Long-Term Cancer Risk Cited in Dayton Water Supply but No ‘Immediate Hazard’

A study of the Dayton, Ohio, public water system, ordered after The Times published a story about the area’s failure to curb hazardous waste pollution, concluded Friday that toxic chemicals in city water pose no “immediate health hazard” but exceed levels that may pose a long-term risk of cancer.

The study documents “a real health concern on long-term basis, and long term could be a year (or) several years,” Morton Nelson, Montgomery County (Ohio) health commissioner and head of the local agency that prepared the report, said in a television interview. “We’re dealing with a very critical situation.”

The report, by the Combined Health District of Montgomery County, urged the city to “adopt as its goal the total elimination” from tap water of a variety of industrial organic pollutants linked to cancer and changes in cells’ genetic makeup.

Battle ‘Won’t Be Cheap’

Dayton Mayor Paul Leonard said Friday the city is committed to removing the pollutants and probably will spend $40 million to $56 million next year on an advanced treatment system for the town’s two waterworks.

“The report is saying we need to brace for the future,” he said. “There are going to be new and different chemicals finding their way into our water supply, and the region has a responsibility to address these issues. And it won’t be cheap.”

Leonard had asked Nelson’s agency to issue “a public verdict on our water supply” after a June article in The Times said leaking toxic waste dumps were tainting the underground river that provides water to more than 600,000 Dayton-area residents.

The Times article said local, state and federal officials had taken little action to curb the pollution, despite repeated studies warning that the water supply is being slowly poisoned.

Meets Legal Standards

Friday’s report, compiled from past tests and interviews with toxic water pollutant experts, concluded that Dayton’s water meets all federal legal standards for safety.

However, unregulated volatile organic chemicals--largely industrial degreasers linked to cancer and birth defects in animals--exist in low concentrations in tap water and at higher levels in some city wells, the report stated.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has proposed regulations that would ban the presence of some of the Dayton volatile organics such as trichloroethylene in tap water and set very low limits for others.

“We have to be realistic about the (volatile organics),” Nelson said in an interview on Dayton television station WKEF-TV. “They have been associated with many problems. One has been cancer; another has been leukemia. They can cause kidney or liver damage.”

To reduce the chemical risks, the report stated, the city should step up monitoring of tap water for chemicals, survey the pollution threat from abandoned waste dumps atop the aquifer and form a regional coalition to prevent other cities from allowing their industry to pollute the underground water supply.

The degree of threat is unclear, partly because local water stocks have not been tested often enough in the past, the report stated. But it said: “The very complexity and uncertainty of the ground water situation demands that every feasible step be taken to protect against further contamination of this valuable resource.”

The report commended the city for signing an agreement with state Environmental Protection Agency officials last January to step up monitoring of city well fields and to reduce pollution threats from an industrial park located atop one major city water supply.

However, “the continued presence of wastes in the 60 or so old disposal sites . . . certainly requires further investigation,” the report stated, and “remedial action to mitigate the danger of such contamination should be pursued whenever appropriate.”

The study “seems to say, ‘Don’t be alarmed on the one hand, but don’t expect to stay healthy for your entire lifetime if you don’t do something,’ ” City Commissioner Mark Henry said.

Henry said the city “is committed to advanced treatment of its water. The only thing we need to resolve from here is the most equitable way to finance it.”

The report and the city’s proposal to install pollution equipment at its waterworks also follow a July letter from state EPA officials warning that Dayton’s water “has one of the widest variety of organic constituents observed to date” in the state, and advising the city to “respond immediately through investigations and corrective measures.”