A Few Things You Should Know about Benzene

by Pure Water Annie

Benzene is a known carcinogen. There is a lot of it around. You’d do best to take in as little as possible.

This piece appeared originally in the Pure Water Occasional for February 2012. Benzene has emerged more recently as a major water contaminant related to wildfires. See Benzene Pollution after California Fire.

Benzene is an organic chemical, one of the aromatic hydrocarbons. It is essentially colorless and has a slightly sweet odor. It is highly flammable. Benzene dissolves easily in water and evaporates quickly at room temperature. It boils at 176 degrees F.

Benzene has been much in the news recently because of its presence in the fracking fluids being injected into the ground by gas well producers, but it can contaminate water via many other sources.

Natural sources of benzene include volcanoes and forest fires. Benzene is also a natural part of crude oil, gasoline and cigarette smoke. Burning PVC also produces benzene. Some industries use benzene to make other chemicals that are used to make plastics, resins, nylon and synthetic fibers. Benzene is also used to make some types of lubricants and pesticides.

Benzene can cause cells not to work correctly, leading to conditions such as anemia. It can damage the immune system by changing blood levels of antibodies and causing the loss of white blood cells.

An ingredient of gasoline, benzene is found in groundwater contaminated by leaking underground fuel storage tanks, or in surface water subject to fuel spills. Gasoline contains a bit less than 1% benzene. Produced from coal or petroleum (usually the latter), benzene ranks among the top 20 chemicals in production volume. Benzene is used to make solvents, detergents, plastics, resins, paint and many other products.

Benzene is a carcinogen in humans. Also, long exposure to high levels in air causes leukemia. People who are exposed over long periods in their workplace are most at risk.

Drinking water or eating food containing high levels of benzene can cause vomiting, dizziness, or even death.

The EPA regulates benzene. The MCL for benzene in water is 0.005 mg/L (5 ppb).

If exposed to air, benzene evaporates to the environment. It can also be broken down by some soil microbes. It may also be degraded in some ground waters. If benzene is released to surface water, most of it should evaporate within a few hours. Though it does not degrade by reacting with water, it may be degraded by microbes. It is not likely to accumulate in aquatic organisms.

Benzene can be removed from water by adsorption with granular activated carbon. It can also be treated by ozonation. Because benzene evaporates easily, open tank aeration is also a valuable treatment method. If benzene is present, it should be treated as a “whole house” or point of entry issue because inhalation is a hazard. The most practical residential treatment is filtration with a good activated carbon filter.

Fracking May Be an Environmental Disaster, but It’s a Goldmine for the Water Treatment Industry

With hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — the use of high pressure water to help extract previously inaccessible shale gas, the U.S., the market for water treatment will grow nine-fold to $9 billion in 2020. This expansion will spur technology innovation and novel thinking about water disposal and reuse, but the field is rapidly growing overcrowded, creating significant risk for new entrants, Lux Research said in a report.

Fracking requires between 4,000 m(3) and over 22,000 m(3) (25,000 bbl to 140,000 bbl) of water per well and produces toxin-laced brine that can be more than six times as salty as the sea. Its growth has energized the water industry, inspiring a bumper crop of new water treatment startups vying to treat the highly challenging flowback water.

Full Story

Water Contaminant Reference List

If you want information about the most common water treatment issues, here’s a list that will take you direct to the Pure Water Occasional’s website.

2000 Water Birds Have Been Found Dead on Chilean Beaches–More in Peru

Some 2,000 birds have been found dead  on a four-mile stretch of beach in central Chile.

The birds include grey petrels, pelicans, gannets and Guanay cormorants.

The mysterious reportings of dead birds in Chile follow other grisly discoveries in neighboring Peru. Thousands of maritime birds including pelicans as well as dolphins have been found dead on Peru’s shores in recent weeks. While environmentalists have suggested that oil exploration work is a possible culprit, government authorities blame warm water.

Read more.

Chloramines and Fish

Here’s a brief piece from an aquarium site that explains monochloramine and its effects on fish. To read more.  It is reprinted from the Pure Water Occasional for October, 2011.

