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Treated sewage on golf courses: What’s your risk?

By DENNIS CHASE

Risk is something we would all like to control in our lives. Unfortunately, in many areas risk to our well-being is unknown and we are expected to trust what we are told.

While reading documents from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I came across the term “acceptable risk” as it relates to the number of illnesses associated with treated wastewater from sewage systems.

The number of citizens becoming ill from a wide variety of illnesses, at a level someone in the EPA considered acceptable, was 8 people per 1,000 of the population.

I don’t know about you, but that number is enough to worry me - a lot! Do the math for the current population of Fayette County at approximately 95,000 people. Eight hundred or so is a lot of folks getting sick and yet our government thinks that is an acceptable risk.

Other than that one reference, virtually nothing is out there to tell us about our risk(s) from being near treated wastewater.

What’s that? you say. You never go near treated wastewater?

You had better take a closer look! There is an environmental axiom that says, “We all live downstream,” and as development continues and water shortages become more of an issue, the truth of this becomes more relevant than ever.

The Chattahoochee River, for instance, is estimated to go through at least five people (plus a few cows) on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. In our case, we are at the upper end of the Flint River watershed, but even with that fact most of what you drink is “used” water.

In addition to our drinking water, water reuse has become commonplace almost everywhere in this country, a virtual necessity in many areas.

In this part of Georgia it is common to use treated wastewater to water golf courses and a few other areas.

If you ask any wastewater treatment manager, they will tell you that they meet or exceed the federal and state standards.

Based on my experience, I can tell you that most of the time they do meet those standards.

That might make you feel better, but my concern here is that those standards are based on taking “most” bacteria and solids out of the wastewater and pronouncing it safe or at least meeting that “acceptable risk” factor.

I hope a few of you will understand my concern when I tell you that those government experts are taking educated guesses at those numbers. For some of the parameters, they just don’t know for sure yet but they put numbers in the standards allowing an unknown risk anyway.

Even worse is that there are many chemicals where they simply have no idea, so they don’t even suggest a standard.

I find it unfortunate, but true, that the “trust me” politicians of big government and big business often have other reasons to ignore those calculations of acceptable risk.

Money is among the more obvious reasons. Better methods of treatment can and will be expensive. But they think it is much easier to tell us they know what’s best for us rather than dealing openly and honestly with the public about difficult issues.

Some of our bureaucrats and politicians come to believe they are supposed to know all the answers and we understand that, but when it comes to answers about the risks we are taking, that is where we want to participate in the decision-making process.

The EPA and, in Georgia, the Environmental Protection Division have the primary responsibility to set standards (acceptable risk) for levels of pollutants in our water.

Those standards, when met by sewage treatment systems, are supposed to assure you that reductions in contaminants in the wastewater returned to our streams are at a safe level.

What the standards do not tell you is that there is a large, and fast-growing list of contaminants which are not even considered, many of which pass through the sewage treatment process with little or no change in the risk to human health.

There are approximately 140 different species of viruses; an unknown number of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, etc.; hundreds of pharmaceuticals, various numbers of their derivatives, diagnostic agents and disinfectants for which there is no accounting.

Granted, some of these are in very low numbers, but before you accept that as reassuring, you should know that many of those contaminants can have long-term impacts when ingested over a period of years. In the case of the very young, very old or people with otherwise reduced levels of immune system protection, the impacts can be significant.

There are no wastewater treatment standards for any of these because so little research has been done in this country to determine what the true level of risk really is: for example, pharmaceuticals.

Until very recently, there has been opposition to some types of research with some research attempts getting limited or no funding. In a number of countries, there has been support of research, but the results have been mixed.

My biggest concern though is the danger from viruses, some of which are very nasty. Viral counts have been made of viruses remaining after passing through the wastewater treatment systems and, unfortunately, a large percentage survive.

An added worry related to viruses is that when sprayed on grass or other vegetation, a common practice in Georgia, they survive for days or weeks.

Think about that the next time you play golf and play in wet grass where you and all of your equipment come into contact with whatever has been sprayed out there.

At least one golf course in Fayette County relies heavily on water from just below a sewage treatment plant out-fall. I can’t prove to you that it is dangerous to play golf there, but if play you must, you now know more of what you risk.

So what do we do? Well, according to one research project, the only method of treatment that seems to be effective is to pass treated sewage effluent through wetlands where the water has at least a 5-day retention period.

Evidently when viruses spend long periods of time in open water they die off naturally.

Wetlands have also proven effective in removing other pollutants so some of the other chemicals I listed earlier would be removed or broken down into less harmful chemicals.

The reality is that we will have to wait a long time for such a treatment process; perhaps we will never see such a process.

For now we need to remain on guard and be suspicious of the often-made recommendation to reuse treated sewage water to solve our water shortages.

We have to insist that sound planning for reuse, well away from people, is what we will accept.

And, where possible, we should be supporting research for better technology for treatment of everything in our wastewater.