Today we received an email from Midori of The Nature Conservancy, an organization dedicated to restoring areas of the world back to the way Nature created them, requesting that we post an article on this site promoting their ‘Give the Gift of Clean Water‘ promotion this Holiday Season.

At first we had our doubts about legitimacy of the request but after talking with a friend who did his undergraduate internship with the organization, we find ourselves compelled to at least mention their program to our readers.

“For the holidays this year we’re promoting the idea of giving gifts of nature and if you order Give the Gift of Clean Water from our Holiday Gift Guide, you’ll be helping to insure fresh drinking water in over 30 countries. In 500+ freshwater project sites, The Nature Conservancy is working to restore rivers that have been altered and clean up lakes and wetlands that have been fouled by toxic runoff.”

The Nature Conservancy has a number of other great, green gift ideas for folks to consider this year, too, including ways to adopt mountain ranges, save endangered reefs, provide care for threatened species like jaguars, provide safe habitats for rhinos and orangutans, support efforts to repopulate the rainforests, etc.

If you have considered donating to a charity this year, but have not, yet, decided on one, we highly suggest taking a look at all the worthwhile, Earth-friendly charitable causes The Nature Conservancy supports in its Holiday Gift Guide.

Want to learn more about The Nature Conservancy? Take a look at the The Nature Conservancy ‘About Us’ Page.

A recent study has found a possible link between increased risk of prostate cancer in areas where more women use specific types of birth control — but as usual other recent studies did not find the same correlation.

We feel the importance of the study lies more in how some experts believe people have become overly exposed to estrogen.

Rather than simply stating that the increased estrogen levels come directly from ingestion of birth control medications, the study implied that people re-ingested estrogen that had worked its way out of women on the pill via normal waste channels, wound its way through (or in some cases around) waste water treatment facilities, entered the environment, and finally gotten consumed or absorbed by plants and animals that people then ate as part of their everyday fare.

Removing estrogen from drinking water?

We wish we had better news on this topic, but we must sadly report that we have yet to hear definitively that any one type of water filtration unit does a good job of removing estrogen from drinking water — nor possibly a number of other pharmaceutical byproducts currently entering our water supply every day.

We have, however, seen that some companies tout reverse osmosis as an effective way to remove MANY of those pharmaceutical byproducts, but NOT all — and we would certainly suggest that anyone considering the purchase of a reverse osmosis for the purpose of removing pharmaceutical residuals review the specifications carefully before making an investment.

Moral of the story?

Experts tell us our water supply keeps getting tainted by new things, or possibly by things we could not test for until recently, and the majority of us just sit idly by and say, “Oh well. The government (or someone else) will take care of it.”

Listen folks: The contaminants already exist and just like with soooooo many other ‘newly detected risks’ the responsibility to safeguard one’s self and loved ones will fall squarely on the shoulders of the individual… until those in power agree which bill will do the most good w/o ruining careers of friends, family, etc.

All of us here at Water Testing Blog would love to know if folks in power and/or in big business already have water filtration units installed their homes and offices and/or have their water trucked in from suspected safe sources. How many, if any, will answer that question?

For more specifics on the study, take a look at this page ( Prostate Cancer May be Linked to Birth Control Pills in Water Supply ); one of several we found while doing a search on the topic.

We get asked this question more times than we care to count… and we don’t mind answering it because at least it means the people asking us have taken an interest in the quality of the water they drink, cook with and use for showering/bathing.

Natural Contamination

Contamination of natural bodies of water (including lakes, streams, aquifers and groundwater) can have numerous characteristics and sources. While many believe only ‘big business’ causes water pollution, all humans and animals release waste products that eventually find their way into lakes, rivers, streams, oceans, etc.

Scientists refer to this occurrence as ‘nutrient loading’ and when it happens too often in one location nutrient loading may result in bacterial contamination that eventually becomes detrimental to the environment and harmful to humans who unknowingly consume the water.

Contaminants often included in the list of ‘natural’ contaminants include things such as coliform bacteria, nitrates, nitrites, etc.

