Government must act to protect the public’s drinking water from omnipresent threat

Sydney Water’s confirmation that cancer-linked “forever chemicals” have been detected across the city’s drinking water supplies is confronting for citizens who have been comforted by the government’s reassurances that our catchments are sequestered in pristine bushland, far from any human activity or pollution.

But to anyone who has been paying close attention to the unfolding forever chemicals scandal, it is completely unsurprising.

These man-made chemicals, also known as PFAS, have contaminated nearly every human on the planet. They fall in rain and have reached the summit of Mount Everest.

It would be more of a revelation if Sydney’s drinking water supply were somehow immune from their rampant spread across the globe.

Thus, it is difficult to comprehend the position taken by regulators until recently that PFAS do not pose a risk to our catchments and, therefore, there is no need for routine monitoring.

After authorities were belatedly pushed into testing by a Herald investigation in June, they discovered that PFAS levels at the Cascade water filtration plant in the Blue Mountains were significantly higher than at other sites.

Given this water source is nestled within World Heritage-listed wilderness, the discovery has completely dismantled any notion that PFAS cannot find their way into catchments because of their remoteness.

Although this testing has delivered some sorely needed clarity, it raises more questions than it answers.

Sydney Water did not directly respond when asked if it would investigate the source of the forever chemicals in the Blue Mountains or attempt to stymie the flow of contamination.

It stressed that the results were safe because they fell within Australia’s drinking water guidelines.

But anyone following this crisis also knows that what is considered safe today can be considered unsafe tomorrow with the flick of a bureaucrat’s pen.

Indeed, Australia’s guidelines have ricocheted around since Defence first announced in 2015 that its forever chemicals pollution was leaching onto private land.

Few residents embroiled in that saga have forgotten the moment in 2016 when regulators inexplicably opted to raise Australia’s safe levels for drinking water to 78 times higher than the United States.

Authorities were forced into an embarrassing backflip less than 12 months later, in an episode that seriously tested the community’s faith in those charged with protecting them.

Now, Australia’s thresholds are again under review after the United States’ dramatic policy shift in April found there was no safe level of exposure to the probable carcinogens.

According to the University of Sydney’s Nicholas Chartres, this decision was not a flash in the pan but the culmination of the most comprehensive scientific evaluation on forever chemicals ever undertaken by a global health agency.

It considered more than 130 epidemiological studies that did not exist when Australia’s guidelines were finalised six years ago.

Australian authorities must act decisively to protect public health by adopting the US standards, routinely testing all drinking water supplies and making the results available to the public. It’s crystal clear which direction the science is moving in and now is a critical inflection point.

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