State and Stamford health officials are urging residents with private wells to get their water tested for pesticides and other possible contaminants.

A study of 628 private wells by the Stamford Health Department found that 195 had some amount of the pesticides Chlordane or Dieldrin. More than half of those 195 had concentrations that put residents who regularly drink the water at a greater risk for health problems, as defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Joseph Kuntz, a Stamford lab technician, said that when health officials first discovered some well contamination in 2009, they expected it to be localized and due to the nearby Scofield Town Dump. But testing had unexpected results.

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Chlordane and Dieldrin were used for termite and other insect extermination in homes and on farms for decades in Connecticut. They were banned in the 1980s, and the EPA now says that exposure to such chemicals over a lifetime, even at trace amounts, can increase the risk of health problems.

“You can’t see it, you can’t taste it and you can’t smell it,” said Bill Warzecha, an environmental analyst at Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “And so except if you test it, you’re not going to know that it’s in there.”

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Stamford, where Kuntz estimates that 5,000 households have private wells, is unique in offering lower-cost testing. The city health department contracted with a local laboratory to bring down the cost of a $350 test to just $100. More than 1,700 people have signed up to get their wells tested, and last year the city passed an ordinance requiring 750 wells to be tested each year starting in 2012. ( source )

This unfortunate ground water contamination story does an excellent job of showing how a suspected small water quality issue in one area can quickly turn into a major problem for an entire region and how diligent testing of well water helps health officials get a better handle on the severity of the situation.

To all the residents in Stamford whose water may contain the compounds (Chlordane and Dieldrin) mentioned in this article, we highly suggest taking advantage of the special pricing offered by the local laboratory. Otherwise, as the full article very plainly stated, testing for pesticides such as chlordane and dieldrin could become very costly.

Other pesticide testing options

With the exception of water testing by a certified water testing laboratory, no real options exist for testing chlordane and dieldrin levels in well or drinking water… BUT home water test kits for other pesticides/herbicides like atrazine and simazine do exist

Both atrazine and simazine got used heavily in the agricultural world in the United States for quite some time before scientists and health experts determined that too much of either compound could cause health problems.

Therefore, if you live in an area once designated as agricultural it may prove wise to test your water for atrazine and simazine.

Regular well water testing

While we sincerely wish yearly testing, or even less frequent testing, of well water would ensure the quality of well water, we know better. Shifts in weather patterns (i.e. droughts, heavy rains, etc.) and changes in the demand on an aquifer can radically change the quality of water an aquifer produces — with little or no warning to those whose wells tap into the aquifer.

Home well water test kits like the Well Driller Master carried by FilterWater.Com make it possible for well owners to perform critical water quality checks on a regular basis.

Do water test kits like the Well Driller Master (or less expensive versions like the Well Water Test Kit, COMPLETE Water Test Kit & SenSafe Water Quality Test Kit) provide ALL the tests required to guarantee the quality of one’s water? No, but their tests can provide key insight into changes in one’s water quality and help one to know when more sophisticated water testing should take place.

SenSafe Water Water Quality Test Kit

More to the point, you can continue reading a recent study of 1,139 children ranging in age from 8 to 15 years old found a definite link between the concentration of pesticide ‘markers’ in the children and the existence of ADHD or other behavioral problems.

We expect that the data generated by this study will definitely raise more than a few eyebrows and add fuel to the fire already burning regarding the topic of pesticide and herbicide use in the United States.

Exposure to pesticides used on common kid-friendly foods — including frozen blueberries, fresh strawberries and celery — appears to boost the chances that children will be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, new research shows.

Youngsters with high levels of pesticide residue in their urine, particularly from widely used types of insecticide such as malathion, were more likely to have ADHD, the behavior disorder that often disrupts school and social life, scientists in the United States and Canada found.

Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison. ( source )

Several of us on the Water Testing Blog staff have small children and it saddens us to learn that supposedly ‘safe’, also known as ‘better than giving them candy or chips’, types of snacks may fall into the category of foods that may contain the toxins mentioned in the article.

In the end…

…we will start washing even the frozen fruits and, of course, testing our drinking water. If the government and big business can’t even keep toxins off of our supposedly safe foods, should we REALLY trust them to keep contaminants out of our drinking water?

Despite growing health concerns about atrazine, an agricultural weedkiller sprayed on farm fields across the Midwest, most drinking water is tested for the chemical only four times a year — so rarely that worrisome spikes of the chemical likely go undetected.

High levels of the herbicide can linger in tap water during the growing season, according to more frequent tests in some agricultural communities.

Spread heaviest on cornfields, atrazine is one of the most commonly detected contaminants in drinking water. Studies have found that exposure to small amounts of the chemical can turn male frogs into females and might be more harmful to humans than once thought.

