STATEMENT BY JULIE PENNY
AUGUT 14, 2002
"QUALITY" OF LONG ISLAND'S GROUNDWATER
-The South Fork-
Yesterday, in my testimony I spoke about the "quantity" of the South Fork's Groundwater. Today, I will discuss "quality."
All levels of our government and agencies have suffered from a lack of strong stewardship so that over the years-figuratively and literally-the quality of our aquifers has been going down the drain. And, continues to do so even as we speak. In Nassau and Suffolk our drinking water is in constant need of artificial resuscitation to keep it drinkable. And even then, sometimes the effort fails and some public wells need to be shut down. Looking at this year's Annual Water Quality Report for the year 2001 from the Suffolk County Water Authority, it is demoralizing to see how treated water-as opposed to RAW water-contains so many chemicals in certain districts. It is not a healthy cocktail to be drinking for the long run. Especially, as the chlorine additive potentiates the noxious chemicals that remain at so-called "acceptable" levels in the tap water, even after filtering..
It appears the Suffolk County Water Authority hasn't taken into perspective the rapidity in which our aquifers have been in decline. In just about 60 years, a mere drop in the geologic bucket, Nassau and Suffolk have degraded their aquifers to a remarkable degree. A glacially pristine aquifer that was tens of thousands of years in the making has been compromised by our human activities. What if our founding fathers polluted our water between 1700 and 1800 to the degree that it's polluted today? At that rate, would we be here today? We should be ashamed of the legacy we are creating for those who follow us. To meet the challenge before us, the SCWA and our government need to combat this degradation head-on.
On the South Fork, our situation is even more precarious. We depend mostly on our Upper Glacial Aquifer because our older aquifer, the Magothy, to a great extent has salt-water intrusion, and we have no ancient Lloyd aquifer to speak of, as they do west of the Shinnecock canal.
We take it for granted-water. You may be riding in your car; walking hand in hand with your child along the beach, a quiet lane; standing at a check-out counter; strolling under a canopy of trees in the woods; gardening in your own backyard. And there, beneath you at all times is the water that brings and sustains life to the South Fork. Indeed, to all of Long Island.
School teachers, construction workers, farmers, real estate brokers, film stars, artists, accountants-makes no difference who you are or what you do-our biology is just the same and without pure water we can not be healthy. The water molecules that affects us physically, affects us economically, sustaining our lives, sustaining our economy. Like a house of cards it all falls apart if we don't have good drinking water and, at a cheap price. There is no snow-capped mountain runoff for us, nor, Adirondeck reservoirs. What comes out of our taps is what comes out of our ground. What we take out of the ground is affected by what we put into the ground. From Brooklyn and Queens on out to Montauk Point, millions of us depend on groundwater for our drinking water in the form of three aquifers that are piggy-backed one on top of the other. Each was formed at a different stage of our geological past, the most recent is the Upper Glacial Aquifer formed a mere 18 million years ago during the retreating ice age. It forms a hilly spine running down the length of Long Island. On the East End we depend on this aquifer closest to the surface-the Upper Glacial Aquifer. Because their Upper Glacial Aquifer is contaminated, Nassau and western Suffolk rely on the more ancient Magothy Aquifer sandwiched just below it, and, the bottommost and oldest aquifer-the Llyod. Yet, the Magothy aquifer is experiencing problems too, from contaminants and chloride. Now, there is a lesson to be learned here for we of the South Fork, from what's transpiring to our west. Development, overuse, pollutants, salt-water intrusion are putting our aquifers at risk.
For a variety of reasons-the agricultural use of pesticides, landfill leachate, petroleum and solvent spills, commercial leaks and leachings from all manner of chemicals, MTBE, salt water intrusion, golf courses, heavy iron content-the South Fork's water is already compromised in many regions. Regions that may, or, may not, have access to public water. (And even public wells are contaminated. Across Suffolk, thousands of private and hundreds of public wells must be treated with expensive and elaborate carbon filtering systems. It will only get worse.)
There is a bureaucratic mentality that says there's trillions of gallons of water in the pine barrens. But it is cost prohibitive to pipe and move. It is always best and cheapest to protect and conserve what is closest to home. It is not feasible and just plain costly to pump water onto the South Fork from off the South Fork. Frankly, we can't afford it.
