Drinking Water

by James Salzman

TAKING THESE CONSIDERATIONS TOGETHER, WE NEED TO FIND A WAY to discuss more honestly and openly what we mean by safe drinking water. There are three fundamental points that should underpin this discussion.

  The first is that safety is a relative concept. We would all be safer if we drove in semiamphibious tanks, yet some people—indeed many—choose to drive motorcycles or tiny cars that will crumple in a crash. They prefer to spend their money for benefits other than car safety, and these are perfectly rational decisions. Just as with the Bangladeshis, people living in Yorubaland, and us, safety ultimately is a judgment about choices. We can reduce the level of arsenic in drinking water to five parts per billion or even lower, but choosing this comes at a price, particularly high for many small water systems in the West. It is hard to disagree with someone who says they want safe water from their tap and, to an impressive degree, the water from our taps today justifiably is regarded as safe by most people. Is it totally safe, in the sense of risk-free? No. But it is not at all clear that this would be a desirable goal.

  The second point is that we water drinkers must ultimately rely on the judgment of experts and accept that they don’t have all the answers. Few consumers, indeed, have the technological savvy to test their water for arsenic, Cryptosporidium, endocrine disruptors, and the myriad other potential threats to our water, much less at concentrations of parts per million. One can use household water filters, and these will remove some pollutants but surely not all. Do emerging contaminants pose serious threats to our drinking water, to our safety? Our current understanding does not provide cause for alarm; hence they are largely unregulated. But our current understanding is also admittedly incomplete. Because we thought our water was safe before, does this mean we have no need to worry, or have we uncovered an unseen harm that must now be addressed for our safety and that of our children?

  The key point to keep in mind is that just because a poison or carcinogen is in our drinking water does not mean it poses a significant hazard. The August 2011 cover of Reader’s Digest, for example, certainly captured readers’ attention with the bright red warning that our water “MAY CONTAIN: ROCKET FUEL, BIRTH CONTROL PILLS, ARSENIC, AND MORE SHOCKING INGREDIENTS.” While this may be both accurate and alarming it is, at the same time, misleading. There is reason to believe that traces of many compounds are harmless below certain levels. Arsenic’s mere presence in a glass of water does not mean you’re poisoning yourself by drinking it. The equally key rejoinder, though, is that low levels do not necessarily mean no harm. Some compounds are harmful at any level.

  We ultimately have no choice but to trust the decision by our government’s regulators that the water coming out of our tap and the bottled water we buy at the store are, in fact, safe to drink. But many of us are unsure whether to trust government authorities when it comes to drinking water. A 2009 survey of environmental problems found that the top concern was water—59 percent of those polled worried “a great deal” about pollution of drinking water. An additional 25 percent worried “a fair amount.” This explains in part the popularity of bottled water and its branding strategy. Effective ads for bottled water are all about the natural, pure essence of the clear liquid. Aquafina, Pepsi’s successful bottled water brand, could not make this clearer. The product’s slogan, spelled out in big letters on the label, reads, “Pure Water.” But, as we shall see in Chapter 6, this is by no means a given because the regulatory standards for bottled water are less demanding than those for tap water.

  There is no question that our ability to understand the risks posed by drinking water has dramatically improved over the centuries. Measuring traces of contaminants in parts per trillion is now possible. We also have a far deeper understanding of the toxicology of drinking water contaminants. But in some cases—indeed, many cases—our sophisticated tools of risk assessment, toxicology, and cost-benefit analysis of drinking water contaminants are indeterminate. They provide numbers, but with significant error bars or extrapolation from trace levels. The experts unavoidably, necessarily, operate with significant uncertainty. In the face of such uncertainty, should the EPA rely on public perceptions of safety when these, too, can seem fallible or irrational? We know far more than John Snow ever did about what makes water unsafe but must still grapple with imprecision more than we like when forced to make decisions. And this ignorance is both humbling and unsettling.

