Cuomo to launch initiatives to ensure safe drinking water in New York state

Earlier this month, New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that he plans to launch initiatives to ensure the safety of drinking water throughout the state of New York.

Cuomo is assembling a Statewide Water Quality Rapid Response Team, which will be tasked with identifying and solving any possible contamination of drinking water, groundwater and surface water, according to a press release.

For Syracuse, though, water safety may not present a problem due to the city’s already existing clean water standards, said Charles Driscoll, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Syracuse University.

The city gets its drinking water from Skaneateles Lake in Onondaga County, according to the Syracuse Department of Water’s website. Driscoll said the lake is a very high quality water supply.

“We’re very fortunate in this region that our water is such good quality,” he said.

Skaneateles Lake is so clean that it has what is known as a “filtration avoidance agreement,” meaning that it is exempt by the United States Environmental Protection Agency from typical water filtration measures, Driscoll said.

While there are particles of algae and clay in the lake, Driscoll said, they are so small that they do not need to be filtered for any health reasons.

The only processing required for the water in Syracuse is the addition of chlorine and phosphate, said Caitlin Eger, a university fellow in SU’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Chlorine serves as a disinfectant to remove any potentially disease-causing bacteria from the water, Eger said.

“Once it gets to your house, there’s a little bit of chlorine left in it so … when you open up the tap, you’re not going to have bacteria in your water source,” Eger said.

The only real challenge for Syracuse’s water department is working with the city’s piping infrastructure, which was built more than 100 years ago, Eger said.

According to the Syracuse water department document, the city has phased out much of its lead-lined piping, but some older buildings and houses still contain their own lead pipes.

“It is a huge task to go into every home … built before 1950, and make sure that none of the pipes in the entire house are lead,” Eger said.

Adding phosphate to the water serves to prevent any lead left from dissolving into the water, thereby preventing the possibility of lead poisoning, Eger added.

Whether Cuomo’s initiatives have been influenced by the recent scandal in Flint, Michigan, is unclear, said Aditi Padhye, a graduate student of environmental engineering at SU.

“The timing can be questioned, but it is very possible that they had it in the works, and because of the scandal it’s just moving faster,” Padhye said.

Governments that don’t take an interest in their citizens’ health also run the risk of losing the community’s trust, Driscoll said.

“In the case of Flint … it was a breach of trust,” Driscoll says. “The whole community there has completely lost faith in their leaders.”

Events in Flint may serve as a reminder for other governments across the country to be careful with their own drinking water systems, Eger said.

“It makes people check their own rear-view mirrors and make sure that the infrastructure they’re using at home is safe,” Eger said.