Glendive tap water safe to drink?

This happens all over the US all the time. It's not always found out or reported on unless it's real big like in this instance.  Minus an epidemic of people getting sick or actual toilet paper coming out of your tub faucet, do you really think the water authorities will let you know about their screwups?

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"Glendive tap water safe to drink"

GLENDIVE - Glendive residents had their tap water restored Friday morning after it was contaminated by oil for nearly a week.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality gave the all-clear for Glendive's municipal drinking water supply.
The DEQ confirmed on Friday that the water now meets standards set by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
The Poplar Pipeline oil spill on Saturday contaminated the water with Benzene, a known carcinogen, and chemical treatment had to be performed at the plant to ensure that chemical was below the federal requirement.
Before consuming tap water, residents are instructed to flush the system by running the taps for about 15 minutes each.
"The primary concern has been restoring Glendive's drinking water supply to meet safe drinking water standards," said DEQ Director Tom Livers. "The response team has been working hard to restore water and help the community get its water back."
The DEQ website provided further instruction on the flushing process.
Information on flushing the pipes in homes is being distributed around town at various locations. Instructions are online at www.poplarresponse.com and on the EPA and DEQ websites.

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GLENDIVE - Glendive residents can raise their glass to the news that clean tap water should be restored on Friday after nearly a week without clean drinking water.
A public information officer on scene said that a field test of the water at the treatment plant is now "decontaminated."

Samples of the water show that all of the elevated levels of contaminates in the water found earlier in the week are now below the federal clean water standard.
But before the water can be restored to residents it must be certified by the state.
The certification process takes about 18 hours and that process began Wednesday morning.
Once the water is "certified" clean by the state, the next step is to flush the system.
Once officials give the go-ahead, residents are asked to turn on all the taps in their home and allow them to run for about 15 minutes.
This will flush the contaminated water from the system.
The Department of Environmental Quality published information on its website on how to properly flush the system.
To flush the system, the DEQ states that all faucets must be turned on at the same time.
Cold water taps should be run for 20 minutes and then shut off. The hot water taps should be run for 15 minutes after the cold taps have run.
A strong odor will likely be present and venting is recommended.
A town meeting held Thursday night explained how appliances like the dishwasher, washer and dryer, and coffee makers should be cleaned.
The meeting was held at Glendive High school at 7 p.m.

