US water ranked 12th in worldwide water quality report

 (Reprinted from Water Technology Magazine Website).  03/09/03

WASHINGTON — The United States ranks 12th in the world in water quality among 122 nations, according to a report issued by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The report took an in-depth look at every major dimension of water use and management, from the growth of cities to the threat of looming water wars between countries, the UN report said.

The report ranked 122 countries according to the quality of their water as well as their ability and commitment to improve the situation, UN officials said.

The rankings were composite figures based upon a range of factors such as the quantity and quality of freshwater, especially groundwater, wastewater treatment facilities as well as legal issues such as the application of pollution regulations, UNESCO said.

The top ranking in the world went to Finland and rounding out the top 10, in order, were Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, Norway, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Korea, Sweden and France, UNESCO reported.

Belgium was considered the worst country in terms of water quality due to the low quantity and quality of its groundwater combined with heavy industrial pollution and poor treatment of wastewater, according to UNESCO.

Morocco, India, Jordan and Sudan followed as the countries with the worst five rankings, the report said.

With more than 25 world maps, numerous charts, graphs and seven case studies of major river basins, the report analyzes how diverse societies cope with water scarcity, including policies that work or don’t work.

The report will be formally presented to the international community on World Water Day, 22 March, during the World Water Forum in Kyoto.

Gazette’s Fair Use Statement

 

Tales from the Wasteland

Philadelphia’s sewer system has swallowed one Volkswagen, countless shopping carts and a billion dollars’ worth of improvements. Now the city has to figure out how to sell a heap of fertilizer.

Andrew Maykuth Online
The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine
February 19, 1989

 

NOT MANY PEOPLE keep count, but the average Philadelphian flushes a toilet about six times a day. Every flush sends about five gallons of water down the drain. Including bathing, laundry and cooking, the gallons add up. Researchers for the Philadelphia Water Department know that all told, each person uses something like 94 gallons a day. After flushing, most people don’t give it any thought.

Norman Lofton does.

Lofton holds one of society’s lower-profile jobs. Five days a week, he puts on a pair of chest-high rubber waders, a yellow raincoat, a hard hat and a pair of gloves and climbs underground. Lofton is a sewer-maintenance crew chief for the Water Department – a “sewer crawler,” in the slang of his trade.

“I wouldn’t say anybody likes it,” said Lofton. “You’d have to be crazy to like it.”

Lofton holds the record for the department’s longest continuous sewer inspection. In 1987, he and his crew entered a pipe in a railroad yard near Queen Lane and came up for air around Henry Avenue, 5,745 feet later. Lofton measured it. “Sixteen hundred and forty feet was examined bent over,” he said. “Some of the sewer was built out of Belgian block, and it was very slippery with waste water and feces. It was like walking on ice. It took us two hours and 15 minutes.”

As Lofton spoke, he was standing in a chamber 26 feet below Wissahickon Avenue near Queen Lane. The light from the manhole above was so diffuse that the pits and ridges in the rough-cast concrete were barely visible. Though they wore yellow rain slickers, the three members of Lofton’s crew, who were joining him at the bottom, moved about like gray phantoms.

Lofton tested a black box called a Dynamation meter, an electronic canary that shrieks if various gases in the sewer approach dangerous levels. The air can be so foul beneath oil refineries, slaughterhouses and chemical plants that the crawlers use scuba equipment. The hot sewage from laundries can block a pipe with steam and suds and scald the crawlers. On this day beneath Wissahickon Avenue, the air was dank but odorless. The box in Lofton’s hand remained silent.

“People have no idea what it’s like down here,” said Lofton, 38, who has worked in the city’s sewers for 18 years. “It’s another city. It’s a private city.” Several small pipes entered the chamber from different directions. Sewage cascaded from each and swirled in a pool around Lofton’s waterproofed ankles. Turbulence had rendered everything in the sewage beyond recognition. It looked like cafe au lait. The sewage flowed into a larger pipe that continued downhill.

Lofton aimed a flashlight into the darkness of the big pipe. “That’s where we’re going.”

AT ONE TIME, THIS SEWER HEADED straight into the Schuylkill. In 1955, it was tied to the Southwest Sewage Treatment Plant near Philadelphia International Airport. There, after minimal treatment, the sewage was dumped into the Delaware.

Nowadays, the sewage at Lofton’s feet takes a much more circuitous route through a tremendously complex treatment system. The stuff is screened, floated, skimmed, separated, pumped full of air and then fed as lunch to a quintillion hungry bacteria. After that, it is tested, disinfected and released into the river.

In the last 15 years, Philadelphia’s waste-water-treatment system has been overhauled at a cost of nearly $1 billion. When the work is completed this summer, it will rank as the largest public-works project in the city’s modern history. The cost is twice that of the city’s proposed convention center, three times the price of the Center City commuter tunnel and four times the cost of the Schuylkill Expressway reconstruction.

Now, sewage-treatment plants are called “water pollution control facilities,” but a billion dollars has bought more than a euphemism. The overhauled system has dramatically improved the water quality of the Schuylkill and the Delaware. Fish have returned in large numbers. The cleaner waterways have, in turn, spawned waterfront development that would not have been possible 40 years ago, when the Delaware stank so badly it nauseated pedestrians at Broad and Chestnut Streets.

With much of the work buried, the project has escaped pageantry. Water Department officials are not naive about the capacity of sewage to inspire civic pride. They would be happy if nobody complained. “Success in sewage treatment is defined as not being noticed,” said William J. Marrazzo, who was, until November, the city’s water commissioner for eight years. But sometimes sewage can’t be ignored.

When the winds are right, it is hard not to notice the city’s three treatment plants. Each day, 466 million gallons of waste water flow into them from Philadelphia and parts of three surrounding counties, a volume equal to the daily flow of the Schuylkill in the summer. If One Liberty Place were an empty shell, the flow would fill all 62 floors in less than eight hours.

Of that load, only a tenth of one percent is solid matter – sludge. It is enough, however, to give sewage a bad name. But while New York dumps its sludge into the ocean, and Boston sends its muck right into its harbor, the Philadelphia Water Department composts its “sludge products” and markets them as fertilizer. The cutting edge of environmentalism, however, can cut both ways: The city has been hard-pressed to find enough large-scale users in places where people won’t raise a stink.

In order to collect that sludge, the city routes its sewage – your sewage – through 2,933 miles of pipes beneath Philadelphia. In a system as long as the nation is wide, there are bound to be backups, leaks, clogs and overflows just about every day.

Norman Lofton knows that well.

IN THE CHAMBER BELOW WISSAhickon Avenue, Lofton bent over and scurried into the pipe. The 4-foot-3-inch-high sewer was constructed of brick in 1894, when indoor plumbing was considered modern. Like all sewers, it was built at a slight slope to keep sewage moving downhill. It originally was circular, but over the decades, the earth above has compressed it into an oval.

The only noise was the splashing of Lofton’s boots and the constant gurgling of sewage. Now and then, reminders of life on the surface penetrated the eerie world – the clang of an automobile running over a manhole cover, the sight of a steel I-beam piercing the pipe, the foundation of some structure overhead. Occasionally, small sewers protruded at head level from the sewer wall – the drains from nearby buildings. You may not think about your six flushes a day, but they are a matter of great concern to a sewer crawler. Fortunately, the unmistakable rumble of a flush is amplified in the pipes. Most of the time, the crawlers can move out of the way.

Lofton pointed to cracks in the sewer wall where clear water dribbled into the pipe. About 5 percent of the waste water enters the system through leaks. Some of it is groundwater; some of it is treated city water – pure, drinkable water – leaking from damaged mains. Sometimes, a leak in a main washes out so much soil that it forms an underground river between the water main and the sewer. Almost every year, one of the washouts collapses, sometimes swallowing a car in a sinkhole. Lofton and his crew make recommendations on major repairs and make smaller patches themselves. In a system as old as Philadelphia’s, where many of the sewers were built in the 19th century, there’s plenty of work to do.