Therefore, if your drinking water comes from the ground (i.e. a well) you may have ‘natural’ things to worry about… and even municipal (i.e city, town, etc.) water sources have problems from time to time. Need proof? Ever hear of things called boil water advisories?

Unnatural Contamination

This type of contamination typically comes from accidental or intentional dumping of foreign matter into or too close to a body of water either on the the surface or under the ground.

Common sources of groundwater and surface water contamination include improper disposal of industrial waste products, faulty septic tanks and waste water storage or processing equipment, landfills, pesticides and fertilizers.

Many experts believe the practice of hydraulic fracturing certainly belongs in the category of unnatural water contamination and pollution… and, of course, many other experts (who often work for or get funding from gas drilling companies) believe hydraulic fracturing poses no (or extremely limited) risks to the environment.

Thus far OUR opinion falls more in line with the folks who suspect that fracking (the nickname for hydraulic fracturing) may pose risks and that more research needs to get done before we turn the Marcellus Shale Formation under the United States into swiss cheese whose holes we filled with ‘questionable’ fluids containing a host of unknown compounds.

Moral of the Story?

You will NEVER know if your water contains unwanted contaminants UNTIL YOU GET IT TESTED and for that task you have several options: 1) Test for the basics yourself using a drinking water test kit; 2) Have a qualified drinking water laboratory test your water; or 3) test for the basics yourself with a water quality test kit and enlist the services of a qualified water testing lab from the list posted on the EPA’s Safe Water Web Site

Not too long ago many news outlets contained broadcasts and articles about the presence of BPA, a hormone-disrupting chemical, in plastics and how people, especially pregnant women, should avoid eating out of containers containing BPA.

Today we read an article about a study that found a link between the consumption of canned foods and elevated levels of BPA in humans. According to the study’s findings, people who ate canned soup regularly had much higher levels of BPA in their urine than people who ate soup made with fresh ingredients.

People who ate a serving of canned soup every day for five days had BPA levels of 20.8 micrograms per liter of urine, whereas people who instead ate fresh soup had levels of 1.1 micrograms per liter, according to the study. BPA is found in many canned foods — it is a byproduct of the chemicals used to prevent corrosion.

…

“We are concerned about the influence of [hormone-disrupting] chemicals on health in general, and BPA is one of them,” Michels told MyHealthNewsDaily.

The study is published online today (Nov. 22) in the Journal of the American Medical Association. ( source )

So there you have it, folks: A good, solid reason to support farmers in your area by purchasing your foods fresh from grocery stores that buy local.

As far as BPA in plastics goes, we will say only that plenty of companies now use BPA-free materials in their containers so the risk of ingesting BPA from plastic containers is one that most of us can easily avoid – if we choose our plastic containers carefully.

Replace older plastic containers

… with newer ones bearing the BPA-Free badge. Oh, and if you routinely use old margarine tubs, cool whip tubs or other plastic tubs (like we do!) you should swap them out for tubs manufactured more recently, too.

And don’t forget to properly recycle the plastic items you decide to get rid of! We don’t want them ending up in landfills where they could possibly leach their BPA content into the environment over time!

As if having your entire town turned upside down, both literally and figuratively, did not do enough damage, now residents in Joplin, Missouri have a new problem to contend with: Higher than normal levels of lead showing up during environmental sampling.

In tests of 44 properties in Jasper County, 19 showed high levels of lead, prompting the city’s mayor to ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources for help in testing for, and cleaning up, the element, according to the Los Angeles Times.

For more than 100 years, beginning in the mid-19th century, Jasper County was at the worldwide forefront of lead and zinc mining. The area included town names like Leadville Hollow and Minersville.

According to Dan Pekarek, director of the Joplin Health Department, a waste product from lead mining called “chat” was dumped in several spots around the city of Joplin, and simply covered with soil. Those sites we likely exposed when the F-5 tornado ripped through the city. ( source )

So… What does that mean for the residents of Joplin in terms of water quality and drinking water safety? It means they will more than likely begin regular testing for lead and other potentially dangerous metals in their drinking water!

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has determined that consuming food and drink containing levels of lead at or above 15ppb (parts per billion) can cause serious health problems.

