Cutler, CA - School drinking water contains toxins

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Posted on Fri, Sep. 25, 2009

AP IMPACT: School drinking water contains toxins
GARANCE BURKE

The Associated Press

CUTLER, Calif. - Over the last decade, the drinking water at thousands of schools across the country has been found to contain unsafe levels of lead, pesticides and dozens of other toxins.

An Associated Press investigation found that contaminants have surfaced at public and private schools in all 50 states , in small towns and inner cities alike.

But the problem has gone largely unmonitored by the federal government, even as the number of water safety violations has multiplied.

"It's an outrage," said Marc Edwards, an engineer at Virginia Tech who has been honored for his work on water quality. "If a landlord doesn't tell a tenant about lead paint in an apartment, he can go to jail. But we have no system to make people follow the rules to keep school children safe?"

The contamination is most apparent at schools with wells, which represent 8 to 11 percent of the nation's schools. Roughly one of every five schools with its own water supply violated the Safe Drinking Water Act in the past decade, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by the AP.

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A Quota of Daily Pollution - EPA Delays and Lack of Enforcement

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Published on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

A Quota of Daily Pollution
by Evaggelos Vallianatos

From the moment of its inception, in December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was caught in a trap. It could not honestly protect “human health and the environment” from the perpetual onslaught of toxins and outright pollution of the industrial behemoth of the United States.

The federal government organizations that tried to protect human health and the environment before 1970 were the giant Departments of Agriculture; Interior; and Health, Education and Welfare. They had failed miserably, which was the real reason for the establishment of EPA.

The most EPA could do was to learn from its predecessors by “regulating” pollution, i.e., allowing factories a quota of pollution every day and prohibit the most life-threatening practices of those making poisons and other dangerous products.

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