That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

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, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

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.

All told, more than 62 million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease, according to an analysis by The Times of more than 19 million drinking-water test results from the District of Columbia and the 45 states that made data available.

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Onetime Nevada Brothel Could Become Conservationists’ Oasis

Watching bulldozers pour crushed rocks to force the Truckee River into a more natural serpentine pattern, Mickey Hazelwood, project director for the Nature Conservancy, mused that like many acts of salvation, this one has its roots deep in sin.

For decades, this high-desert site eight miles east of Reno was best known as the home of the Mustang Ranch, the first licensed brothel in the United States. From thin to plump, dwarflike to Amazonian, women hired to suit a range of tastes would line up for inspection by clients in pink stucco buildings tucked into a cottonwood grove 300 yards from the river’s bank.

The brothel reopened a few miles downriver in 2006, after the land was confiscated by the Internal Revenue Service and the name and buildings were sold to the highest bidder. Working 12-hour shifts at their new complex, part of which was airlifted from the old site, the women still greet customers in knee socks, push-up bras and other intimate wear.

The old property, meanwhile, is undergoing a transformation. Workers are restoring it to floodplain, undoing the damage wrought when federal engineers straightened the Truckee River a half century ago.

For most of its recorded history, the Truckee meandered lazily 110 miles from mountainous Lake Tahoe through Reno, once a floodplain, to the great basin in Nevada. Dense forests grew at its banks, and 20-pound cutthroat trout swam its length.

But as rivers tend to do, the Truckee would flood. In Reno, where the population had been steadily growing since 1900, and passed 50,000 by 1950, the effects could be devastating.

So in the next decade, the Army Corps of Engineers moved to control flooding by straightening and widening the river. The unintended result was that the Truckee deepened in its own channel, and the entire water table dropped along its banks.

Within years, the lower Truckee lost a majority of its native plants as well as dependent birds and wildlife. Only ancient cottonwoods with deep roots survived. Invasive weeds took over, and the river became an eyesore.

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River Project Fuels Competing Claims of Green

Last month, on a gravelly embankment of the Youngsan River here, President Lee Myung-bak broke ground on a $19.2 billion public works project to remake the country’s four longest rivers, an ambitious and controversial undertaking that has spurred a national debate over what constitutes green development.

Mr. Lee says the project will generate thousands of jobs, improve water supply and quality, and prevent flooding, while providing a model for environmentally sound development.

But critics call it a political boondoggle, say it will be an environmental disaster and have sued to stop it. More South Koreans oppose the project than support it. And opponents charge that it is simply a repackaging of Mr. Lee’s earlier dream of linking the Han and Nakdong Rivers to create a “Grand Korean Waterway” across the nation, a proposal he abandoned in the face of widespread opposition.

Meanwhile engineers have already begun work to rebuild the Han, Nakdong, Kum and Youngsan Rivers, work that is likely to make Mr. Lee famous or infamous long after his five-year term ends in 2013 and could even determine who succeeds him.

“If they build a weir here, I fear it will trap the water and make the river more polluted than it is now,” said Choi Han-gon, 55, a farmer here who admits to conflicted feelings about the project. Gazing at a government billboard depicting the futuristic waterfront town promised to rise here within two years, he added, “I can also see why everyone will love it once it’s done.”

Mr. Lee, a former chief executive of the Hyundai construction company who is nicknamed the Bulldozer for his penchant for colossal engineering schemes, aims at nothing less than rethinking the ecology and economy of the rivers, some of which were heavily polluted during the country’s rapid industrialization. For three years, workers will dredge river bottoms and build dikes, reservoirs and hydroelectric power stations.

When the work is done, the government says, the rivers will “come alive” with tourists, sailboats and water sports enthusiasts. Sixteen futuristic-looking weirs will straddle the rivers, creating pristine lakes bordered by wetland parks. A 1,050-mile network of bike trails will run along the rivers.

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A lake lies on its deathbed

The short rains that pounded the larger Nakuru District for a few days in August, September and November were greeted with a sigh of relief.

For a while, residents and tourists marvelled at the replenished Lake Elementaita that had dried up due to the long drought, destruction of its catchment area and the effects of the much publicised climate change.

But their joy was short-lived, as the lake, home to thousands of lesser flamingoes, is on its deathbed again, with more than 80 per cent of it having dried up.

Rift Valley

Other lakes such as Nakuru, Naivasha, Baringo, Solai, Bogoria and Turkana, all in the Rift Valley, have also been affected although Elementaita is the worst hit due to its shallowness.

