The Times recently carried an article by reporter Eric Leins
about how Olin was asking the state of California to let it
discontinue supplying bottled water to the residents of about 600
households because contamination levels tested below 6 parts per
billion.
The Times recently carried an article by reporter Eric Leins about how Olin was asking the state of California to let it discontinue supplying bottled water to the residents of about 600 households because contamination levels tested below 6 parts per billion.
I couldn’t help but think that this is how the long battle against Olin will go. In fact, I’d be perplexed if it went any other way.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Olin would want to eliminate the million-dollars-a-year program of giving bottled water to South Valley residents. If you ran a company, wouldn’t you look for ways to save money? But it does surprise me that their basis would be something as flimsy as an almost imperceptible change in the amount of perchlorates in the groundwater, rather than some major drop in levels.
If there were some sort of trend – say if concentrations had dropped consistently from 50 parts per billion down to 25 and then to 10 and then to 6, then you might be inclined to say, “Well, the trend seems to be going in the right direction.”
But in this case, it seems that many of the wells that tested for contamination haven’t been repeatedly retested, and the difference of 4 ppb, 5 ppb, or 6 ppb doesn’t exactly scream “Big Change!” These cited differences could be testing errors, changes due to seasonal fluctuations in the aquifer because of winter runoff, or any number of statistical quirks. You’d expect more dramatic changes to occur before saying that the aquifer was on the road to recovery and that it’s okay for people to drink the water again.
Whether there’s an assumed toxicity baseline of 4, 6, or 40 ppb isn’t the point. It’s not just the amount of contamination – it’s any contamination. If someone were to say, “I peed in your pool, but it wasn’t very much,” I don’t think you’d be dying to jump in for a swim, even if the pool were Olympic-sized and the amount of pee were only about an ounce.
And even if some official agency said, “Yeah, it’s safe,” I’m sure you still wouldn’t be too eager.
There’s an old saying that goes: If you don’t like the rules, change them. In the case of Olin, it seems that they might be able to get the rules changed, just by asking and asking and asking.
Okay, strictly speaking, there aren’t really solid “rules” regarding what constitutes a safe level of perchlorate contamination. Neither the state nor the federal government have been very helpful in setting levels, even though they knew this sort of contamination had gone on for decades in many other places (Olin’s pollution in our area only came to light in the past couple of years). And only recently did they even make a stab at it.
It’s obvious that Olin and its lawyers aren’t sitting back and waiting for the state, local or other agencies to make decisions. You can bet that Olin is constantly looking for new ways to convince the governing powers to lower acceptable thresholds, limit liability, and so on.
They’re doing this at a perfect time (for them) in history, what with a president who thinks we should “get used to” global warming, an EPA that changes its rules anytime the power or auto industry want to goose their profits and a state and county where the budget is already severely strained, making quick compromises more “cost-effective” than hard solutions.
I’m certainly no marketing or PR genius, but I would think someone at Olin would be bright enough to consider that they’d make more friends – or at least accumulate fewer adversaries – if they did something less abrupt than yanking the clean water out from under hundreds of people.
In the meantime, it’s up to us to keep bugging our elected representatives to keep the heat on this issue. Property values, health and the perception of our land and agricultural values are all at stake.
So, before Olin is let off the hook, let’s make sure that the water really is getting cleaner and that we don’t end up giving the polluters a clean bill of health before we get one.
A tech writer, editor and web developer, Tom Mulhern is a longtime South Bay resident. He and his wife have been living in Gilroy for three years. His column appears periodically in The Times. You can reach him at tm************@***oo.com
