Water Worries Keep Drip, Drip, Dripping

Lead in our water isn’t the only thing we need to be worried about in the aftermath of the Flint, Michigan, crisis.

As the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to launch what it calls a “concerted, strategic engagement with key partners and stakeholders across the nation, including state, tribal and local governments, drinking water utilities, and public health, environmental and community stakeholders” — scientists warn of countless other contaminants that may threaten our health.

The Flint crisis, they say, is a wake-up call.

“As water managers use chemical strategies at treatment plants to try to prevent lead from leaching into water supplies, the current approach won’t be sufficient to keep drinking water safe all the way to the tap,” the American Chemical Society stated in a press release.

The EPA has just announced plans to reach out to communities nationwide in the months ahead.

“The [agency] has already intensified our work with state drinking water programs, with a priority focus on implementation of the federal Lead and Copper Rule,” Joel Beauvais, EPA deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Water, wrote in a recent blog post. That focus includes “directing EPA staff to meet with officials from every state to make sure they’re addressing any high lead levels.”

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The next steps, Beauvais said, include increasing public access to data, along with transparency and accountability on water quality reports.

The initiative will also “better ensure that drinking water infrastructure challenges of low-income environmental justice communities and small systems are being appropriately prioritized and addressed.”

Another priority area, he stated, is getting all stakeholders to work together to prioritize and address the challenges posed by unregulated contaminants, such as algal toxins and perfluorinated compounds.

It seems like a good plan, said Susan Richardson, Ph.D., a professor in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina. But she was actually surprised to see it, she told LifeZette.

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“The EPA has dramatically cut funding for drinking water research through the years,” she said. “I worked at an EPA research lab for about 24 years before coming to the University of South Carolina. I was the only chemist within the Office of Research and Development who was still doing work on drinking water disinfection byproducts, which are linked to adverse human health effects.”

She added, “As I understand it, Mike Schock is their only lead expert left, and his work has been severely underfunded, and he has had little laboratory support.”

Underestimated Threats
Richardson is a member of the American Chemical Society, a nonprofit organization chartered by Congress and with nearly 157,000 members today. It is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research.

She said she and her colleagues understand that people often take the quality of their drinking water for granted. Why wouldn’t they? Drinking water disinfection was a major victory in the 20th century. However, an unintended consequence of killing harmful pathogens in our water is the formation of disinfection byproducts — many of which have been found to be toxic and/or carcinogenic. DBPs are the focus of Richardson’s research.

“They are the chemicals always present in our disinfected water, and human epidemiologic studies have found bladder cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects associated with them,” she told LifeZette.

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“The EPA only regulates 11 of them — and of these, none causes bladder cancer in test animals. As a result, many researchers believe unregulated DBPs may be responsible. To date, almost 700 DBPs have been identified, and many are more toxic than those regulated. So this is a really important area,” added Richardson.

Those who live in communities with small drinking water systems (serving  less than 10,000 people), she said, are particularly at risk, “as there are many violations of DBP levels in those locations.” Exposure to DBPs happens in swimming pools and spas as well.

Richardson’s research group also discovered recently that the compounds used for medical imaging (X-ray contrast media) can react with chlorine or chloramines in drinking water treatment — and form iodinated DBPs. She said those are the most toxic DBPs identified to date.

“This source-to-tap scenario is one of the new research areas of our group,” she said. “We are studying the fate of emerging contaminants through wastewater treatment, to drinking water source waters, as well as the transformation in drinking water treatment.”

She added, “I’m also concerned about other chemicals, like NDMA [a DBP that the EPA is considering for regulation, which is extremely carcinogenic]. There are also severe skin rashes, inhalation, and digestion effects that people have reported from taking showers with water treated with chloramines. The last thing these people suspected was their drinking water — but it appears there may be thousands of people suffering with these more recently recognized issues. There needs to be research to determine what is causing these effects and find out how to eliminate it.”

Richardson said the general public can check the water quality reports that their utility provides — usually online — to see what levels of regulated chemicals are present and whether their water meets current EPA standards.

For water systems using chloramines for disinfection, she said it would be good to know whether orthophosphate corrosion inhibitors are being used to prevent lead leaching.

“It might also be good to have your lead tested in your drinking water — and I would recommend testing it without flushing the water first, so that you have a worst-case scenario reading,” said Richardson.