By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
RENO, Aug. 10, 2000 (LVRJ) -- It's carcinogenic, it's costly to filter from water and it contaminates thousands of wells throughout Nevada and the West.
Federal regulators and dozens of water utility managers from across the U.S. agreed on that much, but little else, about arsenic Aug. 9 at the only public hearing on a new rule to vastly reduce how much of the toxic element Americans can consume in their tap water.
Nevada and other mineral-rich Western states are hardest hit by naturally occurring arsenic contamination, and they will have to spend the most to solve the problem, officials agreed. Mesquite's water supplier could have to build a plant costing $10 million to $20 million by a federal deadline of 2006, Virgin Valley Water District Chief Hydrologist Michael Johnson said. Passing on the cost to customers might hike household water bills by $50 a month, he said.
The towns of Moapa, Pahrump, Indian Springs and Caliente have similar amounts of arsenic in their water to Mesquite, where the levels can reach several times the limit proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Some residents of those communities could see increases in their bills, officials at the meeting said.
The proposed rule is expected to be completed by January. The EPA could weaken it before then, mitigating potential financial impacts.
The drinking water industry estimates that the proposed rule could force utilities to spend as much as $14 billion to build new arsenic-filtering facilities and $1.5 billion a year to operate them.
EPA officials peg annual costs at as low as $380 million a year. They did not provide an estimate of how much it would cost to build facilities nationwide.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority provides almost all of the Las Vegas Valley with water from the Colorado River. The surface water rarely exceeds the EPA's proposed standard, but the authority is planning a pilot filtering program that could cost as much as $100,000, officials said.
A National Academy of Sciences panel determined last year that the EPA's current standard, unchanged since the 1940s, placed Americans at an unacceptable risk of bladder cancer, lung cancer and other skin, heart and lung ailments. The illnesses were linked to arsenic in drinking water by studies of contamination in Taiwan, Argentina and Chile. Few scientists have completed studies of arsenic in drinking water at the comparatively lower levels found in the U.S.
Researcher Charles Abernathy, who has studied arsenic for the EPA for more than 10 years, said that the agency has become concerned about a puzzling cluster of leukemia cases in Fallon, a Navy town about an hour from the site of Wednesday's meeting, where arsenic contaminates drinking water at 20 times the proposed standard.
Doctors have diagnosed seven Fallon children with the blood disease since early 1999, six since March. Abernathy said EPA scientists expect to work closely with Nevada health division officials, who have launched an investigation into the cases.
The meeting almost immediately became a heated debate over science and the price of protecting public health with a rule that could become the most expensive drinking water regulation in the 26-year history of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
"Unfunded mandates will not be complied with, regardless of cost," said Caliente Community Development Director Bryan Elkins. After decades of residents living downwind of the Nevada Test Site, he said, "An increase in cancer in my neck of the woods is a joke."
Utility managers argued that the EPA is playing fast and loose with scientific facts in its proposal to decrease tenfold the amount of arsenic allowed in U.S. drinking water.
The proposed rule would lower the arsenic standard from 50 parts per billion to 5 parts per billion, the equivalent of five drops of water in an Olympic swimming pool.
EPA officials estimated at the meeting that lowering the standard would save as much as $470 million a year in medical expenses and other costs by preventing arsenic-related illnesses.
A skeptical audience tore into those calculations, saying EPA officials had, among numerous other errors, overestimated cancer risks by ignoring a Utah study that showed insignificant increases in illness in a county where arsenic is present at levels most common throughout the U.S.
"We're all aware that economics is a dismal science, but we've moved away from dismal," said Dr. Steve Reiber, vice-president of a Seattle engineering firm. "We're marching off into a swamp here."
© Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2000
