Forty people crammed shoulder-to-shoulder around a ring of brown folding tables, into a conference room at the Ed Weed fish hatchery on Grand Isle last Wednesday night.
The meeting was to inform the public about a recent decision by the Grand Isle Consolidated Water District to add ammonia to the island’s drinking water — a process called chloramination — to meet more stringent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) water quality standards that start in September 2013.
Consumer advocates and state officials disagree on whether chloramination can cause serious health problems.
Much of the meeting involved experts arguing back and forth about things like haloacetic acid, trihalomethanes, NDMA, and so on, until one man asked for the simplified version.
“When I hear this kind of thing on PBS I turn the channel,” he said. A number of people nodded their heads in agreement.
The residents of Grand Isle appeared to be nearly unanimous against chloramination, while the representatives of the Grand Isle Consolidated Water District and the state stood their ground in favor of it.
David Bowditch-Leslie, the treasurer of the board of the Grand Isle Consolidated Water District, said that the public meeting allowed residents to express their frustrations, but in the end the district still has to meet EPA requirements.
State toxicologist Sarah Vose cited a number of studies on animals and humans that found that chloramine was no worse than chlorine — and even that it was better for human health.
“The conclusion from all the data we could look at didn’t point to any negative [health] effects,” Vose said.
But flyers distributed at the meeting by Vermonters for a Clean Environment, a non-profit organization fighting chloramination, claim it can cause rashes, blisters, respiratory illness, digestive problems, and other health issues.
“The disinfection byproducts associated with chloramination are 1,000 times more toxic than the ones formed with chlorine,” said Bob Bowcock, the chief environmental investigator for Erin Brokovich’s consumer advocate firm.
Ellen Powell, who lives in South Burlington, said at the meeting that she began experiencing health problems after the Champlain Water District began chloraminating drinking water in 2006.
“My first shower, I got out of the shower and I looked in the mirror and my eyes were bright red and by the time I got downstairs they were burning severely and felt bone dry at the same time as tears were pouring down my cheeks,” she said. “That lasted about a day and a half.”
During her presentation, she showed pictures of a Winooski resident with bright red spots all over his body and patches of hair missing from his head, symptoms that she said were a result of showering in Winooski’s chloraminated water. She said his symptoms disappeared after he began showering at the Burlington YMCA.
According to the Vermont Department of Health’s website, Colchester, Essex, Essex Junction, Jericho Village, Milton, Shelburne, South Burlington, Williston and Winooski currently use chloraminated water. Burlington has its own water treatment facility that uses chlorine, not chloramine.
Annette Smith of Vermonters for a Clean Environment said that Rutland, North Hero and the Tri-Town Water District, which comprises Bridport, Addison and Shoreham, are all currently considering using chloramine.
The Vermont Department of Health has been fielding water user complaints related to chloramine since 2006. In 2007 it surveyed 81 health care providers in Chittenden County and hosted a Center for Disease Control team of public health and drinking water experts to listen to the health complaints of water users. On July 25 it published an extensive review of scientific research on the health effects of chloramine. None of these turned up what they called “credible evidence” of negative health effects.
But its website states, “The Health Department has not been able to rule out disinfectants as possible contributing factors to health concerns expressed by some Vermonters despite the long history of their use, apparent safety, and lack of documented health issues among the many thousands of Champlain Water District customers.”
Furthermore, in the report, the department states that chloramine (the type under debate is formally called monochloramine) will likely reduce negative health effects:
“… the Health Department believes that the use of monochloramine will reduce the concentration of regulated and possibly unregulated DBPs [disinfection byproducts] in drinking water. This reduction may contribute to fewer adverse health effects compared to drinking water treated with free chlorine as a secondary disinfectant.”
The Health Department’s web page on chloramine explains that drinking water is disinfected in two stages. In the first, chlorine is added to kill 99 percent of all disease-causing microbes. In secondary disinfection, which occurs just before water leaves the treatment facility, a secondary disinfectant is added to the water to kill any pathogens that may arise as the water is transported through pipes to water users. The EPA currently approves chlorine, chloramine, and chlorine dioxide as secondary disinfectants.
The problem with secondary disinfectants — not just chlorine — is that they come in contact with organic debris, like dead leaves or insects, while being carried through the system, and when this happens the debris is oxidized. Oxidation of this debris produces cancer-causing compounds. (We come in contact with oxidized material in our environment all the time, which is why, for a number of years, nutrition hype has focused on anti-cancer antioxidants.)
Alan Huizenga of Green Mountain Engineering, an engineer consulting with Grand Isle Consolidated Water District on this issue, said GAC filters would cost $950,000 to install and would add $120 per year to each user’s water bill. By contrast, a chloramination system costs $200,000 to install and doesn’t increase users’ water bills.
Warren Steadman, the operator of the Grand Isle drinking water facility, said these oxidized pieces of debris (called “disinfection byproducts,” or DBPs) have been increasing in our water supply as the water quality in Lake Champlain degrades.
Chlorinated water’s most abundant DBPs are trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids. These are highly toxic and carcinogenic, and are regulated by the EPA.
The crux of the debate is how bad the DBPs of each secondary disinfectant are, and what water users are willing to accept. According to the Health Department’s July 25 report, chlorinated water was associated with as much as two times as many cancer cases as non-chlorinated water, and significant increases in birth defects. In fact, one study of 250,000 deaths found that those who drank chlorinated water were 1.7 times more likely to die of bladder cancer than those who drank chloraminated water.
Just two out of six hundred known DBPs are regulated by the EPA, and Vose says there are probably 5,000 or even 10,000 DBPs that are unregulated and even unknown to science.
The Health Department’s report states that other DBPs — both regulated and unregulated — are created by both chlorination and chloramination, but that chloramination results in lower levels of DBPs overall.
Bowcock doesn’t expect the EPA to regulate any more DBPs any time soon.
“The way that the United States Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum contaminant level for any chemical in drinking water is about an 18-year process,” he said. “The best way to deal with this, to limit the quantity of the disinfection byproduct precursors: take the organics out.”
The most effective option, he said, is to install Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) filters in the water treatment plant.
Bowcock said home water filters do not help. “Ninety percent of the carbon filters available on the market today do not remove chloramine.” He did not say whether they remove DBPs.
PUR, a company that produces home drinking water filters, claims that their filters remove 98 percent of trihalomethanes. PUR does not make filters fitted for showerheads or bathtub faucets, however.
Alan Huizenga of Green Mountain Engineering, an engineer consulting with Grand Isle Consolidated Water District on this issue, said GAC filters would cost $950,000 to install and would add $120 per year to each user’s water bill. By contrast, a chloramination system costs $200,000 to install and doesn’t increase users’ water bills.
A number of residents, when they heard these numbers, called out that they would gladly pay $10 per month for safer water.
