NEWS OF THE WEEK

NEWS OF THE WEEK: PBS’ ‘Poisoned Waters’ S.O.S.; LA’s Tricky Mail-in Prop 218; Brockovich Targets Groundwater Pollution; LA Eyes Water-Saving Cisterns; AP Reports on ‘Pharma-Tainted Water.’ News briefs of local interest from around the state, the country and the world.

PBS Frontline’s ‘Poisoned Waters’ Reports New Hazardous Chemicals Polluting U.S. Drinking Waters: PBS Frontline documentary “Poisoned Waters” reported April 21st that a new wave of chemical compounds that raise dangers for human health have been found in drinking water systems of cities across the country by the U.S. Geological Survey.
    “Poisoned Waters” reveals new evidence that today's growing environmental threat comes not from the giant industrial polluters of old, but from chemicals in consumers’ face creams, deodorants, prescription medicines and household cleaners that find their way into sewers, storm drains, and eventually into America’s waterways and drinking water.
    “The long-term, slow-motion risk is already being spelled out in large population studies,” Dr. Robert Lawrence of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health tells correspondent and Pulitzer-prize winner Hedrick Smith. Those studies correlate health risks with exposure to chemicals in the environment known as endocrine disrupters because they disrupt the body's normal functioning.
    “We can show that people with higher levels of some of these chemicals may have a higher incidence” of disease and such harmful effects such as lower male sperm count, asserts Linda Birnbaum, Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. "In most cases, we don’t know what the safe levels are.”
    Tests by the U.S. Geological Survey of source waters for urban drinking water systems, have documented new contaminants coast to coast. Other scientists say these chemicals are causing fish kills, frogs with six legs, male fish with female eggs in their gonads and other mutations. They see these mutations as warnings to humans.
    Millions of people are being exposed to endocrine disruptors, Lawrence explains, “and we don’t know precisely how many of them are going to develop premature breast cancer, going to have problems with reproduction, going to have all kinds of congenital anomalies of the male genitalia -- things that are happening at a broad low level so that they don't raise the alarm in the general public.”
    Using Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound as case studies, “Poisoned Waters” examines how these emerging pollutants along with old industrial contaminants like PCBs, lead and mercury and agricultural pollution from concentrated hog, cattle and chicken growing operations, have kept America from making many of the nation's waterways fishable and swimmable again -- a goal set by Congress nearly four decades ago.
    "The environment has slipped off our radar screen because it’s not a hot crisis like the financial meltdown,” says Smith. “But pollution is a ticking time bomb. It’s a chronic cancer that is slowly eating away the natural resources that are vital to our very lives.”
    For more information go to: www.pbs.org/frontline/poisonedwaters.

LA’s Mail-in Prop 218 Ballot Seeks to Avoid Two-Thirds Vote: In a unique effort to pass a huge tax increase, the city of LA is asking Los Angeles property owners to conduct a Proposition 218 vote entirely by mail in order to avoid a two-thirds vote requirement. A “yes” vote would quadruple their monthly payments to clean up stormwater pollution.
    According to the April 23rd Los Angeles Daily News, the city's Board of Public Works will ask the LA’s 788,620 property owners to tax themselves from $23.04 per month per parcel to $47.16 per month next year. The rate would rise to $99 per month by 2014. Fees had not been increased since 1993.
    Two City Council committees are taking up the issue, despite complaints from city officials that the plan is being rushed. The Council's Budget & Finance and Energy & Environment committees will consider allocating $450,000 for ballots and setting a June 23 hearing on the election.
    City officials acknowledge that the mail-in ballot approach has never been done on a citywide basis. Public Works has used mail-in ballots for small assessments on property owners for improvements such as street lights, but never conducted a citywide election for a parcel tax. However, by using a mail-in ballot to send to property owners, the requirement for voter approval drops from a two-thirds vote to a simple majority under the terms of Proposition 218, dramatically increasing the chances that the tax will pass.
     Kris Vosburgh of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which crafted the Proposition 218, told the Daily News that the city’s proposal complied with the law. “But we say the voters should reject it because this is an expense that should be part of the city general fund,” Vosburgh said. “All they're attempting to do is shift a general fund cost to property owners to free up money for their pet projects.”
    Cynthia Ruiz, Board of Public Works president, said the proposed fee increases are needed to keep the city in compliance with federal clean water standards. A citywide election with a mail-in program, Ruiz said, would allow a citywide election to be conducted immediately, instead of having to wait until the next citywide election in June 2010.
    "This way, if it is approved,” Ruiz told the Daily News, “we can get it on the November tax statements of this year, but that's a decision the City Council will have to make.”

