Unsafe levels of toxic chemicals found in drinking water for 6M Americans
hsph.harvard.edu
hsph.harvard.edu
1. Search zipcode in UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt, obtain PWSID.
2. Filter by PWSID in UCMR3_All.txt.
3. Filter that result by rows containing "=" (which means at or above minimum reporting level)
4. Don't panic.
5. Compare AnalyticalResultsValue column to the Reference Concentration in ucmr3-data-summary-april-2016.pdf. If its under the Reference Concentration then you're safe, within the limits of how incomplete their reference concentations are. The document specifically states:
> The intent of the following table is to identify draft UCMR reference concentrations, where possible, to provide context around the detection of a particular UCMR contaminant above the MRL. The draft reference concentration does not represent an “action level” (EPA requires no particular action1,2 based simply on the fact that UCMR monitoring results exceed draft reference concentrations), nor should the draft reference concentration be interpreted as any indication of an Agency intent to establish a future drinking water regulation for the contaminant at this or any other level.
The minimal reporting level seems to be based on how small an amount is detectable, not harmful. The reference concentration appears to be a best guess at the moment for what a maximum safe amount is.
My zipcode for example came up with several of these above the MRL but below the reference concentration. Enjoy.
Edit: added link.
region=$(grep YOUR_ZIP_GOES_HERE UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt|awk '{print $1}')
grep $region.*= UCMR3_All.txt | awk 'FS = "\t" {print $14,$5,$18}'| sort
cargo install xsv
xsv search -s ZIPCODE <zipcode> -d $'\t' UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt
xsv search -s PWSID <pwsid> -d $'\t' UCMR3_All.txt |
xsv search -s AnalyticalResultsSign = |
xsv select FacilityName,Contaminant,AnalyticalResultsValue |
xsv tablehttp://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health-products/g684/water-f...?
... "Brita" filters were found to remove around 55% of PFOA, whereas "ZeroWater" filters remove more than 95%. I.e. "Brita" filters leave 9x more stuff in the water. The performance difference is similar for other unwanted stuff, like lead.
http://www.consumersearch.com/water-filters
They wrote a buying guide for your next water filter:
http://www.consumersearch.com/water-filters/how-to-buy-a-wat...
Other filters have a shitty digital timer on the pitcher lid last time I checked. It never worked well so I resorted to changing the Brita whenever it started tasting funny. Now I just buy artesian alkaline water. I feel much better.
Most of these filters suck. Better off making your own. Buy silver coil and NSF coconut carbon. Use a french press type device to push water through your silver assorted carbon. Easy! And you save plastic since you made the filter yourself :-)
When the third world revolts, this will be their rallying cry.
[0] http://www.consumerreports.org/products/water-filter/clear2o...
[1] http://clear2o.com/download/PERFORMANCE%20DATA%20SHEET.pdf
Just as a comparison, the EPA safety limits for other compounds in drinking water is[1]:
Arsenic 10,000 parts per trillion
Cyanide 200,000 parts per trillion
Carbon tetrachloride 5,000 parts per trillion
All of those compounds are known to be very toxic. I'm curious why the safety limit is so low for these PFAs if there isn't much data on them.
[1]https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/table-re...
See "PFAs last forever...[PFOA] does not hydrolyse, photolyse or biodegrade under environmental conditions http://www.ewg.org/research/pfcs-global-contaminants/pfcs-la...
The closest analogy would be prions which are also very stable, interfere with the basic function of proteins, and can accumulate through a variety of exposure vectors. The difference is that prions coevolved with the rest of our ecosystem whereas PFAs are entirely synthetic and do not exist in nature. It's unlikely that these molecules are as toxic as arsenic (which wrecks havoc by replacing phosphorus in DNA and the Krebs cycle) but this rather unique combination of circumstances requires an extreme level of caution.
Dialysis wouldn't do a thing since most of the toxic molecules arent going to be in the blood plasma.
I did it recently. I'm using the results to put some water filters into the house that are actually NSF (1) certified to remove the contaminants the test found.
[0]https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/ucmr-3-oc...
