h2oNYTIMESept09

Monica Almeida/The New York Times Samples of contaminated tap water from Maywood, Calif.

A New York Times series, “Toxic Waters,” has chronicled the problems of the nation’s drinking water supply, from worsening chemical contamination to the crumbling networks of pipes that are costing local and state governments more and more to repair.

Related Toxic Waters

A series about the worsening pollution in America’s waters and regulators’ response.

Go to the Series »

The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that it would tighten regulations on chemicals used by industry, and allow government scientists to issue rules that would apply to dozens of chemicals at a time, reversing a policy that essentially required them to examine pollutants one by one.

Will the regulatory changes help ease the widespread problems? How can the nation begin to address the prevalent risks, given the overwhelming financial costs?

Alex Matthiessen, Riverkeeper Inc.
Carolyn Berndt, National League of Cities
Robert Morris, engineer and epidemiologist
Jeanne VanBriesen, civil and environmental engineering professor

Where to Start

Alex Matthiessen, who was a special assistant to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt from 1997 to 2000, is the president of Riverkeeper Inc., a clean water advocacy organization based in Tarrytown, N.Y.

Our regulatory system for protecting the nation’s water is not working. After decades of significant improvements, water quality is once again in a state of decline.

The federal share of spending on water systems has plunged from about 75 percent in 1978 to less than 5 percent.

While the E.P.A. and state environmental agencies are failing to fully enforce our federal and state clean water laws, it’s also a funding problem. Since 1978, the U.S. share of water infrastructure spending has plunged from about 75 percent to less than 5 percent, leaving cash-strapped state and local governments to shoulder an expense most cannot afford.

As a result, our water delivery and sewage treatment systems are deteriorating, threatening public health and forcing many Americans to rely increasingly on expensive bottled water, which from an environmental and economic point of view is a disastrous trend.

So where do we get the money to reinvest in our water and sewage systems given Congress’s reluctance to use the annual budget process to make significant investments in clean water?

A National Retreat

Carolyn Berndt is principal associate for systems and sustainability at the National League of Cities.

The water main breaks that occur in nearly every community in the country highlight what state and local officials have long known: that the needs of their water systems far exceed available funding. Much of the infrastructure in many cities is more than 100 years old.

A case study is Nashville, which is facing a $500 million price tag to update its water system that cannot be covered with rate increases alone.

Many communities have made the politically unpopular decision to raise rates. Some have complained that rates are too low for such a vital resource, but the problem of financing critical maintenance, repair and rehabilitation can’t be solved with rate increases alone.

The funding gap between needs and expenditures for aging and failing waste water, storm water and drinking water networks is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few decades. For example, Nashville is facing a $500 million price tag to update its water system that cannot be solved with rate increases alone.

As a share of non-defense federal expenditures, spending on roads, bridges and water systems has steadily declined since 1966.

Filter Just What We Drink

Robert Morris, M.D., Ph.D., is an engineer and epidemiologist specializing in drinking water and health. He is the author of “The Blue Death: The Intriguing Past and Present Danger of the Water You Drink.” He is an adjunct faculty member in environmental engineering at the University of Washington.

A Lebanese woman once described to me the experience of coming to the United States and searching through the house for the drinking water tap. Lebanon, she explained, has separate water pipes for drinking water. She could not imagine that she was supposed to drink the same water that was being used to wash floors and flush toilets.

Local utilities could provide or lease water filtering systems just for drinking water.

Unlike Lebanon, America does not distinguish between the water we drink and the other 99.5 percent of water flowing to our homes. However, the idea of separating water supplies according to end use is not as far fetched as we might imagine.

A 2007 report from the British Royal Society of Chemistry called for a separate water supply system for drinking water pipes as an ideal system for use in Great Britain. Dividing our water supply according to its end use would allow us to raise the quality of our drinking water without incurring the tremendous cost of advanced filtration for toilet water.

Build Smarter Systems

Jeanne M. VanBriesen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, is the director of the Center for Water Quality in Urban Environmental Systems.

Public water works in American cities and towns are a marvel, but they didn’t just happen. They are the result of significant investments our parents and grandparents made in state-of-the art technology — well, state-of-the-art in 1900 or 1950.

