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Falsified Test Results Don’t Help Address Brandon Water Quality Issues

Former Brandon resident and councilman Tim Wakefield says Brandon’s water has too much radium:

A former Brandon City Councilor says testing proves that the City’s water contains radiation levels above Environmental Protection Agency standards.

…The most concerning issue with this water test is that the test was completed after a highly touted IMAR filtration system was installed,” Wakefield said. “The system was supposed to remove the radium better than previous systems. If the new filter media failing clearly the older, less effective media had the potential to release above EPA limits of Radium” [Todd Epp, “Former Brandon City Councilor Says Testing Shows Radiation Above EPA Standards,” KELO Radio, 2019.08.14].

I e-mailed Wakefield and asked him to send me the test data that support his claim. In an e-mail response Wakefield declined, “because there is a fear that the lab would be harassed by the city administrator Bryan Read. I personally saw the non-redacted version of the test report and agree with the resident’s concerns based on past experiences with this leadership team while they hid behind executive session.”

If I had a nickel for every story I ended up putting on ice because sources claimed to be afraid of retribution, I could have supper at Pizza Ranch tonight.

The Brandon City Council doesn’t have that much power to retribute (how much power can a local city council exert when most of its residents make their living elsewhere?). But it does have the power to hold a press conference and say someone published fake water test results:

City Administrator Bryan Read says someone altered legitimate test results and posted them online.

“Whoever posted this on social media altered the results to show that the city was in violation of the federal drinking water standards.”

Read refused to speculate about who may have put up the bogus results, but says its more evidence that you can’t believe everything you read or see on the Internet.

“Anytime someone falsifies records to try to undermine consumer confidence in the drinking water, that’s worse than yelling fire in a crowded theater” [Mark Russo, “Brandon Fights Back Against Online Claims of Unsafe Water,” KELO Radio, 2019.08.14].

Administrator Read said the test results provided by Mid-Continent Laboratories don’t match what was posted online:

City Administrator, Bryan Read says, “Mid-continent reviewed the test results posted on the social media site and also confirmed that the results shown on the site were not the same results that Mid-continent had supplied to their customer. The results shown for Gross Alpha, radium 226 and Radium 228 on the social media site had been altered as well as the statements regarding compliance with the EPA safe drinking water standards.”

Mid-Continent Labs released the real test results they say they gave to their customer.

“Radium 226 was shown at .276 not the 2.276. The Radium 228 results were shown at .518 Not the 3.518,” says Read [link added; Jenna LeMair, “Brandon Drinking Water Is Safe After Officials Uncover Altered Test Results,” KDLT-TV, 2019.08.15].

If a reliable water-testing company as results showing that Brandon’s water endangers residents’ health, withholding those results is as bad as not yelling fire in a burning theater. Whatever meager backlash Brandon city officials might dish out should pale in comparison to the guilt one would bear for not producing reliable, replicable scientific data demonstrating that thousands of people face an increased risk of cancer due to dangerous levels of radium or other pollutants in a municipal water system.

That’s a long way of saying put up or shut up. But when a citizen puts up false evidence, that may only help the city shut up honest advocates who are trying to address real water quality problems.

12 Comments

  1. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-16 09:34

    Radium is naturally-occurring because it is a decay product of uranium, which is also naturally-occurring. But some man-made activities can also enrich its concentration. It is detectable by radiological and chemical methods.

    The reason it is of interest because it is an alpha emitter. Alphas can be stopped by hair and skin, but if you ingest or inhale alpha emitters those protections can be bypassed. It is also a heavier metal, so it does have a chemistry as well.

    Something to look out for regarding the regulation of products that people may like to smoke or consume in an edible configuration.

  2. Donald Pay 2019-08-16 10:12

    Cory writes: “If I had a nickel for every story I ended up putting on ice because sources claimed to be afraid of retribution, I could have supper at Pizza Ranch tonight.”

    Ain’t that the truth. A lot of people claim a lot of things, but they will not stand up.

    There is a lot to be concerned about this whole affair. The whole story didn’t make sense. It’s not as if the potential for radium/radon in some groundwater in the area hasn’t been known for decades. Uranium mining became a state-wide issue in the late 1970s, after the federal government’s NURE program studied potential new uranium resources in the 1970s using radium levels in wells as a prospecting method. It has been a concern, and it has been monitored for decades.

    There is no excuse for changing the numbers on the lab results. That’s horrible. And it takes away from what needs to be of considered. While the water may meet the MCL, which is the enforceable standard, the MCL goal for health for gross alpha is 0. Alpha radiation packs a punch when ingested or inhaled. The closer to 0 you can get, the more protective of health, but the more expensive it becomes to reach.

    I wouldn’t be concerned to drink the water in Brandon, as long as they treating it and are testing it regularly. Some bottled water never gets tested.

  3. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-16 13:31

    Not even renewables can live up to a zero alpha-emitter standard….and good news, we are going to have more renewables and more alpha emitters in the wastes we will eventually just throw away.