  The last point is that certain things are not in doubt. We, as a society, need to realize that providing safe water requires funding to pay for it. This means rebuilding our aging water infrastructure. It means increasing funding for enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act and making the tough political calls to sue local authorities that are violating the law. And it means holding accountable agency officials who are not protecting the public’s health. All easier said than done, but until we act as “citizen drinkers,” using our political process to demand a sustained focus by government officials on provision of safe drinking water, the problems of lax regulation and enforcement will continue.

  CAN DRINKING TOO MUCH WATER KILL YOU?

  As part of its Morning Rave program, the disc jockeys on the Sacramento radio station KDND were talking up the latest racy on-air contest, “Hold Your Wee for a Wii.” The idea was simple enough. The person who drank the most water without urinating would win a Nintendo Wii video game console. Twenty-eight-year-old Jennifer Lea Strange was ready to go. She told the woman beside her that she really wanted to win the game for her two kids. After the first few rounds of drinking eight-ounce bottles of Crystal Geyser water, Jennifer was going strong, watching as one bloated contestant after another dropped out. After downing close to two gallons of water in three hours, though, Jennifer just could not take another sip. She finished a frustrating second. Once in the car, she felt more than frustration. She called her boss, saying she had a terrible headache and was heading home. She was found there several hours later. The cause of death was determined to be “water intoxication.”

  Hilary Bellamy trained for months to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., steadily working up the endurance through daily runs to make it through 26.2 miles on the day of the race. Her goal was 5:45, a steady pace of 13 minutes a mile. At the halfway point she was on pace, slowing a little by the 18 mile mark. Every two miles there were water stops where cups of water or a sports drink were handed to runners. Hilary made sure to stay hydrated and drank steadily. By mile 19 she was having trouble, complaining of a headache and blurry vision. At mile 20 she collapsed in the arms of her husband, there to cheer her on with her three-year-old daughter and nine-month-old son. Rushed to the hospital, Hilary died two days later.

  Jennifer and Hilary both died from a condition known as hyponatremia. Drinking too much water causes salts in the blood to become too diluted, and water floods into cells. This is a particular problem with neurons in the brain, which do not have the space to expand. The result is swelling of the brain, which can lead to coma, seizures, brain damage, and even death. As Paracelsus famously expounded, the dose determines the poison. Water is the vital ingredient for life, but extremes on either side are dangerous. If you don’t drink enough water you will die of thirst. If you drink too much, you can die of hyponatremia.

  5

  Blue Terror

  BLACKSTONE, MASSACHUSETTS, IS A SMALL TOWN OF NINE thousand people on the border with Rhode Island. It’s named after William Blaxton, an Englishman who sailed to the New World in 1623, just two years after the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower. Blaxton made his mark in history as a famous first settler—the first European settler in Rhode Island, the first settler in what would become known as the city of Boston. The Blackstone River meanders through the south part of town. Its place in history is assured by powering the first textile mill in the United States in 1790, a date marked by many as the start of the Industrial Revolution. The town of Blackstone made history for quite a different reason the evening of March 28, 2006.

  That night, there was a break-in at the tow
n’s water tower. Climbing over a twelve-foot-high security fence topped with barbed wire, the group of intruders methodically pried open a two-inch steel door, smashed an electrical panel, scaled the water tower, and kicked in the fiberglass cover on top, exposing the town’s water supply. The next morning, officials discovered the damage and found a bucket with an unknown substance nearby. They naturally assumed the worst—that terrorists had poisoned the town’s drinking water supply—and responded immediately. The water system was shut down while the 1.3 million gallon water tower was flushed. The town’s schools, restaurants, and laundromats were closed. Fire trucks with loudspeakers drove down streets telling people not to use the water. Notices were put in mailboxes with the stark warning “Important!!!!!!! Do not use the drinking water for any purpose.” Residents threw out anything that might contain the tainted water —ice cubes, baby formula, even cooked pasta.

