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« New Canadian legislation reveals toxic chemicals in neighborhoods | Main | Time to say goodbye to Steve »
What's in Washington's water?
I paddle my touring kayak in the Potomac but never a whitewater kayak - never have wanted to practice self-rescues and rolls in that water. Okay, I know, there are world champion kayakers here in DC, and they do it all the time, but they also run the class 5+ rapids at Great Falls. Go figure.
My aversion to doing face plants in the majestic river arises from my son's fifth-grade science fair project on water pollution in Washington D.C. We were both shocked to learn that towards the end of the 19th century, some genius designed the sewer system of the nation's capital to handle rain by overflowing straight into the Potomac. Saber the golden retriever provided valuable confirmation every time she chased a duck and straggled back to shore smelling like a cesspool.
Last week, the U.S. Geological Service published considerably more sophisticated - and chilling - scientific studies of man-made chemicals polluting the Potomac and eight other major rivers. U.S.G.S. researchers found 85 chemicals in samples taken from the Potomac between 2003 and 2005. Among them: water treatment by-products chloroform and bromodichloromethane, a suspected human carcinogen, gasoline hydrocarbons and related chemicals, a dozen herbicides, three pesticides, a fungicide, four manufacturing additives, five cosmetics chemicals, an industrial solvent, cholesterol and two other plant or animal-derived biochemicals. One of the herbicides detected was atrazine, a notorious weed killer suspected of causing the Potomac's "intersex" bass - males that have produced eggs.
A USGS report focusing on tap water derived from the Potomac found that two thirds of 26 compounds detected in at least a fifth of the samples from the great river also showed up in tap water produced for Washington and northern Virginia. The report cautioned that "concentrations for all detected compounds in source and finished water generally were less than 0.1 microgram per liter and always less than human-health benchmarks...On the basis of this screening-level assessment, adverse effects to human health are expected to be negligible (subject to limitations of available human-health benchmarks)."
That last bit about the limits of our knowledge is not comforting, nor is it meant to be. The Pentagon calls it the unk-unk problem - meaning, unknown-unknown, as in, we don't know what we don't know.
But what we do know is that as scientists are able to study increasingly smaller exposures and more subtle causes and effects, we are finding out that tiny traces of some chemicals have a pronounced -- and, so far, never beneficial -- impact on humans and wildlife. The more we learn about birth defects, chronic disease and mysterious neurological and behavioral conditions, the less sanguine we can be about dismissing any exposure as negligible.
That's why Environmental Working Group executive director Richard Wiles told the Washington Post, "Really, no one knows what the effect of drinking this chemical cocktail in your tap water over your lifetime is." Wiles recommends filtering tap water to remove more contaminants.
I'm in. Carbon filters don't cost that much, and I calculate that a reverse osmosis filtration system for my house will pay for itself in a year or so - considering how much water my son consumes in a weekend bicycle racing. During the week, he's a college student studying environmental science. What he learned back in the fifth grade about the yuk we dump in our water convinces him there has to be a better way - and that if he doesn't put his mind to finding it, who will? As the murky, fouled river attests, his parents' generation fell down on the job -- and now some of us are scrambling to make up for lost time.
And keep our heads above that water.
« New Canadian legislation reveals toxic chemicals in neighborhoods |
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