Because chlorine is extremely unstable and dissipates quickly from water, chloramines were developed and are now primarily used to maintain water quality in pipelines that are often quite old and extend for many miles. Chloramine (NH2Cl), an inorganic compound that is a combination of chlorine and ammonia, has been used for more than 90 years. But its proliferation began in the mid-1980s. Of the three types of chloramine used in drinking water, monochloramine, comprised of chlorine and ammonia, is most often applied to public water systems.

Chloramines received a terrible reputation when water utilities added the compound and failed to adequately educate the public because it resulted in massive tropical fish deaths for no apparent reason. The Internet as we know it today was not available then, so aquarium publications, fish clubs and pet shops did their best to spread the word for coping with this problem.

Chloramine is an invisible compound that fish take directly into their bloodstream through their gills. Fish exposed to this compound experience stress, damaged and burned gills, erratic behavior and sometimes even jump out of the aquarium. It is a horrible, yet preventable, death. Fish seen gasping at the water surface with rapid, labored breathing could be suffering the effects of chloramine poisoning (especially if these symptoms occur following a water change).

    Jesus Hated War — Why Do Christians Love It So Much?

By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News
Posted on December 28, 2009, Printed on December 28, 2009

When Gulf War I ended (during George Bush the Elder’s presidency), General Norman Schwartzkopf, the field commander, triumphantly proclaimed, “God must have been on our side!”

Such statements aren’t unusual for glory-seeking dictators, kings, princes, presidents and generals, regardless of what religion justified their particular war, but I cringed when I heard this self-professed Christian warrior claim God’s blessings on the war that made him famous.

In his memoir, It Doesn’t Take A Hero, Schwartzkopf claimed that he kept a Bible at his bedside throughout the war.

I cringed knowing that, according to the biblical Jesus, God is never on the side of the victors. The God of love that Jesus revealed was on the side of the victims, the oppressed, the starving, the sick, the naked, the meek who were victimized by unjust power.

Jesus’s God would not be on the side of the war-makers, but on the side of the peacemakers, the compassionate and long-suffering ones who work to prevent killing and to relieve the suffering of the victims of war.

I cringed when I heard Schwartzkopf claim God’s blessings on the carnage that he helped orchestrate because similar claims have been used to rationalize killing throughout history, from ancient times to some of the darkest days of the modern era.

As the German Nazis went about their systematic purging of any and all leftist or anti-fascist groups – Jews, socialists, homosexuals, liberals, communists, trade unionists and conscientious objectors to war – they insisted that God was on their side, too.

Adolf Hitler claimed that he was doing God’s will. German soldiers, both in WWI and WWII, went into battle with the words “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) inscribed on their belt buckles.

Invoking “Gott Mit Uns” didn’t work just on the uneducated, brain-washable and obedient citizens and conscripted soldiers of Germany. The slogan also convinced most of the educated Protestant and Catholic clergymen to comfortably proclaim from their pulpits that Hitler’s wars were endorsed by the Christian God, and therefore every military action could be justified and carried out without guilt.

Most Germans wanted to believe that Hitler’s wars had to be fought for some higher purpose, a master plan that they trusted would benefit them all by creating “Lebensraum” (living space), which would mean security for the pure Aryan race.

Aggression as Defensive

In the Nazis’ up-is-down world, the propagandists convinced average Germans that Hitler’s wars were purely defensive (“the sword has been forced into our hands”). The terrorizing of foreigners in a neighboring country, in order to steal their land, was the patriotic thing to do.

Convincing the German public to engage in murder for the state took a lot of diligent work from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.

Goebbels had to persuade the Germans that their neighbor’s land and oil and mineral resources could legitimately be taken by any means necessary in order to realize the Fuhrer’s dream of the “Thousand-year Reich,” where perpetual peace for the privileged German people would finally be realized.

The “collateral damage” done to the innocent civilian-victims of Europe and the Soviet Union, was felt to be unavoidable, and the “disappearances” of the non-Aryan “Untermenschen,” mentioned above, was orchestrated with conscienceless bureaucratic efficiency.

Bishops, priests and pastors, most of whom had taken an oath of allegiance to Hitler, told their parishioners that it was their Christian duty to join the military and fight and kill for the Fuhrer.

Resentment also played an important role in the swastika-waving terror. Most of the street-fighting militias loyal to the Nazi party’s politics were WWI veterans who had been rendered unemployable by years of horrific trench warfare experiences.

