EPA and Others on Water · 22 August 2007, 23:03 by Julie Loyd
If you are interested in what the EPA has to say about what’s in your water, you can enter it in the search box on their web page. Their maximum contaminant level goals are what I list below as MCLG’s.
In summary, cadmium affects the lungs both in the short and long term. Kidney, bone, and immune system effects, among others, have been found. You can ingest it from plants that have been fertilized with cadmium-rich fertilizer. The MCLG for cadmium is 5 ppb, which none of our samples met.
In summary, nitrates can damage a baby’s blood’s ability to carry oxygen. In the long term, it can damage the spleen among other things. The MCL for nitrates is 10 ppm, which is roughly where our samples fall.
In summary, copper can cause nausea. Long term, it can cause liver or kidney damage. The MCLG is 1.3 ppm.
Because there are many kinds of phenols, the EPA doesn’t have a single page. Here is what Russel has to say about the one sample high in phenols: “Phenolics are a very large class of organic molecules; some are extremely toxic (e.g. dioxins) while others are relatively harmless or even beneficial (e.g. flavonoids). They include many additives to plastics, as well as most of the components of motor oils. Any measurement over 1 ppm in the environment is a red flag of oil spills or industrial effluent; measurements on the order of 0.1 ppm or less can be natural relatively benign phenolics or contaminants. The history of the pond and what’s gone into it would help sort out what to do next. Charcoal filters are pretty good for removing modest levels of phenolics from drinking water. But I wouldn’t panic unless there’s reason to believe that what we saw was one of the really nasty phenolics like PAHs—something I can’t tell for sure without getting some history, maybe seeing the pond for myself, and shooting a sample of the water on a different instrument that can tell me more about the size and structure of the phenolic molecules involved.”
Here is the surfactant page. Make of it what you will.
Russel says, “We’ll often have to evaluate what we see against the richer, but far more equivocal medical data on ChemIDPlus and ToxNet!”
Major cities publish their water quality results, but they don’t test for everything. Surfactants, for example, aren’t mentioned. Here is Seattle’s, and here is Vancouver, WA’s.
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