Document n94xpNRn47nKeZByXkoXw10V6

SfrSI JNU AMERICAN WATER WORKS ASSN. MO. 22.900 f cumo an MAY 1976 IwcoMU a Percolation & Runoff CarelnogmtMle could be the first book of our last testament, if we are to believe the media these days, to be followed, no doubt, by lameniations-not just the fearsome foursome of PCBs. VCM. ushestos. and chloroform but. according to a New York Timti unicle. "more than (000 agents that have been pinpointed by scientists as definite or suspected causes of cancer." Not all of them are waterborne, of course, but water, being what it is and where it is and how it is used, usually gels involved. This daily diet of disastrous disclosure has now brought Dr. Jonas Salk, devel oper of the first polio vaccine, to the rescue with a new immunization technique, certain to be as effective as his first, for people worried about carcinogens. "The best thing to do," he said in a recent interview. "is quit reading the newspaper " Or if you must read, concentrate on Congressional press releases such as thni recently issued by Senator Vance Hartkc to promote his toxic substances control bill. "Legislation that could lead to eliminating Ml per cent of the causes of cancer in humans was approved unanimously by the Senate Commerce Committee. a" was the pitch. That and a bill to make cancer illegal should-dean up the problem nicely. Lobbying against any such legislation, of course, would be the home wutr-puriftcauon-gadget industry. Drop dread and it drops dead. So the advertisements of Estelle Products Co. of Rock Falls. III., carry the message. "DOCTORS WARN Chlorine in Drinking Waier Causes CANCER. Mean Attacks, and Premature Aging! The New Hurley Water Purifier Completely Removes CHLORINE. Tastes That Are Musty and Fishy. Metallic and Swampy: Also Rusi. DDT, Pesticides. Slime and Odors" and offers h no-obfigation call by its "health consultant." Philmar Inc. of Los Angeles also zeroes in on "THE BAD NEWS OF CHLORINE." noting that: "Now research has established the embarrassing fact that chlorine and not cholesterol is the real cause of our number one killer, namely, heart attack. Until a substitute for chlorine is found, your only salvation is the installation of a Philmar Water Purifier, the only purifier certified by the EPA for complete elimination of water bom (ricj bacteria plus removing the chlorine for good measure." And on the table ofa restaurant in McLean. Va.. there appeared the message: "WE CARE-A Pollution Control Product Mark II. removed the following impurities from the drinking water served in this restaurant: chloradane-DDT-dieldrin-parathion-ioxapherlindustrial chemicals-solvents-chlorine-arsenic--chromiumnicrrury-cysts-larva--virus A others." The Mark II. loo. we understand is registered by EPA. what next but more revela tions? A revelation of another kind came out of a recent Rockefeller Foundation research report. Conducted by Dr. Michael Petit, a microbiologist from Colorado Stale Univ.. (he research sought 10 (race the presence of environmental poisons back through the centime* by sophisticated analysis of hat guano, layer by layer, as deposited in the bateaves of the Southwest. The changing levels ol such poisons. Dr. Petri expected, would indicate the impact of IB PAR man's industrial activity, suggesting a scientific standard for pollution control policy. What he found instead was "new evidence that mercury levels in the modern man-polluted envi ronment were equaled in a pristine era some Ih.fXX) scars .igo during the last glaciation, when today's southwestern desert was much more humid." Then, attempting to (rack mercury through plants and mw animals, he compared the mourn of ihc heavy metal on she plants' surface-the fallout from local industry with the concentration in the plants' internal tissues. Again he was surprised, discovering that plant tissue eonlent m a heavily polluted area was significantly lower than that in a relatively "clean" area. Dr. Petit's hypothesis is that the mercury m plant tissues comes from natural underground mercury deposits that rise toward the surface as vapor and are dissolved by ground water. In an acid surface soil, he suggested, ihe solution is convened into an ion of mercury that ia readily laken up by the roots of plants. Next thing you know well find pollution propitious. PrupOem polMIsn is what the city of Newark. N.J.. might be said to he planning for its 35,000-acre Pequannock watershed as a means of getting the city out of its dollar doldrums. Saddled now with a SI.5 million per year tax bill on the property, the citv has plans to develop 3500 acres of the tract to accommodate construc tion of 5280 units of clustered housing, a half-dozen convention centers, and several hotels, office complexes, end industrial parks. Income from such a project, labeled a "balanced open space plan" in which all necessary ecological precautions have been observed, will presumably pay not only the taxes on the toial property, but will help finance the filler plant that the city has had to build to treat iu water supply and. hopefully, then some. Meanwhile, officials from the communities near the areas to be developed and