 http://www.ktvq.com/news/deq-glendive-tap-water-safe-to-drink/

Deadly Amoeba Found For First Time In Municipal Water Supply

By Richard Knox, NPR

September 15, 2013

A 4-year-old child who died of a rare brain infection in early August has led Louisiana health officials to discover that the cause is lurking in the water pipes of St. Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans.
It's a type of single-celled amoeba called Naegleria fowleri, about a tenth the width of a human hair. Some call it a "brain-eating" amoeba, although it does its damage by causing a devastating immune reaction rather than by actually devouring brain tissue.
Officials are pumping more chlorine into the municipal water supply to kill the bugs and advising the parish's 40,000 residents how to avoid infection. They say the risk is tiny.
As we'll discuss shortly, it's not easy to get infected, and drinking the water poses no risk. But still, finding such a dangerous microbe in the drinking water is troubling and noteworthy.
"This is the first time that it has been found in the drinking water in the United States," Louisiana state epidemiologist Raoult Ratard tells Shots.
But it won't be the last, he says — because health officials are now trying to pin down the cause of previously unexplained encephalitis cases. About 40 percent of cases of this dangerous brain inflammation have no known cause. "Five years ago, we would never have known that this recent case was caused by the amoeba," Ratard says.
Another new element: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now tests water supplies when a case of amoebic encephalitis is discovered, to see where the bug came from.
For instance, in 2011 two Louisiana residents — one a 20-year-old man from St. Bernard Parish — died of amoebic encephalitis after using tap water to rinse their nasal passages, using a popular device called a neti pot. Health officials assumed that contaminated tap water was the source of the infection, but it was never proved.
This summer the amoeba infected the brains of two other US children – a 12-year-old Florida boy, who died, and a 12-year-old Arkansas girl, who survived. She may be one of only three known to survive the infection in the United States.
These alarming deaths are likely to remain rare – but not quite as rare as health officials used to think.
"We're going to see more cases," Ratard says. Instead of three to five cases of amoebic encephalitis per year across the nation, "maybe we'll go to 10 a year," he says. "I don't expect we'll have a hundred."
The episode vividly illustrates how humans live in a sea of potentially lethal microbes that, amazingly, seldom kill.
In this case, it's because Naegleria fowleri is only dangerous when it gains entry into the brain. It does that when water containing the amoeba gets inhaled very deeply, into the area where the roof of the nasal passages meets the floor of the brain.
"To get infected, the amoeba has to get to the ceiling of your nose – way, way up there," Ratard says. "At the top of the nose you have a little paper-thin plate made of bone with a bunch of holes, a little bit like a mosquito net. The holes are for the olfactory nerve. So the amoeba is crawling up the nerve and gets into the brain."
Drinking amoeba-contaminated water poses no risk, presumably because the single-celled organisms can't survive in stomach acid. Normal bathing or showering isn't a risk because even if tap water is contaminated, it doesn't penetrate into the deepest nasal passages.
Brain infections from the amoeba usually pop up in late summer, when warm water favors its reproduction and many people are diving into ponds to escape the heat.
Since uncounted numbers of people swim in waters that undoubtedly contain amoebae, Ratard says, it's a wonder there aren't more infections. Public swimming pools pose no risk because chlorine kills the microbes.
The child who died last month in St. Bernard Parish while visiting from Mississippi, had been playing a long time on a Slip'n'Slide connected to a household water faucet.
It took about two weeks for the CDC to determine that the child had a Naegleria fowleri infection. Then state officials started investigating how.
"We collected the hose and got some samples from the outside faucet, water heater, and toilet tank water," Ratard says. After testing verified amoeba contamination, Louisiana officials put out a press release about the case.
Further testing of tap water in four nearby areas revealed the presence of Naegleria fowleri, as officials announced on Thursday.
Understandably, the announcement has sparked considerable local anxiety, even though health officials have stressed that the risk is low – and can be avoided entirely by common-sense precautions.
"In the old days, you would look at your faucet and it wouldn't scare you," Ratard says. "But these days, for some people, it looks menacing."
To avoid risk, officials are advising people not to put their heads under water while bathing in tap water — and to supervise young children who might. Flushing the water from household pipes before filling a child's wading pool decreases the risk, although some people might want to add some bleach to the water as an added precaution.
Local officials have shut off the water at school drinking fountains, although it's hard to imagine how schoolchildren could inject that water deep into their noses.
In a couple of weeks, officials will retest the St. Bernard Parish drinking water to ensure that added chlorine has eliminated the threat – for this season at least.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Blood Worms Showing Up In Municipal Water Supply

 A sample of blood worms pulled from a water filter pre filter

There's something in the water — and it isn't an ice cube. Residents of one small Oklahoma town are being ordered to sip exclusively bottled water, after tiny red blood worms started popping up in drinking glasses earlier this week.

The outbreak in Colcord, OK, has all but shut down the community, home to around 800 people. Schools are closed, convenience stores can't serve fountain sodas, and residents have been instructed not to cook or brush their teeth using tap water. Bathing, fortunately, is still deemed acceptable by local health authorities.

"The chlorine won't kill them, the bleach won't kill them."

Blood worms — actually the larvae of the midge fly — are typically small, maxing out at around half-an-inch in length. They're known to pop up in the southeastern United States, though not often in municipal water supplies, and are also sold freeze-dried as fish food. Blood worms tend to thrive in low-oxygen or heavily polluted water, where they burrow inside mud. And unfortunately for officials in Colcord, the buggers are also extremely resilient. "The chlorine won't kill them, the bleach won't kill them," Cody Gibby, the town's water commissioner, told a local TV network. "You can take the worms out of the filter system and put them in a straight cup of bleach and leave them in there for about four hours, and they still won't die."

The health risks associated with ingesting blood worms are unknown, though they aren't believed to cause adverse effects. But local authorities in Colcord aren't taking any chances — while they try to figure out how the worms infiltrated water supplies in the first place, they're also distributing pallets of bottled water to residents.