While experiencing diminishing recharge and increasing areas of contamination, we also find that the last decade has left us with burgeoning needs-our population is expanding and will continue to do so. In summer our population trebles. Increasingly, there is a conversion from seasonal to year-round residences. Demographically, retirees are moving from the city and western Long Island to the East End. Seniors are coming back up from retirement in Florida to be near their children as they become frail. Increasingly, the well-heeled are raising their children here on the East End while the husband commutes from the city, or telecommutes. More and more, legal and illegal aliens crowd into legal and illegal housing. Altogether our need for high quality drinking water is escalating.
What does this imply, besides fetching more water from the tap to slake our collective thirst? It means more showers, pools, sprinkling and other out-of-doors uses, laundry, and increased demand of public water for fire-fighting. More switching from private to public well water. And, a limited supply of high quality potable water which will only worsen unless we plan and manage it now. The best way to guarantee future sources of potable water is to save our watersheds as "open space"-in the long run it's the most effective tactic. Nationally, as an article in The New York Times says apropos watersheds, it's costing trillions, what nature does for free. And besides, nature does a better job of it. Additives like chlorine while killing bacteria also kill beneficial intestinal flora that help us absorb needed nutrients.
Besides accidental spills and leaks from gas stations and what not, there's a time-bomb ticking from all the older buried residential tanks (not to mention car junkyards, too).
Also, in its headlong drive to get people to sign up for public water-even those whose water is superior in quality to the SCWA's-short shrift is being given by the SCWA to the changeover from private wells to public wells. They don't tell the potential customer that if they have an old submersible pump (as many have) and don't follow the proper changeover protocols they can contaminate the groundwater. Just "capping" these old submersibles is insufficient. At present, there are no regulations to see that the retirement of these wells is done correctly. In proper well abandonment, a contractor removes the internal apparatus of the old pumps, which are filled with oil and PCB's. If this is not done, or, done improperly, it is a conduit for seepage for these noxious agents into our water table. Proper removal then means homeowners shelling out even more money, on top of that paid to the SCWA for a hook-up. As it's unregulated and not mandated by law, and the SCWA isn't telling them, many just won't don't it. Informing people would be just another proactive way of SCWA helping to protect our groundwater.
Treating contaminated water is costly, especially for MTBE whose filters need to be changed much more frequently than other chemicals in order to remove it. These filters are expensive and housed in buildings as big as a house. At what point in the future will it become so cost prohibitive that our economy will be stunted by these increasing chemical degradations? Every day in East Hampton and Southampton we have news of MTBE turning up-sometimes at astronomical levels, as in Hampton Bays, where a MTBE plume has entered Tiana Bay.
WELL TESTING PROGRAM
The study of wells conducted by the Suffolk County Department of Health Services shows that 50% 0f the East Ends private wells and 23% of its public wells showed detectable levels of pesticides
Unfortunately, the DEC has pulled the plug on further testing by not funding the program further.
The SCDHS collected samples from less than half of the community wells (226). Of those tested, 23.5% (53) contained pesticides, in spite of the fact that there are activated carbon filters on 1/3 of these wells. Of the 834 private and non-community wells, 422 or 50.6% were found to contain pesticides. And, of those 50%, 38.7% of the private wells had multiple compounds. Some of the pesticides found in the wells at greater than the Maximum Contamination Levels (MCL's) are those that have been banned since 1983, or, earlier.
HEALTH IMPACTS
These contaminants are having its effect on our health (especially children's). The Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Center for Children's Health and the Environment has been running an all-important and enlightening series of full-page ads in The New York Times this spring and summer with headlines like: "More kids are getting brain Cancer-WHY?" about the rising incidence of brain, testicular, acute lymphocytic leukemia cancer from exposure to pesticides. Another ad reads, "Pesticides could become the ultimate male contraceptive-WHY?"-explores the frightening reproductive changes and abnormalities in animals and humans that is taking place because of pesticides in our environment. The Mt. Sinai Medical Center has a comprehensive website on this whole topic with all the scientific background for their NY Times ads. Check out this important website: www.childenvironment.org
Recently, the noted writer and biologist, Dr. Sandra Steingraber gave a lecture in East Hampton based on her book "Having Faith" on the harmful impact that chemicals, like pesticides, can have on the developing fetus. A woman's body is a baby's first environment, and exposure to noxious chemicals through the placenta at a critical moment in fetal development (even within the course of a few hours when certain cells metamorph into becoming a particular organ) can have devastating consequences. Same thing with breast milk that is laden with pesticides. Ingestion of contaminated milk can threaten each crucial stage of infant development. When it comes to exposure, timing is all. Her previous book is: Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment.
