Toxic Waters in US

Charles Duhigg talking:

Allegheny Energy, the coal-fired plant in Masontown, Pennsylvania.

This is one of the largest and, for a long time, one of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the United States. And over the last couple of years, we’ve made great advances in how we clean air pollution. So Allegheny, this plant which is called Hatfield’s Ferry, as well as a number of other plants across the nation, have installed these things called scrubbers. And what scrubbers are is it’s basically they spray water and chemicals through the chimneys and take out a lot of the air pollution before it escapes into the sky.

The problem is that when you spray that stuff in there, and sort of the water and the pollution collects at the bottom, you have to do something with it. And what we found is that, increasingly, that pollution and waste is being dumped into nearby rivers and lakes, or it’s being put into large ponds or landfills, where it can also seep through the ground into drinking water supplies. So what the concern is, is that we’re moving pollution perhaps just from the air to the water, and we’re not really solving the problem as robustly as the nation should.

there are solutions out there. There are systems called zero discharge emission systems that would prevent any pollution from making it into the water or the air. But the federal government has not created any rules for power plants, and this has been a big issue. Way back in 2000, the EPA was poised, and in fact had drafted a rule, to specially regulate pollution, water pollution and other types of pollution, from power plants, but the energy industry pushed back pretty significantly. That rule was shelved, and there’s been no rules designed for power plants since then.

The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral. It’s very dense. When you burn it, a lot of bad stuff comes off, a lot of minerals—barium, arsenic, other minerals. Barium is one that the government has said causes health problems. It can affect your organs. It can cause skin rashes and other problems. Arsenic is another mineral that we see a lot in the byproduct, the waste from coal. Because the Clean Water Act doesn’t say you must limit certain types of chemicals, a lot of power plants emit barium, arsenic and other things, but there’s no limit in the law on how much they can put out. And so, as a result, they can essentially dump as much as they want into nearby rivers. And power plants are usually by rivers, because they need a lot of water to produce energy.

Now, the point that you raise is that a lot of regulators have tried to use the Clean Water Act to regulate and rein in the pollution, the water pollution, that comes out of power plants. But the Clean Water Act, like any law, is only as good as you enforce it. And what we found by looking at our records—and we had built this big database—was that hundreds and hundreds of plants have violated their Clean Water Act permit and have never been punished for it. Or if they have been punished, they’ve been punished to the tune of about, you know, couple thousand dollars or maybe $20,000, when these are firms that bring in billions of dollars in profits.

EPA found that near landfills where power plants have dumped the waste from generating electricity, arsenic has seeped into the groundwater. Sometimes the level of arsenic detected in the groundwater was eighteen times higher than the federal limit. They said that for some populations, they were at an exposed cancer risk that was 2,000 times higher than the approved—than what EPA says we should be exposed to.

Power plants are the single largest source of toxic pollution in the nation. I mean, when you think about it, it’s kind of hard to believe, because we assume that garbage or, sort of what comes out of our house, but it’s actually power plants. They burn coal all day long. Coal is—has a lot of byproducts. So, creating special rules for power plants would make sense, because it is such a big source of toxic emissions, more than chemical plants, more than concrete plans, anything else.

Farming and the impact especially of factory farms on drinking water

For example in Morrison, Wisconsin, there is a 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County.

One of the biggest byproducts is, cows produce a lot of manure. And particularly now, because cows are fed high-protein grains, they produce liquid manure. You’ve got to do something with this manure. You’ve got to sweep it away and put it to—dispose of it. And so, what a lot of farmers do is they spray it on fields, and they use it to grow corn that they feed to the cows, and so there’s kind of a nice cycle there. But when you have so many cows producing so much manure—and each cow produces the amount of manure in a year equivalent to about nineteen people, so in Brown County, which is a relatively sparsely populated county, they produce as much manure as a huge, huge city—they have to do something with it. And so, they spray it on the ground. Some regulators there feel that they spray too much of it on the ground. The soil can only absorb so much of the manure. And so, when the soil reaches capacity, the bacteria and the other bad stuff in the manure filters through into drinking water supplies. And then, when people go to their wells, they drink water that smells like manure.

One woman was giving her six-month-old daughter a bath, and she only breastfed her. She didn’t drink any water, but the infant sucked the dish rag that had bacteria in it and ended up being hospitalized. A field across the street has spread manure a couple days earlier. Particularly in winter months—Wisconsin is very cold. In winter months the ground freezes. They have to continue applying the manure, because they’ve got to put it someplace. And then if there’s an early thaw, it just can seep through the ground very, very quickly.

Nineteen-and-a-half million Americans fall ill each year as a result of the waterborne parasites, the viruses, the bacteria.

You go out, you have an upset stomach for a couple days, and you say, “Oh, I must have eaten something bad the other night.” And you don’t even think about your water, because we don’t assume that water contains bad things in America. And for most of us, it’s just a couple days’ inconvenience. But for some populations—the elderly, the young, people with diseases or people with immune problems—these diseases, this exposure can be enormously dangerous. And over a lifetime, as you’re exposed to other things, to arsenic, to carcinogens that are in water, they end up impacting our health in ways that we probably don’t understand.

The Bush administration was notably inactive on environmental issues. Now, I will say the reductions in enforcement of the Clean Water Act started under the Clinton administration. So this isn’t a purely Democrat versus Republican issue. The EPA under the Bush administration was notably inactive on enforcing a lot of environmental regulations.

It takes a long time to build up a robust system. It takes a long time to build it up. You can destroy it in just a couple of years. And so, we’re probably a couple years away from really having the powerful regulation that the Clean Water Act depends on to survive.

We started by looking at a chemical named atrazine, which is a pesticide, that is the most prevalent pesticide in American waters, and basically looked at whether the EPA was regulating this strongly enough. There’s a lot of new science that says that even at very small doses this can cause —atrazine is related to, or seems somehow connected to, birth defects. And so, the basic question there was, is the scientific system at the EPA working? And some people suggest no.

Then we looked at the Clean Water Act and whether it’s being enforced. And we found that the Clean Water Act is being violated hundreds of thousands of times every year and that those aren’t being punished. And so, as a result, the law doesn’t have any teeth.

Then we started looking at the biggest sources of pollution. We looked at farms and power plants, which we’ve discussed. We’re going to be doing a piece on sewer overflows, which is a huge source of water pollution.

And then, finally, later this year we’ll look at the Safe Drinking Water Act and issues around that law and whether it’s working. And we’re just going through the data now, but there’s a lot of reasons to believe that in the last ten or fifteen years the world has been transformed, in terms of the chemicals that we can now use and that we have at our disposal, in terms of how dangerous they are at very, very small concentrations, and that these laws that were created in the 1970s have not been updated to deal with these new threats.

We’ve solved how to create new chemicals and have used that power to really improve the world. But chemicals are dangerous things. And the more complex the chemical, the more dangerous it is at smaller and smaller concentrations. So a lot of these laws, a lot of these protections that were created the 1970s that dealt with arsenic or barium or things that we knew were dangerous and have existed for thousands of years or since the world began, those laws were designed for those chemicals, and they weren’t designed for these new things that are emerging.

There are thousands and thousands of chemicals that essentially the government has never analyzed, which are part of our daily life and are part of our daily environment.

No industry wants more regulation. It just creates more cost, right? Anyone who works in any industry thinks, oh, we do a pretty good job, we don’t need the government coming in. So it’s understandable that every industry would fight back against regulation.

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Charles Duhigg, Award-winning reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of a new series about the worsening pollution in American waters called “Toxic Waters.”

– from democracynow.org