The best you can do, in the end, is to avoid paranoia or panic and just aim for some systematic detection, mitigation and prevention processes in your household. With a little luck and a good system, you cheat death or disability, temporarily. You cannot create an ironclad guarantee of safety, but there are many things that you can do something about.
for pwsid in $(grep 48103 UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt | cut -f 1);do for fid in $(grep $pwsid UCMR3_All.txt | cut -f 4);do grep $fid UCMR3_DRT.txt | cut -f 6;done;done | sort | uniq
p.s. every zip code i've tried has a bunch of findings. anyone have a zip code without one?
I updated the bash line to include filtering on "=". From reading other comments, "which means at or above minimum reporting level". But more importantly, the line I had was reporting the "Disinfectant Type" not the "Contaminant"!
If you're feeling really charitable, I'll pay it forward and second another comment: send the donation to EFF.
for pwsid in $(grep 48103 UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt | cut -f 1);do grep $pwsid UCMR3_All.txt | cut -f 14,17 | grep =;done | sort | uniq
it's ugly. If I get a chance later, I'll throw some styles on it to make it easier to read.
http://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2015-teflon-chemical-har...
For example it colors my county, Alameda County, CA in red because there is some system, somewhere in the county where one of these compounds was detected. But the populous areas of the county are served by East Bay MUD, where the data indicates no detection. The actual data lies in a gigantic text file in a zip archive at https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/ucmr-3-oc...
1. not proved bad, we allow.
2. not proved good, we disallow.
The US is more on the first side and the EU on the second, of course, like for any complex issues, the right decision is context dependent and in the middle.
I am working in the area of chemical properties, this is a hard problem and I am sure that when this class of compounds arrived on the market, smart people tried their best to figure out the health implications. We have more tools and experience 50 years later, but we are not smarter. We need to move with caution while handling an increasing market pressure... this is challenging!
Lead is a much bigger problem since it's much harder to filter out.
Scary and worth reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-be...
MRL Tested
chromium 0.2 0.67
vanadium 0.2 1.1
strontium 0.3 960
chromium-6 0.03 0.44
chlorate 20 190
molybdenum 1 8.7
"The lowest amount of an analyte in a sample that can be quantitatively determined with stated, acceptable precision and accuracy under stated analytical conditions (i.e. the lower limit of quantitation). Therefore, analyses are calibrated to the MRL, or lower. To take into account day-to-day fluctuations in instrument sensitivity, analyst performance, and other factors, the MRL is established at three times the MDL (or greater)."
[Edit 2] In my town's overall distribution system there are multiple samples above the allowable Reference Concentration. The highest were:
Tested Allowable
strontium 1900 1500
chlorate 410 210 Tested Ref. Amt (MCL) IRIS RfD (u g/kg/day)
chromium 0.67 50 3
vanadium 1.1 21 7
strontium 960 1,500
chromium-6 0.44 NA
chlorate 190 210
molybdenum 8.7 40 5
Edit: Western Washington, not close to any kind of Hanford runoff.
Well neither did lead, in the olden days. Not in a weekend, that is.
Of course any fear such as it exists (and regardless of how ill-founded or well-founded it may be!) is not about weekend wipe-outs but rather slowly creeping seeping insidious very-long-term poisoning accumulating and unnoticable from day-to-day, until who knows "suddenly" at some point the entire population has at least half a dozen ailments of civilization, new-fangled "syndromes", mitochondrial or neurodegeneration, and depends on dozen of pills..
As another example the difference in water quality in the same district in Moscow and SPB from different taps is crazy.
Now that smart meters are a thing for electricity I really wonder if it would not start to make sense to work on basic water quality measurements in houses.
I don't know enough to comment on how it happened, but the end result was that the PH was too far off and it destroyed something that caused them to leech lead into the water until replaced.
Large parts of the city are still unable to use the pipes in their house.
Areas around fracking sites must be even worse.
And I don't even want to get into the associated earthquakes.
The UCMR3_All.txt file inside looks to have a fairly nice, denormalized set of samples with location names, dates, and detections.
You'll want NSF grade (food grade) carbon from either bone or coconut shells with a fine enough mesh to provide resistance. I bought 10 pounds of this one and its still lasting over a year:
http://www.buyactivatedcharcoal.com/product/granular_activat...
