Hailley Brune – Opinion Columnist

Water is an interesting thing. In 2019, I was a First-year in Gen Chem. I had to take a chemistry class for my first J-term. During that J-term we had a large focus on water. We each were put into groups to research water contamination. Following that, each group put together an experiment surrounding the topic of water and tested it. It was a very compelling January. I don’t know about anybody else, but I find water to be intellectually absorbing. Let’s give a little background to water in general, and then let’s talk a little about the results of our research.
To give some background on water in the U.S., in general we have to understand the guidelines for water treatment. Now, let me preface that we definitely don’t have the worst water guidelines in the world. We have water treatment plants and we test said water after it’s treated. There are also more machines being invented to help us clean out the water in a more efficient and thorough ways. There are a lot of problems with the way the EPA controls water treatment though.
Dumping has been and probably will always be a problem. There have been many cases in the U.S. of factories dumping chemicals into unlined water systems and poisoning the groundwater. Hinkley, California is an example of this. PG&E was an electric company that dumped millions of gallons of tainted water into an unlined pound by their factory. The factory opened in the 50’s and the town didn’t figure out about the dumping until late 80’s or early 90’s. Hinkley, which was close to the factory, started looking into the water when they noticed some strange things, specifically with their animals. Animals were dying from refusing to drink water and from cancerous tumors throughout their whole body. The cancer cases in people in the town were astronomical as well.
While lawsuits happened once they found out, the town still drank the water for decades. It took until between 2006-2008 for the town to get a settlement, but it took until 2014 before the state of California started considering hexavalent chromium, which is what the company was putting into the water, possibly linking it to cancer. After learning and investigating the case in Hinkley, the EPA didn’t put restrictions or label hexavalent chromium as a dangerous substance.

What I’m trying to get at, very slowly, is that for the EPA to change guidelines and maximum contaminant levels it takes a lot of time and a lot of research.

The people in Hinkley were drinking contaminated water for decades before anybody noticed. The townspeople were the ones who had to hire someone to test the water to try and get help, because the EPA didn’t see it as toxic. This isn’t a once in a billion thing. Water in the U.S. being contaminated or unsafe to drink is very common. A lot of the time, people aren’t even told about the issue and are allowed to continue drinking. I believe it was New York, or another larger city, that had a bad case of lead poisoning in the water a while back. We have guidelines, but we have to wonder how many possibly toxic things might be in water, but the EPA just doesn’t see it as toxic yet.

The amount of time it takes to process and make change, is enough to seriously damage those who are stuck drinking it till then.

Good news, generally Smart Water is clean, while Dasani isn’t as clean.

Really big surprise there, I know. I took an art class my first semester and was told not to drink the water in the building by my professor. They have a Culligan upstairs to drink from instead of the tap.

So, we tested the music building, the art building, and Nobel when we conducted our own experiments. Nobel does have pretty clean water with it’s new pipes and that was used as a control of sorts.

Our results, as well as other groups, were surprising. Almost everybody who did tests on the music/theater building’s water received very odd results. At first we thought it was just because something went wrong, but then every group had weird results with the same building.
Now, this was a J-term project so it didn’t get looked into further, and there are no real concrete results. We would have to retest and then do it again before we could have even an idea of what the water in the buildings is truly like. With that stated, we all found that the art and music/theater buildings had very hard water, and they were not as clean as the controls. Which makes sense considering how long it’s been since they’ve been updated. At the end of the day, if you want to get some water I would suggest going to Nobel or the caf. Always be curious and wonder what you’re truly putting in your body.