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Warning! This Water May Be Hazardous to Your HealthAwake!—1986 | November 22
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A Boon to Farmers, a Bomb to Earth’s Waters
Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers have been a boon to the world’s farmers, but they have been a bomb to earth’s waters. For years farmers in California’s San Joaquin Valley sprayed their grapes, fruit, and tomatoes with the pesticide DBCP, only to discover in recent years that it can cause cancer and sterility in humans. Although the spraying has stopped, the poison hasn’t stopped percolating through the layers of the earth and into the underground water system. “Thirty-five percent of the wells in the valley have DBCP,” said a spokesman for the health department. In one county in California, 250,000 people run the risk of DBCP contamination, reported Newsweek magazine. Other pesticides affect the nervous system. Still others are suspected of causing various other illnesses. Some herbicides have been discovered to have serious effects on the brain, rendering the victim immobile. In many agricultural areas, fertilizers have raised nitrate concentrations above health standards set out in some countries. These chemicals, too, have infiltrated aquifers.
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Warning! This Water May Be Hazardous to Your HealthAwake!—1986 | November 22
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“Ground-water contamination is the result of sins committed a long time ago,” said James Groff of the American Water Works Association. “Nobody had the foresight to predict it.”
The sins, however, continue to be committed to this date. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in the United States alone 1.5 trillion gallons of hazardous waste leak into the underground water system each year.a Much of it is deliberately dumped by unscrupulous and greedy men without regard to the terrible, terrible damage to man’s water and health. “Just 1 gallon of solvent will contaminate 20 million gallons of ground water to exceed safe levels set by most states,” said one scientist. When one thinks in terms of a trillion gallons of waste, then the expression, ‘water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink,’ looms up as being a potentially frightful reality.
A “Time Bomb, Slowly Ticking Away”
“Ground water and its contaminants,” said the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources, “represent a potential time bomb, slowly ticking away. There’s a growing belief that this problem will be the next great crisis of the 1980s.” The New York Times reported: “There is wide agreement, however, that the contamination of ground water is by far the most serious and difficult problem affecting the quality of drinking water and now constitutes a subterranean time bomb.” “There’s no doubt we have a time bomb on our hands,” warned a University of Arizona scientist. “The question is how big the bang will be.”
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