Apr
25
Week 9: You sure your water is safe?
April 25, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Elmy Lung
Most were caught by surprise last month, when the news broke that there are drug residues found in water supplies for over 41 million Americans. The Associated Press (AP) filed the story after a five month investigation throughout the country, checking the water supplies of 25 major areas, “Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, KY”. They found traces of antibiotics, sex hormones, mood stabilizers and anti convulsants in the waters.
Although the drugs come in very small quantities, insufficient to actually induce any direct health effects as opposed to taking them in normal quantities, it got a lot of people worried what’s in their water and more importantly, how drug residues were traced. Americans are now taking medicines far more than they used to. When drugs are taken, not all of them are absorbed by the body. The rest will be passed down and disposed when people relieve themselves. As waste water treatments are not designed to get rid of the residues in such a small quantity, they remain in the water even after it has been treated. The federal government requires no testing for drugs in water and no safety limit has been set. Having said that, Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said,
“We recognize it is a growing concern and we’re taking it very seriously,”
But really, people should pay more attention to their water supplied regardless of the investigation. Sometimes, it’s not how safe their water is, but how much water they get.
Currently, quite a few major cities in the U.S. suffer from aging pipes. Again, the situation is similar to the one in Europe. Although developed countries may not suffer from water shortages per se, water pipes laid down centuries ago have not been checked and taken care of on a regular basis (such as New York and Chicago, where some of their pipes were built back in the 1800s). It has also made it more difficult to access them when new skyscrapers or roads have been built on top of the area which leaves no room for repairing the networks deep underground.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion in the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems”. Some engineers value the project to cost more, around $480 billion U.S.D.
The high cost of such repair work is due to the large scale of having such pipes and tunnels replaced, as they have much been neglected in the past decades. Moreover, it also has to do with the difficulty of accessing them as mentioned.
People should start to pay more attention to the problems because old pipes waste water by leaking a substantial amount each day, and it is impossible to close a city’s water supply to carry out leakage tests. The problem is not limited to that either. Great dangers are posed when water pipes fail and burst. It has happened across the U.S., when an 84 year old pipe burst in New York; an 80 year old pipe broke and forced gallons of water which created a 25 foot hole in a street in Chicago; sinkhole formed in Denver from another old pipe and similar situation in Cleveland. Again, it’s not just the inconvenience of roads, pipes and facilities having to be repaired but also the threats of large amounts of water that shooting up without warning. The water forces and impacts are huge.
Leaking pipes is not a good sign of plentiful water either. The U.S., like another other state, faces a global water shortage crisis. Dr. James Hansen, a renowned climate scientist at NASA, warned that climate change may cause water shortages in the western part of America which may “render the semi-arid states from west and central Texas through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakota drought prone and unsuitable for agriculture.” This has already led to action being taken to introduce legislation by politicians to help protect America’s water supplies. As extreme as it may sound, the action is backed up by scientific study. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)- an organization that had won the Nobel Peace Prize- found that global warming is applying extra pressure on global water sources so while developed countries may feel secure in the amount of water they enjoy, it actually isn’t the case. Their waters are also becoming more scarce, especially when it comes to fresh water supplies.
Some business people are already eyeing on The Great Lakes in Northeast America to provide an “emergency source of water”. A legally binding compact signed last week between American states, as well as Canadian provinces states that it will aim toward a sustainable use of water in the Great Lakes’ basin. Of course, the compact is not just to secure the ecology but also the tourism industry. The surrounding area hosts some of America’s fastest growing counties, as having acess to the valuable resource.
As the largest group of lakes in North America, with the biggest supplies of fresh water in the region, the Great Lakes generate $55 billion from its tourism industry alone- supporting thousands of families who benefit from related jobs.
It is always upsetting when people only realize what’s happening when financial interests are involved. If only people dug deeper, to understand why it is that companies can make money simply from a group of lakes, what causes water pipes to explode, and how water is being treated, will then allow them to form a better picture that the region they are living in is really no different to other parts of the world. The global water problem is real- and there seem to be no solid action taking place. Rather unfortunately, it’s not even seen as a problem at all. So when water from the Great Lakes is drained to serve as an emergency source, maybe then it will all be too late.