Next you'll want to get silver tubing and adapters to kill all bacteria. You'll also be able to connect your carbon filter inline with the tubing and use a pump to push your water through the filter.
This is the best NSF antibacterial silver infused tubing money can buy:
http://www.newageindustries.com/clearflo-Ag-47-antimicrobial...
I recommend NSF Eldon James antimicrobial tube fittings:
http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/default.aspx?catid=550
You can also find the clearflo tubing on usplastics but only in 100 feet rolls. I can ship some if you need only a few feet, my email is in my profile.
Next youll want a transparent/translucent inline refillable filter. I recommend a 1/2" FPT but you can get larger/smaller depending on how much water you want to filter and what your tubing, adapters, and pump size is, everything needs to match. 1/2" ID for tubing and 1/2" NPT / barbs is very compatible and provides enough flow for most purposes. Theres a lot of these on the market, here's a good google search that sources images from amazon, ebay, and some smaller vendors:
https://www.google.com/search?q=inline+refillable+filter&prm...
Unless you hook this contraption up to an actual water line( your sink), you'll need a pump to push the water through the carbon. No, gravity is not good enough - if the filter is worth its salt it will provide a resistance much greater than what gravity can provide.
I recommend Danner steel pumps. Their plastic ones suck, trust me, I've burned through a few. This pump has really shined:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BJK3QQ
Now if you choose to use this pump, go with 1/2" on everything. Here is a barbed adapter that will screw perfectly into the top of the pump and seal perfectly with 1/2" ID tubing:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008TSRZJE
Let me know what you finally settle on and how it goes. Filtration is lots of fun!! Cheers! :-)
Unfortunately this is the law of the land and the opinion of many.
The truly frightening part isn't that people like you, completely devoid of logic and common sense, exist. Its that people like you are many, and that your ignorance is exploited by those who run the show and profit off of this poisoning.
But then this sort of thread always generates more hype than light, I suppose.
citation needed.
There are a bunch of compounds whose effects are so harmful that a few parts per million are potentially lethal.
The fact you apparently are unaware of any of them, speaks volumes.
Which do you prefer, Webster's or OED?
Who the hell are you to say that the adulterant you introduce into my bloodstream is safe because its such a low level? Should you have to wait until I stick my thumb in your eye to attain proof that its harmful before I'm prevented from doing so?
"These experiments yield bodily concentrations of BPA in ranges of parts per million, but some recent studies have even found that when BPA interacts with hormone receptors on cell membranes, concentrations of one part per trillion can stimulate physiological responses."
Just an example, tho.
Also, to borrow from history, cigarettes once upon a time were not considered harmful mainly because there was just no data suggesting that they were. Smokers regularly "saturated" their environments with smoke. Smoking is banned in a lot of placed now that we have data. Does this help people who got lung cancer or other diseases, who might not even smoked themselves but only second hand? It does not.
The compounds in question here are known to bioaccumulate, meaning once you got them in your system, they will (mostly) stay in and not break down. If I came to your house every day, placing a rock in it and telling you that you cannot remove it, you'd probably object and also don't think that me saying "But it's only one(1) rock and does not matter!" especially after I added new rocks for years.
The default should be to ban use of any compound until you can reasonably prove it is safe according to the current state of science, not allowing everything until somebody proves it is unsafe.
Now, if people want to ingest potentially harmful stuff by choice (e.g. smoking)... that's another matter and they should be free to do so. But they should not be free to make other people ingest potentially harmful stuff against their consent or knowledge (e.g. pollution)
This guarantees an exponential slowdown in human progress, while not demonstrably leaving us any safer.
No, thanks.
PP is as scientific as Pascal's Wager and for the same reasons.
> ...from the Faroe Islands, an island country off the coast of Denmark
Not really off the coast of Denmark... https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Faroe+Islands
Just as a private monopoly would start to reduce quality once it cornered the market, public, regulated monopolies behave similarly. Why care about quality if there is no competition and it's just another year earning a pension for the bureaucrats involved?
Consider how the bidding process for building roads results in poorly built roads and no incentive to the winner of the contract to build something that will last. Nearly every piece of American infrastructure is riddled with corruption or incompetence (or both). Even basic construction is full of various rules intended to bolster union workers, etc. and adding enormous cost.
