The Dark Side of MTBE
The first known impact of MTBE on our nation's water supply was in 1980 when a municipal water well in New Jersey was found contaminated with 96 ppb (parts per billion) of MTBE. Then, in 1996, the city of Santa Monica, California, discovered that 70 percent of its municipal wells were contaminated with it. They didn't even know what MTBE was when they found it. It wasn't on state or federal government's lists of potential water contaminants, but when they drew a circle containing these municipal wells on their city map, they discovered, within that circle, 20 gas stations with documented underground gas tank leaks. Soon the water began to smell of turpentine, the way most people describe the smell of water contaminated with MTBE. How much MTBE does it take to foul the smell of water? According to the 60-Minutes interview with Santa Monica water officials, a single cupful of MTBE in a 5 million gallon reservoir is sufficient to render the water undrinkable. The city had no choice but to scramble to close the majority of its wells and buy expensive Colorado River water at a cost of about $3 million a year.
Since Santa Monica closed its wells, the state of California has identified 10,000 MTBE-contaminated groundwater sites. What's more, 49 states have found it in groundwater, and 21 of these have had to shut down at least one of their wells due to MTBE. As of this writing, it has been found in 65 public drinking water supplies in New Jersey, in 100 public water supplies in Long Island, New York where it has leaked from over 400 gasoline storage tanks. It has been found in Maine, Albuquerque, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Hartford, Las Vegas and it has virtually shut down the tiny town of Glenville, nestled at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. In each case, in 49 states, MTBE enters groundwater from leaking, underground gas tanks, from gas spills, and/or from recreational water craft on lakes and rivers.
In 1997, MTBE was discovered in Lake Tahoe in California. South Lake Tahoe was forced to shut 12 wells, a third of its water supply. The city is suing 12 local gas stations, 12 major oil companies and several producers of MTBE hoping to have them share in the enormous costs of removing it from their drinking water. An attorney representing the city, Mr. Victor Sher, told 60-Minutes that we are seeing just the tip of the NTBE iceberg because it is used throughout much of the country and everywhere it is used it gets into the environment.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has known about leaking underground gas tanks and the subsequent contamination of wells, rivers, bays, etc., for many years. In fact, according to Bob Perciasepe, an assistant administrator at the agency, the EPA ordered underground gasoline storage tanks replaced or upgraded by 1998, but over 400,000 tanks are not covered by the order and many of the new tanks are already leaking! It would seem, from a 1987 EPA memo written well before the Clean Air Act of 1990 mandating reformulated gasoline, that this potential national crisis could have been prevented thirteen years ago. The memo 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 in gasoline increases."
EPA's Perciasepe told 60-Minutes, "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."
Despite the warning sounded by that memo, the Clean Air Act of 1990 was passed three years later without studying the possible effects of drinking MTBE-contaminated water. Now thirteen years have passed, and there have still been no EPA or other federally sponsored studies on the effects of MTBE on humans. EPA's Perciasepe confirmed that he was not aware of any study done on the health effects of MTBE in drinking water. He must not be aware of the ongoing studies done at the University of California, nor of those done in Italy five years ago. The Italian study showed that MTBE in high doses caused three cancers in laboratory animals: lymphoma, leukemia and testicular cancer. California's MTBE web site features a paper entitled, "Public Health Goal for Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether (MTBE) in Drinking Water" in which they adopt 13 μg/L or 13 ppb as the state's public health goal or PHG.