As Lofton forged ahead in the slowly descending sewer, the sewage at his feet began to grow deeper and slow down. He aimed his flashlight ahead. Beyond the reach of the beam, the stream roared over an unseen obstruction that was damming the pipe. The blockage might be anything – a branch, a milk crate, a collapsed wall.

“It can be very dangerous down here,” he said. An obstruction like the one ahead could dislodge without warning, unleashing the dammed sewage and sweeping away anyone standing in it. Lofton sloshed ahead a few feet, but when his flashlight showed the level of sewage reaching above the middle of the pipe ahead, he called it quits.

“You can’t underestimate a sewer,” he said. “There’s always surprises.” Since 1985, two people have died in sewers – a child who fell into a damaged manhole and a college student who clambered into an open sewer drain. Both were washed away. Crawlers fear cave-ins and flash floods. In May, Lofton was examining a 10-foot sewer under Third and Thompson Streets when the sewage surged from about a foot deep to more than three feet. Lofton fell down face first. The sewage carried him about 45 feet down the pipe before he could get a foothold. When he stood up, his rubber suit was filled with sewage. “That was the first time I was ever knocked off my feet,” he said.

Inspecting sewers has few rewards – crawlers make about $21,000 a year. In 1971, however, two crawlers came upon some muddy bundles under Torresdale Avenue that turned out to be $92,400 in cash. Nobody claimed the dirty money, and the crawlers were allowed to keep it.

Besides cash, strange and awful things often show up in the sewers. Shopping carts and body parts have washed up at the treatment plants. Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, treatment-plant operators have noted with relief a dramatic decline in the number of fetuses. Some of the sewers are so large they could accommodate a two-lane highway. In fact, a Volkswagen body once was found lodged in one of the pipes. No one could account for it.

Even to the experienced, sewers can be unsettling. “If you turn out your light, it’s dark,” said Lofton. “I mean pitch dark. You can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

The conditions can twist even a sensible person’s brain. When sewer crawlers apply for the job, they must be able to crawl through a pipe 18 inches in diameter. Some applicants have the physical dimensions but, during underground tests, freeze in claustrophobic panic. Doctors say it isn’t true, but crawlers believe that panic leads a human to swell up. They said a crawler once became so frightened that he expanded like a cork and cut off the air to the man behind him. The trailing crawler passed out. Both had to be pulled out of the pipe by the safety ropes crawlers wear on the job.

Lofton is a stout man – he has a 36-inch waist – so he confines his inspections to larger sewers. Still, he occasionally finds himself in a tight squeeze. “A lot of times, I’ve gotten scared, I mean really scared. I started swelling up. And then I talk to the Creator. I talk myself through those sewers.” The sewers have brought Norman Lofton closer to God.

There is considerable lore about the subterranean world. Some of it is true. In Paris, burglars once bored a hole from a sewer into a bank. In New York, the homeless have been found living in sewers.

Most of the stories, however, are greatly embellished. Contrary to common belief, Philadelphia’s sewers do not surge during half time of the Super Bowl. The sewer system is so large that a citywide flush would be no different from a short-lived downpour. Half time at the Army-Navy game is another matter. The effect of 100,000 spectators’ rushing for relief during intermission has overflowed the trunk lines leading away from JFK Stadium.

Many of the stories about underground creatures are also larger than life. Crawlers say they have seen cockroaches the size of mice and rats the size of cats, but reptilian life is no match for sewage. Somebody once dumped a 12 foot pet python into Philadelphia’s sewers, but when it washed up at the Northeast treatment plant, not even biologists from the Philadelphia Zoo could revive it. Everybody has heard stories about alligators in the sewers, but nobody has ever seen one.

“I’m not saying my mind hasn’t seen alligators,” said Lofton. “There are a lot of strange noises here, and you spend a lot of time looking over your shoulder.”

PICTURE PHILADELPHIA AS A human body. Its water system is the arteries, carrying pure water to each household, each cell in the body Philadelphia. Its sewer system is the veins, returning soiled water to be cleansed at the three sewage-treatment plants, the kidneys of the system.

For most of its history, Philadelphia had no kidneys. The sewers of Ben Franklin’s time were constructed of wood – they were open ditches designed primarily to carry away garbage, wash water and rain – and flowed toward the nearest creek. (Outhouses were built over pits, and human wastes remained in them.) As the city grew, the creeks that crossed Center City became choked with sewage. The city turned them into sewers, one by one. Dock Street was once such a stream.

In 1867, the city had only 67 miles of sewers. But then indoor plumbing replaced outhouses during the industrial age, introducing human waste to the system. By 1900, the city had 848 miles of sewers, many of which are still in service today. Most of the pipes are brick and shaped like the cross-section of an egg, with the narrow end pointing down. The shape forces even low volumes of sewage to flow fast.

Since the Mesopotamian Empire, when the first drainage systems were constructed, engineers designed sewers for one purpose: to transport sewage downhill as quickly as possible. Following the contour of the land, relying only on gravity for propulsion, sewers emptied in whatever stream was convenient.

Unfortunately, Philadelphia’s sewage went into the same rivers from which it drew its drinking water – the Schuylkill and the Delaware. Thousands of people died each year from waterborne diseases, such as typhoid and yellow fever.

In the 1880s, a few years after the discovery of typhoid bacteria, the city built a giant sewer along the east bank of the Schuylkill to intercept the pipes that emptied into the river from industrial Manayunk. The interceptor channeled the sewage downstream and emptied into the river just below the Fairmount Water Works intakes, protecting Center City’s drinking-water supply after a fashion. A few years later, a second interceptor was built along Wissahickon Creek.

Still, sewage discharges into the Delaware threatened the city’s largest water intakes in Torresdale. “What was crazy was that raw sewage was being discharged into Pennypack Creek, and when it came out to the Delaware, it went right into the Torresdale water intakes,” said William Wankoff, the city’s chief of sewage treatment. “Talk about recycling.”

In 1907, the state directed Philadelphia to treat its sewage. Seven years later, the city developed a plan to channel all of the sewage to three treatment plants. A network of interceptors would tie the old sewers to the new plants. Where gravity would no longer work, huge pumps would propel the sewage over hills.

The Northeast plant, at the junction of Frankford Creek and the Delaware River in Bridesburg, opened in 1923. It processed only about 15 percent of the city’s sewage. The Depression, Philadelphia politics and World War II delayed construction of the other two plants for 30 years.

During the delay, it became plainly evident that Philadelphia’s sewage was a serious environmental problem. In the 1940s, the Delaware River turned black. Hydrogen sulfide gas corroded metal on houses near the river, longshoremen fell sick, and ships’ engines clogged from floating debris. Water quality is measured by the amount of dissolved oxygen it contains. A clean river has about 8 parts per million of oxygen. Fish labor to breath in a river with fewer than 4 parts per million. In the late 1940s, a 20-mile stretch of the Delaware River along Philadelphia contained no measurable oxygen. It was anoxic, like a septic tank.

After the war, Philadelphia finally built the two other treatment plants, the Southwest plant on Enterprise Avenue by the airport and the Southeast plant on Pattison Avenue, south of the Walt Whitman Bridge. They opened in the mid-1950s.

Finally, the city was treating its sewage. But the transition posed a new problem that has plagued the city to this day.

Until the advent of sewage treatment, sewers were designed to empty both sewage and rainwater directly into a stream. With the new design, everything would go to the treatment plants. During dry weather, when the only sewage in the pipes comes from houses, the flow is fairly predictable.

But even a one-inch rainfall in one day can send half a billion gallons down the sewers – as much as the city’s treatment plants are designed to treat properly. Without some means of relief, a huge storm would fill the new sewers to the brim, overflowing into streets and houses and flooding the sewage treatment plants.

