You know that old cliché about Zen masters who can look at a drop of water and see the whole universe? Jerry Kauffman is kind of like that. When he looks at a glass of water, he sees entire systems at play. He knows, with a striking degree of precision, exactly where his water has come from. Not just from which pipe, or from which treatment plant, or even from which river; he knows from which contaminated farm fields, and which shopping mall parking lots, and which sewage treatment plants upstream. If the water is slightly brown, he knows there’s iron leaking from old municipal pipes. If it’s winter and the water has a slightly yellowish-blue cast, he knows cities have been spreading deicing chemicals on the roads.
Other things Kauffman can tell with his tongue. He can taste when there’s too much chlorine in the water, or not enough. If it’s summer and the water smells like smoke, he knows there’s been another compost fire at an upstream mushroom farm and the ashes have washed into the creek. If it’s winter and the water smells a little like cucumbers, it means towns upstream have been salting their roads with urea—yes, you read that right—that they get from fertilizer makers.
Other things he can’t see or smell, but just knows intuitively. He knows, for example, that there are 700,000 chickens in his watershed, many of them on farms that do little to control the enormous amount of waste flowing into local streams. He knows there are industrial chemicals (like benzene) and naturally occurring toxins (like arsenic) that are part of the region’s soil. He knows that his water, like all of our water, contains pesticides, petrochemicals, and a vast array of prescription drugs. Mood enhancers. Antipsychotics. Erection stimulators. Birth control hormones. Anticonvulsants. All the waste, in other words, that flows downstream from everyone living upstream.
One recent afternoon, I handed Jerry Kauffman a glass of tap water and asked him to tell me about it. We were sitting in a university dining hall, and I had drawn the water from a nearby drinking fountain. The fountain, situated alongside a well-traveled corridor, probably served hundreds of students a day, and the distribution pipes, somewhere beneath our feet, served many thousands more. Where the water had come from, exactly, was something of a mystery, as it is in most urban and suburban places. There were no creeks or streams visible anywhere on campus or in town; they had long since been buried underground. The nearest river was a mile away, in the lone patch of woods that had somehow escaped the bulldozers.
I had been drinking this water for years, without ever thinking very hard about it, and now, sitting in the dining hall, staring into this glass, it looked clear enough to me. But the truth is, when it comes to water, I don’t have Jerry Kauffman’s eyes. When I handed him my glass of water, Kauffman swirled it around, like Robert Parker scrutinizing a fine Burgundy. He poked his nose into the glass, then held it up to the light. “Water is supposed to be clear and odorless,” Kauffman said. “If you can smell something, usually it’s bad for you.” He sniffed again. “You can taste it if there’s too much iron in your water, or too much chlorine. Some of these chemicals have an odor threshold, and some of these we can test for. What I don’t know is which of the other thousands of chemicals are in here that we haven’t tested for.”
Kauffman is Delaware’s state water coordinator, which means it’s his job to make sure that when Delaware citizens turn on their taps, they aren’t being slowly poisoned by the myriad chemicals flowing into their drinking water. This has become quite a challenging job in recent years, especially since water pollution is no longer the blatant, visible travesty it was back in the 1970s, when Americans somehow got used to their urban rivers catching on fire. It’s far more subtle now. Not less ubiquitous. Just more subtle.
Kauffman grew up in Pennsauken, New Jersey, right across the river from Philadelphia, in a town so congested he could run the three miles to school faster than he could take the bus. All that exercise got him in shape, and by the time he graduated and joined the track team at Rutgers, he was running eighty miles a week. He got his time in the mile down to 4:16, and came in second in his conference in the 10,000 meters. Thirty years later, he still has his old white track suit, still stained red from the Brunswick shale dust he kicked up training along the Raritan River.
In the winter, when it got too cold to run, Kauffman and his friends would strap on skates and play hockey out on the frozen Delaware River. It was there that he got his first glimpse of just how polluted his native waterways had become. “The Delaware during the 1970s was black,” Kauffman said. “It was a dead river, black with the crud from oil spills, black with raw sewage. The ice was black, the shoreline was black. In summers, we’d go bow fishing, and the carp would be coated in the stuff. Back then, I just assumed that all rivers were black.”
Kauffman is the only man I know who speaks wistfully about the air quality in northern New Jersey. He remembers the air around Philadelphia, especially that blowing over from chemical plants in Port Richmond, being so contaminated that it actually smelled sweet—and not in the nice sense of that word. It wasn’t until he drove a couple hours north to Rutgers that he smelled clean air. (A few dozen miles north of that, he notes, you were in Newark, and the air started smelling sweet again.)
At Rutgers, Kauffman began as a history major but then switched to engineering so he could spend more time working outside. In the summer, he got a job at the Jersey Shore taking soundings for a bridge project. What he remembers most vividly from that time was the sight of blue crabs floating upside down, dead from pollution.
“It made me really angry to see that,” Kauffman said. “That’s when I knew I was going to study water.”
When I asked him to tell me more about the safety of that glass of tap water in his hands—to explain how things have gotten so contaminated and what can be done to protect ourselves—he suggested we take a ride in a canoe. You can’t understand what comes out of your tap, he said, without understanding where that water has been before it gets there. And where that water has been before it comes out of your faucet might surprise you.
Kauffman and I made a plan to launch a boat on the Brandywine River, which provides much of the drinking water for the city of Wilmington. But really, he could have suggested any river serving any population in any city in the country: the Chattahoochee in Atlanta; the Gunpowder in Baltimore; the Hudson in New York; the Schuylkill in Philadelphia. I have paddled all of these rivers, and many others, and they all share the Brandywine’s troubles. Millions of people live, work, and drive in these rivers’ watersheds. They build homes and factories and vast parking lots and huge crop and livestock operations near the river-banks, and the rivers absorb, one way or another, every ounce of influence humans place on them. Yet these same people also demand that their rivers and reservoirs supply them with millions of gallons of fresh, clean drinking water every day of the year. That’s a lot of stress for any watershed to bear.
