Good afternoon. My name is Lynn Thorp and I am the National Campaigns Director for Clean Water Action. We are a national organization working at the federal level and in 15 states on a wide range of issues including drinking water and implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. It is an honor to mark the Act’s 40th anniversary and share ideas with all of you. In celebration of the Act’s successes and with hope for its future, I want to issue a challenge to us today to put some “teeth” in the first step of the Safe Drinking Water Act’s multi-barrier approach – Source Water Protection.
Three high-profile tap water disruptions this year demonstrate the importance of source water protection. The Call to Action being released today by the Source Water Collaborative is a concrete example of the renewed commitment on the part of diverse organizations. But we need to do more. We need to use our combined influence to motivate action by players who do not have drinking water as their top priority.
Clean Water Action talks about Putting Drinking Water First. It’s more than a talking point. Putting Drinking Water First means making decisions about our activities with an emphasis on their ultimate impact on drinking water sources. Preventing contamination of drinking water sources is not only smart for drinking water, but leads to better health protection, cleaner air, better protection and conservation of natural resources and to stronger communities and economies. A multi-benefit approach.
However, decisions about our activities are not made by my organization, or by Public Water Systems. They’re not made by the EPA Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water. They can play out at every level of government. If influencing them to protect drinking water were easy, I would be talking about something else.
Examples of how challenging this will be are ripped from this year’s headlines. The situation in West Virginia was caused by a tank farm that couldn’t do its job right, but federal and state authority that could better oversee chemical storage facilities has not been fully used. Government does not have adequate data on chemical properties to respond in emergencies. The coal ash spill into the Dan River in North Carolina is a result of lack of safeguards for the second largest waste stream in our country. This imminent regulation has long been a target of rollback attempts. The cyanotoxin issue in Lake Erie is not new, but the Toledo incident drew attention to the lack of progress in making sufficient reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. Fundamental gaps in our nation’s landmark water law – the Clean Water Act – are difficult to ignore.
Speaking of our nation’s landmark water law, integration of the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act has been on EPA’s agenda for some time and the Source Water Collaborative and many others have focused on what should be low-hanging fruit but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Clean Water Action’s priority campaign on the proposed Definition of Waters of the United States is, to us, a Putting Drinking Water first campaign. The streams and wetlands at issue are part of our water infrastructure. Their role in filtering pollution, including nutrients, before it makes its ways to drinking water sources is scientifically demonstrated. The water sector’s concerns about some details of this proposal pale in comparison to vocal and well-funded opposition to these fundamental protections. Another Clean Water Act priority for our organization - control of discharges from power plants, including many of concern in drinking water, - faces hurdles as it moves toward finalization next year even though power plants are the largest point source of toxic water pollution.
It often appears that we have lacked the will collectively as a nation to rein in pollution from our activities – producing food, building our cities and towns, making products, producing energy – even where pollution prevention is possible and affordable if benefits and costs are fully evaluated. This makes Public Water Systems the pollution solution. Contaminants, public health risk and costs are passed downstream to our treatment plants and to the water users of our nation. That means everybody.
My challenge: Can we admit this burden of pollution and demand solutions? Can we recognize that powerful interests often evade and weaken regulatory programs, leaving the Safe Drinking Water Act to clean it up? Can we talk about an Underground Injection Control Program hindered by a statutory requirement not to interfere with oil and gas extraction?
Can we support innovations in the Safe Drinking Water Act? Here’s an example from my dream world. If there is enough occurrence and health information for a contaminant present in consumer products to end up on the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule or Contaminant Candidate Lists, could that trigger action on those products by responsible agencies? I know this is crazy talk, but I am suggesting that it’s time for creative craziness if we want to make strides in source water protection.
When I tell people that the Safe Drinking Water Act is mostly NOT about protecting drinking water sources, I get the furrowed brow look. How can that be? It says “Safe Drinking Water.” That should be an improvement we can agree on in the next phase of the Safe Drinking Water Act’s story. In the meantime, there is much we can do to influence this country to stop talking about drinking water only when there is a problem and to truly Put Drinking Water First.