 Blood worms. This is a picture of blood worms sold as fish food.

High Levels of Arsenic Found in Groundwater Near Fracking Sites 

 

A new report finds poisonous arsenic contamination in Texas occurring in close proximity to natural gas extraction

By Theodoric Meyer and ProPublica

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A new study out of the University of Texas in Arlington finds high levels of arsenic in groundwater near fracking sites. Pictured: natural gas rig outside of Shreveport, Louisiana. Image: Flickr/Daniel Foster

 

A recently published study by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington found elevated levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in groundwater near natural gas fracking sites in Texas’ Barnett Shale.
While the findings are far from conclusive, the study provides further evidence tying fracking to arsenic contamination. An internal Environmental Protection Agency PowerPoint presentation recently obtained by the Los Angeles Times warned that wells near Dimock, Pa., showed elevated levels of arsenic in the groundwater. The EPA also found arsenic in groundwater near fracking sites in Pavillion, Wyo., in 2009 — a study the agency later abandoned.
ProPublica talked with Brian Fontenot, the paper’s lead author, about how his team carried out the study and why it matters. (Fontenot and another author, Laura Hunt, work for the EPA in Dallas, but they conducted the study on their own time in collaboration with several UT Arlington researchers.) Here’s an edited version of our interview:
What led you guys to do the study?
We were sort of talking around lunch one day, and came up with the idea of actually going out and testing water in the Barnett Shale. We’d heard all the things that you see in the media, all the sort of really left-wing stuff and right-wing stuff, but there weren’t a whole lot of answers out there in terms of an actual scientific study of water in the Barnett Shale. Our main intent was to bring an unbiased viewpoint here — to just look at the water, see if we could find anything, and report what we found.
What kind of previous studies had been done in this vein?
The closest analog that I could find to our type of study are the things that have been done in the Marcellus Shale, with Rob Jackson’s group out at Duke University. Ours is set up very similarly to theirs in that we went out to private landowners’ wells and sampled their water wells and assayed them for various things. We decided to go with a list of chemicals thought to be included in hydraulic fracturing that was actually released in a congressional report. Our plan was to sample everyone’s water that we could, and then go through that list of these potential chemical compounds within the congressional list.
How did you do it?
We were able to get a press release put out from UT Arlington that went into the local newspapers that essentially called for volunteers to be participants in the study. For being a participant, you would get free water testing, and we would tell them our results. We were upfront with everyone about, you know, we don’t have a bias, we’re not anti-industry, we’re not pro-industry. We’re just here to finally get some scientific data on this subject. And we had a pretty overwhelming response.
From there we chose folks that we would be able to get to. We had to work on nights and weekends, because we had an agreement with EPA to work on this study outside of work hours. So we spent quite a few weekend days going out to folks who had responded to our call and sampling their water. But that wasn’t quite enough. We also had to get samples from within the Barnett Shale in areas where fracking was not going on, and samples from outside the Barnett Shale where there’s no fracking going on, because we wanted to have those for reference samples. For those samples we went door to door and explained to folks what our study was about.


