Who's really poisoning our drinking water?
Stop pointing those fingers at Bush
Steve Chapman
©Chicago Tribune
April 12, 2001

Like Ronald Reagan designating ketchup as a vegetable and George Bushthe Elder marveling at a grocery scanning device, George W. Bush has givenhis critics the chance to reduce his presidency to a derisive cartoon. Tosay his cancellation of an EPA regulation reducing the amount of arsenicallowed in drinking water has gotten a poor reception is an under-statement.

His opponents portray this as the worst hydration-related decision sinceJim Jones' followers drank poisoned punch.

They claim it exposes Bush as a villain who is cozy with corporate pollutersand indifferent to public health.

The truth is more flattering to Bush – suggesting a president refusingto be stampeded into a bad decision out of fear that demagogues will callhim names.

The EPA arsenic rule, issued in the last days of the Clinton administration,would have cut maximum arsenic concentrations in drinking water from 50parts per billion to 10 parts per billion. That may sound like an irreproachableeffort to protect Americans from a deadly pollutant. But the available scienceindicates no cause for alarm.

In many places where it is found, including vast stretches of the West,arsenic is naturally present in ground water, rather than being dumped byevil corporations. But the amount of arsenic currently allowed is so tinythat further reductions may yield no health benefits whatsoever.

The administration therefore made the sensible choice not to go forwardwith the regulation.

Does that mean it's content with the status quo? No. Overlooked in allthe controversy is that EPA Director Christine Todd Whitman has promisedthe old limit will be reduced, not maintained – but only in accordwith "strong science and a thorough cost analysis."

Hysterics in the environmental movement, such as the Natural ResourcesDefense Council, insist that "many will die from arsenic-related cancersand other diseases" thanks to this decision. But impartial expertshave their doubts. A report last year by the Congressional Research Servicefound that "scientific uncertainty regarding the health effects associatedwith low-level arsenic exposures remains."

A 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that theexisting 50 ppb standard is too loose but demurred at agreeing that it shouldbe reduced to 10 ppb. That document, much trumpeted by environmentalists,also noted something they have not publicized: "No human studies ofsufficient statistical power have examined whether consumption of drinkingwater at the current maximum contaminant level results in an increased incidenceof cancer or noncancer effects." The EPA's science advisory board saidthat the agency's assessment tended to exaggerate the risk considerably.

The benefits of the proposed regulation, it turns out, may be imaginary.The costs are not. More than 90 percent of the water systems that wouldhave been affected by the regulation are in small, rural communities, forwhich the expense would be a crushing burden.

Lidgerwood, N.D., for example, spent nearly $1 million to cut arseniclevels from 56 ppb to 17 – and complying with the Clinton rule wouldhave cost another $1.5 billion. That's a huge outlay for a town of only400 homes.

The National Rural Water Association estimates that Chesapeake Ranch,Md., would see its water rates soar by $72 per month, per home. The town'stwo wells currently fail to meet the 10 ppb standard: One is at 12 ppb andone is at 11. No one seriously believes this reduction would prevent a singlecase of cancer. Every customer served by the water system would have paiddearly to banish a phantom.

Some towns may think the possible health benefits are well worth thecost – and they are free to adopt the tighter standard anytime theywant. But few of their residents seem to think the money would be well spent.

"I have not heard of any towns that have chosen to go as low as10 ppb," says Mike Keegan, a policy analyst for the NRWA. As he notes,"these communities are governed and operated by people whose familiesdrink the water every day, and are locally elected by their community."Why aren't they capable of deciding for themselves whether their healthis worth the money, instead of ceding that decision to Washington?

The Clinton EPA thought it had a duty to make people spend large sumsof money to protect themselves from an alleged danger that most of themdo not regard as worthy of their concern.

The Bush EPA has elected not to enforce such a mandate until it is surethat the change will do some good, at a bearable cost. Bush may have providedeasy fodder for demagogues, editorial cartoonists and other practitionersof oversimplification. But his policy is the only sensible one.