For years, the bright pink lake gave travellers using the Nairobi highway a great view through the dry scrubland that stretches from Naivasha Town to Nakuru.

Motorists would stop by the road to savour the sight that blends the pink colour of thousands of flamingoes with those of pelicans feeding in the shadow waters and the blue colour of the waters.

Others, unable to resist the magnificent sight, would drive down to the lake shore for a closer look and to take pictures.

But that was over a year ago as the protracted drought drained the lake after the rivers that replenish it dried up.

The lake is almost no more. The former expanse of water has been reduced to a puddle at the lake centre, where a few hundred determined birds still huddle to get their last pecks at the fast declining marine organisms that form their diet.

Motorists still look out of their windows, not with awe any more, but with a tinge of sadness to see what man can do to the environment.

Tourist attraction

And they are not alone. Scientists and conservationists are similarly alarmed and view the drying up of the lake as a major blow to an important ecosystem that is both a treasured national heritage and a major tourist attraction.

And the lake’s predicament could not have come at a worse time, what with the plans underway to declare the lake a World Heritage Site.

Kenya Wildlife Service research scientist Bernard Kuloba says Lake Elementaita, before being ravaged by the drought, was a vital breeding ground for the pelicans that live in Lake Nakuru National Park, located scores of kilometres away.

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Millions in U.S. Drink Dirty Water, Records Show

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.

In some instances, drinking water violations were one-time events, and probably posed little risk. But for hundreds of other systems, illegal contamination persisted for years, records show.

On Tuesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee will question a high-ranking E.P.A. official about the agency’s enforcement of drinking-water safety laws. The E.P.A. is expected to announce a new policy for how it polices the nation’s 54,700 water systems.

“This administration has made it clear that clean water is a top priority,” said an E.P.A. spokeswoman, Adora Andy, in response to questions regarding the agency’s drinking water enforcement. The E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, this year announced a wide-ranging overhaul of enforcement of the Clean Water Act, which regulates pollution into waterways.

“The previous eight years provide a perfect example of what happens when political leadership fails to act to protect our health and the environment,” Ms. Andy added.

Water pollution has become a growing concern for some lawmakers as government oversight of polluters has waned. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, in 2007 asked the E.P.A. for data on Americans’ exposure to some contaminants in drinking water.

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"Wired" Irish River Detects Pollution in Real Time

Nature has gone wireless in Ireland, where scientists have outfitted a major river with sensors that detect spikes in pollution in real time.

Sensors recently placed at various points in the River Lee, near the city of Cork, send information on pollution levels back to a data center. Water managers can keep tabs on pollutants entering the river and, if need be, mount an immediate response.

Called the DEPLOY project, the program was developed as a cheaper alternative to sending out scientists to collect water samples several times a day. In addition, the technology can identify a disastrous influx of pollution, such as toxic industrial-chemical spills, before fish go belly up.

Citizens can also set up an account to get data reports, so they can receive text messages or emails whenever water quality reaches an unhealthy level at points in the river where people may kayak or swim .

"You can build a story about what is actually happening with the water," added Paul Gaughan, a project coordinator at the Marine Institute in Galway, Ireland, which is co-funding the initiative with the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.

For some, the Irish project is a test case: If successful, DEPLOY and other water-monitoring projects across the globe could help build a case for widespread wireless environmental monitoring.

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California’s sinking delta

Dennis Baldocchi often drives past the ruins of his grandmother’s house on Sherman Island, in northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Flooding gutted the house when the island’s levee broke 40 years ago. Today, grass grows through the floors and chickens wander through.

To Dr. Baldocchi, the slanting hulk whispers an unsettling truth: The land that his family farmed for three generations is sinking farther below sea level each year.

Immigrants began arriving at the Sacramento River Delta 150 years ago. They drained 450,000 acres of marshy lands so that they could farm asparagus, corn, and sugar beets.

Their ingenuity fueled an economic boom, but it also triggered a slow-motion catastrophe: Draining allowed oxygen to penetrate the soil, permitting microbes to consume organic detritus that had lain undisturbed for millenniums, and to churn out carbon dioxide. As the soil deflated, the land sank as much as two inches per year.

Baldocchi, now a biogeochemist at the University of California in nearby Berkeley, spent much of his childhood on Sherman Island, pheasant hunting and helping harvest asparagus on his uncles’ farms. He didn’t appreciate the slow changes that were taking place in the land until he returned in 1999, after 22 years away.