conservationists throughout the state are girding themselves to fight this invasion of what they cull ihe Last Frontier.'' Elsewhere in the Garden Slate, water and watershed plans have others of the populace up in arms. Ai Paterson a citizens' committee called Sw ash--Save Paterson's Living American Social Heritage-has joined the city in opposing a proposal hv the North Jersey Dist. Water Supply Com. and the Hackensack Water Co. to divert B0 mgd from the confluence of the Passaic and Pompton rivers into the Wanaque reservoir, the supplv of which is now being overdrawn by us participating atiev ol which Paterson is one. Such a diversion, claim the opponents, would drv up the Great Passaic Falls, second largest waterfall on the bast Coast. A reduction of flow of 4 per cent it the estimate of the proposers, of BO per cent is the word among <ppo*erv Meanwhile the $300 million Tocks Island dam and reservoir project on the Delaware River, first proposed m lutt and authorized by Congress in 1962 and killed Iasi lull hv a vote of the Delaware River Basin Com., continues to be flogged hv rnviron- JOURNAL AWWA MQNS 037325 menialtsi groups who fear its resurrection if membership of the commission should change. Last fail, the chief of the Corps of Engineers joined in recommending to Congress that the project be deauthorized. but the validity apparently lingers on. About Round Valley reservoir, dissen sion continues too, despite the fact that the state Anally signed u contract last October to construct a pipeline that will make the reservoir's water available for public sup ply. Built back in the early 1960s when a drought demonstrated the inadequacy of North Jersey supplies, the reservoir has remained untapped since then while the cities that needed the water argued about how much each should pay. leaving it to the state in the end to tackle the job. Now, however, the squabble is concerned with lapping another of the reservoir's resources, a multimillion-dollar recreation area that will be ready for Us grand opening this June, except that the access road to the area is still in the blueprint stage and cannot be finished until mid-1977. And local residents who live on the three small country roads that now lead to the park have threatened to close them off to avoid the massive traffic jams that still afflict nearby Spruce Run reservoir recreation area. New Jersey water, however propitious, does seem to give rise to considerable thermal pollution, personborne! ftotWous poHullon, meanwhile, was plaguing the city of Escondido. Calif., following newspaper reports last November that its water supply was contaminated with PCBs. Source of this startling information was indicated as testimony by EPA before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the SetuUe Commerce Com. Remembering, no doubt, the viruses that appeared in the public supplies of Billerica and Lawrence, Maas., just in time for EPA's testimony on the Safe Drinking Water Act. Lawrence Michaels. Escondido's director of utilities, did some digging for facts and then placed them before California Senator John Tunney, it member of the Subcommittee on the Environment, in these terms: It waa very difficult from the reports and subsequent inquiries to determine exactly when and where the water samples which indicated PCB contamination had been taken because they had not been taken by EPA. However, we are quite certain that they are a result of samples taken in January I97S ky Mr-nitln ryrp, the only U.S. manufacturer of PCB's. at aTocal Arm. Capacitor Specialists, which uses PCB's in producing capacitors. The samples were taken to determine the level of PCB's in the public water supply as background infor mation in determining the amounts of PCB's discharged to the sewer system from thenroductinn process. The sampling point for taking the water was a drinking fountain within the plant area where the PCB's were used in the iCvnilnued on page 20) MAY 1976 If you test drinking water... you've got to oe right! That's why thousands are presently using the SPECTRONIC 20 Now you can get the same standard of quality in... Chemistry ________ SpctvoKNM Rnwnt Svatem MGNS 037326 (Continued from page 19) production process. Such sampling pro cedures are so incredibly unscientific that uny results would be totally invalid and would guarantee that PCB contamination would be present in the sample. However, such a sample would bear no relationship to any possible contamination of the public water supply. Of the five cities identified to the Subcommittee by EPA us having PCB's in their drinking water, only Sellersburg. Ind.. and Winnebago. III., were actually sampled and tested by the EPA laboratory in Cincinnati, Ohio. The remaining three cities were identified from the Monsanto reports and the information on Bridgeport. Conn., and New Bedford. Mass., may be as suspect as the Escondido sample. Since the water supplied to the Escon dido plant was Colorado River water imported by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) which supplies water to much of the Los Anaeies-San Diego metropolitan area, MWD was requested to perform an accurate test