Can America Maintain Clean Drinking Water?

According to a recent article in the National Geographic there is concern that America’s drinking water is in jeopardy.

A chemical spill that left 300,000 residents of Charleston, West Virginia, without tap water is raising new concerns about the ability of the United States to maintain its high quality of drinking water.

While the U.S. has one of the safest water supplies in the world, experts say the Charleston contamination with a coal-washing chemical shows how quickly the trust that most Americans place in their drinking water can be shattered.

“We often don’t think about where our water comes from,” said Steve Fleischli, director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Water Program in Los Angeles. “Does it come from a nearby river or a lake, intermittent streams, isolated wetlands, or an aquifer? Yes, you may have a water treatment plant, but if your water source is not protected, people face a real risk.”

In Charleston on January 9, about 10,000 gallons of a little-known and unregulated chemical called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) leaked from an aboveground storage tank into the Elk River. The amount of the chemical overwhelmed the carbon filtration system in the West Virginia American Water treatment plant about a mile downstream. Within a week, more than 400 people were treated at hospitals for rashes, nausea, vomiting, and other symptoms.

Read National Geographic Story