Safety Record of Reclaimed Water
Re “Los Angeles’ Toilet-to-Tap Fear Factor,” by D.J. Waldie (Opinion, Dec. 1), with the subtitle that “despite public worries, reclaimed water has been proved safe”: The “worries” are not just from the public. The National Research Council’s report on augmenting drinking water with reclaimed water bases its so-called worries on analyses made by some of the nation’s top scientists. The U.S. does not have the technology to even detect some of the thousands of toxins and carcinogens that could make it through the reclamation process and find their way into drinking water.
The fact that some communities are currently drinking reclaimed water does not make it safe. It often takes many decades to detect the damage done by such projects that tinker with the public health and welfare. And sometimes the effects are not detected due to massive data evaluation problems caused by individuals who migrate out of the study area. The L.A. City Council, in its wisdom, did the right thing by examining this issue in depth and putting the project on hold.
Steven B. Oppenheimer
Director, Center for Cancer
and Developmental Biology
Cal State Northridge
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This “fear factor” is unrealistic and unwarranted. Perhaps L.A. Mayor James Hahn fails to realize that most of the water consumed in the U.S., especially from the Mississippi River system, has been consumed and eliminated at least nine times by the time the water runs from its upstream beginnings to the Gulf of Mexico. California is able to afford once-consumed water because it redirected fresh Sierra Nevada streams over 400 miles to dry Southern California, in one of the country’s biggest examples of stolen property.
Hahn and his supporters do not understand natural systems and their mechanisms to clean polluted water. The Department of Water and Power’s Tillman Reclamation Plant is one of the nation’s finest wastewater treatment systems and deserves to be fully utilized. It is time that the fear factor gives way to scientific reality. Critics who do not understand the wastewater system need to do their homework while keeping their mouths shut and their taps open. Retreated sewage water is the norm throughout the developed world.
Joan Clemons
Los Angeles
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The skills to measure (or keep out) biological contaminants are not advanced enough for me. Yes, inorganics are filtered out by reverse osmosis membrane technology. However, never before have such enormous quantities of analgesics, hormones and pharmaceutical residues made their way into our sewers and treatment plants. Their action may be well understood, but the membranes that would keep them out are not available now and won’t be for a long time.
Research over the last few years in places such as golf course lakes that receive reclaimed water directly is not encouraging. The published literature states that in the U.S. and in Europe some aquatic life in these lakes and ponds has been found to have the wrong sex’s proteins; e.g., males with female egg-sac proteins.
No one can predict how long larger quantities of powerful biological and pharmaceutical residues would persist in our aquifers or what their long-term effect on immature humans would be. I would call that unsafe. It makes more sense to choose desalination; it’s feasible, several cities and water districts have started up with it and, eventually, the cost will come down.
Henriette Wessel Wymar
Arcadia