of Colorado River water. Their report indicates no measurable amount of PCB's exist in the Colorado River water at this time. Since the Colorado River is unpolluted by industrial waste discharge and is controlled by large reservoirs which would tend to maintain trace* of uny acci dental contamination for a very long period of time, it is reasonable to assume that there was no contamination when the Monsanto sample was taken in Escondido. It is unfortunate that EPA would present such unreliable information to the Subcom mittee and also unfortunate for those five cities that the information would he made public without some indication of its real source and without notifying the alfected cities. However it would be far more unfor tunate for the entire country if Congress would enact legislation to attempt control of PCB's in the environment because of such false information. Sometimes, it seems. EPA* can be more of a headache than PCBs. Speaking ef headachia, the E.xaunve Fitness Newsletter of last Feb. 14. recom mends. among a few other approaches that certainly have no appeal to us. one that has our vote: "A hot shower with streum of water directed over your neck and -.bould ers" or. if you are real conservation minded, "a towel soaked in hot water and applied to (he back of the neck" as ways to get relief. What with the effective date of the regula tions of the Safe Drinking Water Act coming closer and closer, these are qualities of water that it may pay to remember. On Pm matter ol quality, we learn that Monsanto Corp.. now phasing out its PCB producnolTir^fiasing in MCs-malodor counleractants. Whereas most stmknots now in use work by masking unpleasant odors with stronger, more pleasant ones, the MCs are compounds that "turn the nose ofT to the bad odors, leaving only a percep tion of a fresh air smell. "A few parts per million in a room." it is reported, "will almost instantly eliminate human percep tion of malodors. and the effect will last for hours." The first applications are expected to be in home air fresheners and personal care products (that's where the money is), but after that why not to water supplies? Just think, to control a lu ncr' A la laaar, on the other hand, we hear, water can be upquaiitied by modern tech niques. It was Dr. John G. Parker of the Research Center of the Applied Physics Lab. at Johns Hopkins who found a method of reducing bacteria counts >n samples taken from the Potomac River by laser irradiation. Dr. Parker, it is reported, used collimated light radiated from a rare eanh called neodymium, embedded in a host material called yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), to do the job. After first increasing the oxygen content of the water. Dr. Parker fires the YAG laser into it and the light energy is absorbed by the oxygen molecules, causing them to be JOURNAL AWWA MQNS 03732 7 raised to a highly energetic state. In that state, the oxygen molecules diffuse through the water and collide with the bacteria, where the energy is released. It should be noted, we understand, that the energy involved is equivalent to raising the temperature of-the oxygen molecule to 17.500F and that this energy when released at the point of collision is capable of burning a hole in the bacterium cell wall. Laboratory tests of the ''sterilized" water, it is reported, indicate elevated levels of amino and nucleic acids characterizing the cytoplasm, or insides of the bacteria, showing dearly that the bacterium cell wall has indeed been tom apart. Meanwhile a water-purification process developed for individual rural water sys tems uses only electricity, no neutralizing chemicals. The process involved. Uni uses an electrochemical floccuiator with alumi num electrodes that cause suspended particles to accumulate and settle out. Then an electrochemical process releases chlorine from salts already present in the water to neutralize the bacteria. Developed by Dr. E. A. Htier of Texas A&M, the system is said to work with supplies having as little as 50 ppm of chlorine-containing salts and is expected to be capable of purifying 500 gpd at an operating cost of 25 cents. Are we, we wonder, with it? Cumulative Subject index Code In the Listing that follows, the italicized numbers are subject numbers. The numbers following the italicized numbers are page numbers of articles dealing with (hat partic ular subject (o date this year. 0100 2 0130 1 0200 264 1000 136 i no 4i 1200 37 1210 136 1220 31, II? 1230 117. 123. 129 132Q 86 1510 143, 238 /530 173 1600 97, 238 2000 101. 156 2J00 57. 69, 70. 72. 76. 77. 123, 129 2110 70 2120 82 2300 26, 93 2520 185 2900 105. 132 3000 86 34Q0 223 3510 201. 216, 232 3600 8. 10 3700 147, 189 4000 22. 82. 136, 173. 243 4110 105. 201. 209. 216 mi n w 4130 257 4140 46. 55. 168. 204, 211, 257 4200 204.207, 218. 247 4201 247 4220 207. 223. 228 4230 263 4240 197 4241 168. 197 4250 112, 201. 209. 216 4270 228 4300 168. 218 4310 105. 211 5000 101, 159, 163 5010 3. 5. 8, 10, 12. 15, 17, 19. 22 5200 264 5300 17. 181. 238 5500 19 5510 232 5520 232 5540 223, 234 5600 165 5700 264 5800 156. 246 5900 185 6000 168 7000 46, 112. 218. 263 MAY 1976 HONS 037328