Journey

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 they would make gasoline burn cleaner he was supposed to clean up the air but now MTBE is turning up in lakes and underground aquifers and in 20% 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 90,000 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 70% of its wells were contaminated with MTBE Craig Perkins is Director of Public Works for Santa Monica the first that I heard about MTBE was early March of 1996 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 recently discovered MTBE you ever heard of it 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 know did they know where it came from 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 clean burning gasoline mandated by the Clean Air Act of 1990 every city in America should have clean air and with this legislation I firmly believe we will 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 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 16 gallons for every man woman and child in America 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 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 first-hand about some of its unique properties what we found was 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 the it essentially doubled within a one-week period with no state or federal regulations on MTBE to guide them Santa Monica officials were on their own 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 yeah turpentine paint thinner very very distinct not something what a drink not only was the water undrinkable you couldn’t even cook with 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’s so the the odor would become even more acute one by one Perkins had to shut down seven of Santa Monica’s eleven well forcing the city to buy water diverted from the Colorado River and a cost of three million dollars a year there’s 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 okay 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 10 gallons a reformulated gasoline pump 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 360 feet across it’s 15 feet deep and it holds 5 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 could be found in one gallon of gasoline 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 nobody was required to test for it that’s right and nobody knows how to clean it up that’s right it’s pretty incredible we had a really bad year no doubt about it since then MTBE has caused a lot of places to have bad years since Santa Monica closed its wells three years ago the state of California has identified 10,000 sites where MTBE is present in groundwater and the problem is not confined to California MTBE has been detected at varying levels in groundwater in 49 states 21 have had at least one well shut down because of it it’s been detected in groundwater in Atlanta and Albuquerque Denver and Dallas Hartford and Las Vegas and lots of other places as well dr. Bernard Goldstein is a toxicologist and director of the environmental and occupational health sciences Institute in New Jersey he says the problem was easily preventable that anyone who looked at the chemical properties of MTBE would have known it was going to pollute water MTB has got an oxygen in it and that oxygen just makes it more soluble in water than almost than anything actually else in gasoline so you just know it’s going to move more rapidly in groundwater once it gets filled and we know it’s going to get spilled because we know that there’s a tweaking underground storage tanks a no-brainer yeah I called it in fact environmental engineers government regulators and oil industry scientists had been predicting for years that MTBE would get into groundwater it was first detected in Rockaway New Jersey near a Shell station in 1980 and that’s what it was being used in very small quantities by the late 80s MTBE had already contaminated dozens of sites in the state of Maine dr. Peter Garrett of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and two colleagues laid out the threat to the American Petroleum Institute and the National well Water Association their report said that MTBE moved further and faster in groundwater and was more difficult to clean up than any other contaminant in gasoline they recommended that it be stored with special precautions or banned outright it was a pretty strong paper well it said what made to be said if an MTV production and use escalated then this was going to be a big problem that’s what any reader would get from the paper yes Garrett says the American Petroleum Institute told him he was an alarmist and that his conclusions were reactionary unwarranted and counterproductive but Garrett made sure the report was widely circulated among industry scientists and government regulators what about the EPA EPA I made made a special point to inform them at the time that they decided that MTB he was the solution to the air pollution problems yes did the EPA and did the oil companies know that this was likely to create a water pollution problem or should they have known the answer is yes it was there and it was there in black and white in the spring of 1987 three years before the Clean Air Act was passed this EPA mamo States known cases of drinking water contamination have been reported in four states affecting 20,000 people it’s possible that this problem could rapidly mushroom due to leaking underground storage tanks the problem of groundwater contamination will increase as the proportion of MTBE and gasoline increases Bob participe an assistant administrator of the EPA admits the agency was asleep at the switch those warning bells to the extent that they were ringing and they were ringing at some in some parts and they were ringing in other places we’re not ringing loudly enough we are clearly admitting that that they weren’t ringing loudly enough we didn’t yell loudly enough did anybody at the EPA go to anyone in Congress and say hey wait a minute maybe we ought to take a look at this because we’ve got potential groundwater contamination problems did that happen I can’t speak for every conversation that may have occurred back in the late 80s or early 90s but clearly if they did bring this up in the debate on the Clean Air Act it was drowned out by the enthusiasm for the air quality benefits that people were looking at purchase epi says the EPA thought it could manage the problem it ordered the nation’s underground gasoline storage tanks to be replaced or upgraded by 1990 but more than 400,000 tanks weren’t covered by the order and many new tanks are already leaking any optimism anybody had that we could manage this potential problem has not come to fruition and before this becomes a national crisis before this gets worse we need to change the way we make clean burning gasoline in our view this is a product that should never have been put into the stream of Commerce Viktor share is an attorney representing the water department of South Lake Tahoe California where MTBE was discovered in the lake and the groundwater after the state began testing for it in 1997 within a matter of weeks a dozen wells a third of the