Drinking Water

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has found contaminated underground water about 1,200 feet from a Superfund site at a former paint factory where hundreds of leaking drums of solvent were discovered by firefighters 18 years ago. But EPA officials say the contamination does not appear to be flowing toward New Jersey-American Water Co. wells that provide drinking water for residents. Concerned that contamination from the former Cosdon Chemical Coatings Co. on Cherry Street could be seeping toward those wells or the Delaware River, which also provides drinking water in the area, the EPA in June conducted a series of hydropunches - drilling operations to test underground water - at five locations off the site.

The issue of how to control flooding along the Delaware River is a difficult one made all the more complex because of the potential for unintended consequences. That is why I, along with the other Delaware basin governors, have worked to develop and research measures that balance the need for flood protection against our need for a reliable supply of drinking water. For instance, for the first time in the 75-year history of the basin, operations of the New York City reservoirs today take into account flood mitigation needs.

Intense water flushing has begun in the new Weatherby development, despite new test results that showed the minerals tinting drinking water there posed no health problems. The Consumers New Jersey Water Co. began the six-week program Wednesday, in which the development's water lines will be flushed for more than two hours three days a week, said Sharon Schulman, president of the company. Adjustments also were made to the company's year-old water-treatment plant, which company officials said could not filter unexpected iron levels.

Almost two years after it was detected in two area wells, a chemical many here suspect is responsible for elevated levels of childhood cancer has been found, in minute traces, in an additional well. In a routine sampling of water taken in late July from Well 29 in the east end of the Parkway Well Field, scientists for the state Department of Environmental Protection found small amounts of styrene-acrylonitrile trimer, a plastic manufacturing by-product whose health effects are unknown.

Federal scientists surveying fish in the Potomac River continue to find smallmouth bass with a freakish quirk: The males are making eggs and sperm. Researchers suspect that these "intersex" bass are victims of a newly recognized form of pollution: trace amounts of pharmaceuticals and other chemicals flushed down toilets or flowing from farms' animal waste. Compounds including antibiotics and caffeine drain through sewage systems largely untouched, collect in rivers and streams, and eventually return in tiny amounts to drinking water.

Several city streets are being drilled to test for underground water contamination that may be seeping from the site of the former Cosdon Chemical Coatings plant, officials said. The paint factory on Cherry Street was placed on the federal Superfund list in 1987 by the federal Department of Environmental Protection because of contamination at the 6.7-acre site. Mayor Robert Lowden said last night that while the cleanup was nearly completed, groundwater testing would continue at the site for 40 years.

Conservation groups in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut received some welcome, and overdue, news last week. Two million dollars in congressional funding under the 2004 Highlands Conservation Act for land preservation has finally been made available this year for the 3.5-million-acre Highlands region. They are excited at the prospect of using Pennsylvania's $500,000 allocation to preserve land in Berks County's Oley Hills. This is part of a growing partnership working to protect an area that includes five exceptional streams that provide clean drinking water for Philadelphia-area residents.

This industrial city gets its tap water from a river that flows sudsy and dark. City plants treat the water, but many people boil it and drink it with trepidation. As China gallops toward the modern era, access to safe and clean drinking water is beyond the reach of hundreds of millions of rural and urban people. Chemical spills, rampant pollution, and poor stewardship of the land have tainted much of the nation's water supply, and the groundwater under 90 percent of China's cities is contaminated.

To protect their health, township residents need to get the lead out - of their drinking water. Lead levels exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency's guidelines for safety were found in the drinking water of 13 percent of homes tested in February by the township Water Department, said township Utility Director Ken Banks. Of the 60 homes tested for drinking water, he said eight were found to contain lead levels above the EPA's safety guideline of 15 grams of lead per billion grams of water.

Drinking water at a South Jersey elementary school has been found to be tainted with a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has labeled a likely carcinogen, a union and environmental groups announced yesterday. In November, water samples were taken at several sites near the massive Chambers Works plant run by DuPont Co. near the Delaware Memorial Bridge, said a spokesman for the United Steelworkers, which represents many DuPont workers. One of the water samples was taken from a boys' restroom at Paul W. Carleton Elementary School in Penns Grove, five blocks from the Salem County plant.