This morning, I listened to part of Terry Gross’s interview with Charles Duhigg, a reporter at the New York Times, who is writing a series of articles on the quality of American drinking water. The NYT Toxic Waters webpage lists the articles and accompanies them with video. The NPR interview transcript is available here.
Charles and his staff went to every state in the US and used the Freedom of Information Act to get information about companies that dump pollutants into the water. As part of the Clean Water Act, companies have to measure what they are actually dumping, as much as once a week. From each state, Charles received waterway permits and information on whether companies are breaking the law and whether they have actually been punished. They built a giant database with this information, which supposedly rivals the EPA’s own bookkeeping.
Some key issues that I picked up (paraphrased from the interview):
- An estimated one in ten Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways. This includes carcinogens in the tap water of major American cities and unsafe chemicals in drinking water wells
- The Clean Water Act has been violated more than a half a million times in the last five years, but fewer than three percent of polluters have been fined or punished.
- Much of the water pollution in the 1970s was more obvious–you could see it, and you could taste it, and you could feel it. In addition, it took a lot of pollution to affect your life. Now, many chemicals have no scent, have no taste, making them more difficult to detect. Some are dangerous when they’re measured in parts per billion. This is the equivalent of a thimble full of chemical in a swimming pool’s worth of water, and that can actually be enormously dangerous; can be linked to cancers, can be linked to birth defects and other problems
- The reason why the Clean Water Act isn’t being enforced is that states simply don’t have the resources to control and monitor polluters. The average Department of Environmental Protection’s budget has remained essentially flat over the last decade while the number of facilities that they have to police has doubled. So as a result, they just don’t have the manpower to go out there and actually enforce the law.
