THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509080215
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: BY CARL CAHILL
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
No disrespect intended, but Mayor William E. Ward's guest column in last Sunday's edition of The Clipper did very little to clear the air about Chesapeake's water problems. All that's needed, he wrote, is to upgrade the Northwest River water treatment plant.
``. . . the problem of salty tasting water is temporary,'' he wrote. Well, yes, about as temporary as the pyramids. It's been temporary now for two decades.
``Over the past several years, many summers have come and gone without this problem,'' he continued. Well, no, not according to the American Heart Association and the American Dietetic Association. Both groups advise against drinking water that contains more than 20 parts per million of salt. Chesapeake water has exceeded those levels every summer, sometimes by as much as 10 times.
(Salt levels in Chesapeake water recently were more than 38 times the recommended limits, and most people refuse to drink it. Some Chesapeake children are being told to bring bottled water with them to school this fall.)
Our good burgomaster argues that upgrading the water treatment plant is required under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, and he urges voters in the November election to approve financing the work. But Chesapeake seldom complies with federal water regulations.
``When the upgrade is completed (in 1998), we will be free of the salty tasting water forever,'' wrote the mayor, who, politician that he is, is to be forgiven for extravagant claims. But forever is a long time, and if the Department of Public Utilities' efforts to eliminate the salt are any indication, our grandchildren will still be taking bottled water to school in the next century.
Nowhere in his column does he state the cost of the treatment plant upgrade - $72 million - enough money to buy each water customer in Chesapeake his own, personal, sink-top filtration device at $2,000 each.
And nowhere does he ever acknowledge that Chesapeake water contains any sodium at all. He only repeats that the water is ``salty tasting.''
Nor does he report that the salty water flows through 200 miles of asbestos pipes en route to your spigots, and that the Department of Public Utilities employs a full-time enforcement officer whose job includes issuing criminal summonses under Section 28-11 of the City Code to those residents who refuse to drink city water, salty or not.
Of course, in our bureaucratic society, there are exemptions and exceptions to the Safe Drinking Water Act, just as there are exemptions and exceptions to Section 28-11 of the City Code.
What Mayor Ward also fails to acknowledge is that thousands of Chesapeake residents have gone back to their wells to bring into their homes the pure, sweet water the city is unable to give them.
But slaking your thirst from a private well in Chesapeake is a Class 1 misdemeanor, unless you qualify for an exemption. And to qualify for an exemption, you must perform some bureaucratic acrobatics that would put to shame the convoluted rope trick of an East Indian fakir.
So take the mayor's guest column with a milligram of salt. Or, to be exact as of Sept. 3, 761 milligrams of salt. MEMO: Mr. Cahill is a resident of Old Drive in Chesapeake.
by CNB