They were justifiably angry about their joblessness, poverty, physical disabilities, mental ill health, traumatic brain injuries, hunger, all worsened by the hyperinflation and impoverishment that go hand in hand with the huge costs of having standing armies and fighting perpetual wars.

Many of these unemployed veterans rushed to join the militia groups for the food, shelter and camaraderie, perhaps not realizing that they were helping to create the chaos that would destroy the liberal democratic Weimar republic, an action that would lead the world into another world war that would ultimately turn out to be suicidal for Germany.

Most German churches cooperated with, or at least did not vocally oppose, Hitler’s agenda. Pastors cheered the Fuhrer from swastika-draped pulpits or they stood by silently as the concentration camps and prisons filled with those suspected by the Gestapo of not being supportive of the regime.

All efforts to resist came too late, for the people who objected to the dictatorship were leaderless and unschooled in any nonviolent resistance actions. They had no Gandhi or Martin Luther King and were totally unprepared to act en masse.

Blessed Wars

Though Hitler’s Nazi regime represented an exceptional form of horror in the industrialized slaughter committed during the Holocaust and related mass killings, it must be acknowledged that other countries, including the United States, have undertaken actions that have destroyed other populations and cultures, often with the blessings of religious leaders.

In the last two decades, the two Bush administrations mounted wars in the Persian Gulf region that had the consent (or acquiescence) of the majority of U.S. church leaders, with prayers from Billy Graham in the White House the night before the invasions began.

Virtually all Christian evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders and their congregations were active supporters of the Bush wars.

Only four American Catholic bishops voted in opposition to Bush the Elder’s Gulf War I (at an annual conference of U.S. Catholic bishops). In Gulf War II, Pope John Paul II declared that the war was contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but most American Catholic leaders and parishioners ignored the pontiff’s warnings and supported the war. Most American Protestants did the same.

Yet, General Schwartzkopf and both Presidents Bush are in “good” company when it comes to believing that God is on their side in war. All U.S. presidents and presidential candidates in recent memory, even President Obama, end their speeches with “May God Bless the United States of America,” the equivalent of the German military’s “Gott Mit Uns.”

My Veterans for Peace friends are of the opinion that modern war amounts to legally sanctioned, highly organized mass murder and that basic training is psychological rape with serious, often permanent consequences for everybody involved: the victims, bystanders and maybe especially the soldiers.

And today, the killing is not just done by soldiers on the ground who can see the “whites of their eyes.” War is now often done from a safe distance by the high-tech “soldiering” of high-altitude bombing, supersonic jet fighters, long-range missiles (many of them computer-guided from unmanned drones), and radioactive DU armor-piercing ordnance that will continue killing for many centuries into the future.

The victims of this kind of lopsided modern warfare (for which the human targets have no defense) regard these tactics as cowardly acts.

Bureaucracies of Death

These days, wars are started and perpetuated by a huge conglomeration of war profiteers: corporations (and their lobbyists), government bureaucracies (that obediently follow orders from above), the handlers of pro-war politicians and the financial underwriters of their campaigns, the ruling class, and the Department of War/Defense which has, as job # 1, the planning and orchestrating of current and future military conflicts, whether originating from real, imaginary or invented threats.

A major unasked question is “what should be the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in the starting and perpetuation of politically motivated wars?”

If war-makers mix religion and politics by invoking God’s blessings on the cannons and the cannon fodder, shouldn’t the churches, which are supposed to be the consciences of the nation, apply core Christian ethical principles to the war question and refuse to cooperate with the slaughter of fellow children of God?

Sadly, for the past 1,700 years, Christian churches have not done so. They have largely failed in their moral obligation to teach and live the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.

One only has to read the gruesome history of the many “holy wars” and atrocities committed in the history of Christendom, including the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the wars of the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the various genocides including the Nazi Holocaust.

While the churches have played key roles in the promotion and cover-ups of these brutalities, the churches have not been alone. Whitewashes and excuses have often come from politicians, pundits, “embedded” journalists and co-opted history-writers, especially the authors of high school textbooks.

Recall how, when military spokesmen try to explain away the deaths of non-combatants in these wars, they invoke the term “collateral damage” (the euphemism for the unintended killing and maiming of innocents in wartime) and quickly dismiss those deaths by spouting the unconvincing phrase that Schwartzkopf and all other apologists for war use: “we regret the loss of innocent life.”

