Environmental▼News for the Chamber of Shipping of America. Several technologies have been proposed for shipboard treatment of ballast water, including filtration, chemical disinfection, ozonation, ultraviolet light sterilization, hydrocyclonic separation, and sonic bombardment. The primary hurdle has been the lack of a performance standard by which to evaluate the technologies. Standardized analytical methods are also not yet available, but the USCG and the U.S. EPA are developing such protocols, says Raaymakers.
The United States, Australia, and New Zealand have taken the toughest stance on ballast water. These countries, along with environmentalists, had hoped for more from the IMO treaty. “Not enough research has been done to determine whether or not the standards the IMO has issued are protective enough,” says Bivan Patnaik, regulatory coordinator for the USCG’s aquatic nuisance species program. “In developing its own ballast water discharge standard, the USCG, together with EPA, has begun preparing an environmental impact statement to determine
whether it needs “a more protective standard,” Patnaik adds. However, the shipping industry wants to avoid country-by-country regulations. “We need an international regime so every country and every subnational entity, such as our states, don’t go their own way and create a bunch of different requirements that ships may not be able to comply with from one port to another,” Metcalf says. Consequently, the shipping industry is pushing for quick ratification and supports immediate mandatory ballast water exchanges before the treaty takes effect. —KRIS CHRISTEN
Warnings to the public about poor beach water quality are inherently flawed, according to a series of three papers in this issue of ES&T (pp 2497–2504, 2626–2636, 2637– 2648). An entirely new system is needed that prevents swimmers from being exposed to pollution yet avoids closing beaches when the water is fine, say researchers from the University of California, Irvine; Stanford University; the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of California, San Diego; the Orange County Sanitation District; and the County of Orange Geomatics/Land Information System Division. In California, warning signs are posted on beaches when fecal indicator bacteria in shoreline water exceed state standards. This determination is often based on a single grab sample, and the decision to act is “binary” in nature—either a warning sign is posted or not, with no intermediate information. Similar programs exist nationwide, sponsored in part by the Federal Beaches Environmental and Coastal Health Act passed in October 2000. “One question that frequently comes up is, Can the accuracy of public reporting be improved by decreasing the turnaround time between when a sample is collected and the results are known?” says
PHOTODISC
New beach warning system needed
New research suggests that this sign may be the wrong approach.
Stan Grant, a professor of environmental engineering at Irvine and the papers’ lead author. The current microbial analysis takes almost 24 hours to complete, but a complex web of physical and biological factors—from tidal variations to seasonal rainfall patterns—means that measurements are often based on water that has already come and gone (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 368A–369A). Some scientists advocate faster indicators to deal with the problem, but Grant’s statistical analysis questions that solution. “Even if the turnaround time was reduced to every 10 minutes, the error rates
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could still be quite high,” he says. “The paper identifies a more fundamental problem; specifically, these binary advisory schemes appear to be intrinsically error-prone.” Grant recommends switching to a continuously varying “analog” system, similar to ozone monitoring programs in American cities. “One approach would be to assign a letter grade to beaches, for example, ‘A’ to ‘F’,” he says. Heal the Bay, a conservation group dedicated to protecting Santa Monica Bay, has adopted such a strategy for reporting bay pollution. “Of course, the devil is in the details of how the letters are calculated,” Grant says. He and his coworkers have developed a simple forecasting algorithm to predict water quality, which uses probability theory and estimates of tide range and water quality over the previous 30 days. Such an algorithm could be expanded, he says, or scientists could apply more sophisticated approaches like artificial intelligence. Implementing this kind of program would probably cost less than the current system, according to Grant, because it would require less updating. “The tough part will be in developing software tools that take what we’ve done as a theoretical exercise and make it into something turnkey for managers,” he says. Mark Sobsey, a microbiologist and environmental engineer at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, agrees that the current sampling method is flawed, but he questions how an analog approach would protect human health. “The problem with measuring rapid fluctuations in water quality is that it makes it hard to relate that to exposures,” Sobsey says. “Ideally, you’d like to know what the quality of the water is during the period when people were in it and got exposed.” In a perfect world, swimmers would have a personal sampler that analyzed the water as they swam, Sobsey says. This, of course, will never happen. “There’s a lot of patchiness in [measured] concentrations,” Sobsey says. “From a management standpoint, it creates serious prob-
lems. I would daresay it might be a nightmare.” Because Grant’s research focuses on the effectiveness of public warning systems, it could have implications for other public health and safety issues. “I think the study points up the challenges posed by reporting risk information to the public, whether that be coastal water quality or terrorist threat levels,” Grant says. “In the end, if the reporting is not credible, it undermines the entire enterprise. Because health risk advisories represent, in a sense, the public face of environmental science, it is incredibly important that we get the advisories right.” —JASON GORSS
Deep aquifers susceptible to pollution
THOMAS KARTSCHALL
Groundwater in much of the eastern United States could be more susceptible to contamination than previously believed, according to scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The conclusion is based on one of the first large-scale applications of new water-tracing techniques, which found ubiquitous infiltration of young water— less than 50 years old—into the underground water in the Piedmont region of Virginia. “People need to know that even though their drinking water aquifers are deep, they are not so isolated from the land,” says USGS hydrologist and team leader David
Old mountains may hide surprisingly young groundwater.
Nelms. The USGS results can probably be applied to the entire Appalachian chain, from Alabama on north, he adds. This is because, for the most part, fractures in the hard rock are what account for the infiltration, and rocks in the Appalachians and its foothills are all fractured. USGS is working with the California State Water Resources Control Board on a similar study. In the Virginia study, USGS scientists collected and analyzed water from 165 wells and 6 springs, most of which are public water supplies. The researchers determined the age of well water by looking for unique chemical tracers that have only been in the atmosphere since about 1950. They found that the age of the groundwater had no relationship to its depth. For example, water from a 600-foot-deep well in the Shenandoah National Park had only been in the ground for 7 years. More than 95% of the samples contained waters with apparent ages less than 35 years. About 5% contained young waters with apparent ages of less than 5 years. For more information, go to http://water.usgs.gov/pubs/wri/ wri034278. —REBECCA RENNER
News Briefs Environmental health collaboration With the aim of facilitating research into a number of computing-intensive projects with environmental health implications, the administrators of the U.S. EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) signed a memorandum of understanding in February. The agreement enables the agencies to link supercomputers at EPA’s North Carolina facility and DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory. The agencies expect the linkage to accelerate work in computational toxicology, the application of computer-based statistical techniques and molecular genetics that allow chemical testing on the basis of a chemical’s molecular structure and its effects on genes, and run key air models more quickly.
U.S. OSHA unreactive The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) decision not to amend its regulations and data collection practices for accidents involving reactive chemicals in the workplace is “unacceptable”, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB). In a February letter that CSB sent to OSHA, CSB vowed to continue to push OSHA to improve these standards, which could prevent health and environmental catastrophes. In response to a 2002 CSB report that documented a need for amended standards, OSHA said it had not decided whether to change requirements and cited a lack of consensus from experts; however, it would continue to educate the chemical industry and rely on voluntary measures. CSB is an independent federal agency that investigates chemical accidents, and OSHA is a regulatory agency charged with protecting health and safety in the workplace. For more information, visit www.csb.gov.
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