    What you are missing is the ability of biology to deal with the radiation damage and keep it from cascading…apoptosis is a key tool in that battle. Believe it or not, life has evolved on a planet called Earth that had a lot more radioactivity in the past than it does today.

    Stay below 3 times natural background levels. Then there is no health issue from the radioactivity, and the cost of treatment is feasible. That is the happy medium.

  4. Donald Pay 2019-08-17 09:39

    EPA sets the MCLs based on science, not on something as nebulous as 3″X background.” MCLs try to build in a safety factor, so if there are minor violations over short periods of time, those won’t have much impact on health. The MCLs (the enforceable standard) take into consideration technology available to meet the standard and the costs of that technology, but MCL Goals reflect what medical science says is best. Clearly what is best for health for alpha radiation in water is not achievable, due to unavoidable sources of alpha, but those that can be eliminated or reduced should be. In some community water supply systems, that means finding a new water source if the water can’t be treated to reduce the parameter below MCL levels. It seems that Brandon has taken responsibility to treat its water, and as long as testing shows that treatment is reducing alpha to below the MCL standard, the public shouldn’t be all that concerned.

  5. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-17 10:39

    3 times background is not nebulous. The natural background can be measured. The biological response to those levels can be measured.

    It’s called science.

    The drive to force everything to zero in the absence of health effects is political. If the cause were scientific, there would be calls for similar radiological oversight measures for renewable wastes. There are no such calls.

  6. Adam 2019-08-17 13:25

    Background radiation in Colorado is approx. 33% higher than that in New Jersey.

    McTaggart seems to think that publicly consumed water in Colorado should be allowed to contain significantly more radium as than that which should be served to a person in New Jersey.

    Talk about Junk Science.

  7. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-17 14:04

    Is there any statistical significance in any difference one way or the other between cancer rates in Colorado and New Jersey? Nope.

    What I am saying is that biology can handle background levels and several times background levels. Spending money on trying to get to zero when you don’t have to means that other things of merit do not get funded or funded as well.

    Adam would rather try to get down to zero for politics instead of paying teachers more. Talk about Junk Politics ;^).

  8. Donald Pay 2019-08-17 14:15

    Adam is right. Background levels vary from place to place. Usually background refers broadly to a total dose from many sources in the surrounding environment, and doesn’t distinguish between various types of radiation. I’ve seen figures of 300-310 mrem as a good average for background levels over the US, but with considerable variation. I have no idea what the background levels around Brandon might be.

  9. Adam 2019-08-17 15:09

    The only way McTaggart can feel any good about making a nutso claim is to baselessly accuse all messengers of all proper rebuttals of having previously stated a preference for aiming to get radium ‘levels down to zero for politics instead of paying teachers more.’

    It’s sad and disingenuous, and it’s par for the rural course.

  10. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-17 15:26

    No health effects are found below 10 rem above natural background levels. That is 10,000 millirem above the natural background. That has not changed for some time…it is not a new number. That is why the annual threshold for radiation workers at power plants is placed at 5 rem for a significant safety margin.

    https://hps.org/documents/radiationrisk.pdf

    As Low As Reasonably Achievable is the goal. Below health effect thresholds, not going to break the bank.

  11. Donald Pay 2019-08-17 17:40

    The issue is not quite as simply as “no health effects are found below 10 rem above natural background.” The dose response curve is linear, and the time lag for development of cancer is long, there are multiple causes of multiple types of cancer creating a statistical difficulty in certainty about cause and effect at lower doses. However, the best science, which has been established for decades and is continually being reviewed, indicates that there is no dose which EPA has found that is a safe dose. This is especially true with ingested or inhaled alpha emitters. While the risk may be small for an individual, when you expose large populations to small doses, there is elevated risk that some additional people will develop health problems. This is especially true for fetuses and children, again especially true for ingested or inhaled sources of radiation.

  12. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-17 20:23

    Then if there is no safe dose, say good bye to renewables, because you are just throwing those away. Worse yet, we may have to burn those wastes to reduce their volume, exposing populations to alpha emitters. This is exactly why we will never have a zero dose policy.

    At the lower doses, several models are statistically consistent with the data. So you cannot pick a winner at the lower doses. There has been a policy decision to play things in a conservative manner (can I say “conservative” on this blog? ) and implement the linear relationship for oversight purposes. But it is not correct to say that the data clearly picks linear over the other models.

    If there were a true threshold model, people would want to reduce doses whenever possible to avoid that threshold. So I don’t think things would change that much. But the cost-benefit analysis changes with each model.

    And if you want to pay more to reduce the dose, then go ahead. I wouldn’t mind a cost-effective way to zero out the dose. But let’s be clear that other things that are more important would not get that funding used on zero dose policy.

    I think both Adam and Donald would rather be spending that money on teachers than on radium extraction, as I would too.

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