Water a Cocktail from the Tap

A cracked and faded life preserver, seasoned more from the hot sun than from actual use, had been looking on with us as brown bubbles churned random patterns in the pool’s surface – its maritime feel at odds with its perch above the giant, brewing vat of wastewater. “Ever have to use that,” I ask Mike, nodding toward the “Love Boat” era prop. Murky bubbles continued foaming around the pool, breaking into little sticky brown globs as they met the surface.  “Not since I’ve been here,” Mike said in that factual manner embraced by most government employees, and not a bit amused by the idea of someone drowning in a pool of shit water. “Probably wouldn’t help anyway, though. You wouldn’t be able to swim with all those air bubbles, and I’m pretty sure you’d sink straight to the bottom.”

What a way to go.

Better to meet your end in this pool than some of the ones earlier in the process though. Where we stood, wastewater collected by the city of Charlotte was more than halfway processed for return to nearby Irwin Creek. I’d take my chances in these brown bubbles in a heartbeat over the sludge pond a few stages back. The site we toured, just off of Billy Graham Parkway, was spread over many acres and has cleaned up Charlotte’s wastewater for decades. Carefully planned stages of treatment separate water from sewage so effectively that, according to Erin Culbert of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities, “The cascade of clear water flowing from the wastewater treatment plant back into Irwin Creek is much cleaner than what is already there. Plus as it flows down into the stream, the water is oxygenated as well, which of course benefits the stream’s biosphere.”

However, many water-quality experts warn that while treated wastewater flowing back into the ecosystem from plants such as this may look crystal clear, there is much hiding below the surface.

A large metal screen catches the “big stuff” as soiled water flows from the city’s sewer pipes into the facility. Bowling balls, shopping carts, and even a 55-gallon drum have been found jammed against the screen, says Mike. Much later in the process, UV light scrambles the DNA of microorganisms, rendering them sterile and unable to reproduce. With such minute life cycles, this clever approach spells certain doom for deadly bacteria and other microbes. Across the sprawling complex, between the metal screen and the cascading waterfall, pools, chambers, and vats of all shapes and sizes progressively separate more of the “solids” from the city’s wastewater. The large majority of the solids will eventually part company with the water, and will be recycled as fertilizer at farms in surrounding counties.  The treated water will eventually make its way downstream toward the next town’s municipal water treatment plants, where it will be prepared for drinking, and consumed again.

But just how clean was the wastewater as it splashed down out of the plant and into Irwin Creek? How many unknown substances will this same water carry when it flows through faucets in the next town over? We should reasonably expect it to be devoid of bowling balls and killer bacteria, but is that good enough? Many of us might not give a second thought to spent water that’s well on its way to the next county.

The problem that every resident of Charlotte should care about, though, is that this same process is used by communities upstream from Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake, towns whose treated wastewater flows into streams and rivers that feed these two sources of Charlotte’s drinking water.

According to The United States Geological Survey, treated wastewater is almost certainly laden with hundreds of unidentified substances: pharmaceutical drugs, cosmetics, hormones and antibiotics – all of which are interwoven into our image-conscious and highly medicated society. Almost half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug, and one in six take three or more medications. They’re prescribed to millions of Americans every day, but science suggests only a small amount of these substances are actually processed by our bodies. The portions of these chemicals that aren’t absorbed by the body are passed through and flow into wastewater treatment plants. And while these plants thankfully remove things like shopping carts and fecal matter from wastewater before it’s discharged back into rivers, streams and groundwater, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities itself acknowledges on its own website, www.charmeck.org, that these finely dissolved substances most likely pass from wastewater to drinking water supplies both here in Charlotte and across the entire country.
Part of the problem is that to date very little research, and no regulation – local, state or federal – yet exists for the presence of these substances in municipal water supplies. Only a handful of labs across the country even have the capability to test for the presence of pharmaceutical drugs in water. Setting up this type of detection for the labs that are capable is tedious, not routine, and therefore expensive. Indeed, two different quotes by commercial labs that did have the capacity to conduct these sophisticated tests landed in the $6,000 range – just outside of Uptown Magazine’s water testing budget.