We have people that were pro-industry that wanted to participate in this study to help out — saying, you know, ‘You’re not going to find anything and I’m going to help you prove it.’ And we also had folks that were determined to find problems. We have the whole gamut of folks represented in our study.
We would take a water well, and we would go directly to the head, the closest we could get to the actual water source coming out of the ground, and we would purge that well for about 20 minutes. That ensures that you’re getting fresh water from within the aquifer. So we didn’t take anything from the tap, and nothing that had been through any kind of filtration system. This was as close to the actual groundwater as we could get. We took some measurements, and then we took several samples back to UT Arlington for a battery of chemistry analyses. That’s where we went through and looked for the various volatile organic compounds and heavy metals and methanols and alcohols and things like that.
What did you find?
We found that there were actually quite a few examples of elevated constituents, such as heavy metals, the main players being arsenic, selenium and strontium. And we found each of those metals at levels that are above EPA’s maximum contaminate limit for drinking water.
These heavy metals do naturally occur in the groundwater in this region. But we have a historical dataset that points to the fact that the levels we found are sort of unusual and not natural. These really high levels differ from what the groundwater used to be like before fracking came in. And when you look at the location of the natural gas wells, you find that any time you have water wells that exceed the maximum contaminate limit for any of these heavy metals, they are within about three kilometers of a natural gas well. Once you get a private water well that’s not very close to a natural gas well, all of these heavy metals come down. But just because you’re close to a natural gas well does not mean you’re guaranteed to have elevated contaminate levels. We had quite a few samples that were very close to natural gas wells that had no problems with their water at all.
We also found a few samples that had measureable levels of methanol and ethanol, and these are two substances that don’t naturally occur in groundwater. They can actually be created by bacterial interactions underwater, but whenever methanol or ethanol occur in the environment, they’re very fleeting and transient. So for us to be able to actually randomly take a grab sample and detect detectable methanol and ethanol — that implies that there may be a continuous source of this.
You found levels of arsenic in areas with fracking that were almost 18 times higher than in areas without fracking or in the historical data. What would happen to someone who drank that water?
Arsenic is a pretty well-known poison. If you experience a lot of long-term exposure to arsenic, you get a lot of different risks, like skin damage, problems with the circulatory system or even an increased risk of cancer. The levels that we found would not be a lethal dose, but they’re certainly levels that you would not want to be exposed to for any extended period of time.
What about the other stuff you found?
The heavy metals are a little bit different because they are known to be included in some fracking recipes. But they’re also naturally occurring compounds. We think the problem is that they’re becoming concentrated at levels that aren’t normal as a result of some aspect of natural gas extraction.
It’s not necessarily that we’re saying fracking fluid getting out. We don’t have any evidence of that. But there are many other steps involved, from drilling the hole to getting the water back out. A lot of these can actually cause different scenarios whereby the naturally occurring heavy metals will become concentrated in ways they normally wouldn’t. For example, if you have a private water well that’s not kept up well, you’ll have a scale of rust on the inside. And if someone were to do a lot of drilling nearby, you may find some pressure waves or vibrations that would cause those rust particles to flake out into the water. Arsenic is bound up inside that rust, and that can actually mobilize arsenic that would never be in the water otherwise.


Methanol and ethanol are substances that should not be very easy to find in the groundwater naturally. We definitely know that those are on the list of things that are known to be in hydraulic fracturing fluid. But we were unable to actually sample any hydraulic fracturing fluid, so we can’t make any claims that we have evidence fluids got into the water.
Have you talked with the homeowners whose wells you sampled?
We have shown those homeowners the results. I think most of the folks that had high levels of heavy metals were not necessarily surprised.  You hear so much I think maybe they were expecting it to come back with something even more extreme than that. I don’t want to say they were relieved, but I think they all sort of took the news in stride and realized, OK, well, as a private well owner there’s no state or federal agency that provides any kind of oversight or regulation, so it’s incumbent on that well owner to get testing done and get any kind of remediation.
Do you think fracking is responsible for what you found?
Well, I can’t say we have a smoking gun. We don’t want the public to take away from this that we have pegged fracking as the cause of these issues. But we have shown that these issues do occur in close relation, geographically, to natural gas extraction. And we have this historical database from pretty much the same exact areas that we sampled that never had these issues until the onset of all the fracking. We have about 16,000 active wells here in the Barnett Shale, and that’s all popped up in about the last decade, so it’s been a pretty dramatic increase.
We noticed that when you’re closer to a well, you’re more likely to have a problem, and that today’s samples have problems, while yesterday’s samples before the fracking showed up did not. So we think that the strongest argument we can say is that this needs more research.
From ProPublica.org (find the original story here); reprinted with permission.

Spike in fluoride concentration levels prompts temporary shutdown at Mt Crosby water treatment plant

• Robyn Ironside
• The Courier-Mail

BRISBANE's water supply will remain fluoride free until later on Tuesday or Wednesday after a problem at the Mt Crosby water treatment plant on Friday night.