Not only is Suffolk applying tons of noxious chemicals to lawns, farms and vineyards more than any other part of the state, Suffolk rates the worst in complying with the rules. No wonder we have one of the highest rates of breast and prostate cancer in the nation.
The office of Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced in June that it was taking legal action against Agway stores in Bridgehampton and Riverhead stemming from the repeated sales of illegal pesticides, the "last straw" being a sale last year in May 2001.
In it's latest report, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation in its inspection of agricultural establishments (vegetable growers, orchards, vineyards, sod farms, nursery and greenhouse operations) declared Suffolk the worst county in complying when compared to other NYS counties (For example, noncompliance upstate is 7% as opposed to Suffolk with 28% noncompliance). The report covered worker protection standards, pesticide-related requirements such as applicator certification, record-keeping, and the use of antisiphon devices at equipment filling stations to prevent backflow of contaminated water into a water source. As regards "antisiphon" devices, the report says, "At a minimum, 30 % of the agricultural establishments inspected failed to comply with this important measure. This takes on added significance considering more than 50 pesticides and degradates have been detected in the sole source aquifer underlying Nassau and Suffolk Counties. In fact, in the eastern agricultural communities of Long Island, the pesticides most commonly detected are agricultural.
"It was also found that some growers have been using pesticides that are prohibited from use in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Such prohibitions are specifically designed to safeguard groundwater resources."-NYSDEC
NYSDEC: AMOUNTS OF PESTICIDES USED IN SUFFOLK
Listed below in table-form are the amounts of pesticides used in Suffolk County in 1998 according to the DEC database. (The following information is taken from "Toxic Treadmill: Pesticide Use and Sales in New York State, 1997-1998" who used as their source the: "1998 NYSDEC Pesticide Sales and Database.")
Amount of Pesticide Products Applied by
Commercial Applicators and Sold to Farmers on Long Island- 1998*
| County |
Sales to Farmers |
Commercial Applicator Use |
Total |
| |
Gallons |
Pounds |
Gallons |
Pounds |
Gallons |
Pounds |
| Suffolk |
89,874 |
631,856 |
440,247 |
2,142,782 |
530,121 |
2,774,638 |
*In 1999, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation re-analyzed and recalculated the amounts of pesticides applied commercially for its 1998 data, making for even greater quantities than those listed above.
You can see that "Commercial" use outstrips farmers by about 4 to 1. Our use of chemicals has to stop. People want to do the right thing, the healthy thing. But they've been brain-washed and do things on automatic without knowing that these chemicals can cause problems. Clever advertising with cartoon weeds biting the dust with blasts of Round-up makes the use of chemicals even more appealing. The ordinary public has no idea how destructive all this junk is. They've been programmed to shrink in horror at the thought of dandelions on their lawns. The pesticide industry has a powerful lobby.
In the old days, I remember the anti-smoking campaign, when opponents had free air time. For every cigarette commercial there were great and potent anti-smoking ads that showed the real effects of cigarettes. Equal air time should come back. People need to see the graphic health statistics on what this stuff does to our health and environment.
The public has to be educated, and in a big, big way that they can have beautiful lawns and gardens without the use of chemicals. Education campaigns for the public have to be waged at every level of government. That's where money should be going. Mind-sets have to change.
Certainly, chemicals should be banned in our Special Groundwater Protection Areas.
For starters, we should support legislation that would ban the use of chemicals for ornamental use. The State bills by LaValle/DiNapoli would do that.
Also, as far as enforcement goes. Huge fines should be levied including jail time against those who do not comply with the law.
As far as farmers go on the east End, the Federal government should give them subsidies for a transition to organic farming. Public water is not the panacea for the East End. Strong land use laws and a change in the way people do things is.
 South Fork Groundwater Task Force
PO BOX 2360 Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Phone/Fax: 631 - 725 - 6200
Site By: Hamptons Online
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