EPA Offers Standards on 27 Water Pollutants : But Agency Says It Cannot Meet Legal Deadline for Safe Limits on Full List of Contaminants

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed new regulations that would set limits on the presence of 27 chemicals and pesticides in drinking water, but the agency said it would not comply with a law requiring it to take action by next month on dozens of additional contaminants.

The EPA’s proposal leaves undone a significant part of the rule-making Congress ordered three years ago in an attempt to ensure that industrial chemicals and agricultural pesticides that often seep into drinking water would not endanger human health.

Although Congress then named 83 contaminants to be made subject to federal standards by June of this year, a senior EPA official said that, with the new 27, only 55 chemicals would be covered even by proposed regulations by that deadline. Of those regulations, just 34 will have been made final.

Money, Personnel Short

The official, Michael B. Cook, said that the agency expects its failure to comply with the federal law to be challenged in a number of lawsuits. He said that the agency hopes to complete its rules on drinking water within the next year, and blamed the delay on shortages of funds and personnel.

Environmental groups criticized the agency for what they called its tentative approach to the issue, and indicated that they are contemplating legal action to speed the regulatory process.

“It’s clear that no major step toward drinking-water protection is going to be taken in the near future,” said Jacqueline Warren, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

While the regulations proposed by EPA Tuesday stop short of what Congress required, they nearly double the number of drinking-water contaminants that are subject to federal standards.

Among the widely used pesticides subject to the proposed regulations are alachlor, which is believed to cause cancer, and aldicarb, a poison that affects the nervous system.

Other substances whose presence in drinking water would be regulated for the first time include toluene, a volatile gasoline additive, and asbestos, which is a carcinogen when inhaled but believed by the EPA to cause only benign tumors when ingested.

The standards proposed Tuesday also include revised limits for 11 contaminants already regulated by the EPA, including the pesticides lindane and 2,4-D.

Only about 1% of the nation’s 200,000 water districts are believed to be in violation of the new standards, according to an EPA study. Of the 2,500 districts that would need to introduce costly new water treatment procedures, nearly all are in rural areas and have relatively few customers, the study found.

The cost of the new regulations to the affected water districts is expected to total $88 million annually. In most cases, the cost would be borne by customers, who would pay surcharges of $10 to $460 a household. Costs would be highest in the smallest water districts.

Farm Regions Cited

Regions most likely to be in violation of the standard are in the Midwest and the Southeast, where pesticide use is most widespread, the EPA said. Agricultural areas of California might also be affected.

The EPA’s Cook, director of the agency’s office of drinking water, said that large water districts are unlikely to be found in violation of the new regulations. Facilities that serve large cities generally are more advanced, he said, and usually rely on surface water rather than ground water, which is more easily contaminated.

While environmentalists said they were pleased with some of the steps taken by EPA, some objected to what they said were insufficiently stringent standards for drinking water.

For instance, some noted that while the EPA would allow 2 parts per million of toluene in drinking water, the state of New York permits just .005 p.p.m. In another example, the EPA would allow 10 p.p.m. of another solvent, xylene, while New York permits just .005 p.p.m.

Because state governments in most cases have final authority over drinking water, some environmentalists said that in the future, they may focus their drinking-water lobbying on that level.

“People are just going to have to rely on the states to do better,” said Warren of the Natural Resources Defense Council.