Thank you for your reply. We use reverse osmosis for drinking water, but that’s only a small part of the total use of water. I have read somewhere that some industrial pollutants have altered the genital structures in some newborn babies (e.g., XY get female genitals). I expect the situation (water pollution) — and everything else — will get worse before they get better.

I use them for my drinking water at home.

How is that a response to the poisoning of the waters of West Virginia, for decades, harming millions of people, simply for the sake of profit?

Even if carbon activated filters made drinking water from Elk River 100% of the time (feel free to go there to try that experiment yourself, and also explain why such filters aren’t simply installed in the homes of every West Virginian– hint: because it won’t actually fix the problem), how exactly would that address the environmental effects, agriculture, fishing? (hint– it doesn’t).

And even if remediation efforts would remove all toxics from the soil and ground water (they’ve been trying for about forty years, and also doing some magical thinking hoping the toxics will simply evaporate; hint: they don’t), even if all our wishes came true and all these pollutants simply vanished– still, how would it it make it ok to dump the poisonous slop into the water and soil in the first place, simply because it’s profitable? Study any logic? Ever? How about moral philosophy?

You may also consider reading up on the accumulation of industrial chemicals in soil and water (hint: places get designated Superfund sites for a reason), and many areas (including one not far from where I live) are simply closed off to the public, because the technology and methods to remediate some of the pollutants doesn’t yet exist.

In particular, read up on the effect of industrial pollutants on ecosystems, and human health (q.v. the links I posted at comments #49 and #51).

After you actually read the research, get back to me, and help me better understand your views of the situation in West Virginia, why thousands of people have no drinking water sources, and why you think carbon activated filters sounds like a plausible response to you.

If you are serious about looking at the research, I’m happy to discuss it further with you.

It’s easy for things to fade in the background when so much awful stuff is happening in the world, but the slow poisoning of our friends in West Virginia continues, and will be continuing for decades to come:

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201402270066

“West Virginia inspectors have discovered 600 more above-ground chemical storage tanks located near public drinking-water supplies, pushing their current inventory to more than 1,600 such tanks, according to data made public Thursday.
The Department of Environmental Protection for the first time released lists of storage tanks that could be subject to new rules if lawmakers pass legislation drawn up in response to the January chemical leak on the Elk River.”

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201402240354

“A new report from the West Virginia Rivers Coalition and the consulting firm Downstream Strategies identifies more potential threats of contamination to the Elk River, the drinking water supply for 300,000 state residents.

The report, based on new information from state regulators, lists 63 potential pollution threats, more than the 52 that were contained in a decade-old report published by the state Department of Health and Human Resources.

Forty commercial, 17 industrial and five municipal facilities — everything from above-ground storage tanks to wells producing natural gas — are on the list of “potential significant contamination sources,” or PSCSs.”

http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Rural-West-Virginians-understand-bad-water-5280333.php

“The chemical spill in January that contaminated drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians around Charleston has brought national attention to issues of water safety. But many rural West Virginians outside the reach of the spill have been living without tap water for drinking for months — or even years…

Between 2,000 and 3,000 people in McDowell County itself do not have access to clean tap water or suitable well water, she said.

“I’m 54 years old and, as long as I can remember, people have collected water from a spring or old mine source up on U.S. Route 54 in Maybeury. Any time of day you can see trucks loading their tanks,” she said. Road-side collection sites are often a single PVC pipe jutting out from an embankment.”

Just to be clear, this is how we all allow our fellow Americans to live.

The cynical side of me predicts that some well-informed chemist with experience in the industry will again make the claim that any individual spill, like the one at Elk River, will pose only minimal threats to humans (and wildlife, and the environment), because natural degradation and sequestration processes will make it so. Precisely the kind of magical thinking (the textbook says that this chemical, in isolation, will be confined in sediment, and so no combination of factors, or slow accretion of multiple toxics over decades, need to factored into the analysis) that has brought West Virginia to where it is today.

Maybe industry affiliated chemists need to reflect a bit more on the admonition of Upton Sinclair:

“It’s hard to make a man understand when his livelihood depends upon him not understanding”.

My income isn’t tied to chemical industry profits; maybe that’s why this circumstance seems so despicable to me.

Presumably, the liver’s first pas would convert to the aldehyde, 4-methylcyclohexane methanal, which I am unsure about (formaldehyde is a known carcinogen, but this would have a short half-life in the body). The it would be converted into 4-methylcyclohexane formic acid — again, the formic acid part could be toxic but I don’t know about the entire molecule. The hydrocarbon part should not be dangerous in moderate quantities.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18597132”

Phillydoug, that paper is talking about low-solubility, low-mobility chlorinated compounds, and mentions one of the conditions for their mobilization is the presence of DNAPLs.

This is not a DNAPL. This is not a chlorinated compound. This is not a compound that bioaccumulates. Cutting-and-pasting fate-and-transport papers for chemically unrelated families of compounds isn’t relevant here.

I think it is also important to note that it is incompatible with strong oxidizing agents.

Until WVAW discloses what they treated the water with, we don’t know what is in our chemical cocktail that WVAW has repeatedly told its customers is “safe” to consume and have in their household plumbing.

(Data from MSDS)
Components:

4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (CAS Reg No.34885-03-5)

4-(methoxymethyl)cyclohexanemethanol (CAS Reg No.98955-27-2)

water (CAS Reg No.7732-18-5)

methyl 4-methylcyclohexanecarboxylate (CAS Reg No.51181-40-9)

dimethyl l,4-cyclohexanedicarboxylate (CAS Reg No. 94-60-0)

methanol (CAS Reg No. 67-56-‘ 1)

l,4-cyclohexanedimethanol
(CAS Reg No. 05-08-8)

*Here is the source 2005 MSDS:
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wvpn/files/201401/MSDS-MCHM_I140109214955.pdf

Dirt or dust on food isn’t going to make a difference to whether the compound is too strongly sorbed to the matrix to be bioavailable. Stomach pH might make a difference.

However, EPA detection protocols are pretty aggressive, particularly for leachates (e.g. agitation in citric or acetic acid for 3-5 days, IIRC) followed by GC-MS; you also have the problem that GC-MS will detect based on fragments of molecules, and may not perceive degradation of the compounds caused by sorption to the soil matrix. So again, it’s not the necessarily the case that if something is bound to the soil matrix that it’s readily bioavailable. The risk doesn’t go up or down because our detection technology gets better.