By Joel Thurtell
My first reaction on reading the Sunday, September 13, 2009 New York Times article on water pollution was to think, “Wow! They get it!”
For years, I’ve been reporting that environmental pollution in Metro Detroit’s Rouge River is far worse than custodial institutions like the U.S. Envronmental Protection Agency, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and Wayne County Department of Environment have admitted.
I wrote articles about this for the Detroit Free Press, and the book I co-authored with Free Press photographer Patricia Beck (Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River, 2009, Wayne State University Press) drove home the point.
In May 2005 in the Free Press, I wrote that Michigan natural resources agencies, led by the now-defunct Michigan Water Resources Commission, had set a 20-year deadline for making the Rouge River “swimmable and fishable.” That was done in September 1985.
Oops.
Didn’t happen.
Not even close.
A comprehensive study of E. coli showed that up and down the river, the Rouge was fit for human contact at best 2-5 percent of the time.
I wasn’t writing about drinking, just the mere touching of Rouge River water.
Now, the Times has concluded from what it pitches as an exhaustive investigation that “an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways.”
Last year, the Times reported, “40 percent of the nation’s community water systems violated the Safe Drinking Water Act at least once, according to an analysis of E.P.A. data. Those violations ranged from failing to maintain proper paperwork to allowing carcinogens into tap water. More than 23 million people received drinking water from municipal systems that violated a health-based standard.”
According to the newspaper, “The Times obtained hundreds of thousands of water pollution records through Freedom of Information Act requests to every state and the E.P.A., and compiled a national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by states or the E.P.A. (For an interactive version, which can show violations in any community, visit www.nytimes.com/toxicwaters.)”
Wow! I thought. Finally a comprehensive database on pollution.
I was disappointed. I’m still looking for discharge data from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. I didn’t find data from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, nor from the United States Geological Survey.
What I found was that the Times study relied on self-reporting by governments and private companies of spill or release incidents rather than on records of measurements of actual presence of fecal or toxic substances in water.
In other words, the Times barely scraped the surface of data on pollution. For a broad, national study, maybe it was necessary to approach the subject of water contamination in this narrow, incomplete way.
But incident reports don’t show the whole picture. For one thing, they depend on the polluting actors to report themselves, rather than on objective collection and analysis of data. They also rely on reports at specific points where bad stuff might be released. Non-point pollution, such as fertilizer released into waterways by golf courses or homeowners, farm waste, erosion from construction sites, leaching of human waste from faulty septic systems or animal waste are not likely to show up in these reports. And the Rouge River still receives releases of oils and other chemicals from municipal sewage outlets and old, unremediated factory sites. I imagine that what holds for the Rouge is true for just about any other river, especially ones that have been used by industry.
Evidence of pollution shows up too often where private or governmental parties have consistently collected water samples for testing. There is plenty of data on non-point source pollution, though there could be lots more. The big story on this area of pollution data collection, though, is that governments and nonprofit institutions are cutting back on data collection. We are becoming more and more reliant on self-reporting by potential polluters.
I reported on the pullback from monitoring in the December 10, 2008 issue of Metro Times. In the case of the Rouge River, the monitoring of dissolved oxygen and temperature were being done by USGS hydrologists; the work was paid for by Wayne County. According to the USGS hyrdologist who had been doing the work, he decision to cut it out was made by officials of the Alliance of Rouge Communities, which is half funded by Wayne County and half by local governments who also happen to hold and need to renew pollution discharge permits. It is managed by ECT, a longtime recipient of government contracts for environmental consulting. Parties, in other words, with a vested interest in less, not more, monitoring.
The more monitoring, the better chance that bad things will be found and the governments will be held responsible. There is therefore an incentive not to monitor.
The Times‘ conclusions certainly are cause for alarm. But we need to be aware that continued and expanded monitoring of surface and ground water for feces and toxics is important. By neglecting that important work, we are giving cover to polluters.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
