Today, 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 1.6 million children die each year from diseases caused by poor sanitation—nearly all of them in the developing world. Because the issue of safe drinking water is most dire in developing countries, there is a perception in affluent nations that the difficulty is unique to nations experiencing poverty. The problem of obtaining clean drinking water is, for the rest of us, out of sight and out of mind.

The developed world is not, however, immune from the challenge of maintaining a safe water supply. In his new book, The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink, Dr. Robert Morris, an environmental epidemiologist, begins with a historical account of the efforts to stop the waterborne disease cholera, and then addresses modern challenges in the provision of potable water—challenges that apply to affluent, developed nations. By urging us to stop taking clean water for granted and by rattling our own complacency, The Blue Death indirectly reminds us of the struggles confronting the rest of the world.

American Outbreak
The worst outbreak of waterborne illness in U.S. history occurred not in the nineteenth century but, rather, in 1993 in Milwaukee. The pathogen, cryptosporidium, was not regularly checked for by treatment plants and proved difficult to find. Nonetheless, the high level of the bacteria in the water supply coincided with increases in the turbidity, or cloudiness, of the water—a sign that the treatment process was not working as well as usual. Those signs were ignored. That led to 400,000 people falling ill, 4,000 being hospitalized, and over 100 dying from illness.

The most frightening fact regarding the whole affair was that the turbidity levels during the outbreak were completely within federal limits. In the aftermath, it took five years for the government to lower the limit on turbidity. The regulations requiring plants to actually test for the pathogen itself were not scheduled to take effect until 2002 and did not actually begin until 2005—twelve years after the outbreak that prompted the need for such testing.

The message, Morris emphasizes, is the need for external oversight. Current oversight systems in the U.S. function poorly: the Clean Water Act regulates pollutants going into lakes, and Safe Drinking Water Act controls contaminants in potable water. However, each has separate bureaucracies and separate laws; the lack of coordination makes for an ineffective system riddled with redundancies and loopholes.

Pipeline Vulnerabilities
Environmental Protection Agency procedures only regulate water at the stage in which it leaves treatment plants, not in the pipelines that take the water to households. Morris notes that pipes in many American cities are often more than a century old and that “Periodically, utility workers maintaining these pipe networks even unearth sections of wooden pipe… By 2020 we will need to replace 100,000 miles ach year.”

In addition to being unregulated, old, and decrepit, those pipelines are also vulnerable to terrorist attack. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, the director of the EPA, Christine Todd Whitman, suggested that only massive quantities of chemicals (on the magnitude of multiple truckloads) would pose a serious threat to the water supply. However, that statement was based on an assumption that attacks would occur on large storage reservoirs in which the poisons would be diluted to impotency—not downstream in unguarded pipelines where they would remain dangerous. The threat is not hypothetical; in 2002, Italian police thwarted an attempt by Moroccan terrorists to poison Rome’s water supply with four kilograms of cyanide.

Lessons Learned
We should remember that however terrifying Morris’ accounts may seem—his warnings of our vulnerability to an outbreak of a waterborne disease, or to human error or terrorist attack—our worst-case scenarios mirror what over a billion people face daily. Access to clean water anywhere—from Canada to the Congo—requires constant vigilance. By highlighting the failures of even wealthy nations to secure a safe water supply, Morris shows that the problem is more than just one of obtaining sufficient resources. Safe drinking water can come only from the unglamorous work of local diligence—from the careful application of regulations, incentives, and best practices to the management of the water supply, day after day.¨ ]]>http://hprsite.squarespace.com/the-politics-safe-water-112007/rss-comments-entry-1374291.xml