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River faces risks every day

Thu Apr 2, 2009 / Education and Outreach

River faces risks every day

By Joe Rooney
The Phoenix Correspondent

Editor's note: This is the second in a four-part series running through Saturday that will examine issues surrounding the Schuylkill River, local environmental concerns and public safety. Today's piece continues an examination of the state of drinking water in the borough and its primary source, the Schuylkill River.

PHOENIXVILLE — The first priority in the water treatment plant retrofit isn't improving the water, but improving how the water is treated before delivery. And it seems broken parts and obsolete water treatment systems, rather than an abused and contaminated water source, are what elicit the attention of elected officials and residents with their ears to the ground.

The borough's drinking water is extracted from the Schuylkill River and is filtered and treated for consumption. For many observers, the bad news is that
treated water, no matter how new the system works, involves chemical additions, most notably chlorine.

Dr. Paul Bragg, ND, PhD, says in The Shocking Truth About Water, "The greatest damage done by inorganic minerals (and minerals from tap water)… [is] hardening of the arteries and calcification of the blood vessels [which] starts on the day you start taking inorganic chemicals into our bodies."

Improvement plans for the Phoenixville water treatment facility do not call for new filtrations systems to remove inorganic chemicals, but upgrade old systems and continue to add chemicals (including chlorine) to the water prior to distribution to "improve the overall water quality."

Those that eschew suggestions that chemical additions in water treatment represent a threat to public welfare base their claims on dilution — that the quantities of chemicals present in drinking water are so small as to "cancel out" their known dangers. Not true, say some experts. Dilution, by definition, doesn't "cancel out" anything. If one were to dilute a spoonfull of sugar in 10 gallons of water, you would not taste the sugar, but it's still present in the water. What suggests that chemical additions to drinking water are harmful, experts say, is not the amounts that are present, but that chemicals are present at all.

In higher doses, ingestion of chlorine is fatal, and in the small doses of chlorine people receive from drinking water day in and day out leads to, as Bragg says, "hardening of arteries and calcification of blood vessels," which contributes to heart disease.

What about the raw water before it enters the treatment plant? What's in Phoenixville's drinking before it is treated?

Wednesday's article in The Phoenix outlined the massive scope of the strain the Industrial Revolution and, in particular, the coal mining industry, placed on the Schuylkill River and the remarkable clean up effort of the Schuylkill River that took place after World War II. Today, 94 percent of the Schuylkill River basin is comprised of forests, agriculture and residential development.

The Stroud Water Research Center reports that the majority of the water in the Schuylkill River basin in this area is of "good" or "fair" quality, except for two location, south of Limerick Generating Station but near Phoenixville, that they rank as "poor."

The Stroud Schuylkill River Project "uses bottom dwelling macroinvertebrates such as insects, worms, and crayfish that live in the river and its tributaries to assess current water and habitat quality."

Because of the short life span (a few months to at least a year) of these macroinvertebrates, "the presence or conspicuous absence of an aquatic insect at a site gives a meaningful environmental record of quality during the recent past."

Peculiar macroinvertebrate populations and high pH and alkaline levels moved the Stroud Water Research Center to label the water down stream from the Limerick Generating Station as "poor," according to the project.

Limerick draws water from the Schuylkill and other strategic reservoirs and pools to conduct power generation processes. Most of the water they draw is used to maintain operable equipment temperature, and nearly three-quarters of the water they draw from the Schuylkill River leaves their facility in the form of steam — the familiar exhaust from the massive cooling towers. Only one-quarter of the water taken from the Schuylkill is discharged back into the river. This massive discrepancy in water taken verses water returned leaves the Schuylkill with a diminished flow, and lowered depth — caused by a 42 million gallon daily deficit.

With the water returned to the Schuylkill, the problem is that it is heated. The heated water affects the biodiversity of the water, but it isn't a source of pollution, a station official said.

http://www.phoenixvillenews.com/articles/2009/04/02/news/srv0000005029580.txt