For generations, Americans have treated our river systems like sewer pipes, flushing our toilets, our factories, and our farms to a distant place few of us ever see. The trouble, of course, is that there is no “other place.” Water, as any seventh-grade science student knows, has a way of cycling—endlessly—through both our earthly and our bodily systems. There is the same amount of water on the earth today as there was ten thousand years ago. It’s just more polluted.
Although thousands of synthetic toxins have been studied by government and independent scientists, not a single chemical has been added to the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000. Many drinking water safety standards have not been updated since the 1980s; others have not changed since the law was passed, in 1974. By one estimate, in the last five years, some 62 million Americans have been exposed to chemicals that fail at least one government safety standard. The EPA has only recently vowed to begin analyzing chemicals known to be endocrine disruptors—more than thirteen years after Congress first called for it.
“Surprisingly little is known about the extent of environmental occurrence, transport, and ultimate fate of many synthetic organic chemicals after their intended use,” the U.S. Geological Survey has reported. Among the primary concerns: hormonally active chemicals, personal care products, and pharmaceuticals that are designed to stimulate a physiological response in humans, but also affect plants and animals. Compounds in these products are now thought to impair reproductive organs, increase the incidence of cancer, and add to the toxicity of other chemicals already in the water supply.
Some 97 percent of the nation’s rivers are contaminated with at least one pesticide. Even compounds like DDT, chlordane, aldrin, and dieldrin—most of which have been outlawed for decades—are still being found in fish and riverbeds. More than 80 percent of urban streams and nearly 60 percent of agricultural streams are contaminated at levels dangerous to aquatic life. A single pesticide, atrazine, has been found in 75 percent of stream samples and 40 percent of groundwater. New research suggests that even at concentrations meeting current federal standards, atrazine may be associated with birth defects, low birth weights, and menstrual problems. Or take PCBs. Like countless other industrial chemicals that resist decay, PCBs gradually make their way up the food chain, from water-borne phytoplankton to larger and larger fish, then to birds and to humans. Scientists have found that PCB concentrations in animal tissue can be 25 million times their concentrations in the surrounding water.
So that’s what’s happening nationwide. In Delaware, it’s Jerry’s Kauffman’s job to make sure his river’s health doesn’t collapse. And to try to convince people that a river’s health is directly tied to our own.
One lovely afternoon in late May, I met Kauffman and a group of his graduate students in the rear of a vast mall parking lot in suburban Wilmington, where a small river outfitter had set up shop. We tried on life jackets, threw a bunch of paddles into the back of a university van, and lashed our boats to the roof. As we made our way out of the parking lot and maneuvered through a long strip of fast food restaurants and chain stores, Kauffman looked out the window and reminded me that whatever rain hit the pavement under our wheels would eventually make its way into the Brandywine. In a watershed, he said, everything drains down to the river.
Everything.
Fifteen minutes later, after navigating suburban traffic, we rolled down a hill near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and pulled into the parking lot of the Brandywine River Museum.
The Brandywine Valley is particularly rich in history, and not least for its place in the history of chemistry. Settled some 350 years ago, the valley became an important center of commerce in the British colonies; then, in 1802, the Brandywine caught the eye of a French immigrant named Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours. Du Pont paid a bit over $6,000 for a parcel of land along the riverbank to build a mill so he could make gunpowder; his company soon became the largest manufacturer of gunpowder in the country. Over the next two hundred years, of course, DuPont would grow into one of the wealthiest and most influential companies in the world, stitching dozens of products deeply into our lives: polyester, nylon, Teflon, Lycra, neoprene, Mylar, Tyvek, Kevlar. It wasn’t lost on me that the plastic that had gone into making our canoe had almost certainly been a DuPont product.
I helped Jerry Kauffman and his students unstrap the boats. We propped them on our shoulders and made our way down a dirt path to the river. Kauffman and I put our boat in last; we wanted to make sure the students began their journeys on top of the water, and not beneath it.
Which is a problem when you’re out on a river on a sunny day in May, especially if you’re a graduate student studying watershed management. It wasn’t ten minutes before Kauffman’s students were splashing one another with their paddles, jumping out of their boats, and generally behaving like, well, like anyone should on a beautiful day on a beautiful river.
The Brandywine drains 320 square miles in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, and even from our canoe, it was quickly apparent why it wasn’t only industrialists who had come to love the valley. The river fostered the Brandywine school of painters—Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, Andrew and Jamie Wyeth—and today, with its lovely farms, grand DuPont estates, and rolling fields, fox hunting and polo still maintain a hold on the region’s imagination. The valley is home to Winterthur, the grand museum devoted to Henry Francis DuPont’s collection of antiques and Americana, and Longwood Gardens, a thousand acres of manicured gardens developed by Pierre S. DuPont. This is pastoral country, a quilt of horse, cattle, and pig farms, corn and soybean farms, mushroom farms, and apple orchards.
To my eyes, the water looked clear enough—but then again, so had the glass of water I’d offered Kauffman back in the cafeteria. The forested banks on either side seemed remarkably intact for a river running though one of the most densely populated regions of the country. But the truth was more complicated. Long before the Brandywine passes into downtown Wilmington, and well upstream of the DuPont estates, the river has already been highly contaminated, not once but sixty times by wastewater discharges—from single homes to hospitals to the municipal water treatment plants in Coatesville, Downingtown, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, which collectively treat and discharge 10 to 15 million gallons of water every day. To put this number in perspective, consider that during a drought the Brandywine flows at about 21 million gallons a day—which means that during stretches in the summer, more than half the water in the river is treated wastewater.