Baldocchi motions to the road ahead. It hovers six feet above the plowed fields. The roads have sunk more slowly than surrounding fields, since blacktop slows the seepage of oxygen, which microbes need to devour peat. “When you grow up here, an inch or two per year you don’t notice,” he says. “But if you’re gone 22 years and it drops two or three feet, you get a visual sense of it.”

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Overfishing linked to algal blooms

Nitrogenous fertilizers and detergents have long been known to cause algal blooms that block sunlight and strangle ecosystems, but a study now reveals that overfishing of large predatory fish is also playing a key part.

Britas Klemens Eriksson at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands noticed that populations of predatory fish in the Baltic Sea seemed to be declining in areas where algal blooms subsequently tended to form. Curious as to whether there was a connection, Eriksson and a team of colleagues from the Swedish Board of Fisheries in Öregrund set up an investigation.

The team reviewed a year's worth of field data on predatory pike (Esox lucius) and perch (Perca fluviatilis) populations from nine areas covering 700 kilometres of coastline in the Baltic Sea. They then compared this information with information collected during the same period on smaller fish and algal populations in the region. They found some intriguing patterns.

"In areas where there were strong declines in perch and pike there were massive increases in smaller fish and large blooms of algae," comments Eriksson. Where perch and pike populations were intact, the surrounding waters had a 10% chance of experiencing an algal bloom; in areas where their populations had been substantially reduced, the chances of an algal bloom were 50%.

Intrigued by these trends, the researchers ran small-scale field experiments for 2 years in unpolluted waters to investigate the forces responsible for controlling algal growth. They manipulated the environmental conditions in these experiments by: sometimes excluding large predatory fish through the use of cages; sometimes adding nitrogenous fertilizer pellets; sometimes applying both techniques; and sometimes leaving areas as untouched controls.

As expected, the nitrogenous pellets increased algal growth. But surprisingly, when predatory fish were prevented from accessing a given area, algae in that area became much more prevalent. The effect even proved to be true when nitrogenous pellets were not added to the system.

"This is the first study to show that top predators are linked to the formation of macroalgal blooms," says marine biologist Heike Lotze, at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

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Portland lifts water-boiling order; now tempers are simmering

Portland lifted its drinking water alert Sunday afternoon, meaning westside residents no longer have to boil water, but the E. coli contamination scare has many people simmering in anger instead.

The contamination, discovered Thursday but not relayed to the public until confirmed by a second test Saturday, plainly worried many residents. They questioned why the alert was not given sooner, said officials didn't clearly define the affected area and wondered whether their tap water had made them sick.

It also reignited the argument over whether Portland's five open water storage reservoirs -- part of a system that provides drinking water for more than 860,000 people -- should be covered.

City officials, however, defended the Portland Water Bureau's handling of the situation.

"The system worked exactly as it was planned to work," Commissioner Randy Leonard said at a news conference Sunday. Leonard, who is in charge of the bureau, said no one was at risk during the alert.

Leonard and Mayor Sam Adams said the incident points out the need for improvements, however. Adams said the city should have a system similar to school districts, which e-mail parents when library books are due and make automated telephone calls to warn of closures during bad weather.

The contamination was limited to a single reservoir at Washington Park, but Water Bureau Director David Shaff said the bureau hasn't the capability to pinpoint which customers receive water from which reservoirs. Lacking that, the bureau had to issue a blanket boil-water order to westside residents. It was the first time in the bureau's history that it issued such a directive.

The order affected about 50,000 residences and businesses west of the Willamette River and receiving water from the Portland Water Bureau or the Burlington, Palatine Hill or Valley View water districts, which buy water from Portland.

In response, residents emptied store shelves of bottled water, restaurants on Portland's westside tossed out ice, quit serving water and coffee or closed, and hotels offered guests bottled water and apologies. Some people boiled water for tea and coffee and brushed their teeth with sparkling water.

"I think a lot of people are pretty worried," said Jessica Johnson, who lives in Northwest Portland. "My mom called to tell me yesterday, and I had just chugged a glass of water. But I'm feeling fine."

Leonard said some people overreacted, but said the incident pointed out the need to have water and other emergency supplies on hand. Multnomah County health officer Dr. Gary Oxman said the warning system is a "designed over-reaction" intended to protect the most vulnerable residents.

The E. coli bacteria found in the reservoir was not the most serious type, Oxman said. He and other health officials said the most likely symptoms would be a sore stomach and diarrhea. Hospitals haven't reported any increase in illness, Oxman said.

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