Will Obama Crack Down on Rocket Fuel in Drinking Water?

Fulfilling a confirmation pledge, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lisa P. Jackson is revisiting the Bush administration's refusal to regulate rocket fuel pollution in the nation's drinking water.

Jackson's move, announced Wednesday, is being welcomed by the
environmental community and children's health advocates. Perchlorate, a
major component of rocket and missile propellants and many explosives,
is a potent thyroid toxin known to disrupt brain and neurological
development. For that reason, scientists and medical experts strongly
urge that fetal and neonatal exposures to the chemical be prevented.

Defense and aerospace contractors are certain to fight any federal
effort to order up perchlorate clean-ups, whose costs could run into
the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. During the Cold War, tons of improperly stored rocket fuel seeped into ground waters around rocket and missile test sites and chemical manufacturing and storage facilities.

As David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones
reported last February, companies who make or use perchlorates have
hired a "bevy of lobbyists," among them Democrats such as former Nevada
senator Richard Bryan, once a leading advocate for safe drinking water,
to fend off stringent EPA measures.

MoJo updates its coverage this week by
reporting that "lobbyists for perchlorate firms are well-funded and
skillful -- and those with Democratic ties, like Bryan, will arguably
wield more influence in Obama's Washington than they did during the era
of Republican dominance. They'll doubtless be working hard behind the
scenes to head off the EPA's new regulatory enthusiasm."

Rocket fuel pollution in water and soil is a bigger problem than you might think. In recent years, EPA has detected perchlorates in public water systems in 28 states and territories.
Environmental Working Group's own tests have identified significant perchlorate contamination in nearly a fifth of lettuce samples grown in Southern California and Arizona.

During the Bush administration, EWG and other environmental health
advocates, including the agency's own Children's Health Protection
Advisory Committee, mounted futile efforts to persuade EPA leaders to
crack down on perchlorate pollution.

Last November, EPA scientist Melanie
A Marty, chair of the 28-member children's health advisory panel, which
works closely with the EPA Office of Children's Health Protection,
dispatched an unusually sharply-worded public letter to then EPA
administrator Stephen L. Johnson recommending a strict,
legally-enforceable limit for perchlorate in drinking water.

Marty and her fellow panel members protested the agency's assumption
that perchlorate contamination of up to 15 micrograms per liter of
water posed no threat to adults or even children. The agency's failure
to take into account differences between adult and children, she wrote,
"does not recognize the science which supports the exquisite
sensitivity of the developing brain to even small drops in thyroid
hormone levels and the fact that neonates have much diminished stores
of thyroid hormone relative to adults." Without legal strictures and a
much lower permissible perchlorate limit, she wrote, thousands of
infants could be at risk for "life-long consequences of impaired brain
development."

Jackson's announcement called for public comments over the next 30
days. She did not prejudge the outcome. But her carefully-worded
statement sent a strong signal. It made clear that she and her aides
had studied the Marty panel's arguments closely and recognized their
validity.

"It is critically important to protect sensitive populations,
particularly infants and young children, from perchlorate in drinking
water," Jackson said.

She said she had ordered EPA staffers to place "special emphasis on
evaluating the impact of perchlorate on infants and young children."
Moreover, she said, EPA calculations will "take...into account the fact
that infants and children consume more water per body weight than do
adults" and to consider "a broader range of alternatives for
interpreting the available data on the level of health concern, the
frequency of occurrence of perchlorate in drinking water, and the
opportunity for health risk reduction through a national primary
drinking water standard."

If, as Jackson seems to be semaphoring, EPA is heading toward
regulating perchlorate pollution, and presumably clean-up efforts, the
effort will amount to a direct challenge to defense and aerospace
contractors -- who can be expected to make the EPA struggle for every
inch of turf.

How fiercely and skillfully Jackson, and ultimately the Obama
administration, counter the industries' formidable legal and lobbying
defenses will tell us a lot about the Obama presidency. The stakes are
enormous. Is the administration willing to spend some of its political
capital on this issue? Will it even have enough political capital left
after the bruising health care and climate bill battles? There's no way
to answer these questions today. But very possibly, soon.