The river also collects vast quantities of chemical runoff from farms in southeastern Pennsylvania. It absorbs pharmaceutical drugs flushed through untold thousands of septic tanks and subdivision sewer lines. It is buffeted by industry, and the contaminants washing off countless square miles of roads and parking lots. Even the smaller-scale animals on farms in Pennsylvania’s Amish country produce great quantities of nitrogen. And if it rains in Amish country on Sunday, the runoff is in Wilmington by Monday, and people in Delaware are drinking the treated water on Wednesday.
Yet just how polluted you consider the river to be depends on your sense of history. “Compared to presettlement, the Brandywine is nowhere close to being as clean as it once was, but compared to a hundred years ago, it’s recovering,” Kauffman told me. “People used to know the type of ink being printed at the paper plant by the color of the stream.”
Water here—as everywhere on earth—has always created conflict. The words “river” and “rival,” after all, come from the same root. If companies can get someone else—someone downstream—to deal with pollution, they tend to do it. “That’s what pollution is all about,” Kauffman said. “Someone else is always left to deal with it. Companies just build pollution fines into their bottom lines, into their cost of doing business. Industry calls pollution an ‘externality,’ something they don’t have to deal with. That’s not what I call it.”
Kauffman spends a good bit of his time reminding people that the water we drink is the same water that flows through heavy industrial plants, drains farm fields, and crosses state lines. In certain parts of Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Creek, whose water flows into the Schuylkill and then into the Delaware River, more than 20 percent of the fish have diseases, tumors, or fin damage.
This an especially difficult lesson to impart in states (like Delaware, sandwiched as it is between Pennsylvania and Maryland) that get most of their drinking water from rivers pouring in from other places. What this means is that Kauffman constantly has to remind Pennsylvania lawmakers that their wastewater ends up in Delaware’s drinking supply. It also means that when he goes over to the state capital in Dover, he has to convince lawmakers to spend Delaware money planting trees across the border in Pennsylvania. Thick, forested buffers prevent all kinds of waste products from flowing straight into rivers, and planting trees is far cheaper than retrofitting water treatment plants.
“Water treatment systems are as good as they have ever been in human history,” Kauffman told me. “But water protection is also incredibly underfinanced in the United States. If you total up all the water quality programs in the country—all the testing, all the watershed protection efforts—it comes out to about fifteen bucks a year for every man, woman, and child. That’s the level of commitment to clean water. Is that enough? I say it’s not. Compare that to the other pieces of the federal budget pie, and the water quality piece is so small you can’t even see it on a pie chart.”
Before the federal Clean Water Act was passed, in 1972, people and industries alike could pretty well dump whatever they wanted right into the river. I remember paddling a river in Georgia in the early 1990s with a water quality expert; he pointed to a spot that had been used, a couple of decades ago, as a dump for a chicken processor. Up and down the stream, little kids had swum in a river choked with chicken parts. No longer. Industries treat some wastewater on-site; municipal plants do the best they can with the rest. Yet over the last five years alone, industries have broken water pollution laws more than half a million times—by doing everything from not reporting their emissions to dumping chemicals that may cause cancer or birth defects. Only 3 percent of these violations resulted in fines.
You might think that big rains would help dilute all the toxins and bacteria in a river system, but that turns out not to be the case. Heavy rains can bring massive nitrogen bursts from fertilizers running off farms and lawns; where a normal (and “safe”) nitrogen level might be 10 parts per million, a post-rain reading might be 500. “It used to be thought that ‘the solution to pollution was dilution,’ ” Kauffman said. “Lakes and rivers were thought to be big enough to dilute the sewage.”
We now know that’s not true: contaminants don’t disappear just because they cross state lines. “People in Dover always ask, ‘Why is my money being spent in Pennsylvania?’ ” Kauffman said. “They don’t understand that that’s where their water comes from.”
A mile or two into the trip, Kauffman and I passed several families picnicking and swimming along the riverbank. The families looked to be from Mexico or Central America. Didn’t they realize this was America, I thought? Didn’t they realize that in this country, we consider our rivers to be too polluted to enjoy? Didn’t they realize that all those lovely farm fields, to say nothing of the subdivisions that lay beyond, were also the source of enormous quantities of waste?
To be fair, it’s not like they could see the sources of the pollution. Where public health experts a hundred years ago worried about water-borne illnesses like typhoid and cholera, they now fret over pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, and the mountains of manure (and attendant gastrointestinal bugs) pouring off farms. As Chris Crockett, director of planning and research for Philadelphia’s water department, put it to me, water quality is directly affected by what comes out of a cow’s butt. In the Brandywine Valley, this is no joke: a recent census listed Chester County, Pennsylvania, as having some 42,000 cattle, 13,000 hogs, 8,600 horses, 3,000 sheep, and nearly 700,000 chickens—double the number of human residents.
Animal waste wreaks havoc on drinking water, not only because of the nitrogen and phosphorous it contributes, but because of the antibiotics and the microorganisms flushing through the animals’ guts. It works like this: farm animals eat, they poop, it rains, and the waste runs into the nearest creek. From there it’s into the river, into the drinking water supply, and into your glass. Recent studies have found the fecal bacteria giardia in 90 percent of samples taken from the Brandywine. Cryptosporidium, another parasite, is common in the guts of ruminants like sheep and goats, and passes easily into the guts of humans.
