When is it time to declare an emergency, and when to urge calm until all the facts are in and agreed upon? There is no sure way to say. And no, The Tracker is not talking about climate policy. It’s water.

Last month the NYTimes launched a multimedia Toxic Waters project. Its inaugural piece from Charles Duhigg had a provocative hed, “Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass.” That is about as ambiguous in sentiment as asking, say, how big a bullet do you think can be fired through your kneecap without crippling you?  That is, weed killer rather prejudices the mind and alerts the reflex to flee. If, by contrast, it had offered up for ponder the risks of “how small a smidgen of weed control agent is safe,” the instinct to recoil is smaller. This is just a headline and must not be confused with the reporting. The story looks to have had solid news on fresh evidence that federal regs, on levels of the herbicide atrazine in drinking water,  may need to be stiffened.

Writers on the environment beat might perk up at one brief passage, relating a flat European ban on atrazine use likely to contaminate drinking water. The ban, we learn reflects a “precautionary policy” common within the European Union, an apparent reference to the precautionary principle that has long been debated in enviro and regulatory circles. That is, is it up to regulators to convincingly demonstrate that something is dangerous before acting against it, or is the onus on polluters to offer compelling evidence that a new substance is very very safe before it gets spread about?

The second installment came out over the weekend, with Duhigg again its author. This one deals with heavy metal contamination, and opens with a horrendous vignette of a family in West Virginia so afflicted by scabs, rashes, other sores, and failing teeth that its members try to avoid any contact with tap water. And that water does indeed, it says here, contain high levels of arsenic, barium, lead, manganese, and more.

The meat of the piece is evidence that the Times reports uncovering that  violations of the Clean Water Act are on the rise and, further, that “the vast majority of … polluters have (sic) escaped punishment.” The series – as any investigative piece ought – has a stiff and alarming tone. This is crusading journalism. But one wonders if there is some selective data citation here, and perhaps use of statistics that don’t quite reinforce how common are some of its most alarming examples. One passage for example describes coal mining waste as having as much as 1000 percent (which sounds so much worse than ten times) the legal level of heavy metals. But it’s not clear whether that’s the legal level for waste, or for drinking water. And “up to ” leaves the statement’s meaning in limbo. It then follows up with reference to 4,200 water pollution violations – but of what severity? One wonders.

There is much to admire in this series – including the vast amount of data and obscure reports that the Times and Mr. Duhigg have sifted. The results need reporting. But one wonders further, given the occasional disclaimers the story itself provides saying it is impossible yet to know how many or which ailments are caused by what pollutants,  whether its suggestion of demonstrated and considerable public harm is justified.

A third, and brief, sidebar piece in the series offers a remarkable contrast in tone.

Cornelia Dean has a measured and well-qualified guide, How Safe Is Your Water? It tells readers how to check, often from public records, how their local water companies are doing in the eye of regulators and as measured by mandatory reporting of test on the water they sell. She tells how to find labs to do further testing. How to get good filters on your system. She calls medical substances a “knotty issue.” The closest she comes to telling readers that the nation faces a serious problem is in her closing line, on drugs and other medical chemicals in water. “Many ..seem impervious to water treatment regimes. But are they a problem for people? So far, that question remains unresolved.”

The Tracker is of two minds here. The main series appears to sit on the hysterical side of things. However, here’s a fact I will declare without doing my own homework. Those industrial societies through history that did not regulate water quality, and that had no press or other angry, investigating  gadflies to put pressure on government to do something by screeching over extreme and perhaps exaggerated examples of harm, have quickly poisoned their own water (ditto for air, soil, seas, food, …).

To come next in the series: Dairy and other ag. pollution of water.

-Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.