Afraid you missed the party? Well, no. There was none, something we will have to remedy next year. Yesterday was World Water Day. All over the world, towns, cities, countries, non-profit organizations, held events in line with the motto, “Clean water for a healthy world,” with “clean” also meaning uncontaminated by toxic chemicals.
Yesterday EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced her agency is developing stricter regulations for four chemical compounds: tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, acrylamide and epichlorohydrin. All four compounds can cause cancer, so this is newsworthy, but there were not many media outlets reporting on it and none which connected the dots to health care, the main topic across the nation yesterday. Read about the EPA plan for stricter regulations from the source, or in a newspaper report from Las Vegas where water is already acknowledged as an issue. Organizations like Clean Water Action featured Water Day on the first page of their Web sites. On the Outer Cape, we have drinking water from private wells (ie. groundwater), fresh water in our kettle ponds, salt water in the ocean, and acid rain, which is falling abundantly this morning.
Check out how clear the water in Great Pond is. (The National Seashore, however, warns us not to eat fish from our kettle ponds due to the risk of mercury poisoning.) The ocean has been in the news recently because of major erosion to our coastline. Drinking water is also on people's mind because of N's plan to spray five herbicides and growing opposition of citizens. Read Brent Harold's excellent column on this subject in today's Cape Cod Times ...