city’s water production had to be shut down south lake tahoe is suing 12 local gas stations 12 major oil companies and several manufacturers of MTBE arguing that those responsible for the problem should share in the enormous costs of trying to clean it up for decades the oil industry and government regulators have known that gasoline was leaking from underground storage tanks but until MTBE came along most of the contaminants decomposed before they reach groundwater the problem is that mtbd doesn’t break down and it’s going to take years and years and years and potentially enormous costs enormous expenditures of money to make sure that the water that is used for drinking water is clean Shearer says the reason South Lake Tahoe is having problems is because the wells it taps for drinking water or shallow and that it’s only a matter of time before other parts of the country with deeper wells experience the same problem I think what we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg bottom line is that everywhere MTBE is used which is now in much of the country it gets released to the environment and it will be a problem for groundwater and in many places it already is although it’s most often found at low levels it’s already the second most common water contaminant in the country in New Jersey MTBE is turned up in 65 public drinking water supplies in Long Island New York MTBE is leaked for more than 400 gasoline storage tanks and is now being detected in small quantities in more than a hundred public water supplies we wanted to talk to the big oil companies that manufacture distribute and sell MTBE and gasoline but they all turned us down with one exception the outgoing president and CEO of Sunoco Bob Campbell he told us that the deadlines were complying with a clean air act were extremely tight and the only practical way to meet them was to use MTBE here a chemical engineer by training yes we’ve been told by a lot of people a lot of scientists said all you have to do is look at the chemical properties of MTBE and you should be able to recognize immediately that it’s a extremely water-soluble and that it might be a problem in contaminating drinking water right well as always hindsight is twenty-twenty there was a lot of stuff out there that should have told you somebody in your company that this was a potential problem with potential liability and legal problems down the road I mean how how did all of this body of information get ignored I don’t know there was even or what I’m telling you is as a company we did not have a body of information that I’m aware of where that I think people in our company were I would say what we’re doing here is in fact creating a potential hazard we did not have that but lots of other people in the oil industry did have that information we turned up dozens of documents showing the oil companies not only knew that MTBE was getting into groundwater but that the problem was likely to get much worse if it was added to gasoline in greater quantities what I’m saying is if you’re in the business that we’re in producing the wild potpourri of products that we produce ok and questions that are raised about hydrocarbons in general I am certain their report reports that were put out yesterday on last week and last month it probably questioned everything we do if you had known then what you know now would you put MTBE and gasoline Oh No MTBE then all I said we said TV and with good reason the oil companies face huge liability issues over the use of MTBE and gasoline the city of Santa Monica is already won a twenty-two million dollar settlement from four oil companies to pay for the cost of replacing the contaminated water and that doesn’t begin to cover the costs of getting it out of the groundwater potential damages across the country could run into the billions in spite of all this the federal government still knows next to nothing about the extent of the problem or its potential health consequences more on that when we come back between 75 and a hundred million people live in areas of the country where reformulated gasoline containing MTBE is being used the federal government and the oil companies have known since the 1980s that it was getting into the groundwater yet virtually nothing has been done to examine the potential health consequences or to learn the extent of the problem just how bad could the situation get take a look at Glanville California Glanville California is a rural community of about 300 people in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada’s the centre of town used to be a gathering spot for ranchers and a place where tourists on their way to Death Valley could stop for gas and a bite to eat now it’s a ghost town this was Grizzlies cafe when it was open for business there was times that you couldn’t find a table to set up Frida Kubus says it all started to change in August of 1997 when the State Water Board came in and called the Town Meeting and that’s when they told us all that we had MTBE in our water we said what is MTBE and oh well they kind of shined it on and stroked it off that it was an additive put in the gasoline to clean the air there was really nothing to be too concerned about they also told them not to talk to the news media freitas well she later found out at some of the highest levels of M ever recorded in drinking water what did they tell you to do they told us to take shorter showers and cooler showers and that would help prevent us from breathing the vapors what about cooking what about drinking they told us that if we discontinued using it for that it would leave our bodies in 12 hours the MTBE was coming from the town’s only gas station which quickly closed down the restaurant tried to hang on using bottled water but with no one stopping for gas it went under to everything else in Glenville just sort of faded away how many businesses went under here I can tell you the gas station the mini-mart the feed store the antique store a dress shop and the cafe pretty much the whole town pretty much sold down this was the livestock in the feed supply store it saved people from making a hundred mile trip to Bakersfield to get supplies which really helped a lot even after the gas station was closed down the number of contaminated Wells has increased the state of California has been bringing in water for 14 families and a local saloon people complain of intestinal problems and skin rashes and they say the banks have stopped lending money here people can’t sell their houses it’s kind of taking a spirit of the town away to all because of one leak at one gas station yeah you know in a big town you can have a leak at a station and it’s no big deal you go to another station or you go to another shop many Center this was the only one up here how many Glen bills or potential Glen bills are there out there across the United States the answer is no one really knows even though the Environmental Protection Agency is known since the late 1980s that MTBE was getting into drinking water and that there were possible adverse health effects the agency has done almost nothing right now the only standard for MTBE is a non-binding