Tap Water

During a sit-down Tuesday with top brass from The New York Times, President-elect Donald Trump told the assembled journalists, columnists and editors that “clean air and ‘crystal clear water’ were vitally important,” the paper reported.

Fluorine-based chemicals that can cause cancer, developmental toxicity and numerous other detrimental health effects have contaminated the drinking water of millions of Americans, and the blood of people and animals worldwide. But how did these chemicals get there – and what happens when they’re passed on to future generations?
 

The recent crisis in Flint, Mich., sounded the alarm on the dangers of lead contamination in drinking water. Now there’s potentially more bad news for the nation’s water supply.
 

Every time they drink a glass of tap water, people in the mid-Ohio River Valley of West Virginia and Ohio may be consuming unsafe amounts of an industrial chemical linked to cancer, birth defects, heart disease and other illness. More than a decade after this threat became known, government regulators have failed to set enforceable standards to ensure the water is safe – and now, new science says the danger may be much greater than either residents or regulators thought.

The State of California’s proposed drinking water standard for hexavalent chromium, or chromium-6, could leave roughly 24 million residents, or more than 60 percent of the state’s population, unprotected from the known carcinogen, according to a review of the proposal by Environmental Working Group, Clean Water Action, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Public Environmental Oversight and Integrated Resource Management.

A study published last week by a Duke University research team has found new evidence that links hydraulic fracturing for natural gas to elevated methane levels in private water supplies across northeastern Pennsylvania.

The reality is that the nation’s primary prairie and wetlands protection program – the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) – was not designed to meet the environmental challenges being created by record prices for farm commodities. Because the majority of the land in the program is taken out of agricultural production under 10- and 15-year rental agreements with the owners, cropland that had been “restored” with grasses and trees is increasingly being plowed under to grow crops again as soon as these agreements expire. As a result, the benefits of taxpayers’ investment in these short-term agreements have proved to be fleeting.

As drilling for natural gas pushes more and more into shale formations in populated areas, the problem of gas bubbling into drinking water is occurring with increasing frequency. Several homeowners have reported flaming tap water and have feared explosions. The danger is not just a theoretical one: a home in Bainbridge, Ohio, exploded in 2007 because the hydraulic fracturing and cementing of a nearby gas well was done improperly.

No matter where you live, the tap water is sure to contain some chemicals you don’t want to drink. For instance, we at Environmental Working Group recently reviewed the water quality tests of 201 big water utilities that serve 100 million Americans.  As our new report shows, every single one of them was polluted with unwanted chemicals called trihalomethanes, which are linked to bladder cancer and other serious disorders.