Why did companies dump ‘chat’ all over the place?

At the time no one probably knew the dangers posed by the material so government did not really care where the material ended up. Hence the reason the article mentioned how people used it as fill material under houses, in yards, etc.

Now, however, science and the medical profession both agree that material containing such high levels of lead pose quite a threat, mining companies would need piles and piles of permits before they could dispose of a substance like ‘chat’ and they would more than likely remain on the hook for the safety of surrounding areas for many years.

Testing for lead in water? Soil?

Can the average person test for the presence of lead in their water and soil? Absolutely! SenSafe makes several affordable products that work well for field testing.

Right now (11/09/11) TestProducts.Com has SenSafe’s Lead in Water Test Kit available at a discounted rate of around 18 dollars for two tests and you can use the kit to test for the presence of lead in either soil or water.

A company called WaterSafe also manufactures a Lead in Water Test Kit, but that kit does not include instructions for determining lead levels in soil.

Several weeks ago we discovered a web site that helps people locate jobs in water quality and water treatment professions: www.GetWaterTreatmentJobs.com

We felt the need to post this link because the world needs more qualified people to take an interest jobs in water quality and water treatment. With each passing day the overall worldwide water quality picture gets worse… and it will take diligent efforts by a large number of dedicated employees to get things back on track.

Many of you have asked us what to do if (or more like when at this point) a hurricane makes landfall. For questions like that we suggest visiting the National Hurricane Center Web Site’s “Be Prepared” section. It has a ton of useful information on how best to get ready for the arrival of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Doulton SS-2 Gravity Fed Water Filter Features and Specifications of the Doulton SS2 “Pour-Through” Gravity Fed System: High Grade Stainless Steel Construction Requires No External Plumbing Compact and Easy to Operate Easily Converted to the SS-4, a unit which utilizes 4 ceramic filters instead of 2 Dimensions: Assembled 8″ x 19″ / Stored 8″ x 13.5″ Capacity: 12 GPD (with 2 filters) 24 GPD (with 4 filters) Upper Reservoir Holds 2.11 Gallons (8 liters) Untreated Water Lower Reservoir Holds 2.11 Gallons (8 liters) Treated Water With regard to filtering capabilities, the Doulton W9361122, SS-2 Gravity Fed Water Filter reduces: Chlorine by 99.99% Cysts by 99.99% Organic Chemicals by 99.99% Parasites by 99.99% Particulates by 99.99% Pathogenic Bacteria (i.e. E. Coli, Cholera, Typhoid, etc.) by 99.99% Rust & Sediment by 99.99%

One thing we know for SURE: If the authorities say, “Evacuate!”, don’t sit around like a lump on a log. Secure your property or properties as best you can (the link above has tips for that) and get out of the storm’s way!

Too many people think a storm will ‘blow over’ by the time it reached them and that the government is ‘pulling their leg’ when it comes to flood predictions, wind estimates, etc.

Entire cities have gotten leveled by hurricanes in the past. Don’t think it can’t and/or won’t happen again!

What if my property gets destroyed and I wasn’t there?

At least you’re ALIVE. Don’t think for one minute that you and a few family members or close friends pushing as hard as you can against the door to keep Mother Nature out of your home or business will do anything but put you and all those around you in the middle of something SHE intends to destroy — effectively making you and yours the meat filling in a demolished building sandwich.

Water quality after the hurricane passes?

Municipal Water: As a general rule of thumb, assume the worst when it comes to water quality after an event such as a hurricane until local health officials give the ‘all clear’ sign… and STILL test your water for contaminants such as bacteria, nitrates, and heavy metals such as copper, lead, iron, chromium, etc.

Just because the water filtration plant either survived unscathed or received the necessary repairs does not mean the miles of pipes leading to your faucet didn’t suffer damage.

Well Water: As we have said MANY times in the past and, will probably say several hundred more times in the future, no one but you has responsibility for the quality of the water coming out of your well.

We suggest not using your well until all flood waters have subsided and the area around your wellhead has dried so you can examine it for signs of water breach.