Brockovich Investigates Groundwater Pollution in Michigan: Environmental crusader Erin Brockovich is helping to investigate groundwater pollution near the Bird's Eye cannery in Fennville, Michigan, according to a report from ABC-affiliate WZZM.
    “It appears to be an arsenic problem in quite a few peoples’ wells,” Brockovich said last week after meeting with Fennville residents to discuss wastewater discharges from the Bird’s Eye factory. Tests show some wells near the plant have high concentrations of metals and arsenic.
    Brockovich and her team are asking Fennville residents to answer questions about their property, how long they have lived there, and any illness or symptoms they might have. After the Los Angeles lawyers she represents review the answers, they will decide if they will file a lawsuit against Bird's Eye asking for damages.
    “Sure, sometimes we win big money and people win a big award,” Brockovich told WZZM. “But that doesn’t begin to compensate for the cancer and problems they have gone through.”
    A written statement from Bird’s Eye says they are waiting for state approval to build a $3 million wastewater treatment system. The company has also dug new wells for some residents and is providing others with bottled drinking water.
    Brockovitch’s fight with Pacific Gas & Electric, which ended with a $300 million settlement, became a hit movie starring Julia Roberts. Residents hope Brockovich will help them, too.
    “I’m hopeful she can push something out of them, get them to do something,” said Royal Streiecher, who lives near the plant.
    “She gets results," added resident Carol Church. "That's what we are looking for, results.”

Cisterns Save Rainwater, Test Future Role in LA: According to an April 24th CNN.com report, exploding populations from Phoenix and Las Vegas to suburban Los Angeles, where demands exceeds supply, have turned the issue of water supply from problem to crisis.
    Human consumption isn’t the only problem, because as cities grow, so does the amount of pavement and concrete that seals the natural watersheds. That in turn prevents rainwater from refreshing underground aquifers, “nature’s water tanks.” People need to start thinking about rainwater.
    Presently, building codes in Los Angeles County, as in most parts of the country, require rainwater to be moved from rooftops to the street. As a result, even in mostly sunny southern California, a massive amount of water gets flushed into storm drains every year.
    Said Andy Lipkis of TreePeople, a community-based, non-profit environmental organization based in LA,working with government agencies on water issues, “When it rains an inch, Los Angeles hemorrhages 7.6 billion gallons of water."
    Part of the solution to the water crisis, Lipkis says, is collecting as much rainwater as possible because “it represents half or more of all the water we need in this big city.”
     Lipkis envisions when as many as a million homes and businesses have rainwater cisterns all electronically networked and ready to provide treated drinking water to the public.
    Cisterns have been used throughout history to collect rainwater, and exist now as part of building codes in places like Bermuda, which lack fresh water resources such as lakes or rivers. Lipkis believes it’s an idea whose time has come to the deserts of the West.
    TreePeople, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, has built five demonstration sites in Los Angeles, which include a large hilltop cistern at the organization’s Coldwater Canyon Park headquarters. Lipkis said when it rains an inch those five little projects capture 1.25 million gallons. And it is all free water.
    Storm runoff presents many problems in LA. When it rains heavily the water goes from the streets into the canals of the Los Angeles River and straight into the ocean. With that runoff is all the garbage and toxic pollutants picked up along the way.
    Another problem is the heavy reliance on the almost 100-year-old California Aqueduct, which routes water from the Eastern Sierras. A huge amount of energy is spent bringing water in from hundreds of miles away. “Moving water and using water,” Lipkis says, “consumes, overall, 19% of all the electricity in the state and one-third of the natural gas.”
    It is the single largest use of electricity in the state, the most populous in the country, and which, were it an independent nation, would be the eighth-largest economy in the world. “That’s quite a carbon footprint,” states the CNN report.
    Lipkis believes a hybrid water management system is the best solution, one that would include cisterns, natural watershed management and existing water infrastructure, including a less power hungry aqueduct. And it would include the cooperation of water supply agencies, flood control agencies and sanitation agencies, which he believes have done too much conflicting, single-purpose cost-benefit analyses in the past.
    Lipkis sees only an upside to a large-scale cistern and rainwater infiltration project, and not only because of the environmental benefits. A study in the late 1990s conducted by TreePeople estimated that up to 50,000 new jobs would be created by a sustainable infrastructure system.
    “Why would we invest billions of dollars on old infrastructure we know doesn’t work anymore?” he asks. “It’s very important to start putting this new alternative on the table.”

