http://www.pei.org/FRD/60_Minutes_Transcript.htmDate January 16, 2000 ~ Time 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Station CBS-TV
Program 60 Minutes
President George Bush: (Clip from file video) Every city in America should have clean air. And with this legislation I firmly believe we will.
(Visual of countryside; smog; gasoline pumps with close-up of labels: Contains MTBE; gas station; gas pump; person replacing cap on fuel tank with close-up of gas spill on ground)
Steve Kroft, co-host:
The only trouble with that legislation is that what it required us to do to clean up our air is now polluting our water. And the culprit is something called MTBE, a chemical that the oil companies say they have no choice but to add to their gasoline. Even the government now says that we're facing a national crisis if something isn't done to stop MTBE from leaking into our drinking water.
Have there been studies done on the health effects of MTBE in the drinking water?
Bob Perciasepe (Assistant Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency): Not enough. Not enough. But...
Kroft: But any? I mean, have any been done?
Perciasepe: I'm not aware of any specific studies.
Dr. Bernard Goldstein (Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences Institute): The problem is, how do you expose one hundred million people to a chemical which you have not adequately tested for its toxicity?
Kroft: And that's what's happened?
Goldstein: That's what's happened.
Kroft: MTBE is shorthand for a chemical called methyl tertiary butyl ether. If you don't know about it yet, you will. It's a gasoline additive that is contaminating drinking water from Maine to California and has been called the biggest environmental crisis of the next decade. How did MTBE end up in gasoline? Well, ten years ago, Congress told the oil companies to put it there, either MTBE or some other oxygenate that would make gasoline burn cleaner. It was supposed to clean up the air. But now MTBE is turning up in lakes and underground aquifers, and in twenty percent of the nation's urban wells, forcing some cities to shut down local water supplies. It seems to be turning up wherever people look for it. And no one was even looking for it until it turned up in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago.
Santa Monica, California, is a beach community west of Los Angeles. Ninety thousand people live here, because they like the environment. You can stroll on the outdoor promenade. You can Rollerblade on the boardwalk. You can swim in the ocean. But you haven't been able to drink the water here for nearly four years. That's when the city discovered that seventy percent of its wells were contaminated with MTBE. Craig Perkins is director of public works for Santa Monica.
Craig Perkins (Director, Public Works, Santa Monica): The first that I heard about MTBE was early March of 1998, when my water managers came to me and said, We believe we have to start shutting down water wells because of this contaminant which we've recently discovered, MTBE.
Kroft: You ever heard of it?
Perkins: I had never heard of it.
Perkins says his staff found MTBE in the water by accident, when they sent a routine sample off to an outside lab for analysis. At first, his chemist thought it must be some sort of laboratory error. MTBE wasn't on any state or federal list of possible contaminants, and there were no requirements to test for it.
Did they know what it was? I knew-did they know where it came from?
Perkins: They had discovered what it was. And they told me that it was the chemical that makes reformulated gasoline, clean-burning gasoline, so to speak.
(Visual of gasoline pump with close-up of sticker: Contains MTBE)
Kroft: Clean-burning gasoline mandated by the Clean Air Act of 1990.
President George Bush: (Clip from file video) Every city in America should have clean air. And with this legislation, I firmly believe we will.
(Clip from video of George Bush signing bill; Visual of gasoline pump; field with sign: High Plains Ethanol Plant; ethanol distillery; corn pouring out of hopper)
Kroft: When President Bush signed it, the government basically rewrote the formula for gasoline in parts of the country where air quality was a problem. It required oil companies to make something called reformulated gasoline by adding a class of chemicals called oxygenates. There were really only two choices. Ethanol, which is distilled from corn and used to make gasohol, was a favorite of the farm lobby. But it's expensive, difficult to distribute, and not terribly practical outside the Midwest. (so said the profit whores...)
Most of the oil companies chose the other alternative, MTBE, a little-known chemical which was already being used in small amounts as an octane booster, and fit neatly into the existing refining and distribution system. Within a few years, MTBE was being blended into gasoline all over the country. Today, it's one of the most widely produced chemicals in the United States, four and a half billion gallons a year, roughly sixteen gallons for every man, woman and child in America. (musta been cheaper...)
Perkins: This is not some isolated, esoteric chemical contaminant. This is all over the United States.
This is a map showing our main well field right here...
(Visual of Perkins and Kroft looking at map; map with gas stations and well field; bottle of MTBE)
Kroft: When MTBE turned up in the water in Santa Monica, one of the first things they did was to draw a mile and a quarter radius around their main well field. They found twenty gas stations that had documented leaks from their underground storage tanks, all of them involving gasoline with MTBE. No one seemed to know how to clean it up. Perkins was also learning firsthand about some of its unique properties.
Perkins: What we found with MTBE was that it was behaving much differently than the contaminants that-that we had tracked in the past. It was moving through the-the groundwater into the wells much more quickly. On one of our wells, then it essentially doubled within a one-week period.
(Visual of Perkins and Kroft entering City of Santa Monica Water Treatment Plant; Kroft holding bottle of water, opening it and smelling it)
Kroft: With no state or federal regulations on MTBE to guide them, Santa Monica officials were on their own. But within months, their options had been reduced to one. The water the city was pumping from its wells took on a strong chemical odor and simply became undrinkable.
Smells like paint thinner.
Perkins: Yeah, turpentine, paint thinner, very--very distinct.
Kroft: Not something you want to drink.
Not only was the water undrinkable, you couldn't even cook with it.
Perkins: One of the interesting properties of MTBE is as you heat it and boil it, and even in the hot water as used in the shower, that it tends to aerate the MTBE, so the--the--the odor would become even more acute.
(Visual of pipes; Clip from aerial video of dam on Colorado River; canal)
Kroft: One by one, Perkins had to shut down seven of Santa Monica's eleven wells, forcing the city to buy water diverted from the Colorado River at a cost of three million dollars a year.
Perkins: There was really no other choice to make. How in the world are we going to let this unknown contaminant go into their drinking water, which smells like turpentine, and expect that that's OK?
(Visual of bottles of MTBE; researcher and laboratory rats; person drinking glass of water- gasoline pump with close-up of gallons pumped)
Kroft: The more Perkins found out about MTBE, the more angry he became. One study showed it caused cancer in laboratory animals when administered in high doses. No one knew anything about the human health effects of MTBE in drinking water. And he was also amazed to learn that out of every ten gallons of reformulated gasoline pumped, one gallon is pure MTBE, although it takes a lot less than a gallon to ruin a water supply.
This is one of four water reservoirs operated by the city of Santa Monica. This one is three hundred and sixty feet across, it's fifteen feet deep, and it holds five million gallons of water. Just one cupful of MTBE would make all of this water undrinkable. That's about the same amount of MTBE that can be found in one gallon of gasoline.
Perkins: I think the problem here is that--why is it out there, when we know so little about it? And that's-that's what really, really scared us.
Kroft: Nobody was required to test for it.
Perkins: That's right.
Kroft: And nobody knows how to clean it up?
Perkins: That's right.
Kroft: That's pretty incredible.
MUCH MORE AT LINK!!!
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