Seawater found fluoride levels in one reservoir had jumped to double their normal concentration, prompting an immediate shutdown of the fluoride plant.
The Queensland Water Supply Regulator was notified of the increased levels and advised the disruption did not pose a health risk, said an Seqwater spokesman.
He said the elevated level of fluoride - as much as 1.7mg a litre - did not make it into drinking supplies.
"We thought we'd be able to bring the plant back online over the weekend but our guys are still working to figure out what triggered that spike early Friday night," he said.
Under the Water Fluoridation Regulation 2008, Seqwater is required to produce fluoridated water of between 0.7mg/L and 0.9mg/L averaged over a quarter.

The spokesman said Seqwater was still confident the target rate would be achieved during the July-September quarter.
Fluoride was added to Queensland's water supply under the previous Labor Government in 2008-09 but last year the Newman Government legislated to allow councils to decide whether to maintain fluoridation.
LNP backbencher and health campaigner Jason Woodforth has lobbied vigorously to have fluoride removed from water supplies and on Monday expressed his deep concern about Friday night's incident.
"Let's call fluoride for what it is. It's a toxic waste product," said Mr Woodforth.
His views have been opposed by others in the Newman Government including Health Minister Lawrence Springborg and Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek, a former dentist.
The Seqwater spokesman said they were confident of getting the fluoride plant at Mt Crosby back online by later on Tuesday or Wednesday.
"We won't put it back online until we know exactly what's occurred," he said.

It's Poison!

10 American Cities With the Worst Drinking Water

by Douglas McIntyre Jan 31st 2011 

   Unknown to most Americans, a surprising number of U.S. cities have drinking water with unhealthy levels of chemicals and contaminants. In fact, some organizations and state environmental agencies that collect and analyze water data say the level of chemicals in some Americans' drinking water not only exceeds recommended health guideline but the pollutants even exceed the limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the national legal authority in these matters.

The website 24/7 Wall St. examined the quality of water supplies in most major America cities, using data collected from multiple sources for five years (ending in 2009) by Environmental Working Group (EWG), based in Washington, D.C. The fact that the data covered a half-decade is important because it shows that the presence of certain chemicals is persistent.

Cities in Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia provided insufficient data to be included in EWG's database. Some other major cities outside of these states also failed to submit information, including Detroit, Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C.

Test results from EWG's national database covered "a total of 316 contaminants in water supplied to 256 million Americans in 48,000 communities in 45 states." According to the data, among the contaminants were 202 chemicals that aren't subject to any government regulation or safety standards for drinking water.

Based on the EWG's methodology, 24/7 Wall St. came up with its 10 worst cities list. These cities' water quality rank is based on three metrics, in order of increasing importance:

• The percentage of chemicals found based on the number that were tested for
• The total number of contaminants found
• The most dangerous average level of a single pollutant.

Here's that list, in descending order, with the city's water utility in parenthesis:

10. Jacksonville, Fla. (JEA)
Located on the northeast coast of Florida, Jacksonville is the state's largest city. According to EWG, 23 different toxic chemicals were found in Jacksonville's water supply. The chemicals most frequently discovered in high volumes were trihalomethanes, which consist of four different cleaning byproducts -- one of which is chloroform. Many trihalomethanes are believed to be carcinogenic. Over the five-year testing period, unsafe levels of trihalomethanes were detected during each of the 32 months of testing, and levels deemed illegal by the EPA were detected in 12 of those months. During at least one testing period, trihalomethane levels were measured at nearly twice the EPA legal limit. Chemicals like arsenic and lead were also detected at levels exceeding health guidelines.

9. San Diego (San Diego Water Department)
Located on the Pacific in Southern California, San Diego is the country's eighth-largest city. According to California's Department of Public Health, San Diego's drinking water system contained eight chemicals exceeding health guidelines as well as two chemicals that exceeded the EPA's legal limit. In total, 20 contaminants have been found. One of those in excess of the EPA limit was trihalomethanes. The other was manganese, a natural element that's a byproduct of industrial manufacturing and can be poisonous to humans.

8. North Las Vegas (City of North Las Vegas Utilities Department)
North Las Vegas's water supply mostly comes from groundwater and the Colorado River, and doesn't contain chemicals exceeding legal limits. However, the water supply did contain 11 chemicals that exceeded health guidelines set by federal and state health agencies. The national average for chemicals found in cities' water exceeding health guidelines is four. North Las Vegas had a total of 26 contaminants, compared with the national average of eight. The water contained an extremely high level of uranium, a radioactive element.

