Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [41]
After the moment passes, the water flows placidly through wooden walls into a field of secondary tanks, where it’s suddenly, startlingly, blue. The NTU isn’t yet 0.1—well below the federal standard—but it’s getting there. On this ninety-degree day, I find the urge to dive into these thirty million gallons of sparkling turquoise water nearly irresistible. The water looks done to me, but Klender has further plans. After spending four hours in the secondary tanks, the water will be dosed with carbon dioxide in an adjacent basin, to lower its pH (water with a high pH tastes dry, Klender says), and, depending on the season, blended with powder-activated carbon, which turns all that blue temporarily black.
“The carbon absorbs atrazine,” Klender says.
Every year, American farmers spread about seventy-six million pounds of atrazine, a herbicide, on fields. When it rains, much of that runs into ditches and streams, contaminating drinking-water sources in nearly every major Midwestern city, and well water and groundwater in states where the compound isn’t even used. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have found atrazine at levels up to 224 parts per billion in some Midwestern streams. When Breck Speed, CEO of Mountain Valley Spring Company, looked around Missouri for a spring to feed a bottling plant—water companies are always looking to expand, I’m learning—he came up dry: all the groundwater he tested contained atrazine.
Atrazine kills weeds, and more. Even at levels well below the federal standard—three parts per billion—it causes birth defects, reproductive disorders, and cancer in lab animals. (In the European Union, the maximum contaminant level for atrazine is thirty times lower, at 0.1 ppb.) Human kidneys filter atrazine, and most people don’t spend a lot of time swimming in herbicide-laced water, as frogs do. But human fetuses do live in water. When I asked Tyrone Hayes, the Berkeley developmental endocrinologist who discovered that atrazine caused male frogs, in the wild and in the lab, to grow ovaries in their testes, if he’d recommend that his pregnant wife or his children drink tap water in the Midwest in the springtime, he said, “Why take that chance?”
How do cities get away with serving atrazine-laced water? It’s simple: water utilities are required to announce to the feds only their quarterly averages. EPA regulations focus on limiting risks from long-term exposure: levels of atrazine may peak in the May-to-August runoff period, but with averaging out over quarters, it’s possible to come in under the wire. Cities can also test before and after predicted spikes. The New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, which takes raw water from the Mississippi River, tells customers its “running annual averages observed have always been found to be below the Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) set by the EPA.” Kansas City, by contrast, has never topped three parts per billion in a day, let alone averaged over a year.
And then there’s this: the government sets standards for most contaminants based on a healthy 150-pound person who drinks two liters of water a day. “If you drink a lot more, you get a higher exposure,” Jane Houlihan of the Environmental Working Group, says. “Or if you’re small or vulnerable to a contaminant, you’re also at higher risk.”
Houlihan reminds me that when the EPA sets standards for drinking water, it balances health effects—how many people would get sick from a contaminant—with the cost of cleaning up water to reduce that risk. Pesticide regulations for fruits and vegetables, by contrast, are only health-based. Federal law requires the EPA to prove that the cost of removing a contaminant doesn’t exceed its benefits (deaths averted, that is, with a human life valued at $6.1 million). If it does, the legal limits are raised—that is, weakened.
Agricultural impacts on drinking water are bound to get worse. Pushed by the ethanol boom that drove up corn prices, farmers in 2007 planted ninety million acres of corn, 15 percent