“I guess Noah saw something like that,” said Jim Downs, a maintenance supervisor at the Southwest plant. “I don’t want to.”

The city’s solution was to install 176 regulator gates where the old sewers had flowed into the rivers. Regulators are valves designed to remain closed during the first minutes of rain, forcing sewage that is already in the pipeline to be flushed to the treatment plant. The initial slug of sewage from a rain is called the “shock load” because it is heavily polluted with oil, dirt and trash rinsed from the streets. After the shock load passes to the treatment plant, the regulators open and discharge directly into the river. Theoretically, regulators allow only rainwater (and, inevitably, a small amount of sewage) to escape into the rivers.

In practice, however, regulators are finicky devices – some of them are 60 years old – and they sometimes open too soon. The shock load goes right into the river, where it lives up to its name. What’s worse, the regulator gates often become jammed open with debris and do not close after the rain stops. Then they are like open wounds, bleeding sewage into the river until somebody notices, which may take days.

Last year, the Delaware River Basin Commission estimated that 30 percent of the oxygen-devouring pollution that Philadelphia discharges into the rivers is raw waste from sewer overflows and that more than half the leakage occurs during dry weather.

The most obvious solution is to build a separate sewer system for storm water. Almost all suburban areas and much of Northeast Philadelphia have separate sewer systems, but nearly half of Philadelphia’s sewers are combined sewers. To build a separate storm water system would cost more than $4 billion.

Instead, the Water Department is spending about $2.5 million to overhaul some of the oldest regulators. The program includes installing computerized sensors to detect if waste water is leaking into the river so the city can dispatch a repair crew immediately, rather than discovering the leak days later. The project, however, is moving slowly.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently drafted new regulations that address storm-water pollution, but the improvements do not necessarily involve high-tech hardware. Some solutions are as basic as educating the public not to throw waste like old crankcase oil down the street inlets. The oil simply remains in the sewer inlet until the next storm, when it is washed into the river through a regulator.

“People may think that oil goes to the treatment plant,” said Deputy Water Commissioner Patrick Cairo. “But it doesn’t. It goes into the stream.”

SOME PEOPLE GROW UP longing to be lawyers, or dancers, or firefighters. Nobody in the Philadelphia Water Department – nobody who will admit it – grew up burning with a desire to work with waste water.

“I thought I would go into construction,” said William Wankoff, 43, who graduated from Drexel University in 1968 as a civil engineer. “I was enamored with the idea of sitting on top of a bulldozer.” But in the late 1960s, with the federal government pressuring local governments to clean up polluted streams, water-pollution control was the emerging growth industry for engineers. Wankoff found work with the Water Department. He returned to Drexel for a master’s degree in environmental engineering in the early 1970s. Today, he is responsible for operating the city’s treatment plants, where he bulldozes through paperwork.

Jim Downs was a 25-year-old Culligan Man when he saw a city want ad for somebody with experience in “water treatment.” That’s me, he said. Soon he learned the water he would be treating required more than softening. “You go home and your friends find out you work at the other end of the tunnel,” he said. “They all kind of moved away from me.” After nine years, he is now the head of preventive maintenance at the Southwest plant.

“We’re not in it for the glamour,” joked D. Robert Thompson, the head engineer of what is called the collector system – all the pipes between your house and the treatment plants. Thompson grew up in Doylestown tinkering with anything he could dismantle. At Lehigh University, preparing for a career as a structural engineer, he was introduced to hydraulics and sanitary engineering.

Thompson joined the department in 1978, when the water commissioner was Carmen F. Guarino. Guarino was considered a capable leader among waste-water treatment experts, but his relationship with federal regulators and environmentalists was antagonistic. Guarino left in 1980, and the next year, Mayor William H. Green appointed William Marrazzo, a 31-year-old boy wonder who had received his chemical engineering degree during the age of environmental awareness.

Marrazzo changed the Water Department’s outlook. “What we don’t want as managers in this department are people who can only understand what’s going on underground,” he said in 1981. “We want managers who understand the impact their work will have on the environment and the community.”

Thompson fit the bill. Now, at the age of 33, he oversees 25 people – a position that would be difficult for someone his age to match at a private engineering firm. His car has one of those yellow road signs stuck to the window, only his says, “Sewer Expert on Board.”

He joined Marrazzo’s team of young engineers as it went about overhauling the system. Philadelphia’s treatment plants had been considered state-of-the art in the 1950s, but over the ensuing years, the art changed radically.

In the old days, sewage received what is now called “primary treatment” – a settling out of the solids that removes less than half the oxygen depleting pollutants. Meanwhile, sewage was getting progressively more noxious. Industries poured all sorts of chemicals and organic waste down the drain. Water users paid the same rate whether they emptied the baby’s bath or the rinse bath from an electroplater, loaded with heavy metals.

In the late 1960s, the Delaware still averaged less than 1 part per million of dissolved oxygen during the summer, when oxygen depletion is worst. To shad migrating upstream, the water off Penn’s Landing could just as well have been a brick wall.

The Delaware River Basin Commission ordered the city to upgrade its treatment plants in 1968. The improvements would involve “secondary treatment” – biologically decomposing the sewage to remove 90 percent of the pollution. In 1970, the city agreed to make the improvements by 1977.

Congress put more pressure on the city in 1972 when it passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the landmark legislation that has provided more than $40 billion to local agencies to finance sewage-treatment improvements. Enforcement fell to the EPA.

The EPA and the city have had a titanic struggle since. The EPA sued the city when it did not meet the 1977 deadlines, accusing it of dawdling. The city countersued, accusing the federal government of singling out Philadelphia, and contending that the EPA was “hindering and delaying” the project. After a decade of lawsuits and extended deadlines, the two sides were still using the same arguments last summer.

That may change under John Plonski, the former head of the Licenses and Inspections Department whom Mayor Goode has appointed to replace Marrazzo. Plonski, 41, the former city manager of Norristown, is the first non-engineer to lead the Water Department, and he said his priority is to clear its legal docket. “My coming in here offers these agencies and the city an opportunity to settle up and put the past behind them,” he said.

One thing can be said about the lawsuits, however. They got results. The city is scheduled to finish the improvement project this summer, with the completion of sludge-handling facilities at the Southwest plant. The city says the troublesome plant, the target of the EPA’s most recent suit, will then be able to meet its discharge standards.

And while the water quality in the Delaware has yet to reach its targets, it is getting close. Nowadays, dissolved oxygen rarely dips lower than 3 parts per million. The levels of fecal coliform have dropped enough so that most stretches of the river are considered “swimmable.” The Delaware River Basin Commission found 36 species of fish in the Philadelphia stretch of the river in 1985, twice as many as were found at any time during the two previous decades. The change in the fish population was so dramatic, said David P. Pollison, the commission’s head of planning, that officials resurveyed the river in 1986 to confirm the study.

“In the grand scheme of things, in the big picture,” said Peter Ludzia, a compliance officer in EPA’s Philadelphia office, “Philadelphia’s improvements have had a pretty significant impact on the water quality in the Delaware.”

Whether the investment has been sufficient, however, remains up to the federal government. The EPA is now considering whether to require sewage to receive a third level of treatment that would introduce chemicals to reduce levels of phosphorus, nitrogen and some of the pollutants that slip past secondary treatment. It could add hundreds of millions of dollars more to the project.

IN THIS LINE OF WORK one develops various mechanisms to deal with the public’s impressions about the raw material. The Water Department’s policy is to treat matters clinically. Another approach is to join the crowd and make fun of sewage.

At the beginning of a course he teaches on waste-water treatment, James S. Nicolo, who was the manager of the Southeast plant last year, promises his students: “When you’re done with this class, you’ll really know your s-.”