Fortunately, a better-funded group – The U.S. Geological Survey – has developed a laboratory analytical method to measure the concentrations of eight widely prescribed antidepressants in environmental waters. Most are from the commonly prescribed class called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, and include Prozac, Lexapro, Paxil and Zoloft. Last year, the USGS applied the new method to samples taken from a stream in Texas, and detected high levels of the substances used to make the most commonly prescribed antidepressants.

Sure, Texas is a long way from Charlotte, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the country, and it’s likely that the findings would be similar in any U.S. water samples. Simply, if you drink from the tap, there is a high probability that you’re consuming a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, hormones such as estrogen, and lots of other stuff you didn’t sign on for, which have passed through the bodies of millions of other people.

In compliance with EPA regulations, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities supplies the millions of gallons of drinking water the city demands on a daily basis. Water pulled directly from Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake will pass through treatment facilities like the Franklin Water Treatment plant on Brookshire Boulevard and flow through a complex series of purification stages to make sure that the levels of microbes, turbidity, copper, lead and disinfectants are within the standards set and controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency. Fluoride will be added to keep our teeth strong. Chlorine will kill tiny bugs that would do us harm. Nearly 42,000 treated water samples taken from the county’s drinking water treatment plants will be tested every year. Indeed, documentation provided by the utility, and readily available to the public, confirms levels of more than 100 regulated substances detected in local samples last year were within EPA standards.

But without EPA standards for pharmaceuticals, hormones, cosmetics, and antibiotics in drinking water, no tests are conducted by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department to look for these substances. To be fair, with no regulation, it wouldn’t even know what to look for. If it did find 5 parts per million of the chemical in Prozac, would that amount be dangerous? Would drinking a glass of that water stamp a plastic smile on your face, or pass through you with no effect? How about 1,000 glasses of Prozac-infused water?
On a subsequent tour of the city’s shiny new Environmental Services Facility, we saw plenty of beakers and white lab coats and test tubes in action. A chemistry nerd’s dream come true. Most of the thousands of tests performed on the city’s water samples will be conducted in this state of the art quality control center. But even the scientists there acknowledge that there are very likely all sorts of unregulated substances flowing undetected through Charlotte’s water treatment facilities, and all across the United States.
No one can really say for sure what’s in America’s drinking water. Even Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to know.

Thus the ever-swelling business of selling packaged water. Widespread public awareness of common contaminants sprouted demand for drinking water not just with legally acceptable levels of lead and copper, but with zero heavy metals or other pollutants. With their wallets, American consumers have spoken loudly. Drinking water was once the sole domain of municipalities, but now more and more new companies scramble to use clever packaging and relentless marketing campaigns to hawk the earth’s most important commodity.
Huntersville’s Midas Spring is one rare exception. The local bottler’s biggest change in recent memory was making the switch from glass bottles to plastic.

Owner Gianni Liburdi correctly points out that the company is the oldest registered business operating in Mecklenburg County, and unlike national water giants such as Coke, Pepsi and Nestle (Dasani, Aquafina, Deer Park, etc.), Midas Spring has been in the bottled water business since 1871.”Our spring flows up from an aquifer 200 feet below the surface. The water has trace amounts of magnesium and calcium, which are very beneficial to the human body,” Liburdi says.