It’s not just drinking contaminated water that can make you sick, of course. Swimmers can become contaminated, and so can fishermen. Baltimore, where I live, sits at the lip of the Chesapeake Bay, an ecological bowl that collects the waters of the middle third of the eastern United States. Water pours into the bay from as far away as Cooperstown, New York, and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a stretch that includes enormous swaths of agricultural land and unimaginable quantities of animal waste.
A few years ago, Johns Hopkins’s Ellen Silbergeld and her colleagues Jennifer Roberts and Thaddeus Graczyk found that a lake near my house was so contaminated with cryptosporidium that a fisherman’s chances of becoming infected were 80 percent. Not by eating his catch, mind you, but by merely touching the water and then putting his hand to his eyes or mouth.
Now, you might say, I’m not crazy enough to fish in an urban stream; streams aren’t clean enough to fish in. Maybe so. But in 1993, more than 400,000 people in Milwaukee fell ill, and more than 100 died, because of an outbreak of cryptosporidium. Gary Wells, a Milwaukee resident and an AIDS patient, told CNN that he lost more than one friend to the parasite. “I used to drink this,” he said, gesturing toward his sink, “because I thought I could trust that it was OK. But obviously I was wrong.”
In the spring of 2008, almost forty years after Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire, sending flames eight stories into the air, Dr. Silbergeld and her Johns Hopkins colleague Jay Graham published an essay called “The Cuyahoga Is Still Burning.” It’s burning not with fire but with viruses, bacteria, and microparasites. Fish and people might be returning to swim in the river, the scientists wrote, but the ever-expanding volume of contaminants running off industrial farms and suburban sprawl is too much for any system to handle.
The problem is not just animal waste, either. If rainfall (or snowmelt) is heavy enough, a city’s sewage treatment plant can be overwhelmed by water gushing in from the countless pipes and storm drains in the streets. Before some recent upgrades to its sewage treatment system, Wilmington’s system overflowed 60 percent of the time it rained. Nationwide, the EPA says, this happens about 40,000 times a year. Some researchers estimate that more than 860 billion gallons of untreated sewage gets into our waterways every year.
In Baltimore, sewage treatment systems are so decrepit that in 2002 some 355 million gallons of raw sewage flowed into city streams. This was more than ten times the previous year’s amount. Under pressure from the EPA and the Justice Department, the city agreed to spend nearly $1 billion to upgrade its system by 2016.
And while the health implications of raw human and animal sewage are hard to tally, Jerry Kauffman has, shall we say, a gut feeling.
“It’s hard to quantify spikes in ER visits, but they’re out there,” he told me. Nearly 20 million Americans get sick every year from water contaminated with parasites, bacteria, or viruses, a number that does not include illnesses caused by synthetic chemicals.
And what is true in miniature in a place like the Brandywine Valley is true writ large elsewhere in the country. Small farms that once pastured their cows and considered manure a priceless fertilizer have given way to large farms that keep their animals in cement-floored barns. Rather than permitting cows to do what they do best—spread manure on fields—farmers now use frontend loaders to move the waste into vast containment ponds, which can leak or overflow altogether. Farmers on the eastern shore of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia raise some 570 million chickens, which collectively produce some 1.5 billion pounds of manure a year. This is more than the total human waste produced by New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Atlanta combined, yet it essentially flows untreated from farm to river to bay, producing 42 percent of the nitrogen and 46 percent of the phosphorous pouring into the Chesapeake.
Paddling along the Brandywine, Jerry Kauffman reeled off some of his favorite water-quality statistics. By the time the Colorado River reaches household taps in southern California, more than two hundred communities, including Las Vegas, have discharged their effluent into the river. By the time someone in New Orleans drinks a glass of tap water from the Mississippi River, Kauffman says, the water has traveled through the guts of five people. How many cows have also passed the water, and how many petrochemical plants, Kauffman did not hazard a guess.
The trouble is that rivers, like air currents, don’t adhere to state lines. As a history major-turned-engineer, Kauffman is fond of invoking Benjamin Franklin, whom he calls “the founder of America’s first municipal water system.” Franklin left money in his will to purchase land in the Schuylkill watershed to protect Philadelphia’s water. He also petitioned Pennsylvania to move its tanneries and slaughterhouses away from the shores of the Delaware River.
If you really want to clean up a natural system, Kauffman says, you might need to reimagine political boundaries. If the country were divided up into thirty-six watersheds instead of fifty states, people would likely live with far clearer connections to their drinking water—and might take more care in protecting it. And then people like him wouldn’t have to work so hard to get a Delaware legislator to pony up for clean water in Pennsylvania, because both areas would be drinking the same water, and both would know it. (Such a system has long been in place in Switzerland, where political boundaries are dictated by ridgelines, which determine the way water flows.)
But given American history, such an arrangement does not seem likely. A century ago, Kauffman said, John Wesley Powell, the famous explorer of the Colorado River and head of the U.S. Geological Survey, proposed dividing the American West along watershed lines. He lost his job for his trouble. More recently, the Supreme Court declared—in a ruling hailed by the developers who brought the case, as well as their allies in industry and Big Agriculture—that the Clean Water Act applies only to “navigable, permanent waterways.” The rest of our fresh water—including 60 percent of the country’s streams and some 20 million acres of wetlands—apparently do not need such protection.
Just a couple of weeks before Kauffman and I put our boat in the water, the Associated Press had reported that “a vast array of pharmaceuticals” had been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans. While the concentrations were measured in parts per billion or even trillion, far below those of a medical dose, they nonetheless raised real concerns. People drink a lot of water, after all, and they drink it every day. For many, many years. They also bathe in it. And cook with it. Our blood is 95 percent water. The bodies of babies are nearly 80 percent water; adult women and men are 50 to 60 percent water.