Nicolo is a clever teacher who enjoys describing the science and the nuances of waste water. Relaxed, cheerful and not one to take things too seriously, Nicolo discovered sewage as a second career. A graduate of Villanova’s engineering school, he worked for the Navy until 1978, designing parts for F-14s and F-16s. But he was bored. When he was 30 years old, he took a $2,000 pay cut to work for the Water Department. He now says, “It was probably the best thing I ever did.”

Rather than designing airplane parts, Nicolo helped redesign the Southeast plant, the city’s smallest and newest. A few months ago, he was transferred to manage the Northeast plant, the city’s largest plant and, because of its proximity to residential areas, its most problematic.

At Southeast, Nicolo learned sewage treatment from the ground up. “The most important thing about working at a sewage treatment plant is personal hygiene,” he said on a tour of the plant. “When I first started working here, I went to the john after being out near the tanks: First, I went to the toilet, and then I washed my hands. One of the men said, ‘You’re new here, aren’t you? Around here, we wash our hands before we go to the bathroom.’ ”

After that, Nicolo became familiar with every aspect of Southeast.

The plant is designed to handle 120 million gallons of sewage a day from a 21-square-mile area of Philadelphia and a sliver of Montgomery County. Sewage from as far as Chestnut Hill and the Wyndmoor section of Springfield Township takes up to 15 hours to travel to Southeast. In its final sprint to the plant, the waste water rushes through an 11-foot-diameter pipe that passes beneath Delaware Avenue.

The sewage enters Southeast’s headworks at 37 feet below ground level, in the basement of a cavernous pump house. Nicolo led the way down a concrete stairwell to the basement where roiling, churning sewage was entering in a chamber called a wet well.

“That stuff comes in real fast, at 49,000 gallons per minute,” said Nicolo. He had to shout to be heard over the droning electric pumps that elevate the sewage to ground level so it can flow through the rest of the treatment plant. During power outages, the pumps shut down, but the sewage keeps rushing into the basement of the pump house. It rapidly fills up the wet well. “All you can do is run like hell,” said Nicolo. “It rises fast. It chases you up the steps.” It happens often enough that the concrete walls of the stairwell are flecked in brown to a line about 12 feet above the top of the well.

Before the pumps draw the sewage to the surface, the waste water passes through iron screens that collect any debris wider than one inch, which might damage the pumps. A mechanical rake periodically clears off the trash. Most of the debris is street junk – lumber, beverage cans, rags and a fair amount of cash. “You’d be surprised,” said Downs, “how many guys make it a part of their day to go walking through the screen room, especially after a big rainstorm.”

Until this point, the sewer system has been designed to maintain a quick enough flow to keep all the solids afloat. The basic treatment process that follows – primary treatment – involves little more than slowing down the sewage to settle out progressively smaller particles.

The first step is the grit chamber, a large pool where gravel, sand and bits of glass settle to the bottom. If you dropped your wedding ring down a sewer, this is where it would stop. Grit is removed and sterilized in an incinerator before it is sent to a landfill.

Next, the sewage slows to a crawl in the primary settling tanks. The tanks are 12 feet deep and 250 feet long. During the two hours it takes sewage to pass through the primary tanks, suspended solids slowly drift to the bottom. Grease, tampon applicators and condoms – technically called scum – float to the top. Automated wooden boards slowly skim the scum from the top and then scrape the sludge away from the bottom. After it is collected, it is incincerated. Since a lot of it is grease, it burns easily.

Primary treatment involves only the physical removal of solids. In the last 15 years, Philadelphia has converted its three plants to include secondary treatment, or the biological decomposition of sewage. Southeast, which began secondary treatment only two years ago, was the last plant to undergo the improvements.

Secondary treatment essentially attempts to duplicate the cleansing process that naturally occurs in a river. Microorganisms in a stream feed o9converting the waste into carbon dioxide and solids. But the microbes also consume a stream’s dissolved oxygen. Heavily polluted streams lose so much oxygen that even the microbes die and the cleansing action all but ceases. They become septic, like the Delaware River during the 1940s.

The key to this cleansing process are the microorganisms – bacteria, protozoa and algae. Treatment plant operators once were nuts-and-bolts kind of people, but secondary treatment has forced them to learn as much about microbiology as mechanical engineering. The microbes that consume sewage have a host of complicated names, but to treatment plant engineers, they are simply “bugs.”

After primary treatment, the sewage flows into aeration tanks, where it is pumped full of oxygen – so much that the microbes not only survive, but also breed like crazy and gobble up the sewage. After this microbial feeding frenzy, the sewage, which is now called “mixed liquor,” flows into a settlement tank, where the end product – sludge – sinks to the bottom.

Without the sludge, the water in the settlement tanks is ready to be released back into the river. One might presume that the sludge would be disposed of – “wasted,” as they say in the trade. In truth, much of the sludge, teeming with bugs, is pumped right back to the aeration tanks to breed a new generation of bacteria. “You settle those bugs out and bring them back so they can eat again,” said Tom Lauletta, the former manager of the Southwest plant.

The trick of the science is to judge the proper amount of sludge to send back for a second meal. Sewage treatment plant operators often characterize bacteria by their behavior. Bugs can be lazy, aggressive, old, young, hungry or fat. Adolescent, virile bugs get sent back to eat again. Old, indolent bugs get wasted.

“We’re operating with a young sludge,” Nicolo said. “We determine the age by a mean cell-retention time before we waste it. We waste 300,000 gallons each day from the two tanks. We like to keep our sludge at about 3 1/2 days old.”

Nicolo walked along the tanks, passing a trough that contained mixed liquor. It looked like a bartender’s practical joke. “Mixed liquor should be a golden brown and not have too much odor,” he said. “The tests to measure the oxygen demand of sewage take five days to complete. By then the sewage is long gone. So you operate the plant through your five senses. This mixed liquor looks and smells just about right.”

Often, a single source of sewage can make a great difference in the character of the waste water entering a plant. “This is not the normal color of our sewage,” Nicolo said as he returned to the headworks. “This is funny. It’s usually more gray, and not this brown.” The department’s investigators later determined that a building contractor had flushed a large amount of dirt down the sewers.

Philadelphia’s sewage today largely reflects the city’s decline as a manufacturing center. Industrial users accounted for 25 percent of the sewer system’s flow three decades ago, but now contribute only 7 percent of the output. Today’s sewage is more dilute. Not that the city misses the industrial sewage; it contained toxic metals or chemicals that strained the abilities of the treatment process.

The loss of other industries, however, was deeply lamented at the Southeast plant. The sewage from Schmidt’s Brewery, the Domino Sugar refinery and Publicker’s Distillery ended up at Southeast before they closed. “Those places had great waste – all sugars and carbohydrates,” said Thomas Healey, the head of the industrial waste unit. “It was good food for the bugs.”

UNTIL 1980, THE SLUDGE from Southeast was loaded on a barge and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean. Nine years ago, under pressure from the EPA, the city agreed to halt ocean dumping and turned to composting. Nowadays, the sludge that the Southeast plant wastes is pumped about five miles under the Schuylkill to the Southwest plant. After it is condensed, it goes to the city’s giant Sludge Processing and Distribution Center, next to the Southwest plant.

Philadelphia’s three plants produce about 175 dry tons of sludge a day, and all of it is composted at the sludge processing facility. Dry ton, however, is a misleading term; it refers to the weight of solids suspended in a liquid. Sludge is anything but dry. Straight from the settlement tanks, it is about 3 percent solid – very pourable. It solidifies somewhat while it spends a month in closed tanks, when the microbes continue to digest the waste. Afterward, it is wrung out in centrifuges and presses and becomes known as “dewatered sludge cake,” which is about 20 percent solid. It has the consistency and the appearance of a fresh cow patty. A dry ton of sludge cake, including the water, actually weighs about five tons.

Sludge is William Toffey’s business.

Two years ago, Toffey worked in the city planning office before taking on the monumental job as the Water Department’s sludge utilization manager. When introduced to strangers, he does not hide the nature of his work. “I tell them I sell sludge,” he said. “It generates all sorts of interesting conversations.”

