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Associated PressA newspaper reports that two officials resisted cleanup of radioactive water and kept the public uninformed about it.
PENSACOLA - Two former utility administrators resisted efforts to remove high levels of radium from drinking water while downplaying its links to bone and nasal cancer and keeping the public in the dark for more than four years, a newspaper reported.
About 10,000 people served by the Escambia County Utilities Authority in Pensacola and Gulf Breeze drank water containing more than twice the federal standard of radioactivity while administrators stalled removal efforts, the Pensacola News Journal reported Monday.
The newspaper reviewed more than 50,000 pages of public documents showing that unsafe levels of radium 226 and 228 were detected in 1996 but not removed until 2000.
That's when the state Department of Environmental Protection fined the utility for violating the federal standard and failing to notify the public. Even then, utility officials claimed customers faced no significant risk.
"Anything I have said or written on this topic I still believe to be very true," said A.E. Van Dever Jr., the Utilities Authority's former executive director, maintaining that he never did anything to endanger consumers.
Van Dever was fired by the authority's elected board last year. He is now utilities director for Lake Worth in Palm Beach County.
Former scientific, technical and regulatory administrator Bernie Dahl, now retired and living in Red Rock, Okla., declined comment.
Records indicate the two fought state efforts to remove the radium by arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency was getting ready to relax the federal standard and that it would cost up to $150-million to treat every well in the system.
The eventual cleanup cost was only $515,000 after two wells were closed. Meanwhile, the EPA in April 2000 refused to alter its standard, citing new research indicating that radium is more dangerous than previously thought.
Experts remain divided.
"There's always a potential risk," said Neal Nelson, an EPA pharmacologist. "You don't want to drink water with any level of radium in it."
Dr. John Lanza, director of the Escambia County Health Department, said people who drank the tainted water could develop cancer years from now. In 2001, Lanza had agreed with a statement by the utility that drinking the water would cause no significant increase in health risk as long as exposure was short-term.
Other health experts say any levels exceeding the federal standard can damage the body's immune system and that small children and developing fetuses are particularly at risk.