Like a bridge over troubled waters, (www.phillywater.org)

I promised to examine Philadelphia’s edgy artist community in Northern Liberties in this post but it just wasn’t meant to happen. The artists skipped town and recent news about Pennsylvania’s water quality was so disturbing, I decided to take a break from my favorite neighborhood.

While Northern Liberties residents are concerned about sewage water backing up into their homes, local activists are also worried about the water after it’s been treated at one of Philly’s water plants. They claim that the treated water may have too many pollutants in it, which could have serious health consequences for both aquatic life and recreational users of Philly’s rivers.

Fortunately for the Sierra Club, the federal government seems to agree that Philly’s water is a problem.

A recent federal report entitled Toxic Pollution Health uses information accumulated in the Toxic Release Inventory — which collects information about local and state emissions of toxic chemicals into the air and water — to determine which cities are most detrimental to the environment.

For Pennsylvania, the report should function as a much-needed wake-up call.

Pennsylvania ranked 12th in the nation for air and water releases of developmental toxins, emitting 2,809,879 pounds of toxins. Of the 100 counties in the nation with the highest air and water releases of developmental toxins, nearby Chester County ranked 20th worst (797,278 pounds) and Lancaster County ranked 37th worst (425,852 pounds).

These figures should not be taken lightly, especially by Philadelphia’s Department of Environmental Protection and the Philadelphia Water Department.

What’s even more troubling is the EPA wants to relax its reporting requirements for companies, a decision that would allow companies to report less about the toxins they emit. This means that in the future, the reports like the one I just described won’t be able to tell us the harms these companies may cause to our health.

“Our best guess is this is some effort to give companies a little less spotlight on their toxic emissions,” said Sean Moulton, a spokesman for OMB Watch, a non-profit organization that monitors the Office of Budget Management’s activities.

If implemented, the proposals would cut states’ toxics databases in half, so it’s no wonder 23 state governments have already protested to the EPA. Those comments are in addition to those from 60 members of Congress, 200 public interest organizations, and over 120,000 average American citizens.

What makes this proposal so dangerous is the shortsightedness with which the EPA acted.

“We know they cut a lot of corners in their research,” Moulton said. “They haven’t released any models or statistics to see potential health effects of exposure to these toxins, so we know they haven’t done proper analysis.”

Luckily, the DEP has protested these changes. We can only hope that the EPA listens to their constituents and rethinks this disastrous decision. For Pennsylvania, it’s a clear signal that now’s the time to start thinking about the environment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.