If ANY flood water (which definitely contained innumerable drinking water contaminants) seeped into the wellhead area you will definitely want to perform a thorough well disinfection… and for that we always suggest contacting a local water well servicing company or at the very least getting detailed instructions from your local health department.

Then, even after you get the ‘thumbs up’ sign from a certified water testing laboratory such as National Testing Laboratories which will test your water for a LOT more (noteworthy!) parameters than you can test for on your own, we still suggest performing a battery of simple tests on a regular basis for at least three to six months after the visual aftereffects of a natural disaster have gone away.

Why continue testing? Simple: Whenever flood waters enter an area and then leave, they leave behind a cornucopia of potentially harmful deposits that will, in time, find their way into bodies of surface water. Those bodies of water, at some point, do interact with, and often times directly affect, of surrounding water sources — despite the fact that drinking water aquifers exist deep in the ground.

Minute and not-so-minute cracks in the rock formations encasing the aquifers will eventually allow potentially contaminated water from the surface access to the aquifers.

Moral of the story?

We wish everyone formerly in the path of, currently getting battered by, and about to get thrashed by Hurricane Irene the best of luck during these extremely difficult times.

• Weather.Com — Great site for continuously updated Hurricane news.

• National Hurricane Center — Excellent site created and maintained by the National Weather Service for the purpose of helping people get ready for, and hopefully recover after, a hurricane makes landfall in the United States. On our last visit to this site we noted that they had audio instructions in both English and Spanish.

• Drinking Water Safety During/After Flooding — Similar to what we wrote above, but still might prove useful.

Stay safe, play it smart and always have a plan!

– Water Testing Blog Staff

As strange as that sounds, experts in the Philadelphia area have suggested that patients receiving treatment for thyroid cancer may have something to do with the presence of I-131, a radioactive isotope of Iodine used pretty much exclusively in the treatment of certain types of cancer, in local bodies of surface water.

We couldn’t have made this kind of thing up even if we tried. Scientists have hypothesized that the lack of any industrial applications using that specific isotope leaves few options other than human waste from patients receiving radiation treatment for cancer as the source of contamination.

For more information on this topic, you can read the whole article here.

While no at-home test kits exist to test for the type of iodine mentioned in the above article, some do exist for testing levels of ‘regular’ iodine which occasionally shows up in drinking and industrial water.

As an example, the SenSafe Iodine Test Strips can detect concentrations as low as .02 ppm without the need for messy reagents, advanced testing techniques or expensive meters.

SenSafe’s Iodine Test Strips

Now we come to our favorite part:The Moral of the Story

Whether the result of irresponsible actions on the part of industry, poor enforcement of environmental codes on the part of government bodies, or the unintentional discharge of questionable contaminants such as pharmaceuticals into the water supply by any person who takes medications, the fact remains that our drinking water MAY contain any number of potentially dangerous contaminants at any given time.

Simply put, the folks who designed and built the bulk of our water treatment facilities could not have planned for many of the potential drinking water contaminants we could find in our water supply today because we, as a culture, didn’t even know they existed until recently.

Therefore, Water Testing Blog continues to believe that a thorough testing of one’s water by a certified water testing company such as National Testing Labs, or one suggested by your local health department, followed by the proper installation of the correct home water treatment device(s) will always make sense.

While hunting for interesting (and hopefully useful) water news just now we accidentally tripped over a synopsis of a book called The Big Thirst, a book written by Charles Fishman about our planet’s abundance of water, dependance on water, and ironically, its shortage of water.

While the little kid in us found it hilarious that a man with the word ‘fish’ in his name wrote a book about water, the synopsis quickly wiped the smirk off our face and replaced it with a look of awe. In that synopsis on the Water & Wastewater Blog we found this:

• Water is never destroyed or used up. Today we’re drinking the same water the dinosaurs drank. (Is that Tyrannosaurus Rex pee in your glass?)
• Water is the lubricant that allows the continents to move.
• A 150-pound man is 90 pounds water.
• The average American flushes 18.5 gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet every day.
• An IBM chip factory in Vermont uses 3.2 million gallons of water a day.
• In water-short Australia, a single wool processing factory uses 380,000 gallons of water daily.
• Also in Australia, a farmer pours 6 billion liters of water over 10,450 acres of rice fields.
• A two-liter bottle of coke takes five liters of water to produce it.
• 49 percent of water use in the US is for power plants.
• The electricity you use at home requires 250 gallons of water per person per day.
• 1 ton of steel takes 300 tons of water.
• At lift-off the space shuttles used one million gallons of water per minute (not to keep it cool but to buffer it against being shaken apart by the noise).
• Of the world’s 6.9 billion people, 1.1 billion don’t have adequate water.
• 5,000 children die every day from lack of water or diseases from tainted drinking water.

Quite honestly, we already knew about the toilet flushing statistic and the amount of water in a human being, but some of the other statistics blew us away.

If you found yourself as astonished by some of those numbers as we found ourselves, then you, too will probably go and check out what else Mr. Fishman has to say in The Big Thirst.

The double meaning of ‘fracking’ in this instance makes us chuckle. It could either serve as a replacement word for a curse word or as an accurate description of the chemicals in question.

The other day we received an email inquiry from ‘Wesley’ who asked a question that no one, surprisingly enough, has ever asked: “If drinking water was contaminated by fracking chemicals, would a reverse osmosis remove them and make the water safe to drink? If not, what would remove these chemicals from the water?”

Very good question! Too bad we don’t have a definitive answer.

Why no definitive answer?

Quite honestly, until gas companies come clean with the full list of ingredients they put in fracking fluids we will never really know what method of water filtration will work best to remove them. We do know, however, that properly functioning reverse osmosis water filter systems will put a serious dent in the concentrations of commonly found drinking water contaminants… including a number of the compounds currently identified as fracking fluid components.

Will reverse osmosis save your bacon, if fracking fluid somehow makes its way into your water supply? As of right now we don’t know for sure, but we bet water treated using reverse osmosis will contain far fewer contaminants and we, if given the option, would rather drink the RO (reverse osmosis) water!

Please note, however, that as we conducted the research for this blog posting we uncovered something that we did not, previously fully understand… reverse osmosis units on their own do an excellent job of improving water quality by cleansing it of SOME unwanted contaminants potentially found in fracking fluids (i.e. dissolved metals), but a person looking for a water filter certified to remove other common fracking fluid components like VOC’s (volatile organic contaminants) should seriously consider purchasing a unit equipped with pre and/or post filters that scrub the water for VOC’s.

As an example, of what we just talked about, the Pentek RO-3500 reverse osmosis system has tested and certified to NSF/ANSI to Standard 58 for the reduction of Pentavalent Arsenic, Barium, Cadmium, Copper, Hexavalent & Trivalent Chromium, Cyst, Fluoride, Lead, Nitrate/Nitrite, Radium 226/228, Selenium, TDS and Turbidity in water, but not VOC’s.

Don’t get the wrong idea about the Pentek RO-3500, though. The reviews we found for the unit speak VOLUMES about its ability to clean up otherwise unpleasant drinking water. It just may not work as well for the purpose of removing fracking fluids from drinking water.

So… If not reverse osmosis, then WHAT?

Again we want to stress that until gas drilling companies must reveal the full list of potential ‘nasties’ they put in fracking fluid, no one will really know the best way to remove fracking fluid from drinking water.

Having said that, we came across a non-RO unit called the Pentek US-1500 Chemical/Lead System that uses two different types of filters to clean drinking water… and it has tested and certified to NSF/ANSI 53 for the reduction of reduce 43 different VOCs, lead, cysts, mercury, asbestos, chlorine taste and chlorine odor.

No, the Pentek US-1500 will not filter out the contaminants that a good quality reverse osmosis unit will. . . so we suggest TESTING YOUR WATER before investing in a water filtration unit!

If you plan to buy a water filter, also plan to have your water tested by a certified drinking water testing laboratory. Whether you choose use a mail order water testing service like National Testing Laboratories or you opt for the services provided by a local laboratory, a water test may keep you from foolishly spending your hard earned money on the wrong type of water filtration system!