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Even with limited official testing, atrazine in the past four years was detected in the drinking water of 60 Illinois communities where more than a million people live, according to a Tribune analysis of state and federal records.

Under a deal between the EPA and the chief manufacturer of atrazine, about 130 water utilities in 10 states are tested weekly or biweekly. The Tribune analysis showed that during 2008, four downstate towns — Evansville, Farina, Flora and Mount Olive — were among nine Midwest communities where the average annual level of atrazine and its breakdown products exceeded the federal safety limit of 3 parts per billion. About half of the 130 saw concentrations that jumped above 3 parts per billion at least once that year.

In Flora, about 240 miles south of Chicago, atrazine levels spiked as high as 30 parts per billion. The findings concern researchers because some studies have shown adverse affects from exposure to concentrations as small as 0.1 parts per billion. The chemical has not been found in Chicago tap water, in part because Lake Michigan dilutes farm runoff.

The more frequent tests are done outside the EPA’s official monitoring program and don’t count when regulators consider whether communities meet the legal limit for atrazine.

They also don’t trigger provisions in the federal Safe Drinking Water Act that require the public to be notified about water contamination. As a result, residents are rarely advised that they can buy inexpensive filters to screen the chemical out of their tap water.

Atrazine can’t be sprayed in Europe because it contaminates groundwater, but it remains widely used in the U.S., where the EPA endorsed its continued use as recently as 2006, based on a scientific review from 2003. Federal records show the review was heavily influenced by industry and relied on studies financed by Syngenta, a Swiss-based company that manufactures most of the atrazine sprayed in the U.S. ( source )

The last paragraph cited above pretty much says it all: The word of the chemical manufacturer, and not that of an independent organization, got used to shape and mold public policy regarding the testing and regulation of atrazine.

Pesticide in Water Test Atrazine & Simazine 2 Tests for Each

National Testing Labs 83 Water Parameters 20 Pesticides/Herbicides

Want our advice? Of course you do!

If you live w/in 50 to 100 miles of an agricultural area and have a well, or your local water system draws from a well located near agricultural areas, either get your water tested for atrazine as well as other pesticides and herbicides several times a year — especially after periods of heavy rain and/or runoff.

Test kits such as the Pesticide Test Kit for atrazine and simazine work well as occasional screening methods but when it comes to giving the final word on whether or not your water contains harmful contaminants, always turn to the experts at a certified drinking water testing lab such as National Testing Labs.

North Stamford Concerned Citizens for the Environment formed last fall when homeowners near Stamford’s Scofieldtown Park learned their well water was tainted with banned pesticides. The same toxins had been found in the soil of the park, which was built on a former industrial landfill. Many in the area believed commercial waste from the site had leached into the ground water, and they decided to act.

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Though the EPA had been monitoring the park since 1996 and locals had been complaining about it for a good 10 years prior, Lauricella discovered little had been done.” The reports I was able to unearth showed that the city, state and federal government all let this inquiry fall through the cracks,” she says.

“Over time, there were people who raised various issues,” states Ben Barnes, Stamford’s former Director of Operations. “I don’t think the city ignored them particularly.” Barnes himself spent the waning months of the Dannel Malloy administration dealing directly with the well contamination and investigating the history of Scofieldtown.

Barnes explains the former landfill is subject to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (better known as Superfund), and that prompted testing by the EPA. But the agency’s findings placed Scofieldtown in a nebulous area between an ecological disaster that qualified for a massive amount of federal intervention and an old, abandoned dump that was determined to be “clean enough.” ( source )

If the term ‘clean enough’ used in reference to a potentially hazardous site where hazardous chemicals more than likely found their final(?) resting place does not scare you, then what will? At least in this case the government has decided to step in, as the article mentions later on, but what about all the years before when children played in that park and those chemicals may have found their way into local wells unnoticed?

Something to think about: Even the best intentions of the most honest water quality inspectors go to waste when politics and budgets get involved… and the same goes for the intentions of most homeowners when the subject of decreasing property values comes up.

Testing for Pesticides in Well and Drinking Water…

Most of your traditional at-home drinking water test kits and well water test kits will not contain a test for pesticides for a number of reasons including keeping costs down and the fact that a kit would have to contain way too many different, and often times complicated, testing supplies one would need to test for the 1,000’s of commonly (and uncommonly) used pesticides in the world.

While you can test for two VERY commonly used pesticides, atrazine and simazine, using an at-home pesticides test kit, having your water tested by a certified water testing laboratory like National Testing Labs will provide you with a much better picture of your water’s safety by letting you know if it contains 20 different pesticides, herbicides and PCB’s.