Over the course of a five-month investigation, AP reporters reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking water databases, and interviewed 230 officials, academics, and scientists. They also surveyed the nation’s fifty largest cities and a dozen other major water providers, as well as community suppliers in all fifty states. Their discoveries were alarming: drugs had been detected in the drinking water supplies of twenty-four major metropolitan areas, from southern California to northern New Jersey. Watersheds—the systems of creeks and rivers that both form and drain into our water supplies—were also found to be widely contaminated.
Officials in Philadelphia reported fifty-six pharmaceuticals or drug by-products, including medicines for pain, high cholesterol, epilepsy, mental illness, and heart problems. More than 18 million people in southern California drink water contaminated with antianxiety medications. Nearly 900,000 people in northern New Jersey are exposed to angina medications and the anti-seizure and mood stabilizer carbamazepine. San Franciscans get sex hormones. Water officials did their best to dampen anxieties. The public “doesn’t know how to interpret the information,” the head of a California water supplier said. We don’t want to get people alarmed.
In the canoe, I brought up the story and asked Jerry Kauffman where all these drugs had come from. Was somebody dumping them illegally? Had there been an accidental spill? Nope, he said; the contamination was nationwide. The drugs came from inside us. It turns out that people’s bodies do not fully absorb medications, and what is not absorbed ends up being excreted and flushed down the toilet. Although municipal wastewater is treated before it is piped back into rivers or lakes, and drinking water is treated before it is piped into our homes, not all drug residues are—or can be—extracted by the treatment process.
When I asked him about all the drugs in our drinking water, Kauffman smiled and offered the usual jokes about what a glass full of antidepressants might mean for the national mood. But then his demeanor grew more serious.
“How concerned should we be? Even the Bush White House,” he noted, “issued a policy, asking people not to dump these things down the toilet, which is what we’d always been told to do. But these pharmaceuticals ought to be handled like all other chemicals. We should monitor for them and set standards. The drug companies should be regulated like any other industry that disposes of toxins. They make the stuff; they should have a hand in dealing with its disposal.”
The trouble is, treating these contaminants is not as easy as dumping chlorine into the water treatment tanks. Try as they might, engineers simply cannot invent a system capable of stripping every chemical compound out of contaminated river water. Water treatment plants, many of them built in the late nineteenth century, were designed to prevent outbreaks of things like typhoid and cholera. The engineers who built them never imagined they’d need to remove things like Viagra.
The federal government does not require testing for pharmaceuticals in drinking water, and has not set safety limits for them. Of the 62 major water providers contacted by the AP, only 28 tested for drugs. Among the 34 that don’t are Houston, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, Phoenix, Boston, and New York’s Department of Environmental Protection, which provides water to 9 million people.
This has become a troublesome fact, particularly as prescription drug use has exploded in recent years. Over the past five years, drug prescriptions in the United States have risen 12 percent, to 3.7 billion. Nonprescription drugs have remained steady at 3.7 billion. Veterinary drug prescriptions rose 8 percent, to $5.2 billion over the same period.
The industry response to the AP’s report was boilerplate. “Based on what we now know,” said Thomas White, a consultant for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, “I would say we find that there’s little or no risk from pharmaceuticals in the environment to human health.”
But recent medical studies have shown that even small amounts of medications can affect human embryonic kidney and blood cells, as well as breast cancer cells. In rivers, male fish are being feminized. Even earthworms, which inhabit the very baseline of the food chain, are contaminated. A year before the AP report, the director of environmental technology for Merck and Co. had told a conference that “there’s no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations that they’re at, could be causing impacts to human health or to aquatic organisms.”
The AP’s report was not the first time an alarm bell has gone off about the nation’s drinking water supplies. More than a dozen years before, the U.S. Geological Survey had surveyed 139 streams around the country and found toxins left over from things like pharmaceuticals and cosmetics in 80 percent of them. Beyond providing further evidence of broad chemical contamination, the study confirmed what many water experts had feared: that toxic chemicals not only don’t break down, they survive municipal wastewater treatment. And cities and states just have not been able to catch up to the new contaminants.
“This is purely a cost issue,” Kauffman told me. “Better technology is achievable. We can screen for these chemicals, we can set safety standards for them, and there is technology out there to treat it. The costs for reverse osmosis and ultraviolet treatment are coming down, which could allow us to stop using chlorine. We could screen for medicines just like we screen for zinc or anything else. It’s just a matter of cost.”
But Kauffman does not spend his days trying to convince lawmakers to build more expensive treatment plants. “This is not an engineering problem, it’s a social behavioral problem,” he said. “It used to be that all the emphasis was on the tail end. Most engineering programs are still locked into a ‘we can fix it with technology’ mind-set. Now we are trying to emphasize prevention. But it’s the big-picture behavior modification that I see as being the main challenge. We need to get people to identify with streams and change their behavior.
“The most cost effective way to protect a watershed is through source water protection. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York City do this very well—they get their water from watersheds that are 80 percent forested. Just increasing forest cover by 10 percent can dramatically increase the money you save on water treatment. It’s much less costly to plant a forest than it is to build a new treatment plant.”
