Dayton Officials Defend Water Quality Measures

City officials said Monday that a Los Angeles Times story portraying the city’s water supply as “a textbook illustration of what government’s decade-long war on toxic wastes was supposed to prevent” accurately showed the dangers but ignored the local efforts that have been made to protect the water.

“Dayton is doing as much and more than any community in the nation,” said Dayton Mayor Paul Leonard, who held a news conference to discuss the article published Saturday and to reassure residents that their water quality remains high.

He also announced that Dayton ground water and tap water will be tested by the Combined Health District of Montgomery County to dispel any doubts.

The Times article said that studies dating back to the 1960s show that a local aquifer that is the primary water supply for 600,000 persons is being poisoned slowly by chemical leaks from waste dumps and lagoons. The article said local, state and federal officials haven’t done much about the problem.

Believe Steps Ignored

Leonard and City Manager Richard Helwig said that they feel the positive steps Dayton has taken were ignored.

“It was an emphasis on the problems without an equal emphasis on the progress we’ve made in water protection in this community,” Leonard said. “The bottom line is this, the quality of the water supply in the greater Dayton community, according to the experts at the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, is well within the acceptable standards.”

In January, Dayton signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ohio EPA setting out a plan to protect the area’s ground water. Dayton also has raised about $59 million for water monitoring and improvement programs over the next five years, officials said.

Dayton’s hazardous materials team was formed in 1982 to “get on top of any spills which might result in pollution of the underground water supply,” Leonard said.

Routine Water Tests

Water tests are routinely performed by the water department and the EPA, but Leonard said the study by the combined health district will be an independent, “public verdict” that will “emphasize to the people in this community that the water supply is not poisoned.”

Although the water may contain contaminants common in an urban setting, they are within safe levels set by experts, he said.

Helwig said “rather than being the whipping community nationally, we fully expect to be the community that is viewed as the leader in dealing with these very severe concerns.”

Helwig and Leonard said Dayton would need the help of the state and federal government--and that both were dragging their feet on cleanup funding.

Chemist’s Reaction

Dusty Hall, a local environmental chemist who chairs the Dayton-area Sierra Club and the club’s committee on water quality, said it was heartening to know the city was spending money to investigate how to remove toxic contaminants from the drinking water.

Hall said he felt The Times article basically was accurate.

“In the Dayton area alone, there are 57 documented dumps and landfills, and so far only two have been looked at,” said Ronald Schmidt, a Wright State University geologist quoted in The Times story. “Nobody is looking at them. Not the Ohio EPA, not the local people.”