrations of toxic chemicals, radioactive substances or dangerous bacteria into the homes, schools and offices of some 49 million Americans, according to a report by The New York Times.
Some of those violations were short-lived while others went on for years. Federal and state regulators were informed of each violation as it occurred, yet only 6 percent of the law-breaking water systems were ever fined or called to account in some way, according to millions of regulatory records examined by The Times.
Contaminated drinking water is linked to millions of illnesses in the United States every year--roughly 19 million cases annually are attributed to waterborne parasites, viruses and bacteria alone--but the full extent of the health hazard is impossible to determine in the short-term because many of the contaminants regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act are contributing factors diseases that are slow to develop, such as various types of cancer.
The report points to a serious breakdown at almost every level of the regulatory system. Records show that state and federal regulators often failed to force water systems that were violating key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act to comply with the law. Many water systems never heard from regulators after submitting paperwork showing that they were out of compliance, while others failed to take action even after technical assistance and financial aid were available.
At the same time, the research revealed that some of the regulations were too weak to be effective. A water system could be in full compliance with the limits on arsenic, for example, and still deliver tap water that would put consumers at a 1-in-600 chance of developing bladder cancer.
As I said before, access to clean, safe drinking water is not a luxury or a privilege, it is a fundamental right, one the government is obliged to guarantee its citizens, and one that we purchase with our taxes as well as regular payments to local water districts.
Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency are working on reforms to ensure safer drinking water for all Americans, and it seems pretty clear that stronger government oversight of both water polluters and drinking water providers is needed. Given the years of neglect by federal regulators at the EPA, however, even some people within the agency seem to lack confidence that changes in policy will lead to better results.
"The same people who told us to ignore Safe Drinking Water Act violations are still running the divisions," one mid-level E.P.A. official told The Times. "There's no accountability, and so nothing's going to change."
It will be up to Congress and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to restore the accountability of the agency and the regulatory process, and to make sure Americans can trust what comes out of the tap.
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And most people with colon cancer report having swallowed small amounts of saliva periodically throughout their lives.
-According to the CDC, only 1800 of the 24 million annual deaths in the US are due to water borne disease (0.008%). None are attributed to chemical contaminants. (Are there really none?)
-Most safety standards for contaminants are 10-20x higher than the evidence shows is necessary, when that is known.
-BUT: most chems have not been studied for safety levels. Fortunately, the rates of problems for these is so low as to not be obviously discernible, if they do cause any problems at all.
-We reach a point of diminishing returns when we invest money and effort in studying problems that are rare or nonexistent.
-Life is a gamble. How much can you spare for a bet?
By coincidence, this in today’s news: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/14/private-property-clean-water-restoration-act/
Freedom is the right to do anything the law allows.
–Baron de Montesquieu
The point here is that the safety standards set by the Safe Drinking Water Act were routinely violated by utilities entrusted with delivering safe, clean drinking water. The cases cited were for illegal levels of harmful substances that exceeded established safety standards.
It seems a little glib to compare swallowing “small amounts of saliva periodically throughout their lives” to millions of people uknowingly ingesting such substances from a source they should be able to trust. The number of U.S. deaths due to waterborne disease may be relatively low, but millions of people fall ill each year due to tainted drinking water and some of those illnesses are quite serious. And if the problem goes unchecked, it’s hard to know what the cumulative effect may be.
Despite the violations, nobody is getting sick from chemical contamination- that’s because the standards leave a very great margin of safety. The overwhelming number of infectious problems come from drinking water from untreated sources. There have been notable clusters of infectious cases when municiple sources become accidently, unknowingly contaminated, but this is rare, maybe once in a decade across the country.
-Instead of these vague allusions to potential, but rare problems which seem more intended to incite a needless panic among the uneducated, why not pick a specific instance of a real problem (eg- the Cryptosporidium contamination of the Milwaukee water supply around 1985) and analyze it to see where the mistakes were made and suggest possible remedial actions? There’s always a cost to regulation. And there’s the point of diminshing returns from regulations.