Another enormous headache for water treatment experts like Jerry Kauffman is the runoff that pours off what are known as “impervious surfaces”—roads, parking lots, even the roofs of people’s houses. Americans have paved 4 million linear miles of public roads, and this number does not include the 43,480 square miles of parking lots, driveways, or other paved surfaces. Road salt, petrochemicals, degraded brake linings—all of it ends up in rivers, and then in water treatment plants. In Tysons Corner, Virginia, forty years’ worth of turbocharged suburban development has turned a sleepy section of farmland into an office and shopping district with 46 million square feet of buildings and 40 million square feet of parking lot. That’s a lot of cement—and a lot of storm water runoff, all of which ends up in the Chesapeake Bay. In and around Seattle, the volume of petrochemicals flowing from roads and parking lots into Puget Sound is twice the volume spilled by the Exxon Valdez. These chemicals don’t disappear, of course. They go right back into the food chain. People used to think of Puget Sound as a toilet, Washington’s governor said, but really it’s a bathtub.
In Delaware’s tidal streams, PCBs, the jelly-like compounds used to insulate electrical transformers, have been an especially serious problem, Kauffman noted, not because they were dumped there (as they were by General Electric in New York’s Hudson River) but because so many PCBs were used for things like the Amtrak rail lines. Time was, engineers built electrical substations right next to water-intake stations. “We wouldn’t do that again,” Kauffman said.
Someone has to pay to clean up all those toxins, and Kauffman and others think the money should come not from a state’s general fund but from the people who paved things over in the first place. “Why should a guy with a small row house pay the same as a guy with a ten-thousand-square-foot parking lot?” Kauffman asked.
As it is, people don’t think about water treatment, because they pay less for it than they do for cable television. Once people have to fork over more, the theory goes, they’ll start to pay more attention. Kind of like driving a smaller car when gasoline goes to $4 a gallon.
Here’s how it would work: Let’s say you build a massive parking lot next to a shopping mall. You no longer get to watch the water flow down into storm drains and not think about it anymore. Same with the driveway at your house. On the other hand, if you can figure out a way to keep water on your own property—rain barrels hooked up to your downspouts, rain gardens designed into your lawns—you would get a tax credit. The setup would be similar to people installing solar panels on their roofs and selling electricity back into the grid. You take care of your own place, in other words, and you benefit. And by taking care of your own place, you remove your part of the burden from the larger system as a whole. Thought of this way, backyards could function not just as lawns but as water purifiers: the rain that falls on your yard filters through your gardens and your soil, and thus doesn’t flow off into the neighborhood’s storm sewer, where it doesn’t flow into a river, where it doesn’t need massively expensive water treatment plants. Now, to be sure, this is—dare I say it?—something of a pipe dream, but you get the picture. The city of Philadelphia began charging more for storm water treatment in 2010; it has also pledged to spend $1.6 billion over twenty years to install rain gardens, build porous sidewalks, and plant thousands of trees. Where once businesses got two bills (one for water and one for sewer), now they will get three.
The trouble is, this sort of thinking is new enough to seem threatening. Government requests that farmers or home owners plant tree buffers or rain gardens can seem like “land taking.” And when it comes to raising taxes, it can be a tough sell to get voters to make the connection between their tap water and their lawns—let alone the parking lot at the shopping mall. “Right through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, rivers were seen as pipes providing water and for treating waste,” Kauffman said. “We did everything we could to get storm water out of sight, so it could stay out of mind.”
The day was getting late. As Kauffman and I pulled our canoe out of the water, a few miles upstream from the city of Wilmington, I noticed a pair of Baltimore orioles zipping through the trees downstream. I tried to decide whether or not this was an omen. Orioles are no longer a common site in the region. Was the fact that a pair had taken up residence here a good sign? The water beneath our boats—the baseline for everything going into the orioles’ systems, and our own—was not exactly pristine, but there was a nice forest buffer, just the way Jerry Kauffman likes it.
Yet even here, by drinking water standards, the Brandywine was already very, very dirty. A few miles downriver, and things would get considerably less hospitable. Just south of where Jerry Kauffman and I got out of our canoe, the Brandywine becomes, officially, a city river, providing millions of gallons of drinking water a day to the people of Wilmington and Chester County, Pennsylvania.
To return our boats to the rental company, we drove back through the miles of strip malls to the giant parking lot and the outfitter where we had rented out boats. The whole way back, I noticed, there was very little soil visible anywhere, let alone trees. All of these acres of pavement, one day soon, would get rained on and—like mall parking lots across the United States—shed their contaminants downhill, straight into the river. And from there, it would not be long before the water came straight through the tap.
Exploring the Brandywine upstream is one thing, Jerry Kauffman told me, but getting to know it downstream is quite another. You’ve seen the river sliding by the horse farms. Now you need to see it in the city’s bowels.
The Brandywine rolls into Wilmington at a rate of about 300 million gallons a day. As it moves through the city, about 10 million gallons a day are diverted into an open-air, troughlike “raceway,” then channeled into a big pipe leading directly into the Brandywine Filter Plant. The plant is old; it was designed around the time Frederick Law Olmstead designed the city’s Brandywine Park, in the late nineteenth century. And like all urban treatment plants, it did what it was initially designed to do: prevent outbreaks of typhoid and cholera by removing human and animal waste from the city’s drinking water. The trouble now, of course, is that typhoid and cholera have given way to far more subtle challenges.
Today, getting the Brandywine clean enough to drink is Matthew Miller’s job. Miller, who serves as Wilmington’s water quality manager, is the city’s last line of defense. He is the man in charge of keeping everything the Brandywine has been collecting from getting into people’s bodies. It’s a big job.
Miller met Jerry Kauffman and me outside the gates of the Brandywine Filter Plant.
Again, it’s important to understand that even before the Brandywine water enters the Wilmington treatment system, more than 13 million gallons a day have already been tainted by treated wastewater from plants in Downington, Coatesville, and West Chester, Pennsylvania. If a heavy rain causes the Coatesville plant to overflow with raw sewage, all that is here, too. So are all the raw animal wastes and all the pesticides from Pennsylvania and Delaware farms—some 80 percent of Delaware’s rivers are contaminated with the agricultural pesticide atrazine alone—and all the runoff from the endless shopping strips in northern Delaware, and all the Viagra and birth control hormones and everything else that has not been absorbed by the good citizens of the region.