Selling sludge is nothing like selling encyclopedias. Toffey, 38, is equipped with an Ivy League education and bearing. He has a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Cornell University and a master’s in environmental planning from the University of Pennsylvania. Slender and high-strung, he wears English-cut suits and wire-rim glasses. He uses such terms as “marketing utilization decisions.” At other times, he uses plain English: “In order to maintain a consistent product, we screen out the solids that can’t be squished or mished or pulled out.”

With loping strides, Toffey marched around the 42-acre sludge-composting facility, the largest such operation in the United States. All around him were mounds of sludge cake and wood chips, smoldering from the 140-degree heat the compost generates. The heat kills most of the disease-causing bacteria and after seven weeks leaves the sludge looking at least something like earth.

Philadelphia produces several different sludge products, which it markets under the trade names of Mine Mix, Philly Mulch and Earthlife. The blends represent various mixtures of sludge and wood chips. “We didn’t want to put all our sludge eggs in one basket,” said Toffey. A plane approaching Philadelphia International Airport screamed overhead.

The original product – 15-year-old sludge that had been dredged from lagoons at the Southwest plant – was called Philorganic. The department gave it away in the late ’70s. But as the department diversified its line, Philorganic was also used to refer to sludge composted with wood chips and then screened to achieve a fine loam. Confusion arose about Philorganic’s true identity, so that name was discarded and the screened material was renamed Earthlife. “It is the finest, most value-added product we have to offer,” said Toffey. Earthlife sells for about $12 a ton, if it’s bought by the tractor-trailer load. Toffey said it is price-competitive with other soil conditioners.

About 25 percent of the city’s sludge cake is applied straight to strip mines or farmland, just like manure. The rest is composted. A distributor sells the compost to landscapers and garden centers, through which it most often ends up beneath lawns or athletic fields. Despite assurances that little of the metallic content is transmitted to plants, the city maintains a conservative stand and recommends that the sludge not be applied to land where crops are grown for human consumption. The warning, Toffey acknowledged, is not a good marketing tool.

Sludge also has a short-lived odor when it is applied to the ground, an aroma that farmers regard as earthy. Suburbanites say it stinks. “It’s not a popular program, especially when you get closer to suburban areas,” said Toffey. “It’s been very disappointing.”

The city first started using the sludge mixtures to reclaim abandoned strip mines in Western Pennsylvania. Residents near the mines complained loudly about having to live with Philadelphia’s waste. Because of the protests, fewer mines are being reclaimed today, even though studies of the sites showed no contamination, and plant life thrived on the once-barren land.

Because of the fear of sludge products, the city’s program is struggling. As of January, the department had a four-month backlog of sludge products – about 120,000 wet tons of sludge cake and Mine Mix – stored at the processing facility.

Toffey views the sludge crisis as an irony of modern environmentalism: “As a nation, we’ve raised the fears in order to raise the environmental consciousness. But that fear has come around and bogged us down.”

With New York and northern New Jersey cities on their way out of the ocean – Congress has banned sludge dumping starting in 1991 – there will be millions of tons of new sludge to deal with in the coming years. The disposal options are limited. Sludge can be incinerated or sent to a landfill, at considerable cost. The city once attempted to fuse sludge and incinerator ash into a vitreous roadbed material it called Ecorock, but the process was too expensive. Other processes to turn sludge into fuel pellets are considered experimental. And so the most environmentally conscientious – and cost effective – method remains composting.

Hence the city’s focus on sludge. “If we can have a major success here,” said Toffey, “I think it will have a lot of effect swaying people over to land application of sludge products.” When the sludge-handling improvements are finished this year, people driving by on I-95 can gaze out on acre upon acre of composting sludge and feel proud for their small contribution to that great mound.

More likely, however, is that they’ll see acres of concrete tanks filled with decomposing sewage. And, in the center of it all – hiding a complex of digesters, aerators, sludge thickeners and enough plumbing to reroute the Nile – rows of identical brick buildings. If you squint, they look like classrooms.

“We actually got some complaints,” Marrazzo said, “from people who wondered how we allowed a junior college to get built in the middle of a sewage treatment plant.”

Sewage treatment cannot escape notice.

Fair Use Statement

An Amazing Story…

The roots of the company stretch back over 200
years to the beginning of the English china industry.

The company’s impressive history is dotted with the names of Queen Victoria, Louis Pasteur, and King Edward VII. From its humble origins on the banks of the Thames river, it grew to become the premier name in water filtration.

 

 


John Doulton
On the eve of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, John Doulton was taken into partnership by the widow Martha Jones who had inherited from her late husband a pottery in Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth, by the side of the Thames river. Her foreman John Watts was included in the partnership and the new firm became Jones, Watts and Doulton Company. John Doulton founded his first pottery that same year, 1815, at Lambeth, England on the banks of the Thames river.

The main products of the original company were ceramic busts, figurines, canning jars and tableware. Influenced by the unrelenting progress of the Industrial Revolution, Doulton placed equal emphasis on industrial applications for ceramic technology. It was John Doulton’s son, Henry, however, who carried that tradition of the Lambeth pottery to its zenith.

Henry Doulton
As early as 1827, Henry Doulton developed ceramic filters for removing bacteria from drinking water.

 

“Offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination and
destructive to the health”
This was how London drinking water, drawn from the Thames, was described in a pamphlet published in 1827. The Thames was heavily contaminated with raw sewage; cholera and typhoid epidemics were rampant. The first Doulton® water filters were made using various earth and clay materials. By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, Doulton was well established as a manufacturer of domestic and industrial products in a fine stoneware body that bore comparison with any in Europe.

Queen Victoria
In 1835, Queen Victoria recognized the present health dangers in her drinking water and commissioned Doulton to produce a water filter for the Royal household.

Doulton created a gravity fed stoneware filter that combined the technology of a ceramic filter with the artistry of a hand crafted pottery water container. By 1846, the Lambeth factory was in the vanguard of the revolution in sanitation technology and products which Chadwick, and the great reformers of the day, brought to metropolitan England. Without the hard work and foresight of Henry Doulton that revolution would have been delayed by decades.

Henry Doulton introduced the Doulton® Manganous Carbon water filter in 1862, the same year that Louis Pasteur’s experiments with bacteria conclusively exploded the myth of spontaneous generation and proved that all microorganisms arise from other microorganisms.

Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur’s research into bacteria made it possible to focus the efforts of Doulton Filter’s Research and Development toward the creation of a porous ceramic capable of filtering out these tiny organisms. With Pasteur’s advancements in microbiology, Doulton’s Research and Development department, headed by Henry Doulton, created micro porous ceramic (diatomaceous earth) cartridges capable of removing bacteria with better than 99% efficiency.

 

Doulton Filters were rapidly adopted by the military, Crown Agents, hospitals, laboratories and domestic users throughout the world.
In 1862, Doulton filters shown at the Kensington International Exhibition proudly wore the Royal arms of Queen Victoria.

King Edward VII
In 1882 Henry Doulton acquired a small factory in the Midlands, motherland of the Staffordshire potteries and the home of the Doulton Drinking Water Purifier. In 1901, King Edward VII knighted Henry Doulton and in 1902 King Edward VII conferred the double honor of the royal warrant and the specific – as opposed to the assumed – right to use the title “Royal” for his work on drinking water filtration.

This Royal Warrant authorized the company to use the word ROYAL in reference to its products. Along the way the honors were won at the great international exhibitions in Chicago and Paris and the range of products proliferated. Queen Victoria bestowed upon Doulton the right to embellish each of its units with the ROYAL CREST.

In 1906, Doulton introduced a filter that proved to be equal to the one Louis Pasteur had developed in France. It was rapidly adopted by hospitals, laboratories and for use in domestic water filtration throughout the world. The popularity and effectiveness of even the early 20th century designs has resulted in their continued use world wide. The range and efficiency of Doulton® domestic water filters have been widely extended over the years to meet the demands of increasingly sophisticated uses.

