In 1984 Wisconsin banned lead soldering in drinking water pipes, and, while main pipes were replaced, many pipes that branch off to individual buildings continue to pose health risks to hundreds of thousands of private homes and businesses across the state.
According to Fox 6 News, Gov. Tony Evers plans to grant environmental officials $70 million to replace the lead pipes and improve the overall quality of Wisconsin’s drinking water over the next two years.
Kevin Masarik, a groundwater education specialist at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, believes passing such legislation could fundamentally improve the health of people exposed to contaminants in their drinking water.
“It depends on the contaminant, but there is a variety of both chronic and acute health effects of poor drinking water,” Masarik said.
Masarik said the consumption or inhalation of lead leads to neurological damage and developmental problems, especially in infants and small children.
Pregnant women are also more susceptible to the repercussions of consuming lead, he said, as the contaminant can cause birth defects and even miscarriages.
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Although lead is a contaminant of great concern, there are other contaminants in drinking water that consumers can be affected by.
Masarik said nitrates in drinking water, typically from fertilizers or leachate in landfills, can lead to a lack of oxygen in the blood and cause blue baby syndrome in infants that, if left untreated, can be fatal.
“There are a variety of different contaminants that we would expect to find in well water and community water,” Masarik said. “Some are natural from bedrock, others are human induced, such as nitrate.”
To sanitize drinking water, some cities use ultra violet radiation or ozone, but most often, facilities use chlorine as a water treatment, Masarik said.
According to the City of Madison water quality website, Madison’s drinking water is sanitized using chlorine to destroy viruses and bacteria that may be present in the water.
Additional steps can be added, depending on the specific contaminants that are present in a city’s drinking water. According to National Public Radio, because lead pipes are an issue in Wisconsin, many facilities add phosphate to their water supply to create a barrier between the lead pipe and the water instead of replacing the lead pipes altogether.
“Various other chemicals can be added to adjust for hardness and pH levels or to prevent corrosion, based on the water source,” NPR said. ‘But depending on where you are in the United States, there can be different challenges, and corresponding methods of treating drinking water.”
Morgan Robertson, a UW-Madison associate professor of geography, the majority of people in the U.S. are fortunate enough to have treated water, yet many impoverished families in America and across the world still suffer from poor health due to the consumption of untreated water.
Robertson said lower-class individuals all over the world face the consequences of poor quality drinking water, which she believed to be an act of environmental injustice.
“People who don’t have money to protect their health through personal expenditures are disproportionately affected by this problem,” Robertson said.
Expressing the same sentiment, Masarik said lower-income families are more focused on basic needs like food and shelter rather than water quality.
Not only are low-income families disproportionately affected by contaminated drinking water, but people who use well water rather than community-sanitized water are also more affected, Robertson said. Private wells are completely unprotected with no regulations in place to ensure that contaminant levels are not creating health safety hazards, she said.
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Even if homeowners were required to test their well water, some may be resentful if the proper tools and resources were not provided to do so, Masarik said.
“Requiring homeowners to test on a routine basis most likely wouldn’t result in people being more likely to take corrective measures,” Masarik said. “In my sense it wouldn’t be effective unless they [officials] could devote the resources to go through with it.”
Although Masarik believes that implementing regulations to have homeowners test their well water for lead and other contaminants would be beneficial for their health, he is unsure how feasible it is given the cost and availability of resources.
Even if it is not required, Masarik said testing and education about water testing should be made more available to the public to help people understand the consequences of contaminants.
“Testing is available, [officials] might need to do a better job at facilitating that-so people know how to do it and where to send the sample,” Masarik said. “Helping people understand the importance of what’s in their drinking water would go a long way.”
