“City workers spent hours Friday afternoon trying to clean up a massive fish kill on Ten Mile Creek in Duncanville.
“Crews with the cities of Duncanville and Cedar Hill walked along the shore picking up dozens of dead fish.
“Neighbors noticed the creek’s water changing color earlier in the week, but started smelling the problem Friday morning.
“When I came out this morning, I smelled something really strong,” said D.J. McCasland, who has lived on the creek for 15 years. “I walked down here, looked over to the creek, and there were hundreds of fish piled up on the ledge — dead!”
“Although homes in Duncanville noticed the problem, city leaders blame a water main break upstream in neighboring Cedar Hill. On Thursday morning, crews discovered a 16-inch water main break.
“Officials fixed the leak within hours, but they aren’t sure how long the main was spewing chlorinated tap water into the creek.
“It happened for Marc Edwards, a lean, intense Virginia Tech environmental engineering professor. Drawing on what he called his own “world-class stubbornness,” he mounted a six-year campaign that succeeded last week in forcing the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to admit that it had misled the public about the risk of lead in the District’s drinking water.”
“The CDC, which is the nation’s principal public health agency, made the confession in a “Notice to Readers” published in an official weekly bulletin Friday. It came a day after a scathing House subcommittee report said the agency knowingly used flawed and incomplete data when it assured D.C. residents in 2004 that their health hadn’t been hurt by spikes in lead in the drinking water.”
“The head of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority also didn’t shy from stating the magnitude of the problem created when a 10-foot-wide steel pipe burst at a seam Saturday morning. Over the next eight hours, an estimated 65 million gallons spilled into the Charles River and forced officials to tap a reservoir filled with untreated water, potentially contaminating the supply to 750,000 households.
“For the people in the water industry, it is everyone’s worst nightmare: to lose your main transmission linecoming into a metropolitan area,” said MWRA Executive Director Frederick Laskey.”
“Water Number: More than 100. After months of requests and two Freedom of Information Act requests to the US Food and Drug Administration (which regulates some bottled waters), I got a list of recalls of bottled waters in the U.S. Combined with other research, I ultimately compiled a list of more than 100 bottled water recalls, affecting millions of bottles of water.
“This list (which I will soon post online) includes a remarkable list of contaminants. In addition to the benzene found in Perrier, bottled water has been found to contain mold, sodium hydroxide, kerosene, styrene, algae, yeast, tetrahydrofuran, sand, fecal coliforms and other forms of bacteria, elevated chlorine, “filth,” glass particles, sanitizer, and in my very favorite example, crickets.”
“Despite growing health concerns about atrazine, an agricultural weed killer sprayed on farm fields across the Midwest, most drinking water is tested for the chemical only four times a year — so rarely that worrisome spikes of the chemical often go undetected.
“Atrazine has been banned in Europe because it contaminates groundwater, but it remains widely used in the U.S., where the EPA endorsed its continued use as recently as 2003. Federal records show the review was heavily influenced by industry and relied on studies financed by Syngenta, a Swiss-based company that manufactures most of the atrazine sprayed in the U.S.”
“Corporations have a financial incentive to hide their environmental impacts from an American public that wants to buy environmentally friendly products. As consumers have been looking for ways to “go green,” corporations have been accused of “greenwashing” — selling products as environmentally responsible when they actually damage the environment. Today, with heightened media attention on the world water crisis, blue is the new green — and corporations appear to be using similar “bluewashing” tactics to obscure their effect on the world’s water.”
“Several cash strapped US cities have sold off their municipal water systems or at least contracted operations to for-profit companies. (One of the truly odd things about the water market in America is that the biggest players in privatization are European corporations.) Recapping the perverse incentive: conserve water to be “green;” get charged more for what you still use to keep the overseas profit stream flowing.”
“Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country.
“State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.
“In the last year, federal lawmakers have allocated more than $10 billion for water infrastructure programs, one of the largest such commitments in history. But Mr. Hawkins and others say that even those outlays are almost insignificant compared with the problems they are supposed to fix. An E.P.A. study last year estimated that $335 billion would be needed simply to maintain the nation’s tap water systems in coming decades.”
“The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois by 16 cities in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa. The communities allege that Swiss corporation Syngenta AG and its Delaware counterpart Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc. reaped billions of dollars from the sale of atrazine while local taxpayers were left with the financial burden of filtering the chemical from drinking water.”
Water Number: $4 a bottle. In the latest skirmish in the war on tap water, the sports arena that hosts the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team — with the lovely name of the Quicken Loans Arena concession — has removed its drinking water fountains. The only way for thirsty fans to get water now is to wait in line at the concessions counter for a free small cup or pay $4 for bottled water or try to drink water from the bathroom faucets.
An expert in California’s delta told a panel of the National Academies of Sciences on Sunday that their decisions about the largest estuary on the West Coast could alter how Californians use water.
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