Like herpes, BC water scare stories reappear

Like herpes, celebrity scare artist Erin Brockovich is back to plague Bossier City with her money-generating brand of alarmism for alarmism’s sake.

Seven years ago, Brockovich – who launched a career in environmentalist quackery when she helped to con a huge lawsuit settlement payout from a California utility using faulty scientific conclusions and reasoning that brought her a hit movie deal – drummed up negativity about Bossier City’s water system in the wake of the discovery that naegleria fowleri, popularly known as the brain-eating amoeba, had infiltrated a line outside the city system but connected to it. The city commenced with a lengthy chlorine flush to negate that, but in the interim Brockovich and a colleague moaned about the allegedly dangerousness and ineffectiveness of it all, even though scientific evidence said otherwise.

Now she’s back, griping again about chlorine flushes after somehow spotting word that city water customers were complaining about the smell. That odor is a byproduct of when pure chlorine, rather than its related chloramine, comes into contact with organic compounds and produced byproducts of trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids.

TTHM and HAA5 in sufficient quantities – 80 and 60 parts per billion, as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency – have been associated with cancer in animal testing. Back then, Brockovich panned the chlorine flush method and Bossier City’s application even though it brings universal endorsement within the scientific community.

Indeed, even with the nanoscopic, and not confirmed as causal agents, chances that these byproducts could trigger cancer in somebody, by the numbers, once in generation in Bossier City, the city’s water reports from 2018 on have shown in no testing has the EPA compliance numbers been breached in any year. For 2024, the highest TTHM level observed was 30.4 ppb and for HAA5 was 18.5 ppb.

In 2020, the city installed equipment as a pilot for nanofiltration to reduce organics, reducing the need for the occasional flush. It has queued up $21 million in state capital outlay ready to go to expand the system. The city also has taken $10 million of its own to start another pilot program, this for upgrading the existing water system to maximize the impact of nanofiltration by enhancing the ozone system, with the goal of having not to rely at all upon disinfecting routines such as pure chlorine flushes.

Thus, to summarize, not only is there no evidence the flushes have produced byproducts at dangerous levels at any time, but also the city is working to minimize the frequency of the flushes that cause occasional inconvenience. Whether it’s worth tens of millions of dollars to minimize rarely odiferous water and to move cancer incidence below once in a generation is a policy matter worth debate, but that’s what’s happening.

So, disregard the bleating of someone who needs to sell copies of newsletters and to put people in seats in lecture halls in order to pay her bills, and can do so best by frightening folks with uncorroborated accusations. If you want to get upset at Bossier City’s water provision, do so for a genuine reason such as line breaks, higher rates, or giving away a waterworks for free.