EPA cover up in TX
HOUSTON— Newly-released e-mails from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality show the agency’s top commissioners directed staff to continue lowering radiation test results, in defiance of federal EPA rules.
The e-mails and documents, released under order from the Texas Attorney General to KHOU-TV, also show the agency was attempting to help water systems get out of formally violating federal limits for radiation in drinking water. Without a formal violation, the water systems did not have to inform their residents of the increased health risk.
“It’s a conspiracy at the TCEQ of the highest order,” said Tom Smith, of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. “The documents have indicted the management of this commission in a massive cover-up to convince people that our water is safe to drink when it’s not.”
Smith is talking about what happened to residents who live in communities served by utilities like Harris County Municipal Utility District 105. For years, tests performed by the Texas Department of State Health Services showed the utility provided water that exceeded the EPA legal limit for exposure to alpha radiation.
However, the TCEQ would consistently subtract off each test’s margin of error from those results, making the actual testing results appear lower than they actually were. In MUD 105’s case, the utility was able to avoid violations for nearly 20 years, thanks to the TCEQ subtractions.
On Dec. 7, 2000, the EPA said in the federal register that states should not add or subtract the margin of error, also called the counting error, from test results.
In an e-mail from Oct. 30, 2007, a TCEQ drinking water team leader began questioning a senior director about if it would be appropriate for the state agency to stop subtracting the counting error from test results to comply with all federal regulations.
More
http://www.myweathertech.com/2011/05/21/massive-cover-up-texas-officials...
EPA Trustworthiness
I'm a senior environmental scientist with over 30 years experience in health physics and radiation protection. I’m currently teaching this in a foreign nuclear plant. In all due respect, this is the tip of the ice burg.
The EPA approved of superfund cleanup records of a former atomic weapons plant that documented the largest underground drinking water supply east of the Mississippi will be contaminated with radioactivity for one thousand years and they gave sworn testimony in federal court that didn’t and couldn’t happen.
Live in Texas hill
http://www.khou.com/home/related/At-the-Scrap-Yard-Video-of-Geiger-Count...
This is a radium problem in water unrelated to Fukushima it's not a EPA coverup but local municipalities underreporting levels to EPA. And appears to be a coverup dirty yes indeed.
.The state paper names the Hickory Aquifer as one of the most contaminated in Texas, and says, “without a feasible means to treat the drinking water and manage the residuals, the Hickory Aquifer would become unusable as a public drinking water source.”
The Hickory Aquifer is the main water source for much of the Texas Hill Country and communities in central Texas that depend on groundwater.
http://www.khou.com/home/-I-Team-Texas-drinking-water-makes-pipes-and-pl...
Links - Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
• Click here to find radiation test results for your water system
http://www.khou.com/news/texas-drinking-water-radiation-levels
• Texas politicians knew agency hid the amount of radiation in drinking water
http://www.khou.com/video/yahoo-video/-Texas-politicians-knew-agency-hid...
• Radiation in your tap water - part 2
http://www.khou.com/news/local/State-lowballs-radiation-scores-in-Texas-...
• Radiation in your tap water - part 1
http://www.khou.com/home/Radiation-in-Houstons-tap-water--Long-history-o...
• Radiation in Houston’s tap water, long history of contamination
http://www.khou.com/home/Radiation-in-Houstons-tap-water--Long-history-o...
• Draft of federal report finds radiation widespread in Houston water
http://www.khou.com/home/-I-team-Draft-of-Federal-Report-Finds-Radiation...
• City of Houston shuts down two radioactive water wells
http://www.khou.com/news/investigative/I-TEAM-City-of-Houston-shuts-down...
• Council members call for stricter water radiation standards than EPA
http://www.khou.com/news/investigative/I-Team-Radiation-in-Water-Council...
Thanks for the interesting
Thanks for the interesting links Bill! We decided to stop drinking the tap water here in WA a LOOONNNGG time ago. You would be amazed the kind of contaminents that can be found in your drinking glass...pharmaceuticals especially!
fukushima MSM blackout.....
I think the blackout may not be so much about fukushima, but the fear that we will all wake up and realize that increasing "background" radiation from all sources worldwide are a growing problem, and destined to increase.
Ionizing radiation can cause leukemia
A DIFFERENT Type of Radiation
Atomic bomb exposures include gamma and neutron rays, while medical X-rays are a different type of radiation.
http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/11/13087/chernobyl-cleanup-workers-had-sig...
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/forum/218/leukemias-among-chornobyl-cleanup-...
Chernobyl Cleanup Workers Had Significantly Increased Risk of Leukemia
A 20-year study following 110,645 workers who helped clean up after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in the former Soviet territory of Ukraine shows that the workers share a significant increased risk of developing leukemia. For many years, doctors have known that ionizing radiation from an X-ray source or produced by the decay of radioactive elements can cause leukemia, because it can penetrate the body, expose bone marrow to the radiation and damage DNA. But while scientists have understood this basic mechanism for decades, the question of how much leukemia risk is associated with moderate or low doses of radiation has been hard to answer.
Atomic bomb survivors were bathed in gamma or neutron rays, while someone who undergoes a CT scan in the U.S. is exposed to X-rays, a different type of radiation. The new work helps to bridge this gap because the doses received by the Ukrainian cleanup workers falls somewhere in between the high level received by the Japanese atomic bomb victims and the lower levels received by people who undergo extensive medical scans.
Actually...
Actually, this isn't really an increase in background radiation as it is a perception of same due to the public and MSM discovering the true degree to which Mother Nature exposes us to nuclear radiation.
As Mark of BRAWM had to point out many times to people who got Geiger counters in the wake of Fukushima and "discovered" that rainwater was radioactive.
Their Geiger counters couldn't see the actual effluent from Fukushima as can the Germanium detectors and spectroscopic analysis that BRAWM does. Mark pointed out that they were merely seeing the effects of Radon that the rainwater scavenges from the atmosphere.
Mother Nature created the radioactivity that they were measuring.
Mother Nature is still responsible for the vast majority of everyone's radiation exposure.
Actually...
Mother Nature is only responsible for about half of everyone's radiation exposure, the other half is from medical procedures.
Mother Nature is responsible for 82%
Mother Nature is responsible for 82%
Most of that is due to Radon and other naturally radioactive materials
Medical exposure is about 15%
Medical exposure is about 15%
Courtesy of the Health Physics Society chapter at the University of Michigan:
http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/radrus.htm
We see that X-rays contribute 11% and other nuclear medicine uses account for another 4%; 15% in total.
As stated in the above web page, the data was compiled by the NCRP - National Council on Radiation Protection which is a consortium of eminent scientists that have been chartered by Congress as advisors to the Congress on all matters involving radiation risks and uses.
Hanging on to data from the 80's?
Medical exposure is about 48%
"Americans were exposed to more than seven times as much ionizing radiation from diagnostic medical procedures in 2006 than they were in the early 1980s.The increase over the past quarter century puts the cumulative national medical exposures on a level with natural background radiation exposure."
ahttp://radiology.rsna.org/content/253/2/293.full
WRONG!!!! WRONG!!! WRONG!!!
The figures from the Health Physics Society are ACCURATE and don't date to the '80s.
Back in the '80s; the medical exposure level was only a few percent vs. the 15% that we see today.
Interesting
I *think* the Calif. Dept. of Public Health actually *adds* their
margin of error from their raw results in their final report.
Final Report:
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/Documents/CDPH-RHB-RadReport-2011-03-25.pdf
Prelim Report:
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/Documents/CDPH-RHB-PreLabAnalysis-2011-0...