EPA report details incidents of toxic spills into groundwater, rivers, or lakes used for drinking water. The data from 2010-2019 provides the most comprehensive report to date on such spills.
Excerpt from this story from Circle of Blue:
The Freedom Industries spill is one of many incidents detailed in a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report that is the most comprehensive assessment to date of the number, location, and characteristics of chemical and toxic spills into U.S. drinking water sources.
Using a combination of federal data sets covering the years between 2010 and 2019, the assessment found 3,931 incidents of toxic spills into groundwater, rivers, or lakes used for drinking water. The spills occurred in the vicinity of 15 percent of the country’s drinking water intakes that draw from surface water but in less than 1 percent of groundwater wells used as a public supply source. A spill in the vicinity does not necessarily mean that drinking water was compromised.
“The findings from this study demonstrate there is a significant risk of releases into sources of drinking water at a national scale,” according to the report. “However, the risk to a community water system will depend on their unique circumstances.”
The EPA did not make the report author available for an interview but the agency noted in a statement that the risk of contamination varies across individual water systems.
Outside experts said that the report is an important contribution to understanding contamination risks to drinking water.
“I don’t think there’s ever been an aggregation of the data in this manner before,” Kevin Morley of the American Water Works Association, an industry group, told Circle of Blue.
Spills occurred in every state, but certain regions exhibited more failures. The largest number of incidents were concentrated around transportation routes, mining and drilling sites, and industrial hubs. Those areas include the Ohio River Valley, Mississippi Delta, Los Angeles area, oil and gas belts of Oklahoma and Texas, and Interstate 95 corridor in the Northeast.
States with the most incidents were Texas (303), California (244), Oklahoma (236), Louisiana (205), and Pennsylvania (169). Osage County, Oklahoma, an oil and gas hub, alone accounted for 117 incidents.
More than half the incidents were small, meaning spills of less than 1,000 gallons. Large spills like the release of millions gallons of coal waste into the Dan River in North Carolina in 2014 were infrequent.
Equipment failures (27 percent) were the leading cause of spills, and private industry was most often the responsible party.
Out of the 840 hazardous substances that were documented in the decade of spills, more than half the incidents were related to discharges of refined oil.