Good book on the topic that HN readers will appreciate is "The Master Switch": https://www.amazon.ca/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires...
Calling others ignorant does not help an argument. I think he had a point that when you let government control something it is the worst kind of monopoly and the quality is bound go down the drain. Whether it VA affairs, public education or IRS.
Thats not necessarily true. Certainly outside the US there are many, many public institutions which do fantastic work. The ABC here in Australia and the BBC in the UK produce great television. The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) are highly regarded here, as was CSIRO before the government gutted their funding (CSIRO is an Australian government research group which invented parts of wifi).
I don't know if the reputation US government agencies have for incompetence is real or due to media spin, but the problem is obviously not inevitable. To quote Bill Clinton: "The problem with ideology is that it gives you the answer before you've asked the question".
As an Australian, aside from their news which last I checked doesn't get the same kind of views as the private companies I would disagree.
Maybe the parents enjoy ABC1 or whatever plays kids shows all day but I find the quality of their original shows to be quite poor and their flagships like QANDA have really gone off the rails in the last few years.
its almost like public services dont work well when you defund them.
Yupp. Looking at checks signed by other helps make the decision lot quicker.
> BBC in the UK produce great television.
What for ? At what cost to public taxpayer ? Is it even needed to be run using taxpayer money ?
I only ask because I moved from government to private sector. In government we were all so frustrated that we were so inefficient and had to work with such backward technology and systems. So I left to get paid more and do things better for private industry...
I get paid more, but by god, we're about 10 years behind some of the practices we were bitching about in government, but we call everything a grand success and put out so much advertising and never admit failure and we don't really care about measuring or performance objectively.
I think there's so little cross over most people don't really know whether what they're doing it's objectively efficient...most of us in government had swallowed the line we were behind because that's what we were always told and things were objectively frustrating: so we bought that private is better. And this was despite the general observation that our private competitors generally put things out of lower quality and then arguing that we should be abolished because of our inefficiency/lack of need for us any more.
I'm not saying government is inherently more efficient than private sector, just that government involvement isn't necessarily more inefficient/desirable than private sector or deregulation.
Also, I think a part of this also has to do with the general cultural values systems a society has. Have government or private industry set up to deal with things the society genuinely doesn't value that much, and you're going to find its generally poorly done no matter who it's running the show...
[citation needed]
I think the US political climate seems uniquely poorly suited to having well-functioning government because it seems half the country is hell-bent on proving that government doesn't work.
I don't live in the US and I've only had great experiences at the driver licensing center and tax authority. My garbage gets picked up on time, the water is clean and safe to drink. Meanwhile at private services I've waited in massive lines at banks, and had poor service from telecom companies.
Whichever entity is running the water for a particular area, it's either going to be run by the state or contracted out by it. I don't know anywhere that isn't true, other than places where the water supply is so abysmal that people pay private firms to truck water around.
Government organisations do don't magically do what they were nominally made for. Like all providers, their work is the product of various human motitivations operating under under various kinds of control.
Approximately speaking: private providers are controlled by competition and regulation. Government organisations are controlled by politics and a command structure. Much of that is also regulation -- though sometimes under a different name.
What you call incompetence and corruption happens when those controls fail. The resulting organisation is very much like a private monpoly: it has no competitors, and the chain of bureaucratic control stops short of making anyone accountable to the public.
What sorts of contaminants in drinking water are harmful? How much contamination is too much? What tradeoffs are important when determining that?
Chlorine causes cancer, but it is added to the water supply to prevent bacteria growth while the water is in transit to buildings and residences. Those closest to the treatment facility get over-chlorinated water, and (assuming enough has been added) those furthest away get bacteria-free water.
Fluoride is also sometimes added to water, but it too can cause health problems. How much is reasonable, what is the right tradeoff between the dental health benefits of fluoride and the harms? Who is to decide this?
In Flint, the pipes began leaching harmful chemicals into the water supply, but the officials ignored reports of the problem. Why weren't citizens quickly aware that the water entering their homes (and bodies) was poisonous? Because the public trusts government to do a good job and not to be corrupt.
