Residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania are currently grappling with uncertainty and anxiety surrounding their drinking water. On Friday night, more than 8,000 gallons of hazardous chemicals spilled into Otter Creek (also known as Mill Creek), which flows into the Delaware River, the largest source of drinking water for the city.
Based on testing, Philadelphia’s tap water remains safe to drink at least until late Monday night, according to local officials.
“The Philadelphia Water Department is confident that tap water from the Baxter Drinking Water Treatment Plant will remain safe to drink and use at least through 11:59 p.m. today (Monday, March 27, 2023.) This assurance is due to the treatment and continuous testing of water that is currently available to residents,” the city noted in its latest update at 1:30 p.m. ET on Monday, echoing an earlier text alert transmitted to cell phones in the Philly area.
However, that safety assessment could change after 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday, per the city’s water department. For now, officials are recommending that residents in the affected area fill up water containers at home for an emergency supply, pending more test results.
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Previously, Philadelphia advised residents to switch to bottled water in an earlier emergency alert. Officials later updated that advisory following testing and said the tap water is safe to drink for the time being.
Yet, though later walked-back, the alert stoked panic and caused a run on bottled water locally. Many Philadelphia-area grocery stores ran out, according to reports from The Philadelphia Inquirer and other outlets. In one anecdote, a Philadelphia-based friend texted me to say that an ACME grocery in North Philly was advising people to buy Gatorade as an alternative over the store’s PA system.
The small chemical spill was reported at around 11:40 p.m. on Friday, according to a Coast Guard press release. The company responsible, Trinseo Altuglas LLC, said that the spill was the result of an “equipment failure” at its Bristol facility in a Sunday news statement. It claimed that 8,100 gallons of a latex solution “overflowed the on-site containment and entered a storm drain, where it flowed to Otter Creek and then to the Delaware River,” in the release.
Altuglas makes acrylic resin and other plastic materials. The company and city officials have described the mixture spilled into Otter Creek as a “latex product” or “latex emulsion.” Butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and methyl methacrylate are all chemicals thought to be in the spilled solution, according to the city—and it’s these three compounds that officials are testing and monitoring for.
Baxter Drinking Water Treatment Plant, Philly’s largest tap water provider, takes in water from the Delaware River downstream of the spill. The concern is that the pollution could therefore end up in a portion of the city’s drinking water. However, so far, officials have said none of the chemicals of concern have actually been detected at Baxter or elsewhere in the city’s water system. The treatment plant has only taken in water once since the spill occurred, and officials reported no detectable contamination in that intake.
Baxter will need to re-up its water reserves before Tuesday, and more testing will need to be done to verify the continued safety of the tap water then, officials have explained. Philadelphia city government held a press briefing on Sunday about the spill. Another briefing is scheduled for 5 p.m. ET Monday.
The chemicals (butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and methyl methacrylate) are all known to be respiratory and skin irritants, above certain levels. However, less is known what impacts these chemicals have on human health when ingested, particularly with short-term exposure, Keeve Nachman, a toxicologist and environmental health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told Gizmodo by phone.
The Environmental Protection Agency has established a reference dosage for one of the three compounds, methyl methacrylate, which is considered the safe threshold for regular exposure. Based on that EPA reference dosage (1.4 milligrams per kg of bodyweight per day), a person would need to ingest a lot of methyl methacrylate to experience adverse health effects.
Ingestion symptoms for all three chemicals may include abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, according to the National Institutes of Heath’s PubChem. Yet Nachman pointed out that the city of Philadelphia hasn’t released enough information to assess whether or not those are symptoms people could potentially face in the current scenario. To accurately assess risk, Nachman said he would need to know what level of each chemical is circulating in the river water, if any.
“We need to know more about how much of this chemical people [could] actually be getting through their drinking water, and for how long, before we comment on risk,” the toxicologist explained.
Yet even with the unknowns, he seemed optimistic that this spill likely won’t cause serious harm. Usually, health impacts of water pollution are assessed over the long term, Nachman explained. If any contamination does manage to enter the water supply, it is likely to be a less dangerous, short-term exposure, he said. “It may be the case that people are not exposed long enough for us to be concerned about drinking water.”
Ultimately, if the contamination doesn’t stay in the river long, “it seems unlikely that people would get sick,” Nachman said.
Additionally, given the size of the spill, chemical concentrations in the water are likely to be very low. The 8,000+ gallons spilled is tiny, relative to the amount of water in the Delaware River as it passes through Philadelphia. For context, more than 1 million gallons flow through the waterway per second at Trenton, NJ and Penn’s Landing, according to USGS monitoring data.
For now, residents of Philadelphia should stay up-to-date on their local advisories and alerts.
Source: Gizmodo