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Radiation in Your Water?

Radiation Warnings Withheld from Public in Texas

Recently uncovered emails between Texas officials reveal a conspiracy to withhold warnings of unsafe levels of alpha particle radiation detected in drinking water from the public. The emails reveal that officials from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) knowingly defied a ruling from the EPA that would have required them to warn the public about unsafe levels of radiation that were detected in public water supplies. The TCEQ avoided having to warn citizens of the risk by ordering its staff to underreport alpha particle radiation levels found in drinking water for a period of eight years from 2000 to 2008.

Tom Smith of the watchdog group Public Citizen describes the situation: “It’s a conspiracy at the TCEQ of the highest order. The documents have indicted the management of this commission in a massive cover-up to convince people that our water is safe to drink when it’s not.”

The emails showed that officials in the TCEQ devised a scheme to underreport levels of radiation that were detected in drinking water supplies. Officials in the TCEQ, upon receiving a report that showed radiation levels in excess of Federal standards would order staff to subtract the margin of error that is expected in reports of this type from the reported levels. The subtraction would reduce the reported level of alpha particle radiation enough so that the commission would not have to alert the public or the EPA of the danger. A ruling issued by the EPA in 2000 specifically forbade the practice, but the email correspondence shows clearly that TCEQ officials choose to ignore it.

Texas Officials Rejected EPA Standards

Kathleen Hartnett White, who was the Chair of the TCEQ Commission at the time and also sat on the Texas Water Advisory Council, says the decision to continue the subtraction was a good one: “As memory serves me, that made incredibly good sense.” She felt that the EPA rules were too expensive, and would end up costing small communities tens of millions of dollars.

White’s financial rationale is lost on Brenda Haynes, who lived in one of the affected districts. Haynes came down with thyroid cancer during the time that the unsafe levels went unreported. Because she wasn’t warned, she continued to drink the contaminated water during treatment for the cancer. Haynes husband Ian reacted angrily to the news: “We were put at more risk than what we thought”. Haynes said that he and his wife would have made different choices at the time if they had been warned.

Texas has a Water Problem

The state of Texas has been in the news several times about water quality, and the news is never good. Despite TCEQ efforts to cover up pollution, there were reports of 18 different chemicals that violated public safety standards between 2004 and 2007. A recent report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) revealed that Houston Texas has the sixth worst water quality in the nation.
 

Protect yourself when the Government won’t

Texas isn’t the only state where public officials turn a blind eye to waterborne public health hazards. The most recent EWG report on water pollution reveals widespread contamination by carcinogens like chromium-6 that the EPA doesn’t even require municipal water authorities to report. Problems like this make it clear that if you want safe drinking water, you need to filter it yourself.

Thankfully, effective filtration systems exist that can stop toxins before they can harm you. Fresh Water Depots Filtration system is effective against a wider range of pollutants than competing filtration systems. Conventional filtration systems such as water softeners only stop hard water problems, if you want safe water, you need a filtration system designed to deliver it. 

This article should not be relied on to determine if radiation is in your water.