The first paragraph of AP News says it all:
The Environmental Protection Agency has decided there’s no need to rid drinking water of a toxic rocket fuel ingredient that has fouled public water supplies around the country.
This is a completely baseless and counterproductive decision, as the movie FLOW illustrates.
The AP article says the EPA claims to have used a risk calculation that decided Americans do not deserve the cost of cleanup:
The EPA document says that mandating a clean-up level for perchlorate would not result in a “meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction for persons served by public-water systems.”
In other words, the government does not want to spend its money on cleanup of a toxin that they are primarily responsible for dumping into the water. The EPA is harming national security.
Lenny Siegel, director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight in Mountain View, Calif., added: “This is an unconscionable decision not based upon science or law but on concern that a more stringent standard could cost the government significantly.”
The Defense Department used perchlorate for decades in testing missiles and rockets, and most perchlorate contamination is the result of defense and aerospace activities, congressional investigators said last year.
The Pentagon could face liability if EPA set a national drinking water standard that forced water agencies around the country to undertake costly clean-up efforts. Defense officials have spent years questioning EPA’s conclusions about the risks posed by perchlorate.
Fortunately, states are acting on their own to set a health standard for drinking water that includes a limit on perchlorate. The states do not seem to be as biased towards protecting the Pentagon budget in their calculations.
California uses 6 parts per billion as a level of concern, whereas the US Navy uses 24 parts per billion. The problem with perchlorate is that it travels through water into plants, milk, and people; even nursing babies are at risk:
A chemical pollutant that is commonly found in water supplies could harm nursing babies, even lead to mental impairment in extreme cases.
Perchlorate-an industrial pollutant linked to thyroid ailments-has been found in US drinking water and a survey is currently under way to find out its extent and impact in the UK.
Now it has been discovered that it becomes actively concentrated in breast milk, according to a team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore.
Today perhaps you can feel lucky that you don’t live in a city like Rialto, California (that has 22 wells contaminated with perclorate and one registering 10,000 ppb) but tomorrow you might be wondering why the EPA does not want to protect you and your family from danger.
The EPA should immediately go after the sources of contamination, public and private, and declare levels above 6 ppm an unacceptable risk to American safety and security. Keep in mind that the cost of cleanup will decrease significantly if the EPA takes a stand on this issue — demand for new cleanup technology will spur innovation.