 

Doulton® ceramics are now in use in over 150 countries.
Today's ProductBritish Berkefeld
In 1985 the British Berkefeld® brand was acquired by Doulton Industrial Products, the manufacturer of Royal Doulton® water filters, a company whose name has been synonymous with high quality and reliability since the early years of the twentieth century.

Today the British Berkefeld® name is the preferred choice for water purification products in world-wide locations where outbreaks of illness are associated with unreliable water supplies.

The Royal Doulton Visitor Center was opened in May 1996 within the heart of the Royal Doulton factory in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, the “Mother Town” of the Potteries. Visitors walk through original factory buildings dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, which have been beautifully refurbished as the Home of the Royal Doulton Figure.

In July 1998 the Visitor Center was named Visitor Attraction of the Year in its category by the Heart of England Tourist Board.
Fair Use Statement

 

 

            Prominent researcher apologizes for pushing fluoride

Barry Forbes
The Tribune, Mesa, AZ
Sunday, December 5, 1999

“Why’d you do it, Doc? Why’d you toss the fluoride folks overboard?” I had just tracked down Dr. Hardy Limeback, B.Sc., Ph.D in Biochemistry, D.D.S., head of the Department of Preventive Dentistry for the University of Toronto, and president of the Canadian Association for Dental Research.

(Whew.)

Dr. Limeback is Canada’s leading fluoride authority and, until recently, the country’s primary promoter of the controversial additive. In a surprising newsmaker interview this past April, Dr. Limeback announced a dramatic change of heart. “Children under three should never use fluoridated toothpaste,” he counseled. “Or drink fluoridated water.
And baby formula must never be made up using Toronto tap water. Never.”

Why, I wondered? What could have caused such a powerful paradigm shift?

“It’s been building up for a couple of years,” Limeback told me during a recent telephone interview. “But certainly the crowning blow was the realization that we have been dumping contaminated fluoride into water reservoirs for half a century. The vast majority of all fluoride additives come from Tampa Bay, Florida smokestack scrubbers. The additives are a toxic byproduct of the super-phosphate fertilizer industry.”

“Tragically,” he continued, “that means we’re not just dumping toxic fluoride into our drinking water. We’re also exposing innocent, unsuspecting people to deadly elements of lead, arsenic and radium, all of them carcinogenic. Because of the cumulative properties of toxins, the detrimental effects on human health are catastrophic.”

A recent study at the University of Toronto confirmed Dr. Limeback’s worst fears. “Residents of cities that fluoridate have double the fluoride in their hip bones vis-a-vis the balance of the population. Worse, we discovered that fluoride is actually altering the basic architecture of human bones.”

Skeletal fluorosis is a debilitating condition that occurs when fluoride accumulates in bones, making them extremely weak and brittle. The earliest symptoms? “Mottled and brittle teeth,” Dr. Limeback told me. “In Canada we are now  spending more money treating dental fluorosis than we do treating cavities. That includes my own practice.”

One of the most obvious living experiments today, Dr. Limeback believes, is a proof-positive comparison between any two Canadian cities. “Here in Toronto we’ve been fluoridating for 36 years. Yet Vancouver – which has never fluoridated – has a cavity rate lower than Toronto’s.”

And, he pointed out, cavity rates are low all across the industrialized world – including Europe, which is 98% fluoride free. Low because of improved standards of living, less refined sugar, regular dental checkups, flossing and frequent brushing. Now less than 2 cavities per child Canada-wide, he said.

“I don’t get it, Doc. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ran a puff piece all across America saying the stuff was better than sliced bread. What’s the story?” “Unfortunately,” he replied, “the CDC is basing its position on data that  is 50 years old, and questionable at best. Absolutely no one has done research on fluorosilicates, which is the junk they’re dumping into the drinking water.” “On the other hand,” he added, “the evidence against systemic fluoride in-take continues to pour in.”

“But Doc, the dentists.”

“I have absolutely no training in toxicity,” he stated firmly. “Your well-intentioned dentist is simply following 50 years of misinformation from public health and the dental association. Me, too. Unfortunately, we  were wrong.”

Last week, Dr. Hardy Limeback addressed his faculty and students at the  University of Toronto, Department of Dentistry. In a poignant, memorable meeting, he apologized to those gathered before him. “Speaking as the head of preventive dentistry, I told them that I had unintentionally mislead my colleagues and my students. For the past 15  years, I had refused to study the toxicology information that is readily available to anyone. Poisoning our children was the furthest thing from my mind.”

“The truth,” he confessed to me, “was a bitter pill to swallow. But swallow it I did.”

South of the border, the paradigm shift has yet to dawn. After half a century of delusion, the CDC, American Dental Association and Public Health stubbornly and skillfully continue to manipulate public opinion in favor of fluoridation.

Meantime, study after study is delivering the death knell of the deadly toxin. Sure, fluoridation will be around for a long time yet, but ultimately its supporters need to ready the life rafts. The poisonous waters of doubt and confusion are bound to get choppier.
“Are lawsuits inevitable?” I asked the good doctor. “Remember tobacco,” was his short, succinct reply.

Fair Use

 Probe urged into fluoride in water link to cancer

The Irish Examiner 09 Jan 2002

By Fionnuala Quinlan

THE Government has been urged to investigate the link between bone cancer and fluoridated drinking water after a study found 40% more people in the Republic contract the disease than in the North.

Research carried out at Boston University of School of Public Health, using data from the Irish National Cancer Registry and its northern equivalent, found 40% more people suffer from the rare bone cancer osteosarcoma in the Republic than the North, where water is not fluoridated.

Irish Dentists Opposing Fluoridation warn that the research is consistent with existing studies which have linked osteosarcoma to fluoridated drinking water.

Spokesman Dr Don MacCauley said that while the Irish study did not conclusively link the cancer to fluoridation, it underscored the need for urgent research into the health effects of adding 2,000 gallons of hydrofluosilic acid to drinking water in the Republic.

“The legislation, which permits fluoridation in this country requires the Minister of Health to carry out health studies into the effects of nearly 40 years of this mass-medication. This research has never been done,” Dr MacCauley said.

“Another fluoride health alert is screaming but when will the Minister of Health start listening? When will the minister fulfil his duty and carry out the health studies required by law?

“It is outrageous that there are still no plans for health studies.

“Instead, Minister Martin has delegated his responsibilities to a pro-fluoride sham of a forum, which cannot even get its act together to report on time,” Dr MacCauley said.

The report by the Government’s Forum on Fluoridation was due for publication at the end of October, but it has been postponed until later this month.

Fluoride has also been linked to cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, hip fractures and thyroid disorders, while an American study found fluoride exposure could produce lower IQ levels in children.

Ireland is the only country in Europe to insist that drinking water be fluoridated.

“In spite of all the evidence about the dangers of fluoride, Ireland has never carried out a survey. That is illegal,” Dr MacCauley said.

Director of the National Cancer Registry Dr Harry Comber said osteosarcoma was a relatively rare cancer of the bones which usually affected children and teenagers up to age of 20.

However, he cautioned against drawing firm conclusions from the osteosarcoma research in the Republic and the North because he said the disease was relatively rare and the populations on both sides of the Border were quite small.

A spokesman for the Department of Health was yesterday unavailable for comment.

See our “Fair Use” Policy

Once Again, the Kooks Are Vanquished

by Paul Carpenter

Gazette’s Introductory Note:  In January, 1999,  the City Council of Allentown, PA voted to fluoridate the city’s drinking water after  heated public controversy.  The following article by columnist Paul Carpenter appeared in the Allentown Morning Call in late January.

Doctors recommend Camels by a margin of 2 to 1.

