I've alluded to the fact that I spent many years working on a nation-wide(US) water testing project once and that I don't own the results, they were never published, and I can't specifically give away those results that I don't own. All of this recent talk about PFAs in water is absolutely killing me. This new water testing is going to take place over the next three years, and it's important to note that it's *only* talking about a handful of chemicals.
I've found that particularly US-based people really think their water is great and vastly overestimate how great it is. It comes out of the tap, you drink it and you don't die of waterborne illnesses. Woohoo. Really, it's an accomplishment.
But until you spend time in a water testing lab you don't really begin to realize how much isn't tested for in that water you drink and bathe in. It's just not possible.
People would ask me all the time "How do I get my water tested for everything?" You can't. Think of the story recently about how many chemicals are in plastics, for instance. 16,000-ish and over 4,000 that are potentially hazardous. Basically zero of those are tested for in any way whatsoever. To get something tested, someone has to care enough that it's there in the first place. Then someone has to create testing procedures and standards. Then there has to be a market for that test.
Let's JUST talk about PFAs. You know how many there are? Ballpark is ~15,000 different PFAs. You know how many are tested in this new EPA program? 25.
Now that we've established that, just how likely is it that testing will find PFAs in YOUR water in the US?
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/
Pretty likely.
While I can't really talk about what states are likely to find if they honestly look, what I do talk about, and have for probably 20 years now, is what I did when I realized what's really in your water. I put in a whole home filter outside of our home to filter out a lot of stuff for showering and hand washing. No one so much as cleans vegetables here unless the water comes from the reverse osmosis system in our kitchen. Drinking water, ice, pasta water, fruit and veggie washing water, etc all comes from that.
I'm very sensitive to the fact that not everyone can do all of that. It's a step in the right direction that the EPA is beginning to do something about this, but it's far later than it should be and doesn't go nearly far enough. All I can say is that you should demand better, and not just about PFAs, but all contaminants in your water supply.
And before anyone asks, yes, the spring water on the homestead is about as clean as you can find anymore. Under 10 TDS and no contaminants that I've found to date. Again, can't test for everything even if you wanted to and had a million dollars to throw at it. It was a major selling point on the property for us.
When you come across the EPA touting that they're putting $300 million into what are known as "Brownfields" just know that's basically nothing.
Brownfield sites are polluted sites that are too polluted for redevelopment.
The EPA doesn't even know how many there are.
The GAO thinks there could be a million of them as of 20 years ago.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-05-94.pdf
Tons of them are contaminated with PFAs.
Even if there were "only" a million, a number I am willing to bet is an underestimation, $300 million isn't a drop in the bucket of what's required.
A kind of odd article came across my timeline this morning, and it seems to fit here, so I'd like to point it out.
https://www.newsweek.com/drinking-water-warning-hempstead-new-york-1903989
Hempstead New York's Mayor is sounding the alarm about 1,4-dioxane in their water. He's also tying it to the EPA's new PFA requirements in asking for the federal government to buy them a new water treatment system. To be clear, I know of no reason that PFAs and dioxane would be tied together. PFAs are fluorinated, that's what the "F" tells you in PFA. Dioxane is C4H8O2. I know of no process, off hand, that uses both. They are both pollutants, but that's as far as they go in the same category.
What's really odd to me here is that the EPA has a thing called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR). Every few years they pick another set of chemicals and test water across the country for those chemicals.
UCMR 3 was from 2013-2015 and I distinctly remembered two things about it. One, dioxane was on the list. Two, New York had a very high incidence of dioxane being over acceptable limits. If New York wasn't top in the nation, it was at least pretty close.
So I looked up UCMR 3(https://www.epa.gov/dwucmr/occurrence-data-unregulated-contaminant-monitoring-rule#3), downloaded the data, searched it for Hempstead, and counted it up. Hempstead had 30 tests for dioxane over those two years and 25 of them tested high. Some of them ridiculously high.
Now I wonder. Did Hempstead ignore it for the last decade and now sees an opportunity to try to get the federal government to pay for their water treatment? Is that why they're mentioning it in the same breath as PFAs now? Or did they do something, and it wasn't enough?
The article just leads to more questions than answers, and the take home message here is that your water is almost certainly contaminated with tons of crap that people know about, and tons of crap that people don't know about. The only way to protect yourself is to clean it yourself.
Reverse osmosis is probably your best bet to get stuff that you know about and don't know about out of your water. While it's said to not be 100% effective for dioxane, if you had one, single point, method to use, that would still be it.