Some studies do, in fact, suggest that a diet supplemented with magnesium can help prevent heart disease and Attention Deficit Disorder. And it’s no secret how important calcium is.
Naturally, Liburdi was happy to talk at length about Midas Spring, but in the process he also shed some light on the water industry, as well. “Every drop of Midas Spring water comes directly from our spring here in Huntersville. Many of the national bottled water companies, though – the big ones that we all know – some even with the word ‘spring’ in their names, fill their bottles with only a fraction of actual spring water. Demand for their product far exceeds what any natural spring could produce, so the rest of the bottle is filled up with purified water. Typically water from a municipality or even directly from a lake, that’s been stripped of everything – including any beneficial minerals – using the reverse osmosis process.”
Bruce DeBlock has been selling “RO” water for years from a kiosk in the parking lot of Park Road Shopping Center. Water he buys from the city, just like the rest of us, passes through a series of carbon filters, de-ionizers, ozone gas, ultraviolet light and many other stages before producing a finished product at 1 part dissolved solids per million parts water. The very knowledgeable owner of H2Oasis contends that his process, much too advanced and costly to be employed on the massive scale needed by the city, eliminates pathogens, viruses, carcinogens, arsenic, fecal matter, and lead that is present in municipal water in small amounts – amounts that are within EPA regulations. H2Oasis store manager Sonny Kiel assured me their filtration process even eliminates finely dissolved substances such as pharmaceutical drugs from the water his company sells.

Kiel demonstrated in an informal test, with a handheld digital dissolved solids tester, that his purified water did indeed come in at 1 part dissolved solids per million gallons of water. Municipal drinking water drawn from a sink 10 feet away measured considerably higher at 42 parts per million. According to Kiel, quarterly filter changes ensure the high level of purity the business is built on, and those who shrug at the difference between 1 ppm and 42 ppm, need only take a look at the stage 2 filter when it’s replaced. This filter, says Kiel, is positioned early in the process, and “looks and smells like shit” when it is removed for replacement.

But how do we really know that the water in a bottle of Poland Spring off the shelf is hormone free? Or what the 1 ppm at H2Oasis is made up of, or that Liburdi’s calcium-rich spring water isn’t brimming with other stuff that’s not on the label? Unlike municipal water utilities, which are looked on closely by the EPA, the Food and Drug Administration alone has the daunting task of monitoring the goliath industry of purified and packaged water. According to Nestle Waters North America, bottled water sales volume in this country, second only to soft drinks, exceeds beer, coffee, milk and fruit beverages.

In “Flow,” her award-winning documentary about the “world water crisis,” Irena Salina suggests that there aren’t nearly enough inspectors to effectively monitor the entire U.S. bottled water industry. Not even close.  According to Liburdi, an FDA inspector stops by and pokes around Midas Spring on a couple of surprise visits every year. By DeBlock’s own admission, no one from the FDA has ever been to H2Oasis.

The big players in the water business use such vast amounts of water that they often pull directly from the same lake or river that a municipal water utility might. Naturally, their RO purification systems and bottling operations are colossal and set up to meet national demand for bottled water. If there aren’t an adequate number of inspectors, as Salina suggests, they’ll likely be pulling some overtime.

Liburdi was well prepared for my follow-up question about the possibility that his spring could somehow be compromised by an outside source – a toxic industrial spill from a nearby business, perhaps, that could have seeped into the water table, and into the spring. To ensure purity, he says, his water is passed through a series of filters, and a UV light as well, before it’s sealed into little plastic bottles for sale. He seemed sure that his water was also free of unregulated substances, too, and it just might be. But without specifically testing for these substances, he’s in the same boat as the city of Charlotte, H2Oasis, and the hundreds of other entities offering drinking water for sale in this country. Without adequate data on what foreign contaminants might slip through even the most sophisticated purification processes, and a cost effective way to find out if they’re even there, none of them can know for sure, and therefore neither can the consumer.

Perhaps most troubling is that it would appear that the scope of what isn’t known about this phenomenon is enormous – much larger than what is known. Until there’s regulation and oversight, and a financially streamlined way for those who provide drinking water to test for these chemicals, as consumers we’ll remain in the dark. In our sophisticated society, we depend more and more on drugs, antibiotics, and all kinds of other stuff to get us through our modern lives.

But not one of us will live without water.

~Matt Kokenes