Devra Davis
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 The bailer had been dissolved by the groundwater. The groundwater eventually dissolved the well itself."
"What could have eaten through thick plastic pipes like that?" I asked.
He answered, "Well, I can't be sure. Pretty strong acids must have been there. We also know that benzene dissolves plastics. But we will never know. Every time we would come in to sample a spot, the guys from the plant would know we were coming and would tell us where to look."
"What happened then?" I asked. "That must have been a little unnerving."
He sighed and nodded. "Yep. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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 The reasoning was thus: the area was restricted from public use, and the localized contaminated groundwater did not affect public drinking-water supplies since drinking water in the area came from public water storage sources. Cleaning it up was not a priority.
A decade later, in 1995, the same year that LaShekia Chat-man, who lived amid this constellation of contaminated locales, was diagnosed with lupus, the DEC finally began full remediation at the East Delavan site two blocks away from her home. Much of the TCE- and PCB-contaminated soil was turned up and excavated from the facility. |
Mark Lynas
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 Battles have broken out between different states: in August 2005 protesters in Salt Lake City took to the streets to oppose a plan by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to pump groundwater through 500 miles of pipes south to Las Vegas.
The San Joaquin River, its waters diverted to feed the fertile fields of California's productive Central Valley, also mostly fails to reach the sea down its old natural river bed. As an Associated Press reporter put it: 'Where spawning Chinook salmon once ran thick, lizards and tumbleweed inhabit a riverbed that often goes for years without water. |
Devra Davis
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| The groundwater eventually dissolved the well itself."
"What could have eaten through thick plastic pipes like that?" I asked.
He answered, "Well, I can't be sure. Pretty strong acids must have been there. We also know that benzene dissolves plastics. But we will never know. Every time we would come in to sample a spot, the guys from the plant would know we were coming and would tell us where to look."
"What happened then?" I asked. "That must have been a little unnerving."
He sighed and nodded. "Yep. Well, the next day we went out to drill new wells, right where our old one had dissolved. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It can easily leach into groundwater supplies.)
According to www.lightbulbrecycling.com, each year an estimated 600 million fluorescent lamps are disposed of in U.S. landfills, amounting to 30,000 pounds of mercury waste. Astonishingly, that's almost half the amount of mercury emitted into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants each year. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 Groundwater and Human Health. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has estimated that a nationwide initiative to add calcium and magnesium to soft water (low magnesium) might reduce the annual cardiovascular death rate by 150,000 people in the United States alone.
Jean Durlach, M.D., president of the International Society for the Development of Magnesium Research, has also noted that heart disease is less prevalent in areas where the water has a high magnesium content.
Studies also show that a high magnesium intake is associated with lower blood pressure. |
by Michael Murray, N.D. and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D.
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| Residues from toxic chemicals used in conventional farming methods remain in the soil and leach into groundwater. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, pesticides, some known to be carcinogens, now pollute the groundwater—the primary source of drinking water—in thirty-eight states, affecting more than half the country's population. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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| For ten years water laced with TCE has been leaching into the groundwater from those nearby landfills and ending up in Eno Road residents' coffee cups and water glasses.
There are many, many other Eno Roads. In 2002, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and its partners prepared public-health assessment documents for 122 toxic waste sites. Of those sites, 28.5 percent were found to be leaching contaminants into the community, posing a public health hazard. In another 2002 assessment, ATSDR estimated that more than 1. |
| Noshing at the top of the food chain, we all receive a concentrated level of the environmental chemicals that persist in the air, water, and ground—because these contaminants have been ingested by all the animals that feed underneath us at each step, all the way down to the plants that grow in soil nourished by groundwater that has been steeped in industrial runoff before being eaten by the cow in the field. |
Devra Davis
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| I was concerned about unmitigated discharge of pollutants in the air and in the groundwater.
"Yet the decision is hard, because Clairton was a very important job center. They are balancing, do we shut this plant down because it's the worst environmental site in the hemisphere? I can tell you this: I've been to thirty or forty superfund sites and Clairton was the worst."