Not only that, but the federal government enthusiastically supports the tobacco industry with enormous subsidies and official studies proving that smoking is good for you and that critics of the tobacco industry are a bunch of kooks.

I didn’t make that up. In my youth, as far as the American Medical Association and the government were concerned, there was something wrong with anyone who said smoking was harmful.

I was happily smoking up a storm at that time — Camels, you betcha — and some kook researchers came up with outrageous claims about a link with cancer and heart disease. I clearly remember the term that federal officials then used to describe those claims: “pseudo science.”

The tune has changed, of course. Eventually, the kooks’ claims about the virulence of smoking could not be ridiculed away. In the meantime, one wonders how many were killed by the poisons in tobacco smoke.

During Allentown’s fluoridation debate, I again heard the term “pseudo science,” this time to describe the claims of anti-fluoridation kooks.

As I noted Friday, the feds and the American Dental Association finally won their 40-year fight to get Allentown to join other righteous communities that add the industrial toxic waste known as fluorides to water.

Dentists recommend it by a margin of 2 to 1, you know. The ADA says it prevents cavities, and dentists will be glad to give up cavity-fixing profits out of the kindness of their hearts.

One of the things I mentioned in Friday’s article was a claim by one of the anti-fluoridation people who spoke during the public portion of Wednesday’s City Council meeting. (Following that portion, council approved fluoridation in a 5-2 vote.)

Rosemarie Doward said the ADA itself had admitted that dentists’ profits increase when their area is fluoridated. (I said that may be because a dentist gets $57 for fixing a cavity while raking in up to $700 per tooth for fixing fluorosis, a discoloration problem caused by fluoridation.)

That’s a kook’s claim if ever there was one, but I later tracked down the ADA publication upon which Doward based her statement.

The nice people at Lehigh Valley Hospital keep back copies of the Journal of the American Dental Association, and there it was on page 364 of Volume 84, February 1972.

The net income of dentists in fluoridated areas and “fluoride-deficient” areas were compared, JADA said, and the income in fluoridated areas is 17 percent higher. That crass admission was embarrassing back in 1972, obviously, and the ADA never again released such data.

Also Friday, I mentioned a California dentist, David Kennedy, who founded an anti-fluoridation group, Citizens for Safe Drinking Water.

I telephoned Kennedy in San Diego and he didn’t seem like a kook. His grandfather was a dentist, his father is a dentist and he is a dentist.

“I used to support fluoridation,” he said. “When the science became clear that it was not a benefit, I stopped supporting it.”

Kennedy said respected studies in America, Europe and elsewhere have revealed links to cancer, bone fractures and other problems, but are being ignored here. “From the very beginning, it (fluoridation) is a scam. It’s a way to dispose of a hazardous waste (by) claiming a benefit,” he said. “There is a profit motive for the ADA. The ADA is paid by companies that have a fluoridated product.”

Kennedy also noted that the only country in Europe that still has widespread fluoridation is Ireland. Take a wild guess which European country now has the worst dental health.

While you’re at it, consider that the fluoridation industry is pouring $50 million a year into campaigns to get California communities fluoridated. That’s because only 15-1/2 percent of Californians are forced to drink fluoridated water, compared with half of the people across the nation.

Take another wild guess about how California’s dental health, including cavities, compares with that of the nation as a whole.

Gazette Fair Use Policy.

Study: showering boosts concentrations of potentially hazardous trihalomethanes

 

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

May 2, 2002

CHAPEL HILL — Trihalomethanes — byproducts of interaction between chlorine used to disinfect water and organic matter found in raw water — increase significantly in the bloodstream after showering, a new study shows. Public health experts suspect the chemicals may boost the risk of cancer and contribute to reproductive problems such as miscarriage.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, involved 50 women living in Georgia and Texas. It showed that showering shifted the distribution of trihalomethanes (THMs) in blood toward that found in the tap water in volunteers’ houses.

Another finding was that the distribution of trihalomethane species — there are four chlorinated and brominated forms — detected in the women’s blood reflected differences of type and concentration in their respective local tap water.

A report on the research appeared in April in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Primary authors are Amy M. Miles, a former public health graduate student at UNC and now an environmental engineer at Research Triangle Institute, and Dr. Philip C. Singer, professor of environmental sciences and engineering at UNC.

“Chlorination of tap water was one of the most important improvements made in public health, and it saves countless lives each year by reducing risk from bacterial contamination,” Miles said. “Water-borne diseases used to be a major cause of death and illness, and they still are in some parts of the world without chlorination.”

Despite its obvious benefits, if chlorination creates its own lesser but significant risks, as many scientists believe, it needs to be studied further, she said. Many water treatment plants are switching to alternative disinfectants to reduce trihalomethane concentrations in drinking water.

The new study aimed to evaluate whether health workers could use drinking water concentrations of THM to predict concentrations in people’s blood, Miles said.

Researchers picked Corpus Christi, Texas, and Cobb County, Ga., to investigate, she said. That’s because water supplies in the former showed moderately high levels of chloroform, the most highly chlorinated THM, and, in the latter, lower total THM concentrations but a higher proportion of brominated species, which are believed to be potentially more hazardous.

Through blood sample analysis, researchers measured THMs in the blood of 25 women at each site before and soon after they showered and compared those levels to concentrations found in tap water at their houses.

“Concentrations of THMs were about 1,000 times lower in blood than in tap water, but after the showers, median levels in blood increased by a factor of four,” Miles said. “This showed THMs were getting into the blood as a result of water use. It could not address, however, whether the concentrations were harmful or were linked to any particular health problem.”

Future studies by Singer and colleagues will examine various trihalomethane exposures more closely, including those caused by inhaling the compounds from air inside houses, she said.

Report co-authors are Drs. David L. Ashley and Michele C. Lynberg of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pauline Mendola of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Peter H. Langlois of the Texas Department of Health and J.R. Nuckols of Colorado State University.

Support for the research came from the American Water Works Association Research Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the EPA.

 

Fair Use Policy

Why the War Against Pot? 

by Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor

Have you ever wondered why the United States spends vast piles of money and squanders immeasurable amounts of human talent and natural resources in the effort to combat a benign substance like marijuana?

Have you wondered why the US is now the only industrialized country to criminalize a substance that is obviously far less harmful than the majority of legally sold pharmaceuticals?

Kate Silver, writing in the Nov. 13, 2001 Las Vegas Weekly, has some answers.

In case you haven’t guessed, like everything else in the USA, it has to do with money. It has a lot to do with the end of the Cold War, Silver says.  When the Cold War ended, ” enormous needs for certain technology and personnel were eradicated. Once America declared its infamous War on Drugs, those needs were refilled.” It provided a new “enemy” and thus created a vast number of new government jobs and a major new source of technological endeavors to be managed by government bureaucrats. It turned the Cold War inward and allowed us to wage war on our own people at a tidy profit. Silver also points out that as a very nice side-effect,  “many powerful Political Action Committees donate money to campaigns to push their own agenda, keeping marijuana illegal.”

“Outside of a dog, a countertop water filter is man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to drink water.”–Groucho Marx.Model 77–“The World’s Greatest $77 Water Filter.”

The toll of this war is, of course, enormous in terms of  “jobs, relationships, money and time lost for the crime of smoking a joint.”  Marijuana arrests take a lot of manpower and a lot of time. “In 2000, police arrested 734,498 people for marijuana violations–the highest ever recorded by the FBI. Of those, 88 percent were for possession. The remaining 88,456 were charged with sale/manufacture.”

You probably have noticed that government officials long ago gave up trying to justify the War on Dope with anything resembling logic.  Pot has just been added to the ever-growing list of “enemies” we’re expected to fight without asking why.

Silver concludes: “Las Vegas Weekly contacted a police source in hopes of getting an argument against legalization, and providing a semblance of balance. Sadly enough, the only reasoning the source could give for pot being illegal is, well, because it’s illegal.”

