We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals

Citation needed. PFCs are EVERYWHERE, in TODAY's products. Everything from water-resistant workout pants, to your Chipotle burrito bowl container, to teflon-coated pasta extruders used in food manufacturing (which you cannot examine the way you can a non-stick pan to see whether it's degraded or not) to Glide dental floss that you put in your mouth daily.

You won't find PFCs on the label of any of these examples, either. But they're there.

Apart from that, it's quite obvious that most US tap water is not drinkable since it has this foamy, soft texture with a lot of chlorine. I wonder if there is any connection to that or if that is just a correlation.

> Even though they 'stopped' using these chemicals in manufacturing 10-15 years ago, there's still an incredible level of contamination

They haven't stopped using them, the chemicals are still used in stain and water resistant carpeting and textiles. They're used in cosmetics and sunscreens among other things. One of the biggest sources of contamination is fire retardant foams used in fire suppression.

If you look at some of the sites in that report listed as having contaminated water, many are located near military bases, like Oceanside CA. These bases are the largest sources of ground water contamination of all sorts but specifically PFAS because they routinely practice fire suppression exercises.

> 26,000 sites listed by EPA [1]. But that's sort of irrelevant, because these compounds don't break up over human time scales.

PFAS is an emerging contaminant and isn't strictly regulated yet. Keeping track of these sites however is not irrelevant, it's extremely important that we know of and track these sites because they can and are being remediated.

The current method of remediation involves setting up hundreds or thousands of ground water monitoring wells around a contamination site to track the plumes and then using pumps to remove the ground water and filter it through activated carbon filters. The filters are treated as hazardous waste and incinerated.

> It's hard not to be alarmist about this, PFAS contamination is genuinely terrifying.

I wouldn't say you're being alarmist at all, if anything the current response to PFAS is insufficient and we should be treating it as a public health crisis at least on par with Lead.

The question really is "what is the optimal level of this compound" followed by "how far are we happy to deviate from the optimal amount in either direction to make water production cheaper while having minimal health downsides?"

But they do tend to pooh-pooh any anti-chemical reporting. They are very data-driven so they don't "worry" about things like PFAS because there hasn't been any proven deaths from it, which I find a bit too arrogant. They are also very pro-GMO, which I disagree with. However, I still support them with my donations because we need level-headed reporting like this.

Here's an article from today that I just read that shows their philosophy on anti-hysteria media.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/04/01/abc-news-terrible-scary...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Council_on_Science_an...

All of the above.

Water facilities seem to get tainted the way Flints water facility was tainted, cost cutting. Some things, like brain eating amoebas are hard to get rid of in totality, but in the right environment they could thrive.

Water mains and lateral lines get damaged from over and under pressurization constantly. Fire hydrants are a big source of this. This damage can be difficult to locate without real time digital water meters because pressurization across the system is constantly in flux.

Source: worked at a digital water metering company

https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/reducing-pfas-drinking-wa...

Also, ion-exchange resins.

https://www.epa.gov/ccr

However, it is important to know how the water is being sampled. If all you ever do is report water quality as it leave the treatment plant, then your data is not useful unless you only use the water at that point. To get good and useful data, you need to sample at various endpoint(house/business locations). You want to randomize these testing locations to avoid selection bias but you also want to get several data points out of them to both eliminate and spot irregularities(i.e. spike in chlorine due to heavy rain, spike in lead due to corrosion in pipes.).

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, would you trust the government if they are telling you the water has no issues?

I want a $1 chip I can put a bit of an Apple on and have it tell me how many pesticides, how organic, and stuff like that.

It seems all the tech is possible for that kind of thing (microfluidics, micro gas spectrometry), but there isn't a big enough market to sell it all for rock bottom prices

> Despite mounting evidence of widespread contamination and health risks, the EPA has still not set an enforceable legal limit for PFAS in drinking water.