[Water_news] 4. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATER QUALITY - 9/25/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

September 25, 2007

 

4. Water Quality

 

RECYCLING WATER:

Making sewage water good to drink; VALLEY DISTRICT, SAN JOSE LOOK TO ENSURE ADEQUATE FUTURE SUPPLY - San Jose Mercury News

 

FLUORIDE IN DRINKING WATER:

The Orange Grove: Fluoride nothing to smile about; Children's teeth can be harmed by the cavity-fighting water additive - Orange County Register

 

 

RECYCLING WATER:

Making sewage water good to drink; VALLEY DISTRICT, SAN JOSE LOOK TO ENSURE ADEQUATE FUTURE SUPPLY

San Jose Mercury News – 9/25/07

By Paul Rogers, staff writer

 

The Santa Clara Valley Water District and the city of San Jose are beginning talks on a bold new strategy to boost water supplies: making sewage water clean enough to drink.

 

If the public backs the plan, one day millions of gallons of the purified water could be pumped into streams and groundwater aquifers across Santa Clara County and mixed with existing drinking water supplies.

 

The county now provides half of its drinking water from wells that pump water from those aquifers. The other half comes from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

 

"This is a homegrown resource. It is the most reliable supply you can have," said Eric Rosenblum, division manager for San Jose's South Bay Water Recycling Project.

 

"It is much less dependent on the weather than other sources. It is a great new tool to meet water needs."

 

The potentially controversial idea, still in the early stages, will be discussed this morning at the water district's weekly board meeting in San Jose. A final, detailed proposal isn't expected until next year.

 

Experts note that the technology exists to take sewage water and purify it to levels that meet California drinking water standards using an array of techniques such as reverse osmosis, microfiltration and ultraviolet light.

 

But in several areas around California - from San Diego to Pleasanton - attempts at blending purified wastewater with drinking water aquifers have been dropped after public outcry from critics who call the projects "toilet-to-tap."

 

But some water districts have already moved ahead with projects.

 

The Orange County Water District will christen a new $480 million project in November to produce up to 70 million gallons of recycled water a day from treated sewage. It will be used to recharge drinking water aquifers that serve Anaheim, Huntington Beach and other cities.

 

The project - the largest of its kind in the United States - came after nine years of public hearings and scientific studies. It won permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Public Health.

 

Cautious approach

 

Keith Whitman, water supply manager for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, promised that the district will take a similarly cautious approach.

 

"What we don't want to end up with is what's happened in other areas where you have fear and politics cause a backlash," he said.

 

Because California's population is expected to grow from the current 37 million to more than 52 million by 2030, the state Department of Water Resources recommended four years ago that California triple its use of recycled water, now about 500,000 acre-feet a year, by 2030.

 

Nearly all the recycled water in the state, however, goes for non-potable uses such as irrigating crops, cooling power plants, and watering golf courses, cemeteries and highway landscaping.

 

San Jose has used it in those ways for a decade.

 

In 1997, the city began delivering recycled wastewater across the county through purple pipes from its sewage treatment plant in Alviso. The project now has 540 customers and provides about 10,000 acre-feet of water a year - nearly 3 percent of total county demand. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or the amount of water a family of five uses in a year.

 

Customers for recycled water include San Jose Municipal Golf Course, Metcalf Energy Plant in South San Jose, Oak Hill Cemetery and dozens of schools and parks.

 

The city sells the water at a discounted rate. Originally, the $225 million project was built after state water regulators ordered the city to stop pumping so much treated fresh water into San Francisco Bay, where it was diluting brackish marshes and changing the bay's ecology.

 

But now, the city and the water district see the project as a potentially significant source of drinking water.

 

Today, the water district board will vote whether to allow its staff to negotiate with the city to expand the use of recycled water. If approved, as expected, the final agreement would come next year.

 

No project would be built without public hearings, an environmental impact statement, approval from the state Department of Public Health, the Regional Water Quality Control Board and the San Jose City Council.

 

In early feasibility studies, the water district has envisioned constructing a $52 million advanced treatment plant. It would be located in Alviso next to the city's wastewater treatment plant and produce the same amount of recycled water now produced by the plant, about 10 million gallons a day, but at a higher quality. It would remove salts that, if left untreated, would eventually build up in irrigation water, causing grass to brown and harming redwoods and other trees in clay soil.

 

Could open by 2012

 

Whitman said construction could begin on the plant by 2010 and open by 2012.

 

After that, if the city and district want to blend its recycled water with groundwater aquifers, they would build one or more "satellite plants" in places like Coyote Valley and further treat the water to drinking water standards.

 

The state Department of Public Health requires any recycled water used on food crops, school fields or residential irrigation to be treated to tertiary standards - the highest level of sewage treatment, and disinfected with chlorine. San Jose's now meets that standard.

 

But the health department does not have uniform guidelines for pumping it into drinking water aquifers. New rules the department is drafting would require it to meet drinking water standards.

 

Environmentalists are generally supportive.

 

"Recycled water is going to be a critical component of California's water future," said Linda Sheehan, executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance, in Fremont. "It has to be, because of population growth and because climate change is going to reduce the amount of snowpack in the Sierra."