 

Bee Bea Sharper on Drugs

Year of the passage of the Harrison Tax Act, which started the U. S. “War on Drugs”: 1914

Year in which the non-medical sale or possession of marijuana was made illegal in the U.S.: 1937.

Year of the Nixon Administration’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act, which begins the current era of drug-related legislation: 1970.

According to Nixon, drug abuse was “America’s public enemy number: one.”

Amount spent on the Drug War by the Nixon Administration in 1969: $65,000,000.

Amount spent on the Drug War by the Clinton Administration in 1999: $17,700,000,000.

Percentage of high school seniors who in 1999 said they could find marijuana “fairly easily”: 88.9%

The total number of Americans behind bars in 1970: 200,000.

The total number of Americans serving time for non-violent drug offenses in 2000: 450,000.

Approximate percentage of federal inmates in 2000 who are drug offenders: 60%.

Fraction of these federal drug prisoners who are non-violent, first-time offenders: 1/2.

Amount the U.S. will spend  to keep drug law violators behind bars in the year 2000: $24,000.000.

Change in marijuana use among eighth graders during the height of Clinton’s 1991-1996 anti-marijuana crusade: up 300%.

Number of regular American illegal drug users in 2000: 12,000,000.

Cost of putting a single drug user in prison for five years: $500,000.

Number of drug offenders who could be treated with the money it costs to incarcerate a single non-violent drug offender for five years: more than 100.

Percentage of 12th graders who say it is harder under current drug laws to buy marijuana than to buy beer: 25%.

Number of “drug war orphans”–children with one or both parents serving time for a drug offense–in the year 2000: 1,000,000 plus.

According to FBI figures, number of Americans arrested for marijuana violations alone in 2000: 734,498. 

Likelihood  that “drug war orphans” will themselves end up on prison, as compared to other children: 5 times.

Percentage of the U. S. population that is African American: 12%.

Percentage of total  U. S. drug users who are African American: 13%.

Percentage of total U. S. citizens who are arrested for drug offenses that are African American: 35%.

Percentage of total U. S. citizens that are convicted of drug offenses that are African American: 55%.

Percentage of total U. S. citizens who are incarcerated for drug offenses that are African American: 74%.

Rate at which black men are sent to state prisons for drug offenses as compared with white men: 13 times.

Percentage of Americans who in a 2001 survey said they thought the war on drugs was a failure: 72%.

Average federal sentence for a drug offence in 1997: 78 months.

Average federal sentence for manslaughter in 1997: 30 months.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the number of Americans being drugged as treatment for depression in 1987: 1.7 million.

Number of Americans being drugged for treatment of depression in 1997: 6.2 million.

Of every 100 Americans, the number that are now being treated for clinical depression: 2.3.

Percentage of emergency room visits by older Americans that are caused by adverse reaction to legally prescribed drugs: 11%.

Percentage of Americans 65 and over who according to one study are taking at least one prescription drug: 90%.

Average number of prescription drugs being taken by Americans sixty-five and over: 4.

Number of Americans who die each year from taking legal prescription drugs, not not counting the many thousands who die of medical “accidents” and mistakes: 100,000.

Number who die each day: 270.

Number of Americans who die each day as compared with Americans who die in traffic accidents: Double.

Percentage of Americans who currently take at least one prescription drug: 65%.

Annual expenditure by Americans for prescription drugs: $250 billion.

Amount of “attention deficit drugs” taken by American children as compared with European children: 300%.

Amount spent by the pharmaceutical industry each year to “enlighten” physicians and help with their expenses: $ hundreds of millions.

CANCER RISK FROM INDUSTRIAL CHEMICAL RISES, STUDY FINDS

By Ralph Vartabedian


Reprinted here from Rachel’s Democracy and Health News #886.  Aug. 3, 2006.


[Rachel’s introduction: Trichloroethylene, or TCE, is commonly found in drinking water, air, and soil. A new report from the National Research Council says evidence is growing that TCE causes cancer. What are the implications?]

After a detailed study of the most widespread industrial contaminant in U.S. drinking water, the National Research Council will report today that evidence is growing stronger that the chemical causes cancer and other human health problems.

The 379-page report clears a path for federal regulators to formally raise the risk assessment of trichloroethylene, known as TCE, a step that has been tied up by infighting between scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Defense Department.

California has some of the nation’s worst TCE contamination, including vast tracts of groundwater in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys that are a drinking source for more than 1 million Southern Californians. The state’s 67 Superfund sites with TCE contamination are clustered in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties.

If the risk posed by TCE is significantly higher than previously thought, it could prompt lower limits for TCE in water, as well as stricter cleanups of hundreds of military bases and other polluted facilities. The contamination occurred because TCE, a chemical solvent, was widely dumped into the ground.

Already, some EPA offices are forcing tougher cleanups based on evidence that the chemical poses a greater-than-expected cancer risk.

The EPA attempted to issue a risk assessment in 2001 that found TCE to be two to 40 times more carcinogenic than previously thought, but that action was opposed by the Defense Department, the Energy Department and NASA. The Pentagon has 1,400 properties contaminated with TCE.

The Bush administration sent the matter to the National Research Council for study, based on military assertions that the EPA had overblown the risks. But the new report does not support that criticism.

“The committee found that the evidence on carcinogenic risk and other health hazards from exposure to trichloroethylene has strengthened since 2001,” the report said.

The report urged federal agencies to complete their assessment of TCE risks as soon as possible “with currently available data,” meaning they should not wait for additional basic research, as suggested by the Defense Department.

The report is to be formally released today by the National Research Council. An early copy was provided to The Times by the Natural Resources News Service, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that investigates environmental issues. The authors of the study also briefed members of Congress on Wednesday.

“It is the strongest report on TCE that we have had,” said Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey (D-N.Y.), whose district includes hundreds of homes that have air filtration systems to eliminate TCE vapors from the ground. “The fact that we have this TCE-laden drinking water used by millions of people is abominable.”

Hinchey and others in Congress are demanding stronger cleanup standards and lower limits for the chemical in drinking water. Currently, the EPA allows 5 parts per billion; that could be lowered to as little as 1 part per billion for drinking water if the risk assessment sidetracked in 2001 is adopted, according to an analysis by the Air Force.

It would drive up cleanup costs by billions of dollars but potentially save thousands of lives, scientists say. The report’s authors told Congress on Wednesday that they did not think the EPA should throw out its 2001 draft risk assessment and start over. Instead, they hope the TCE analysis can be completed within six months to a year.

Dr. Gina Solomon, an environmental health expert who served on a scientific advisory board that reviewed the original assessment, said the new report could have a profound effect on the issue.

“That is a very strong statement, a ringing endorsement of the EPA’s 2001 draft risk assessment,” said Solomon, an associate clinical professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Solomon said the report also rejected a key position of the chemical industry and Pentagon environmental experts that TCE was not dangerous at low levels of exposure.

Federal regulators should stick with the current scientific model that the cancer risk posed by TCE is proportional to the level of exposure, the National Research Council said.

In its report, the council found the evidence of TCE risk was greatest for kidney cancer, but not as high for liver cancer. It did not study other diseases that could be connected, including leukemia.

The report found merit in the Pentagon’s criticism of EPA methodology on epidemiology, which is the study of how disease is distributed in the population. It called for a new survey of prior research.

The report from the National Research Council has been awaited by communities exposed to TCE across the country.

“We can’t afford any more delays,” said Jerry Ensminger, a former Marine drill sergeant who served at Camp Lejuene, where drinking water supplies were tainted. His daughter died at age 9 in 1976 from leukemia, which Ensminger blamed on TCE exposure.

Ensminger said he was heartened by the report’s conclusions, but remained concerned about whether the government would move quickly to deal with the chemical contamination.

“I want to know why the Bush administration does not err on the side of life when it comes to the environment,” he said.

Originally published in the Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2006

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Fair Use Statement