“We’re the last people in the watershed,” Miller says. “We do a pretty good job with what we have.”
(As he was speaking, I remembered visiting villages in Indonesia in which the community elders live at the downstream end of a series of rice paddies. If the people controlling the upstream paddies don’t release enough water, the downstream paddies fail. Since no one wants to upset the elders, the water keeps flowing. I wondered how differently things in Delaware would look if the DuPont family estates had been built downstream of the DuPont chemical plants, rather than vice versa.)
This is a water treatment plant, not a wastewater treatment plant, and even at the level of employee emotions, this makes a big difference. Wastewater is treated only for “aquatic and recreational” purposes, Miller says. “If you mess up wastewater, you kill a few fish,” he says. “Here, if you mess up, you kill a few people.”
So. Here you are, Matthew Miller, worrying about how you keep all the myriad contaminants that pour off our yards and roads and industries and farms from getting into our drinking water. How do you do it? You start by acknowledging that nothing, not chemistry or physics or biology, can return this soup to the pure form it took when it fell from the sky. Remember all the algae in the water, formed because of all the nitrogen-rich fertilizer draining off people’s lawns? You try to get that out by dumping in powdered carbon. The algae sticks to the carbon, as do a number of toxic chemicals. (In Tennessee they use carbon to purify their whiskey, Kauffman says; in Wilmington they use it to purify their Brandywine.)
What about all those nasty chemicals and heavy metals, like PCBs and mercury? You try to get them out by dumping in liquid “ferric” (a solution containing iron), which binds to the toxins and settles out as a sludge. The sludge gets dumped into a sewer, goes through a wastewater treatment plant, and is then combined with fly ash left over from coal-fired power plants and dumped into a landfill. Not that it stays there; nature being nature, the sludge eventually, inevitably, seeps out of the landfill as a “leachate,” and reenters the watershed. And around and around it goes.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Because all that ferric makes the water acidic, Miller and his crew have to add lime to get the pH back up to 6.5 or 6.6. So far, river water plus carbon plus ferric plus lime. And we’re just getting started.
The inside of the Brandywine treatment plant reminded me of nothing so much as a fifteenth-century Hungarian bathhouse. In both places, you enter a door, go down some stairs, and find yourself in unimaginably huge underground caverns. At the treatment plant—which is only one century old, not six—what you find first is a cement floor, about eighty yards by twenty yards, with overhead skylights, built over an enormous underground tank. If you peer through a rectangular hole beneath your feet, you can see what Wilmington’s drinking water looks like at an early stage of treatment. It looks like … well, it looks like crap. I mean this literally. It’s not, of course—the numberless clumps of brown sediment suspended in the water are actually bits of coffee-colored “flocc,” as the chunks of contaminants bound to the ferric are known. This is exactly what Matthew Miller, dipping in a clear plastic ladle attached to a four-foot pole, likes to see.
“This is good,” he said. “This is very good.”
“That’s your drinking water,” Jerry Kauffman said.
What was happening beneath our feet is called “flocculation.” The ferric-loaded water moves over a series of baffles, which screen out some of the flocc. The water is then channeled into an enormous cavern, divided into ten lanes like a giant indoor swimming pool. These are the sedimentation basins, where the flocculated sediment settles out as “mixed liquor.” With all the big chunks out, the water is treated with chlorine, and then more lime, then sodium fluorosilicate, the fluoride added to protect your teeth. This last addition, for some reason, struck me as slightly unnerving, perhaps because the bags of fluorosilicate stacked in a storage room were marked not only with the word TOXIC but with a skull and crossbones. Granted, this is a question of quantity, not just toxicity. But still …
Fluoride has been added to municipal water supplies since 1945—making it one more chemical additive introduced to our bodies since World War II. More than 160 million Americans drink water that is treated with fluoride, and perhaps not surprisingly, the practice of adding fluoride to drinking water has come under intense scrutiny over the years. Though fluoride does occur naturally, it has also been used as a rat poison; hydrogen fluoride is regulated as a hazardous toxin in chemical plants. Employees at the EPA have asked Congress to take a closer look at some of the ingredients of the fluoride added to water, which often includes waste products from the fertilizer industry, especially since federal agencies are “actively advocating that each man, woman and child drink, eat and bathe in these chemicals.”
In 2001, the CDC concluded that adding fluoride to water saved less than one decayed tooth per person. Some dental experts suggest that fluoride is best applied with toothpaste, rather than through the bloodstream. In Europe, where the drop in tooth decay has paralleled that in the United States, seventeen of twenty-one countries have either refused or discontinued fluoridation.
After the fluoride, zinc orthophosphate is added as a corrosion inhibitor, which is thought to create a film inside the city’s water pipes that prevents calcium and magnesium from rusting, coating, or clogging the pipes. (It turns out that most of customers’ complaints about the city’s water are about the discoloration caused by rusting pipes.)
Then comes what Jerry Kauffman calls “the nasty stuff,” liquid sodium hypochlorite. After September 11, 2001, the city upped the dosage to assuage anxieties about someone dumping toxins in the water supply. (Not that chlorine is without its problems. Miller recently fielded a call from a woman who complained that chlorine levels had gotten intolerably high. “The water is burning me,” she said. But if you’re Matt Miller, what are you going to do?)
