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14-B  The Atlanta Journal and CONSTITUTION  SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 1978

IT'S IN THE WATER

Atlantans Sip Chloroform Daily

By TYRONE TERRY
It is almost like making a one-course meal for 750,000 people each day of the week, 365 days a year.

But the recipe is a bit weird. It calls for ingredients such as carbon, lime, aluminum sulfate, chlorine and fluoride.

Everyone uses about 74 gallons of this special "soup" each day.

The demand varies daily. Sometimes only an 85-million-gallon batch is needed.  At other times, the "cooks" make 140 million gallons. It depends on the weather.

Although some federal Environmental Protection people say the final product is pretty good, Atlantans flush most of it down their toilets.

[[image]]
William Bush

It is, of course, water.

The recipe started out simply, H20. But pollution changed that. Before you can drink Atlanta's water, supplied daily by the Chattahoochee River, the city's water control officials - like their counterparts across the nation - add a number of chemicals to make the water safe.

The EPA suspects, though, that some of those chemicals could be harmful in the long run. The scientific community is still debating that point.

"Atlanta doesn't have totally pure water, but it is in a lot better shape than many other large cities," said EPA toxicologist Mark McClanahan.

"Atlanta's big problem is not much in quality, but quantity. It faces an ever increasing population. The greater Atlanta area only has a certain amount of water available to it."

Deciding what to two about the quantity of water is still unresolved. But William T. Bush, director of Atlanta's Water Bureau boasts that the city's water has just the right combination of ingredients, resulting in a tasty and safe thirst quencher.

"We meet all the requirements and all the organic restrictions set up by EPA," Bush said. McClanahan doesn't dispute that.

In order to keep the water quality high a 500-square-mile area surrounding Atlanta is monitored daily to check for pollutants.

Much like fresh food a large restaurant receives daily, the water that the Chattahoochee delivers to the Water Quality Control Center (five miles north of Five Points) has to be cleaned of excess particles picked up during "shipping."

Logs and other large debris get screened out first at the Control Center. Even though the raw water often looks much like the finished product that Atlantans drink, many dangerous chemicals cannot be detected by the naked eye.

Sophisticated equipment performs that task. Decayed leaves, petroleum spills, industrial discharges, treated sewage, bacteria and other harmful pollutants could be in the Chattahoochee River at one time or another.

In 1963, a 14-inch pipeline that carried kerosene across the river broke, spilling the liquid into the Chattahoochee for several hours.

The water system still averages two oil sticks a month. But the amount of sewage discharge has dropped drastically in the last five years.

At one time, about 40 sewage plants emptied into the river. Through consolidation, that number is down to 12 and most of the discharge is downstream.

To make the water fit to drink, chlorine at about one-half part per million is added to kill bacteria. If an extra heavy dose of chlorine is needed, the water becomes acidic.

Lime is added to control acidity.

In the early stages of treatment, carbon is applied to absorb the pollutants and improve color and taste.

With those seasonings completed, the "soup" then is sprinkled with aluminum sulfate. That chemical helps separates solids from the water. After the solids are skimmed off, a dash of lime is added again to give the water an 8.9 (alkaline) reading on the pH scale.

"At 8.9, rusting in many water pipes is pretty much controlled," Bush said. "It would take a 10 or 11 reading to eliminate rust completely, but the water would taste like lime."

Chlorine is put into the water again to make sure there is a residual amount when you turn on you [[your]] water faucet. And in the last stage, fluoride is sprinkled in to control tooth decay in chlldren [[children]].

But when you drink a glass of treated Chattahoochee River water, you are swallowing chloroform, a suspected cancer-causing agent, and two other trihalomethanes, formed when chloroform interacts with natural substances found in untreated water.

The EPA suspects that trihalomethanes are harmful and is considering making it mandatory for water plants serving cities of 75,000 people or more to install carbon filters to help weed them out. Hearings are scheduled March 23 in Miami, and March 29 in New Orleans.

But water bureau director Bush argues that not enough research has been done. Atlanta would have to spend $36 million to build such a carbon filter system, and $6 million annually to operate it he claims.

"That is foolish, we don't need it," he said. "We are going to fight it all the way."

"Studies conducted by the highly respected National Academy of Sciences show that there is no hard evidence that long-term, low-level exposure to organics is harmful to health," he said. "Yet EPA has adopted the philosphy [[philosophy]], 'Do something even if it's wrong' and indeed carbon filters might be the wrong thing to do." EPA acknowledged in their statements on these proposed regulations that bacteria growth on the granular activated carbon could cause problems.

"I don't believe that there is any question that organics are preferable to stomach disorders, virus infections or the like; and these diseases could occur if our disinfection programs are changed."