Put in pipes that sense when breaks are about to happen and can call for repairs.

We’ve been coasting on those investments for a long time, and there is no way to put off the need to repair, replace and upgrade much of these systems. The bill will be large, and we will be tempted to delay. But new investments in what is an important part of our public health system offer an opportunity to create a different kind of water network.

We wouldn’t use the same kind of phones or cars our grandparents had all those years ago, and we shouldn’t replace the water system in 2010 with the same technology we used to build it in 1900.

The time has come to create an intelligent infrastructure: water pipes that sense when breaks are about to happen and fix themselves or call for repairs; sensors that evaluate the water quality 24-7, adjusting treatment at the plant for changes in the river; and responsive systems that adjust reservoir levels to optimize energy generation, flood control, and recreational opportunities. The time has come for the water systems we rely on to be at least half as smart as our phones.

About 50 million people are affected in Bangladesh

Speaking at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) annual meeting in London, scientists said this will lead to higher rates of cancer in the future.

Eating large amounts of rice grown in affected areas could also be a health risk, scientists said.

"It's a global problem, present in 70 countries, probably more," said Peter Ravenscroft, a research associate in geography with Cambridge University.

"If you work on drinking water standards used in Europe and North America, then you see that about 140 million people around the world are above those levels and at risk."

Arsenic consumption leads to higher rates of some cancers, including tumours of the lung, bladder and skin, and other lung conditions. Some of these effects show up decades after the first exposure.

I don't know of one government agency which has given this the priority it deserves

Allan Smith

"In the long term, one in every 10 people with high concentrations of arsenic in their water will die from it," observed Allan Smith from the University of California at Berkeley.

"This is the highest known increase in mortality from any environmental exposure."

The international response, he said, is not what the scale of the problem merits.

"I don't know of one government agency which has given this the priority it deserves," he commented.

The first signs that arsenic-contaminated water might be a major health issue emerged in the 1980s, with the documentation of poisoned communities in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.

Rice plants absorb arsenic from the soil as they grow

In order to avoid drinking surface water, which can be contaminated with bacteria causing diarrhoea and other diseases, aid agencies had been promoting the digging of wells, not suspecting that well water would emerge with elevated levels of arsenic.

The metal is present naturally in soil, and leaches into groundwater, with bacteria thought to play a role.

Since then, large-scale contamination has been found in other Asian countries such as China, Cambodia and Vietnam, in South America and Africa.

It is less of a problem in North America and Europe where most water is provided by utilities. However, some private wells in the UK may not be tested and could present a problem, Mr Ravenscroft said.

Once the threat has been identified, there are remedies, such as as digging deeper wells, purification, and identifying safe surface water supplies.

As a matter of priority, scientists at the RGS meeting said, governments should test all wells in order to assess the threat to communities.

"Africa, for example, is probably affected less than other continents, but so little is known that we would recommend widespread testing," said Peter Ravenscroft.

His Cambridge team has developed computer models aimed at predicting which regions might have the highest risks, taking into account factors such as geology and climate.

Arsenic contamination can be a problem in parts of the US

"We have assessments of the Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins, for example, and then we look for similar basins elsewhere.

"There are similar areas in Indonesia and the Philippines, and very little evidence of tests; yet where there has been some testing, in (the Indonesian province of) Aceh for example, signs of arsenic turned up."

Asian countries use water for agriculture as well as drinking, and this too can be a source of arsenic poisoning.

Rice is usually grown in paddy fields, often flooded with water from the same wells. Arsenic is drawn up into the grains which are used for food.

Andrew Meharg from Aberdeen University has shown that arsenic transfers from soil to rice about 10 times more efficiently than to other grain crops.

This is clearly a problem in countries such as Bangladesh where rice is the staple food, and Professor Meharg believes it could be an issue even in the UK among communities which eat rice frequently.

"The average (British) person eats about 10g to 16g of rice per day, but members of the UK Bangladeshi community for example might eat 300g per day," he said.

The UK's Food Standards Agency is currently assessing whether this level of consumption carries any risk.

The Nation’s Big Water Repair Bill

Where to Start

A National Retreat

Filter Just What We Drink

Build Smarter Systems