  By the time lab results came back a few days later showing no contamination in the water, the mystery had been solved. Two fifteen-year-old high school kids, looking for excitement, had apparently caused all the mayhem so they could pee into the water tower. The Boston Herald newspaper humorously called them the “Whiz Kids.” But it was no laughing matter. Their teenage stunt had cost the town $40,000 in response costs and, most important, starkly revealed what municipal water managers have long known. Our drinking water supplies are vulnerable.

  As Ralph Mullinix, water manager for Loveland, Colorado, put it, “It’s not that difficult to get up on top of a water tower. Every high school kid in the country has done that during his senior year, usually to write his girlfriend’s name on it. You can harden your perimeter around your key facilities, but the fact is that water systems are very vulnerable.” Elizabeth Hunt, Vermont’s drinking water chief of planning, adds more darkly, “After 9/11, we can’t just assume that it’s only some kids goofing off.”

  The previous two chapters explored whether it is safe to drink the water, focusing on natural and emerging threats such as sewage and synthetic hormones. But intentional threats to drinking water can pose just as great a danger. The Blackstone incident showed just how easy it is to contaminate water supplies on purpose. Fortunately, no one was harmed by the high school prank, but what if the Blackstone intruders had been terrorists intent on causing real injury, not just thrill-seeking juvenile delinquents? Standing on top of the water tower, the fiberglass cover pried off, could they really have poisoned the whole town? Just how vulnerable are our drinking water sources? And what should we be doing in the face of these potential threats?

  While the attacks of 9/11 focused immediate attention on the safety of our drinking water, these are hardly new concerns. Poisoning the enemy’s water is a longstanding military strategy. When Solon of Athens laid siege to Cirrha in 600 BC, he ordered that the poisonous hellebore roots be placed in the local water supply, making the Cirrhaeans violently sick. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate forces were accused of dumping diseased animal carcasses in drinking wells and ponds. Japan allegedly introduced cholera strains into drinking water during its conquest of China. Poisoning has served its political purposes as well. The Roman emperor Nero routinely dispatched his enemies by pouring cherry laurel water, which naturally contains cyanide, into their wells.

  In 1941, concerned over domestic attacks from Nazi or Japanese agents, J. Edgar Hoover, the famed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wrote, “It has long been recognized that among public utilities, water supply facilities offer a particularly vulnerable point of attack to the foreign agent, due to the strategic position they occupy in keeping the wheels of industry turning and in preserving the health and morale of the American populace.” And he was right. Since his warning, there has been a series of attempted attacks on American drinking water supplies.

  In the early 1970s, the domestic revolutionary group the Weather Underground sought to blackmail a homosexual officer working at the bacteriological warfare facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland, in the hopes of obtaining microorganisms to contaminate water supplies. A decade later, the FBI foiled a plot by the white supremacist group “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord” to poison urban water supplies with potassium cyanide. In 2002, four Moroccans were caught planning a tunnel under the U.S. embassy in Rome so they could contaminate the water with ten pounds of potassium ferrocyanide. In his State of the Union address that same year, President Bush stated that soldiers in Afghanistan had found diagrams and information on U.S. water facilities.

  These are just a few of the most publicized incidents, but there are countless more. An editorial in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management put this in broader context, claiming that “threats to attack, or, more commonly, contaminate, water systems are not unusual. There are hundreds of threats against municipal water systems each year.” A classified 2012 U.S. intelligence assessment leaked to the Washington Post concluded that water infrastructure could become a high-visibility structure for terrorists to attack, particularly as water problems become more acute across the globe.

  Even popular culture has picked up on the threat. The 2002 action movie The Tuxedo features Jackie Chan chopping and kicking his way to thwart the evil designs of a bottled water manufacturer trying to poison municipal water supplies (all the better to grow his market share). The plot of the 2005 movie Batman Begins turns on a secretive and ancient group attacking Gotham City by injecting fear-inducing compounds into the water system. The 2006 film V for Vendetta features corrupt government leaders contaminating London’s water supply to kill, spread fear, and consolidate power.