"Why did you stop working there?" I asked.
"I couldn't take it anymore. I got to the point that I couldn't smell anything anymore. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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| PCBs were found in both soil and groundwater in a high-enough concentration to qualify by state definition as a hazardous waste site. But that was the lesser menace. A heavy concentration of lead ash intermingled with the soil sat several inches thick across the 3.32-acre site. The lead existed at a shockingly high concentration. |
| Rains caused TCE-laden runoff to course into the stream and railroad spur area, and TCE and other VOCs were continuing to leach slowly into the area groundwater from the facility's chemical spillage. Full remediation of the soil would be a huge and costly challenge.
Little was done in the 1980s to address the problem. At that time, only the four below-ground tanks of degreasing solvents, fuels, and unknown chemicals were emptied. |
Devra Davis
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| A few years later, for my first real job as an engineering pro I returned to the site as a groundwater consultant. That's when I found out that what left the plant made problems even a half mile away. There's a water treatment plant down the river. The intake filters got clogged up with toxic materials from Clairton; they couldn't just be taken to a landfill. They needed to go into an official hazardous waste disposal site, with all sorts of added costs and protections. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 Instead of eliminating what was essentially a cyclical problem, securitization has created an overflowing mess that will contaminate the financial groundwater for years to come.
The process of converting illiquid obligations and risks into marketable securities played a supporting role in the transformation of the financial services industry and will help exacerbate the damage caused by plunging markets. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 During seed production," says Joe Cummins, "barnase may be present in dust and debris from the crop and surface along with groundwater may be contaminated with the toxin. Humans or animals breathing the plant material may experience severe toxicity."71 The toxin might also theoretically have effects on offspring (by transmission through the placenta and via damage to the parents' sex cells), as well as effects via milk or meat from animals exposed to barnase, and honey from bees in contact with the pollen may also be toxic. |
Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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 Toxic materials seep into the groundwater, migrating out across many miles of aquifer. The same materials spread out by othet routes, rippling through waves of human activity, from primary manufacture through commercial distribution.
The human advancements that introduce such risks into our environment need not be sophisticated; it is often a small change in a relatively simple technology that carries great potential for harm, even through the everyday products that surround us. In the coming chapters, I cover the histories of some of these substances. |
Devra Davis
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| When they were digging the foundation for the new coke ovens, the groundwater filled right in to the holes."
"How could this happen?" I asked.
"All the water in the ground there," he explained, "feeds right into the river. What runs below the ground right by the plant is actually an underground plume of water just a little higher than the surface of the river. Naturally it all flows downhill, taking whatever is with it into the Monongahela River.
"We were digging to lay the foundation for the new ovens, but strange things kept happening. |
Mark Lynas
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| Although some of this extra water will be vital to top up reservoirs sucked dangerously low during hot summers, too much of it will come in heavy bursts, running quickly off the land and streets rather than soaking more gently into the soil to recharge groundwater supplies. Communities will struggle to cope as summer drought gives way to winter downpours, sending floods surging through towns and villages as rivers burst their banks. |
| Salt water will creep up the stricken river systems, poisoning groundwater supplies. Higher temperatures mean greater evaporation, further drying out vegetation and soils, and leading to huge losses from dwindling reservoirs stored behind dams.
At the very least, these changes mean big disruptions in everyday life for the average Australian, major economic losses and strict rationing of water. At worst, they may lead to population movements out of areas with too little water, and towards Tasmania and the northern tropical region where rainfall remains more reliable. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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| On military bases, TCE has frequently been used as a cleansing solvent to hose down planes, tanks, trucks, and other machinery, often draining off into streams or groundwater. Other common sources of TCE runoff range from dry-cleaning companies to airplane and machine manufacturers, where TCE is used in stripping metal parts, to leather production, as well as through household use of everything from paint thinners and strippers to many glues and adhesives. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 You may also choose to have tests performed for radon or arsenic, especially if these contaminants are a common problem in groundwater in your region.