 

Sheehan said, however, that the water must be rigorously tested not only for traditional contaminants such as bacteria but also for minute levels of pharmaceuticals, hormones and other contaminants that can get through sewage treatment plants unfiltered.

 

The largest hurdle if the project is to go forward is the "yuck factor." Even if the science is sound, how do you persuade people that it is OK to drink toilet water?

 

In Sonoma County, some vintners have been fighting a proposal this summer to use recycled water from Santa Rosa to irrigate wine grapes.

 

"I am worried that there is a huge backlash on recycled water on our grapes," Katie Murphy, vice-president of the Alexander Valley Association, told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in May. "I fear negative publicity - and that could linger over our wine industry for a long time."

 

In Orange County, water officials held hundreds of public meetings with hospitals, civic groups, religious leaders and others.

 

They noted that astronauts have drunk recycled water for years - and that anyone drawing water from a river is drinking the recycled wastewater of cities upstream, as Los Angeles does with Las Vegas, and Memphis with St. Louis.

 

"We are very concerned about public opinion," said San Jose's Rosenblum. "People in Silicon Valley value innovation and technology, but they also value a high quality environment and a reliable source of water. So to the extent that using recycled water for potable purposes helps achieve those goals, I think the people in our area will be open to its use." #

http://www.mercurynews.com/healthandscience/ci_6991754

 

 

FLUORIDE IN DRINKING WATER:

The Orange Grove: Fluoride nothing to smile about; Children's teeth can be harmed by the cavity-fighting water additive

Orange County Register – 9/25/07

By Robert Schecter

 

On Sept. 21, a front-page article in the Register reported on the imminent fluoridation of much of Orange County's water supply. The headline read "For Orange County water customers, a reason to … smile."

 

The story explained that the Metropolitan Water District in November will begin adding fluoride to its system, which supplies some or all of the water to most of Orange County's local water providers.

 

Is fluoridation a reason to smile? After all, most people know of fluoride only as something that's put in toothpaste and water to prevent cavities. Now that it's going to be added to our children's drinking water shouldn't we know exactly what is it and where it comes from?

 

Fluorine is an element found in the Earth's crust in minerals such as apatite and cryolite. Apatite, used in the manufacture of phosphate fertilizers, is the primary source of the fluoride used in water fluoridation programs. The Department of Health and Human Services states that in the manufacture of phosphate fertilizer, fluorides are released as toxic pollutants.

 

That is, unless these toxic pollutants are recovered and dumped into our drinking water.

 

Additionally, fluoride is widely used as an insecticide – killing bugs while at the same time giving them great teeth. Fluoride is, in fact, so toxic that your tube of toothpaste carries a warning. "If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or contact a poison control center right away."

 

Fluoride and fluoridation are responsible for a condition called dental fluorosis, which, in very mild cases, causes white and yellow blotches on children's developing teeth. The condition is permanent and only can be masked, by expensive cosmetic surgery. Fluorosis is on the rise, afflicting 20 percent to 75 percent of children living in areas with fluoridated water.

 

Some dentists often blame swallowed toothpaste for the problem because it allows them to use the excuse of "fluoride is only a problem when used improperly," but current levels of dietary fluoride are more than enough to cause the condition without any help from toothpaste.

 

Some dentists assure us the discoloration affecting our children's teeth is "only cosmetic" and that the condition is mild or very mild – which is meaningless when one considers that moderate-to-severe cases of fluorosis, caused by water containing naturally high levels of fluoride, leave sufferers with crumbling, dark brown teeth.

 

The problem has gotten so bad that the American Dental Association, by far fluoride's biggest supporter, recently had to issue a warning about allowing babies to drink fluoridated tap water because of the fluorosis risk. Think about that. Due to the actions of the government and dental authorities it is unsafe for our babies to drink their own tap water.

 

But don't we have to take a risk? After all, we're told, "Most dentists agree that adding fluoride drastically reduced tooth decay."

 

 Perhaps. If they were right, but the evidence supporting the efficacy of fluoride is exceedingly questionable.

 

For example, articles appearing in journals such as Nature and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine have recognized fluoride was not responsible for the large drop in tooth decay that began in the mid-20th century. Furthermore, a report prepared for the Ontario, Canada, Ministry of Health reported that today the effects of fluoridation are often both statistically and clinically insignificant. Additionally, past studies showing fluoride to be an effective cavity fighter have been roundly criticized. A 1986 article in the journal Nature discussed well-known flaws in early studies examining fluoride's efficacy and concluded they were primitive and lacked quantitative and statistical methods.

 

Later studies, done in the 1940s, and facilitating widespread fluoridation contained so many methodological flaws that Sutton, in 1959, was able to write an entire book about those flaws. Then in 2000 the British Medical Journal published a study by McDonagh entitled "Systematic Review of Water Fluoridation," which examined 214 studies involving fluoridation and found none has been of good quality.

 

For me and for Orange County's children, fluoridation, seen in its true light and not through rose-colored glasses, is not a reason to smile but, rather, a reason to cry. #

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/fluoride-water-fluoridation-1851626-children-used

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