Here’s a website you can check on your municipal water for contaminants. Just plug in your zip code.
I checked mine. We have 11 contaminants way over the allowed limit. I checked my D’s. They have only 1 contaminants over the limit.
If you’re on a private well, you need to send a sample to a lab. We do this yearly, or almost yearly.
I checked mine as well as all of my kids’ and all of us have 6-8 contaminants over the safe limit but within the legal limit. The risk for each is potential cancer. Other than immediately stopping drinking the water, does anyone know how to get more information? Three of us live in areas where the water consistently is praised as safe…not sure what is said about the others. Concerning for sure.
Does your water district provide annual water quality reports? Are these guys saying water districts are faking that data?
Not sure if your question is in response to mine, @BB but, yes, our local water district does. Seems like since the contaminants are below the legal limit, it’s fair game for them to tout their “clean and safe” water. I’d have to look up the last report to see how it handles this kind of information (yes legal, questionable safety).
I’d be glad if our water meet all the legal limits. It doesn’t. Sometimes over as much as 300 times! Good thing I have a good water filter.
Well water tests available to the average Joe don’t test for many harmful contaminants like PFOAs. They need special testing.
Mine shows 4 detected, 2 over the safe limit, potential cancer. One of the worst ones is nitrate, of course the creek where much of the water comes from is surrounded by farmland. I don’t drink our water(except what is used in cooking and such) but I think we have more problems than just our water. It is unreal how many people in our area have been affected by cancer, many have passed away, seems like an awfully high number for a rural area.
The website has a bias—wanting folks filters and lobby for cleaner water as a nonprofit.
My water company sends annual reports wherein we are always below all limits. This one doesn’t have the area we live in so the nearest one has 7 items over limits.
My D’s zip code has 7 items over limits too. S’s area code has 9 over limit! Sounds like we are all drinking polluted water! Yikes!
Our zip shows we have unhealthy (but not illegal) carcinogens like radium and hexavalent chromium, 1,4 dioxane, pfos. I am looking into getting reverse osmosis filter.
To clarify - by “over the limit” they mean over the limit set by the Environmental Working Group, not the EPA or other government agency.
I’m glad the EWG is doing independent work on this, it’s scary to see that some of these chemicals have no legal limit to the government.
My area has 8 contaminants above the EWG’s limit. For my in-laws, they only have 5 but one of them is PFOA. It’s hard to evaluate how one of these may be worse than another. Where D3 went to school, uranium was listed! I guess it’s from all that testing in the southwest back in the 40’s and 50’s. Yikes.
Note that what EWG considers safe limits for many pollutants are lower than the legal limits.
The EPA doesn’t really have a good track record on this stuff, IMO.
I watched the last 20 minutes of this show the other night and it did not leave me with much confidence in the CDC or EPA. I am on a well but pretty close to a coal fired steam plant. We had our water tested a few years ago and it was ok.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/what-lies-upstream/
A good documentary to watch is The Devil We Know. It’s on Netflix if you have a subscription. Very eyeopening.
I still take the cake with the most contaminants over the limit at 11.
I can find news reports saying our water was safe dating back a decade. Then in 2016 the township was closing down private wells and quickly putting in filtration systems for the public water because of PFAS in our water. Folks were randomly selected for bloodwork studies and found to have five times the amount of cancer causing chemicals in their systems than the average American. I can stand on my front porch and yell loudly and 6 people who have been diagnosed with cancer would hear me.
I was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer at 45. My friend across the street Kidney cancer at 44. A woman behind her thyroid cancer at 32. My son has had two teachers die from cancer and one diagnosed over the last few years. 3 of his close friends had a parent die. Also a high percentage of people with high cholesterol, thyroid issues and other problems caused by water contaminants. It is truly a frightening thing. The water is supposedly safe now - I will never drink it again!
@Iglooo - My D1 is in San Diego currently which also has 11 contaminants. I’m hoping that it’s not the number that counts!
Probably not but some of the 11 contaminants are over the limit x300. If the filtering miss so many contaminants, it can’t be good.
So very much of what we consume has contaminants of one sort or another.
According to the alternative med folks, many of us would test poorly.