NPR's recent story "Chlorine Substitutes in Water May Have Risks" is a little upsetting. It would be a lot more upsetting, though, if I lived in one of the many states where water treatment plants have started using Chloramine (Chlorine + ammonia) as primary water disinfectant in response to recent EPA guidelines. Apparently Chlorine (what has been predominantly used in the past) actually produces small levels of carcinogenic byproducts. Cancer is a bad thing, so the EPA recently advocated the use of Chloramine. Good, right? Nope.
In Washington D.C. health officials have discovered that Chloramine not only produces nitrasomes, a carcinogen much more harmful than the after-effects of Chlorine, but fails to prevent lead from leaching into the local water supply. "Unheard-of" lead levels started to appear in D.C. water districts and in D.C. children. Apparently, problems with Chloramine may manifest differently or not at all across the country, depending on the reactions of individual water systems, and many companies will be reticent to make the high-cost switch back to Chlorine. That's a big, fat, expensive question mark.
Whether it's because Utah is slow on the uptake, dislikes the EPA in general or just has really good judgment, we're still using chlorine. Is that all good? According to NPR, "There are still good reasons for many water systems to move away from chlorine...but [Sedlak] says local authorities need to remember that a new disinfectant may bring its own problems." If Utah does decide to make a change, hopefully we'll learn from the mistakes of our neighbors. More importantly, I hope that US citizens will become AWARE of environmental changes in progress and not just react to them after the fact.