Public health standards dictate whether an old person gets stents or a coronary bypass operation or neither. There are age limits that apply regardless of health, because of the average health of people of certain ages.
In all cases, public health guidelines are fraught with tradeoffs that inflict intentional harm, usually to conserve resources, etc.
The problem is that the public believes these guidelines to be in their individual best interest. Th public also believes that water deemed safe by regulators is actually safe to consume over the long term, when it may not actually be.
Is it safe to ride in a car with seatbelts and no airbags? Is it safe to drink city water for municipality X for 20 years? How many people will die due to not having an airbag? How many due to low level contamination in the water? Someone is making this judgment call on behalf of everyone, but due to the need to preserve their political authority, the tradeoffs and weaknesses of the approach are not surfaced. They can't say "buy a home water filter" because then they are discriminating against people too poor to do so.
How many poor people live in buildings with water pipes that were grandfathered into code compliance but still create health risks? How much health risk is "reasonable" to prevent the landlord from having to replace pipes?
Similarly, regarding net neutrality, how many startups can never succeed because the "net neutral" latency is too high for the service they wanted to build?
Many of these things are minor, but across the whole spectrum of imperfectly regulated things, are all exposed to significant risk and harm. It's the things we don't tend to focus on (like what constitutes safe water) that are the most likely to harm us, and when we're grieving because a grandparent is sick we are not likely to be thinking about the standard of care that made him/her ineligible for a therapy that had a 1 in 5 chance of extending his/her life by a few years.
Institutions desire power and authority, and they often start out by doing some sort of useful service. But they are easily corrupted. One hallmark of tyranny is the creation of a top down idea of the "greater good". We must be vigilant to prevent our trusted institutions from embodying this sort of tyranny, even on issues that seem inconsequential or minor.
Loyalty shareholders is any day better than total lack of accountability which is the case with public utility companies.
i never was that excited to go to h&r block, but figured they'd be an extra pair of eyes to catch anything stupid. now i don't bother. i've been to the irs a couple times since with my tax questions and get good answers from them. also haven't ever had a problem with the DMV. the VA, i've no experience with.
Those are the metrics that should matter to the society as a whole.
The BMW showroom looks shiny, and they explicitly kick out and don't include in their metrics the customers they fail to serve. Great if you've got the money to pay for that. Bad if you want a measure of social utility or overall efficiency, or if you don't have the money...
Monopolies and businesses if great size have general issues also, regardless of being government or private...
Not making this argument, just pointing out that it helps to surface information.
> Private firms generally have far less internal accountability as far as I can see
- Fannie and Freddie had been exempted from releasing public financial records for several years prior to the financial crisis of 2008.
- Wikileaks revealed that information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was classified solely to help support the government's narrative about the success of the war effort and the lack of Iranian involvement, etc.
With those two examples alone, we see that significant corruption exists on a massive, world altering scale.
In terms of accountability, private firms have an obligation to shareholders to behave ethically and legally, and to behave in a responsible way with the capital provided by shareholders. Specific behavior (such as dumping pollution into public waterways) is dependent on laws and on the enforcement of those laws.
Why do we still see smoke stacks leaking disgusting filth into the environment? Why do we still see pipes carrying all sorts of waste into the oceans? Because the firms doing the polluting are friends of the lawmakers and help keep them in power. The lawmakers are certainly not the "good guys".
Also, notice that in US newspapers there is a steady stream of stories talking about how bad it is to live in other countries. People would leave to find better regulated, less corrupt places, so there is a pretty significant theme of "America is the best country on Earth", and for some reason Americans like reading about problems in other countries and ignoring our own problems.
the implication in this statement is that any organization whose purpose is other than maximizing income streams will be dysfunctional and ineffective. i don't think that's the case.
(edited for tone and concision.)
When there is only one choice, it doesn't really matter what the characteristics of it are, and any information that might reflect negatively on it can be kept hidden from view.
This is not just for the purpose of maximizing income streams. Two competing charities might attempt to raise money to accomplish the same goal, but one may have a far better approach and get far better results.
Imagine if you were given a large scoop of a mushy substance labeled "FOOD". There were multiple vats of it behind a counter, but they all contained the same thing.