Finding the Right Filter
Filters can be configured in many ways, and they have varying types of mechanical and chemical reduction capabilities. Although some are designed to filter water for the whole house, a majority of the systems on the market today are designed to treat water coming from a single faucet. |
David R. Montgomery
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 Every new irrigated field raised the local groundwater table a little more. Each summer, evaporation pumped more salt up into the soil. Hilgard realized that, like a lamp's wick, clay soils brought the salt closer to the surface. Better drained, sandy soils were less susceptible to salt buildup. Hilgard also realized that alkali soils could make excellent agricultural soils—if you could just get rid of the salt.
Hilgard fought the then popular idea that salty soils tesulted from sea-water evaporated after Noah's flood. |
Lynne McTaggart
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 Any changes in our solar system (the activity of the sun, the movement of the planets, the daily oscillation of the Earth in its rotation) or geological changes on Earth (the presence of groundwater or the movement of the Earth's molten inner core) can alter the strength of the Earth's GMF on a daily basis. Storms in space transfer some of the energy of the solar wind to the Earth's magnetosphere, causing wild fluctuations of direction and speed in the particles in the Earth's magnetic field. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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| Drugged Drinking Water
Pharmaceutical drugs prescribed at high rates such as antidepressants and antibiotics are now turning up in rivers and groundwater. In addition to people dumping excess or expired prescription drugs down the drain or toilet, pharmaceuticals are also making their way into drinking water through human waste after people take these drugs. They enter sewage treatment centers, which don't weed out these chemicals before drinking water is processed. |
| In 2000 the hit movie Erin Brockovich was based on one woman's crusade to prove that a chemical leak into the groundwater of a small town led to a disturbing array of health problems in the community. Another case that made headlines recently involved a military base at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where 75,000 Marines and their families were exposed to toxic tap water that may have caused cancer and birth defects. |
Andreas Moritz
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 The Environment Agency has revealed that Prozac is building up both in river systems and the groundwater used for drinking supplies.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Prozac has been in major waterways for months already. A Baylor University toxicologist (Brooks) discovered traces of Prozac's active ingredient (fluoxetine) in the tissues of blue gill fish in a lake in Dallas, Texas. Brooks speculated that the fluoxetine made its way from the urine of Prozac users through a water treatment plant and into the lake. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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| Water supplies must originate from somewhere, but those sources are becoming infected with pollutants from a variety of places—power plants, factories, septic systems, sewage spills, waste disposal sites for hazardous materials that sink into the groundwater, animal feed lots, landfills, acid water runoff from mines, disposal wells, land disposal of sludge, spray irrigation, buried storage tanks and pipelines, and even from us dumping things down the drain like cosmetics and unused drugs. This list goes on and on. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
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 Lawn and garden pesticides and herbicides often don't stay only where they're applied; many can contaminate groundwater as well as indoor air. Organic, toxin-free products include corn gluten for lawn weed control. (Remember, weeds may cause eyesores, but they won't cause cancer.)
IN MJCTS The best air filter for your home is a high-efficiency particle air filter (HERA). Replace your air-conditioner filter yearly and clean your air ducts every three years. Partial cleaning of ducts can make your air worse, so do a good job when you attack the clumped-up material. |
David Steinman
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 Attached to the wastewater treatment plant is a cogenera-tion plant that captures energy from what would have been dumped into the rivers and groundwater.
The upgrades to the waste plant make it one of the first treatment plants in the United States to receive and process inedible grease in a comprehensive system specifically designed to control odors, generate reliable power, reduce energy costs, and provide a new municipal revenue stream. The new system will efficiently create and use a free biofuel? |
| Soil samples indicated the presence of pesticides, benzene, toluene, xylene, chlordane, naphthalene, and metals. groundwater samples contained metals, benzene, toluene, xylene, pesticides, trichlorethylene, and chlorobenzene.36
I have no interest in being a Chevron booster, either, and, more recendy, they were experiencing serious criticisms from a region in Ecuador where they have oil fields they inherited from their merger with Texaco. But, as I learned with Cargill, I think you have to look at not only a company's history but also where it is headed. |
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