After chlorination, the water is pushed outside, to open-air concrete “settling tanks,” whose twenty-four square chambers reminded me, for some reason, of a catfish farm. It was at this point that the whole process of municipal water treatment finally struck me as absurd. Not only are the outdoor tanks literally crumbling—I saw rusty rebar sticking up from between decaying dividers—they are bombarded by what Miller delicately called “bird crap.”
The tanks “are open to all the birds who would like to relieve themselves into them,” Miller said. “That’s a disadvantage. It’s the same stuff we tried to take out in the first place.” To fend the birds off, the city had hung a single plastic owl from a chain.
From the catfish ponds, the water is moved back inside. In a room equipped like a high school science lab, nozzles from hoses attached to each stage of the treatment process pour into Big Gulp cups from 7-Eleven. The water is tested every couple of hours for everything from turbidity (cloudiness) and pH to chlorine and fluoride, to make sure fluctuations in things like rainfall and runoff don’t throw off the numbers. Visually, the difference between the “raw” river water and the final “finished stage” was striking: what typically comes in at 7.26 turbidity units has now settled out to below .3, and often as low as .005.
The water is then moved into another cavernous, beautifully tiled room. It looks like your kitchen might look, if it was equipped with an Olympic-sized pool. This is where the water goes through final chlorination and filtration, seeping through beds of sand and into a clear well. From there, it’s off to the customers.
The story doesn’t end here, of course. The water still has to get to your tap, often through pipes that were manufactured a long time ago. Some were made with lead solder. In the Maine body burden study, people’s lead contamination came not just from old lead paint but from lead solder used on water pipes. The presence of lead in creaky municipal water systems is an especially vexing problem in older cities like Baltimore, which still relies heavily on an ancient water distribution system, from the city’s main trunk lines to the pipes inside older homes. And as with other contaminants, running water through a municipal treatment plant does not remove all the lead. Neither does “purging” the water run from your tap first thing in the morning, since this sheds only the water touching the pipes closest to the tap itself, and not the water deeper in the system, where it is at least as likely to be contaminated. Besides, even flushing for fifteen minutes is only temporary, since lead levels rise again after just fifteen to thirty minutes once the tap has been turned off.
Other pipes were lined with toxic chemicals. (In the 1960s, the Johns Manville corporation installed a thousand miles of cement water pipes in New England, in cities like Providence, Rhode Island, and in the fast-growing villages on Cape Cod. The pipes came with a special feature: a plastic lining meant to improve the taste of drinking water, applied with a solvent called tetrachloroethylene, more commonly referred to as perchloroethylene (PCE), or “perc.” Known even at the time as a “suspected human carcinogen,” perc was still not regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act. Studies would later reveal elevated rates of cancer mortality on the Upper Cape during the years the pipes were in place. In some EPA studies, more than a quarter of groundwater and nearly 40 percent of surface water sources had some degree of PCE contamination, and the compound still shows up in parts of New Jersey, New York, Arizona, and Massachusetts.)
So, I asked Kauffman, given the ignorance about rivers and the difficulty of keeping municipal water sources clean and the ancient infrastructure of most American cities, should people just throw in the towel and drink bottled water?
Since some bottlers simply repackage municipal tap water, people who buy “filtered” water in plastic bottles may simply be paying for what they can get for free. Regulations for bottled water don’t require disinfection for pathogens like cryptosporidium or giardia. (In New York City, city officials recently spent $700,000 to convince residents that their water, which is piped in from the Catskills and considered some of the best drinking water in the country, is worth drinking.)
And given what we know about the chemicals that leach out of plastic bottles—phthalates if the bottle is crinkly, bisphenol A if the bottle is stiff—drinking from a bottle is hardly a comfort. To say nothing of the added environmental cost, in both the oil-based manufacture and the imperfect disposal, of the plastic bottles left over once the water has been consumed. By some estimates, 1.5 million tons of petrochemicals are used to make water bottles. Every year.
“Sales of bottled water are driven by anxiety,” he said. “But bottled water is even less regulated than tap water. There is a list of ingredients on all other processed foods and drinks, but there are no ingredients listed on bottled water. In my opinion, if this stuff is sold as a consumer product, it should be monitored like any other food product.”
In Jerry Kauffman’s office, the staff follows a policy called “drinking the water”—kind of like “walking the walk.” The office used to have bottled water delivered, but Kauffman canceled the contract. Some people were upset by this, but Kauffman decided that drinking what came out of the tap would keep his team focused on what goes into the tap.
For the home owner, Kauffman recommends taking simple steps, like using a good end-of-tap filter. Filters will help remove some of the metallic odors and tastes from the water, along with some synthetic chemicals that may have slipped through municipal water treatment.
But Kauffman is also quick and consistent with his recommendation that people become more aware of the way their behaviors affect their watersheds. Individual home owners, for example, can use fewer pesticides on their lawns or, better yet, replace their lawns with native trees and plants. Farmers can plant trees along stream banks to keep agricultural waste from flowing into creeks. Good landscaping and farming practices, Kauffman said, can lower the amount of nitrogen in streams from 500 parts per million to 1 part per million, and at very low cost. He recommends the proper disposal of pharmaceutical drugs, and much more awareness about the harm pavement does to river systems. Cities can be more vigilant as well. The city of Wilmington, he noted, is working to cover over the open-air tanks at its water treatment plant; has constructed huge storage tanks under the city parks to store sewage overflows during storms; and is paying Amish farmers upstream to fence their cows away from streams and reforest the floodplains.
Everything we do is connected, one way or another, to water, and ultimately our bodies will be only as healthy as our drinking water supply. “In our field, we believe people will do more to protect their water if they identify more with their drinking water sources, if they are more connected to the rivers and bays that surround them,” Kauffman told me. “You know what Ben Franklin said: ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ ”