Council Ignores Important Information on Chloramine By Amanda Mitchell February 22, 2014
As many of you have already signed our informal petition to stop the planned use of chloramine, it is important to inform you that our City Council is not interested in listening to us. They mocked concern and put our future into the hands of a corporation, CH2M Hill, that has clung onto outdated information. According to our Ketchikan Daily Newspaper, Olsen said no one ever spoke out on this issue. I know personally that this is not so and many of you did speak out, but were completely ignored and told misleading information. We now have more information on chloramination than we did 10 years ago, but again our Council does not care about what this means. Our Council has been given information about NDMA and they were given a 77 page bound book with information about chloramination. What the newspaper failed to report is that the byproducts of chlorine, which are possible carcinogens, are what we are trying to lower, but NDMA, which is a byproduct of chloramination, is a POTENT carcinogen according to the World Health Organization and it will be unregulated in our drinking water. Meaning our water is going from bad to worse. What they choose to ignore in last night’s meeting was the fact that the EPA is getting ready to set regulations of nitroamines, to include NDMA. This is because it is known to cause harm. What many believe is that this regulation will eventually force many water districts to switch over to a GAC system anyway. Unfortunately, for our children and us, we will have already been subjected to this potent carcinogen and its genotoxic properties. Our council is downplaying this and does not care, but you should. Using chloramination puts the low income families at a further disadvantage. Those that are unable to replace their plumbing parts or put in a high tech filtration system will be impacted by this. They say that because no one spoke out about this years ago that this makes it right to harm our children and families and to ignore us now. If our world ran like this, progress would have stopped long ago. Basically, this means our voice today does not count, but only when they say it should. They back up a corporation, CH2M Hill, and represent this corporation over our citizens in our town. And for all this information given to us, like the false advertising in the paper that stated the EPA mandates this chemical when it is not true, they stand by and say that we aren’t justified standing up to say no when we find out that we have been misled and lied to. We have over 500 signatures and many people who signed had no clue about this prior to us talking to them. And what is confusing is that this project has been in the works for ‘years’, yet our city didn’t apply for a filtration avoidance waiver until 2012. Maybe we need to go back and look through all this information to find out the truth. We have tried to get a small proportion of the information to do just this, but we were quoted over $1400 to access ‘public’ records. You can see David Martin’s email posted on our facebook page. Some towns have been very blessed to have a Council back them up, but do not be dismayed that we don’t. We had hoped that our Council cared enough about what we had to say and that an informal petition would work. However, they have made it clear that we are going to need to put it on a ballot using an official petition. There are towns that have fought back and won. I had contact with one town that said 5 of the 7 council members ended up stepping down over this exact issue and their town was better off. Turned out not only did they not need chloramine in their water, but after adjusting their current system they didn’t even need a filtration system to be in compliance with EPA regulations. I encourage you to research on your own. Check out our website http://saveourwater.blog.com or visit us on facebook under United Citizens for Better Water. We still encourage passing our online petition around (to those that are not even in Ketchikan) as it promotes awareness and maybe will play an important part helping us win this fight. But most importantly, we are now going for an official petition to put this on a ballot. Follow us on facebook to keep updated or check in with our website regularly. And don’t forget to mark your calendars for Bob Bowcock’s (Erin Brochovich’s Lead Environmental Investigator) presentation on March 5th, 6pm at the Ted Civic Center. FREE ADMISSION. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, Amanda Mitchell
Received February 21, 2014 - Published February 22, 2014 Viewpoints - Opinion Letters:
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