advisory that the agency sent out two years ago it sets a limit of 20 to 40 parts per billion in drinking water bob purchase epi is assistant administrator of the EPA did the APA require local municipalities to test groundwater for the presence of MTBE we never required them to do the testing specifically there any requirements to test now we are working on taking that advisory that we issued two years ago and finalizing it into a standard which will require the the the monitoring at the drinking water and when would that begin we hope next year you’re telling me on one hand that we’ve got to move quickly to prevent this thing from becoming a national crisis and yet it’s still not a requirement the local governments and municipalities and water providers they don’t even have to test for MTBE I don’t even have to test for it that is something we should have done earlier I should have been done when the alarm bells are going off earlier ten years ago the early part of the decade we really haven’t looked for MTBE yet it’s been the sort of a don’t-ask-don’t-tell examination Victor’s share the attorney suing the oil companies on behalf of South Lake Tahoe says there are only a few states that require testing for MTBE in drinking water and 42 million Americans get their drinking water from private wells which usually aren’t monitored at all or if they are may not be tested for MTBE the only entities that are really in a position to understand the extent of the problem and to know how many gas stations leak in to what extent and to what extent MTBE is getting into the environment are the oil companies and they haven’t done adequate testing and the testing we know about that has been done by the oil companies is not very encouraging one internal study conducted by Chevron found that MTBE is contaminated the groundwater at 80 percent of the 400 sites the company tested what we do know is that every time somebody looks to examine either the frequency of releases from gasoline stations or the occurrence of MTBE in groundwater the statistics have to be revised upward that is the more we look the more we find it if little is known about the extent of MTBE pollution and water supplies even less is known about the human health effects of drinking the contaminated water way back in 1987 this memo from the office of pesticides and toxic substances recommends that the EPA conducts six kinds of ingestion studies as well as inhalation studies where those studies got most of the studies that were done in the late 80s and into the early 90s were done on inhalation and and that was a mistake have there’s been studies done on the health effects of MTBE in the drinking water not enough not enough any I mean have any been done I’m not aware of any of the specific studies that have been done in that what are you doing about the problem right now I mean what has been done since this first memo in 1987 what’s been done not enough in fact the only study that has ever been conducted on ingesting MTBE was done on laboratory animals in Italy more than five years ago it showed that in high doses it caused leukemia lymphoma and testicular cancer but those results have been questioned by some scientists the EPA’s position is that MTBE is a possible human carcinogen how do you expose a hundred million people to a chemical which you have not adequately tested for its toxicity and that’s what’s happened that’s what’s happened dr. Bernard Goldstein the toxicologist says the study should have been done before the government allowed huge quantities of MTBE to be put in gasoline he calls it a classic case of how not to protect the public this is a chemical that’s in gasoline if I wanted to be sure that i poisoned as many Americans as possible I put something in gasoline I mean that’s what we’re all exposed to with the exception of I guess a few Hermits in the Mojave Desert which means that you want to study this even more carefully than you’d study any other chemical absent scientific data on the human health effects of MTBE in drinking water and confronted with growing reports of groundwater contamination the EPA’s position now is that action must be taken last summer a blue-ribbon panel of environmentalists scientists government regulators and industry representatives recommended that Congress do away with the oxygen a requirement in the Clean Air Act so that industry can begin phasing out the use of MTBE Sunoco chief executive officer Bob Campbell was one of the members we as an industry and a company are there to be responsive to people and we’re not about to continue to put something in gasoline that causes it that causes drinking water it smell funny it tastes funny and the presumption is that if it’s a gasoline additive it smells funny and tastes funny it’s probably not good it’s probably not good for I think that’s the presumption that most people would have certainly that if it smells funny and tastes funny I’m not gonna worry about all your health effects study over all these expert testimony I just don’t want it there why are you still putting in your gasoline I love not to people putting in our gasoline today but I don’t have any choice as it stands right now there’s a lot there that requires that reformulated gasoline contains 2% by weight of oxygen and the only practical alternative that I have in order to comply with that law is that we use MTV and we are using it today as we sit here we don’t need to do more studies to determine whether or not we should remove this additive from gasoline we know enough now we don’t need more studies we should do it now you can talk about eliminating MTBE for gasoline but what about the MTB and the water I mean it’s still there in Santa Monica it’s still there in Lake Tahoe is still present in some levels and 20% of the urban wells in the United States shouldn’t we find out whether it’s dangerous to humans whether it causes cancer our first defense is to get it out to keep this problem from getting worse we will have to continue that effort I don’t think it will be acceptable to leave this in the water we will have to work to get it out of the water none of this is any consolation to the people of Glenville California where one well they’re tested at 20,000 parts per billion of MTBE a thousand times greater than the level the EPA is now recommending there’s no indication yet the MTBE has human health consequences you know that that’s what they say but if they would really like to know the human health consequences of MTBE they have an awful lot of guinea pigs right here in Glenville there are several studies now underway looking at possible health effects of MTBE and drinking water and technology is being developed to remove the contaminant from groundwater what’s lacking is an engineering solution to make the process practical and cost-effective there hasn’t been much progress in removing MTBE from gasoline either six months have passed since the government’s blue-ribbon panel issued its recommendations yet Congress has done nothing about lifting the oxygen a requirement of the Clean Air Act which would allow the oil companies to begin removing MTBE from gasoline