And they piously mouth these equally insincere words: “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” The same rote phraseology too often comes from the lips of religious leaders.

Christ’s Teachings

How can the legalized mass slaughter of war, often progressing to the point of genocide, be a part of a Christian tradition that started out with a small group of inspired, oppressed and impoverished peasants who were trying to live by the highly ethical, nonviolent teachings of their pacifist leader?

Interestingly, the active pacifism of the early Christian church did prove to be successful – and even practical. During the first few centuries of Christianity, enmity and eye-for-an-eye retaliation were rejected. The Golden Rule and the refusal to kill the enemy were actually taught in the church.

Gospel non-violence was the norm, so the professed enemies of those communities of faith were not provoked to retaliation because there was nothing against which to retaliate. Rather, enemies were befriended, prayed for, fed, nourished and embraced as neighbors – potential friends who needed understanding and mercy.

The church survived the persecutions of those early years and thrived, largely because of its commitment to the nonviolence of Jesus. It was not until the church was co-opted by the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th Century that power and wealth changed the priorities of church leaders.

Today however, it is obvious that the vast majority of professed Christians have been misled, intentionally or unintentionally, into believing that they can immerse themselves in un-Christ-like realities like war and killing and somehow still be following the gentle Jesus.

Today, American Christianity is at risk of going the way of the pro-war “Christianity” of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, which may in the long run discredit the faith much the way Christianity lost credibility among many Germans because their churches and church leaders facilitated those destructive wars.

The vast majority of Germans before World War II were baptized members of a Christian church, but since WWII ended church membership has fallen sharply and the number of Germans attending weekly worship services is now estimated to be in the single digits.

The psychological and spiritual wounding of the soldiers and their families in the two world wars stripped the German churches of their moral standing.

Those PTSD-afflicted ex-church-going combat veterans who lost their faith in the wars, along with their traumatized families, found out much too late that they had not been warned by the very institutions that theoretically should have courageously and faithfully taken on the heavy responsibility to teach private and public morality.

Many Germans who survived the wars felt betrayed by their churches and therefore had no inclination to try to reclaim their lost faith. The churches sank toward irrelevancy.

The world would have been far better off if the Christian leaders of the world had been faithful to the ethical teachings of the gospels and quit making blasphemous appeals to God on behalf of war, whether with those “Gott Mit Uns” belt buckles or the “God Bless America” political sloganeering.

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21,000 Home Pools Water Slides Are Being Recalled After Death of a Young Colorado Mother

A 29-year-old Colorado mother died in Andover, Mass. after fracturing her neck going down a Banzai in-ground pool water slide which had been placed over the concrete edge of a pool. The woman hit her head at the bottom of the slide because it had partially deflated.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., of Bentonville, Ark. and Toys R Us Inc., of Wayne, NJ, in cooperation with The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), are announcing a recall of about 21,000 inflatable Banzai in-ground pool water  slides.
Read more.

Toxic Substances from Everyday Life Are Slipping Through Treatment Plants

A federal study released May 8, 2012 found more than 100 toxic substances from everyday life are making their way through wastewater treatment plants into the Columbia River.

Jennifer Morace, the U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who was lead investigator on the study, said: “This links it back to what we do in our everyday lives, what goes down the drain and to the wastewater treatment plant, and the fact they were not designed to remove the new or emerging contaminants.”

A total of 112 toxic materials were found, 53 percent of those that were tested for, including flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, personal care products, mercury and cleaning products.

Full Details from the Seattle Times.

 Vermont Ponders Fracking Ban

Vermont is about to become the first U.S. state to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.

Fracking extracts natural gas by injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into shale rock formations to fracture the rock and release the gas. Giant holding ponds or tanks are needed to store the chemically contaminated waste water that comes back up the hole after wells have been fractured.

The Vermont House of Representatives voted 103-36 Friday to approve a conference committee report calling for the ban. The report reconciles differences with a bill banning the practice passed by the state Senate last week.

The measure now goes to the desk of Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, who is expected to sign it into law.

“We don’t want to be shooting chemicals into our groundwater in pursuit of gas that does not exist,” Governor Shumlin said Friday after the House vote.

Read the Full Story on the Environmental News Service Website.