At the end of last month, state
health officials announced that it had found in a system hooked up to
Bossier City’s water naegleria fowleri,
more popularly known as the brain-eating amoeba. A recommended 0.5
mg/l chlorine level in water systems should prevent its presence, but
because of biofilter buildup (essentially, organic slime lining pipes) it can
hang around in pipes even with that additive and it was detected in a previously
dormant line of the water system in question.
In that case, pursuant
to best practices research, a system should have a flush double that level
for 60 days, to ensure that all lines, even those the farthest away, receive
such water and that it penetrates any biofilter. That Bossier City began doing
a few days later.
Yet that’s not good enough for scare-specialist-celebrity Erin Brockovich, who complained this will be too dangerous. Brockovich, who gained notoriety by helping to bilk a California utility out of hundreds of millions of dollars using faulty scientific conclusions and reasoning, and colleague Bob Bowcock said the flush could cause more problems without really making things safe.
Specifically, the disinfection/chlorination
process creates trihalomethanes, which by federal law
mustn’t stay consistently above 80 parts per billion, and haloacetic acids
which mustn’t consistently above 60 PPB. Bossier City succeeded in hitting
those benchmarks in 2017, with
its highest (of six) TTHM monitoring points recording an average of 39 and for
HAA 24.
However, Bowcock in a radio
interview faulted these data because they indicated at least once at one
station in 2017 Bossier City had exceeded the mark in each instance. And, while
it’s true that a number of countries have established lower tolerances of these
substances in drinking water, World Health Organization standards essentially
recommend much higher levels for safe consumption.
Scientific evidence suggests a relationship
between a couple of TTHM compounds and cancer – in animals. Inadequate evidence
exists that these cause cancer in humans. Regardless, using the one TTHM
compound – bromodichloromethane – which WHO thinks could cause human cancer at
the level it thinks could cause one additional death out of 100,000 people over
70 years (assuming consumption of 2 liters of water daily, whether
intentionally, over that lifetime), it said would come at a level of 60 (the
federal standard of 80 doesn’t differentiate among different compounds).
Lowering the standard without increasingly
significantly the odds of water-borne disease would require much more expensive
methods such as alternative disinfection and filtration. And, as the data show,
that would lower insignificantly the cancer rate – if there’s any connection at
all; recall that insufficient evidence exists to show that in humans.
Doubling the chlorine also poses no risk. In the
interview, Bowcock claimed harmful effects from excessive chlorine,
particularly from pregnant women in gas that may emanate from faucets. In fact,
chlorine
is not a carcinogenic and only in concentrations
well above 1 mg/l may it cause respiratory problems in humans over the long
term – but typically because the environment, such as a pool, doesn’t
have an adequate balance of chlorine. In short, extremely brief inhalation
of relatively low intensity chlorine won’t do any harm – and there
are no adverse health effects for the unborn from their mothers swimming in
chlorinated pools.
Recognize that Brockovich makes a living – charging
as much as $50,000 an appearance – off of hyping problems. She (with
Bowcock in tow) has a history of linking scary rhetoric about water quality
with paid speaking gigs. Now we’ll see if she can frighten enough people in
Bossier Parish to invite her to interject herself more into the controversy, if
not leading to emoluments of some kind or at least free publicity to leverage
the same elsewhere.
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