  To date, large-scale attacks have fortunately been limited to the big screen in movie theaters. There have not been any successful, major attacks on American water supplies, but the threat and fear remain. And for good reason. The simple fact is that our water supplies cannot be fully protected. We can erect more fences, higher fences, locks, and security cameras, and hire more guards—and we have—but these will never make us completely safe. To understand why, you need to appreciate the sheer size of a municipal water system.

  Most water systems are linear designs, from source to faucet. They start at a supply source, typically some combination of a reservoir, dam, river, or groundwater aquifer. The water is then moved to a treatment facility. Depending on the quality of the water, the treatment plant may use mechanical and chemical processes for purification. These can range from settling pools and fine filters to adding chlorine, bubbling ozone gas, or passing the water through ultraviolet light. The drinking-quality water is then passed through distribution systems to a faucet and the point of consumption. Depending on the setting, distribution systems can include water towers, pipes, and pumping stations.

  The architecture of a modern water system

  So why is protection so difficult? Consider that, nationwide, water is drawn from more than 75,000 dams and reservoirs. This water courses through two million miles of pipe, with millions more access points. There are more than 160,000 drinking water facilities, mostly owned and operated by local government and private parties. Some of these utilities are huge, delivering water to major cities. Others are tiny, serving communities of just twenty-five people. When you add up all the reservoirs, dams, wells, pumping stations, water towers, water tanks, and water treatment facilities, not to mention the miles of pipes connecting them all, it becomes evident pretty quickly that the different parts of our water systems present a big—an impossibly big—target to protect.

  Moreover, most of the water sources and distribution system are easily accessible to the public, or at least accessible without much trouble. The Blackstone teenage vandals were hardly master criminals, and they did just fine. There have been similar reports of teen damage in Florida, Washington, and Vermont, just to name a few. In facing the challenge from determined terrorists, it seems clear that we have to further “harden” our water infrastructure against threats but, in a world of limited budgets, which parts of the system shou
ld be hardened? To answer this intelligently, we need to better understand the nature of the threats.

  BATMAN BEGINS AND OTHER POPULAR VERSIONS OF WATER ATTACKS often portray the evildoers skulking in shadows of a huge, churning treatment plant, pulling out a test tube or flask, and pouring the nefarious contents into the water. But what would an attack look like in real life? Leaving aside the super-fear-inducing toxin of the movies, there are basically four types of threats water managers are genuinely concerned about.

  The most obvious is chemical. We all know arsenic in a glass of water can kill, and there are plenty of historical examples to persuade those who remain in doubt. Nor is arsenic alone as a dangerous powder that can be slipped into the drink of an unsuspecting victim. So-called “date rape” drugs rely on spiking a drink with sedatives that impair motor control and can cause amnesia. Other threats may be posed by a whole slew of water-soluble chemicals, including cyanide or even a “designer chemical” specially designed for the task.

  The second class of threat is biological. In some respects, this is an ever-present concern because every year we find unanticipated contamination of drinking water by microbes. The 103 deaths in Milwaukee described earlier were caused by the presence of the cryptosporidium bacteria in the drinking water. The small town of Gideon, in southwest Missouri, was hit by an epidemic that afflicted almost half of the population. Fifteen people were admitted to hospital, and seven residents in a nursing home died. The cause was eventually attributed to salmonella spread by bird droppings in the town’s water tank. Either the treatment plant’s chlorination of the water was inadequate, or these were bacterial strains resistant to chlorine.

  These examples were unintended biological contaminants. The government is also concerned about the intentional introduction of these organisms. The U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command carried out a study of potential biological weapons. In all, twenty-seven biological agents were examined. Seven of these were identified as “weaponized”—able to be used as a weapon in a drinking water system—and a further fourteen were assessed as possible or probable weapons. This does not include, of course, bio-engineered agents.