7. Omaha (Metropolitan Utilities District)
The land-locked city of Omaha gets its water from the Missouri and Platte Rivers, as well as from groundwater. Of the 148 chemicals tested for in Omaha, 42 were detected in some amount, 20 of which were above health guidelines, and four of those were detected in illegal amounts. These were atrazine, trihalomethanes, nitrate and nitrite, and manganese. Atrazine is an herbicide that has been shown to cause birth defects. Nitrate is found in fertilizer, and nitrite is used for curing meat. Manganese was detected at 40 times the legal limit during one month of testing.

6. Houston (City of Houston Public Works)
Houston is the fourth-largest U.S. city. It gets its water from sources such as the Trinity River, the San Jacinto Rivers and Lake Houston. Texas conducted 22,083 water quality tests between 2004 and 2007 on Houston's water supply, and found 18 chemicals that exceeded federal and state health guidelines, compared to the national average of four. Three chemicals exceeded EPA legal health standards, against the national average of 0.5 chemicals. A total of 46 pollutants were detected, compared to the national average of eight. The city water has contained illegal levels of alpha particles, a form of radiation. Similarly, haloacetic acids, from various disinfection byproducts, have been detected.

5. Reno (Truckee Meadows Water Authority)
Reno gets most of its water from the Truckee River, which flows from Lake Tahoe. Of the 126 chemicals tested for in Reno over four years, 21 were discovered in the city's water supply, eight of which were detected in levels above EPA health guidelines, and three of these occurred in illegal amounts. These were manganese, tetrachloroethylene and arsenic. Tetrachloroethylene is a fluid used for dry cleaning and as an industrial solvent, and is deemed a likely carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Arsenic is a byproduct of herbicides and pesticides, and is extremely poisonous to humans. During at least one month of testing, arsenic levels were detected at roughly two and a half times the legal limit.

4. Riverside County, Calif. (Eastern Municipal Water District)
Riverside county is a 7,200-square-mile area located north of San Diego, part of California's "Inland Empire." The county is primarily located in desert territory, and so the water utilities draw their supply from the Bay Delta, which is miles to the north. The water in Riverside County contained 13 chemicals that exceeded recommended health guidelines over the four tested years, and one that exceeded legal limits. In total, 22 chemicals were detected in the district's water supply. The contaminant exceeding legal health standards was tetrachloroethylene.

3. Las Vegas (Las Vegas Valley Water District)
Located in the Mojave desert, Las Vegas gets its water from the Colorado River through miles-long intake pipes. While its water doesn't exceed the legal limits for any single type of contaminant, Las Vegas's water has a large range of pollutants. Of the 125 chemicals tested for over a five-year period, 30 were identified in some amount, and 12 were found in levels that exceeded EPA health guidelines. These chemicals included radium-226, radium-228, arsenic and lead. The two radium isotopes are commonly found around uranium deposits and are hazardous to human health, even in small quantities.

2. Riverside, Calif. (City of Riverside Public Utilities)
Riverside, with a population slightly greater than 300,000, gets most of its drinking supply from groundwater. Regulators in the city of Riverside, which has a different water-treatment facility than the rest of Riverside County, detected 15 chemicals that exceeded health guidelines and one that exceeded legal standards. In total, 30 chemicals were found. Since 2004, the water has almost consistently been riddled with alpha particle activity, traces of bromoform (a form of trihalomethane) and uranium, causing an unusually unhealthy water supply.

1. Pensacola, Fla. (Emerald Coast Water Utility)
Located on the Florida Panhandle along the Gulf of Mexico, Pensacola is Florida's westernmost major city. Analysts say it has the worst water quality in the country. Of the 101 chemicals tested for over five years, 45 were discovered. Of them, 21 were discovered in unhealthy amounts. The worst of these were radium-228 and -228, trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, alpha particles, benzine and lead. Pensacola's water was also found to contain cyanide and chloroform. The combination of these chemicals makes Pensacola's water supply America's most unhealthy.