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AP Probe: Pharmaceuticals Contaminate U.S. Drinking Water:  “Pharma-tainted water” -- most cities and water providers still don’t test for it, but scientists say that wherever researchers look, they will find it.
    An Associated Press investigative report released April 19th described how U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released tons of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water. The federal government has consistently overlooked the contamination, according to the report.
    A variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking, uses hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients, such as lithium to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder, nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives, and copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.
    No one tracks the extent to which pharmaceuticals are released by U.S. manufacturers as drugs, federal and industry officials say, and therefore they don't know the extent of the problem. However, an analysis of 20 years of federal records revealed a glimpse of pharmaceuticals coming from factories.
    An ongoing AP “PharmaWater” investigation into trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water identified 22 compounds that show up on EPA and Food & Drug Administration lists. The EPA monitors them as industrial chemicals released into rivers, lakes and other bodies of water under federal pollution laws, while the Food & Drug Administration classifies them as active pharmaceutical ingredients.
    Both the EPA and the U.S. Geological Survey have studies under way comparing sewage at treatment plants that receive wastewater from drugmaking factories against sewage at treatment plants that do not. Preliminary USGS results show that treated wastewater from sewage plants serving drug factories had significantly more medicine residues. Data from an EPA study show a disproportionate concentration in wastewater of an antibiotic that a major Michigan factory was producing at the time the samples were taken.
    The data doesn’t show precisely how much comes from drugmakers versus other manufacturers, but the amount-released figure is “a massive undercount,” according to The AP, “because of the limited federal government tracking.”
    Drugmakers have dismissed the suggestion that they contributes significantly to drug pollution in water, and federal drug and water regulators agree. But some researchers say the lack of required testing amounts to a policy of denial regarding drugmakers’ contribution to water pollution. Studies in the U.S. and abroad are now confirming doubts over industry denials.
    Last year, the AP reported trace amounts of a wide range of pharmaceuticals in American drinking water supplies, including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. Recent findings in Dallas, Cleveland and Maryland’s Prince George’s and Montgomery counties have detected pharmaceuticals in the drinking water of “at least 51 million Americans.”  
    Consumers are considered the biggest contributors to the contamination by excreting what bodies don’t absorb and flushing unused drugs down toilets. The AP also found that an estimated 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and contaminated packaging are thrown away each year by hospitals and long-term care facilities.
    Researchers have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of drugs harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species. Also, according to The AP report, researchers report that human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain drugs. Some scientists say they are increasingly concerned that the consumption of combinations of many drugs, even in small amounts, could harm humans over decades.
    Utilities say the water is safe. Scientists, doctors and the EPA say there are no confirmed human risks associated with consuming minute concentrations of drugs. But those experts also agree that dangers cannot be ruled out, especially given the emerging research.
    Two common industrial chemicals that are also pharmaceuticals -- the antiseptics phenol and hydrogen peroxide -- account for 92% of the 271 million pounds identified as coming from drugmakers and other manufacturers. Both can be toxic and both are considered to be ubiquitous in the environment.
    However, the list of 22 includes other troubling releases of chemicals that can be used to make drugs and other products: 8 million pounds of the skin-bleaching cream hydroquinone, 3 million pounds of nicotine compounds that can be used in quit-smoking patches, 10,000 pounds of the antibiotic tetracycline hydrochloride. Others include treatments for head lice and worms.
    Several big drugmakers were asked this simple question by The AP: “Have you tested wastewater from your plants to find out whether any active pharmaceuticals are escaping, and if so what have you found?”
  No drugmaker answered directly.
  It's not just the industry that isn't testing.
    FDA spokesman Christopher Kelly noted that his agency is not responsible for what comes out on the waste end of drug factories. At the EPA, acting assistant administrator for water Mike Shapiro -- whose agency’s Web site says pharmaceutical releases from manufacturing are “well defined and controlled” -- did not mention factories as a source of pharmaceutical pollution when asked by The AP how drugs get into drinking water.   
Edited from an Associated Press special report.