Water Filter News

As water crisis hitting several parts of the world, the Pittsburgh region distinguishes itself as a place where water abounds.
But from experts’ point of view, water here is not safe from problems.

Unlike other region, Pittsburgh doesn’t have problems like drought, melting mountain snow-pack and dropping river levels , said Ty Gourley, project manager for the Regional Water Management Task Force, an 11-county Western Pennsylvania group that seeks to improve water management and quality. The Army Corps of Engineers calls the city’s watershed one of the nation’s most reliable.

“We have an overabundance of water,” Gourley said.

“And no one expects Pennsylvania to get drier,” said Douglas Lecomte, a meteorologist from the federal Climate Program Office in Maryland. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded Pennsylvania winters are going to get wetter.”

Here, the issue is quality not quantity — whether it’s the state of an aging infrastructure or synthetic chemicals polluting drinking-water supplies, experts say.

John Schombert, executive director of the 3 Rivers Wet Weather Demonstration Program, a nonprofit in Lawrenceville said, “Ninety percent of the region’s residents get their drinking water from the local rivers.”

Many lines— for sewage, storm water or drinking water— are a century old, said Stanley States, a microbiologist and water quality manager for the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority. Deteriorating freshwater pipes might leak up to 25 percent of the water they transport, according to state Department of Environmental Protection data.

Area Rivers are filthy with common ingredients found in plastics, detergents and contraceptives, says Professor Conrad Dan Volz of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute’s Center for Environmental Oncology. Those chemicals have caused male channel catfish in the Allegheny River to develop eggs in their testes, Volz said.

“It’s no different than the smoking controversy,” Volz said. “For years and years, we counted bodies until we had enough data that we could say smoking causes lung cancer. With wildlife, we can tell right away.”

What those catfish tell Volz is that women could be at higher risk for breast cancer and men for testicular cancer from exposure to those chemicals.

“We need to act quickly,” Volz said.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 7:24 am and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.