Cincinnati lab plays key role in tap water safety
CINCINNATI — About a threehour drive south of Toledo is a massive federal building where researchers develop much of the science that goes into protecting the tap water inside homes.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Andrew W. Breidenbach Environmental Research Center played an important role in getting Toledo through its algae driven water crisis the first weekend of August, 2014.
Science generated in that building also could become more important as the investigation deepens into the Norfolk Southern train derailment on Feb. 3 in East Palestine.
That event has prompted calls from state and federal officials for years of follow-up studies into the potential impact of toxic chemical exposure on human health and wildlife throughout much of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
Lab spokesman Char Bowling said that research generated there “supports and provides a scientific foundation for the responders and decision makers” investigating the East Palestine crisis and other events, as needed. She points out that scientists there, though, are not part of the onsite East Palestine emergency response team.
The research center has also produced science that policymakers have needed to address water problems in Washington, Flint, Michigan, Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Sebring, Ohio, to name a few.
The 10-story building is on 22 acres across from the University of Cincinnati. It is the U.S. EPA’s second-largest research and development facility, and is considered one of the world’s tops for water research.
Another aspect of this national lab is the scientific detective work that goes into better understanding how waterlines corrode.
On the sixth floor is an area where pipelines from all across the country have been cut down to about the length of celery stalks and split in half for intensive chemical analyses.
Pipeline samples from Flint; Chicago; Newark; Stow, Ohio; Glocester, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Reading, Massachusetts, and even the Canadian cities of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Edmonton have been analyzed and are among those on display there.
Physical scientists Jennifer Tully and Mike DeSantis explained how the corrosion is analyzed, and how information from that research can be useful in the national push to replace lead-based pipes.
“These are very complex chemical systems here,” Tully said during a tour of the research facility last month. “We spent a lot of time taking apart the various characteristics of pipes.”
Such research is essential for any municipality that may be switching to a different source of raw water, because all have different organics in them, DeSantis said.
“Knowing what you have before you make a change is important,” he said.
In another area, Steve Harmon, a U.S. EPA supervisor in the water infrastructure division, showed how flecks of lead barely noticeable to the human eye are filtered out, packed together, and seen under a powerful electron microscope.
The Andrew W. Breidenbach Environmental Research Center employs 980 people and has a combined payroll of $88.6 million, according to a U.S. EPA fact sheet.
Research there also assists with homeland security because it helps operators of water-treatment plants “detect, respond to and become more resilient to natural and man-made disasters” with developments in technology such as real-time sensors and software “for detecting intentional contamination,” the fact sheet states.
The U.S. EPA said it wanted to get out its story about the research center following the passage of President Biden’s 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which is making an unprecedented $50 billion available nationwide to help modernize America’s water treatment and wastewater services.
One thing makes this highly secured center a little different from ordinary laboratories. Scientists there, many part of the agency’s national Office of Research and Development, aren’t allowed to talk policy. Just science.
Lake Erie research
This particular building is one of several in the Cincinnati area focused exclusively on water research, which doesn’t always mean tap water. It can also mean research into surface water.
Examples include Lake Erie and the Maumee River, distribution systems, home and business plumbing, wastewater, stormwater, and ways in which water is reused or recycled, said Regan Murray, the lab’s water infrastructure division director.
A chemist, Heath Mash, is one of the experts there who do a lot of research into the lingering effects of harmful algal blooms not just in western Lake Erie but also Grand Lake St. Marys and other bodies of water across Ohio.
He said the chief toxin in western Lake Erie, microcystin, is especially troublesome. That is because it has become so concentrated and has become “essentially self-restoring” in recent years because of the western basin’s relative warmth, shallowness, and high nutrient inflow from fertilizer runoff.
Microcystis has come on strong in western Lake Erie almost every summer since 1995. “The species there, specifically, is very resilient,” Mash said.
One of the lesser-known facts about the toxin produced by it is the rapidly growing number of varieties of it that are being identified. There were only 50 known variations when the World Health Organization developed its first advisory for them in 1998. Sixteen years later, when the Toledo water crisis occurred, there were 80. Today, there are believed to be about 350 variations.
Mash agreed there needs to be more research into the other forms of microcystin, even if many of them act similarly by the way they attack the human liver.
Another great unknown is how far the water-based algal toxin travels in the air.
Algal toxins, though, comprise only a portion of what this laboratory studies.
In the basement is a small room where some mighty big work is being done, including that into an issue seen as one of the world’s emerging threats in water science. Known as “forever chemicals” because of their inability to break down in nature, they are synthetic and there are some 4,700 kinds of them.
They “are the most persistent synthetic chemicals to date, they hardly degrade in the natural environment and have been found in the blood and breast milk of people and wildlife all round the world,” according to Chem Trust, a United Kingdom and European chemists.
Once thought to be relegated mostly to firefighting foam, they have been found in countless nonstick consumer products, from paper and cardboard packaging to clothing, cosmetics, and electronics.
Jonathan Pressman is the U.S. EPA branch chief leading work on drinking water treatment involving forever chemicals. He said that research into removing those chemicals from drinking water shows promise, but that a lot of long-term questions remain.
Technologies are available to remove them from water,” said Sandhya Parshionikar, associate national program director for U.S. EPA’s safe and sustainable water research program. “However, there is limited information about how they perform over time,” she said.
Dan Tettenhorst, a U.S. EPA chemist, said forever chemicals gained a lot of attention because there are so many unknowns. “We need to be very specialized and highly specific,” he said of research efforts.
Mash agreed. “You can’t have just one test for them,” he said of the diversity of the chemicals.
In another part of the basement, researchers are studying the pathways and rise of a bacteria known as legionella. They cause a severe and potentially deadly type of pneumonia known as Legionnaires’ disease.
The disease got a lot of attention during the Flint water crisis because of several deaths attributed to it.
But Laura Boczek, a U.S. EPA research microbiologist, said the bacteria is a lot more prevalent than people might realize, and appears to be getting worse as Earth’s climate continues to warm. The primary way humans ingest it is by inhaling droplets of water that contain the bacteria, not by drinking it, she said.
Legionnaires’ disease and other conditions caused by the legionella bacterium have been on the rise nationally especially since 2013, with an increase believed to be as much as 500 percent greater, Boczek said.
About one in 10 people sickened by Legionnaires’ disease die from it, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
The bacterium occurs naturally in freshwater lakes and streaIt can get into building water systems, including storage tanks, and air conditioning units.
“This organism in particular does grow well in hot water systems,” Boczek said. “We are seeing a dramatic increase across the country, not just Flint.”
She and other scientists are looking for better ways of identifying and destroying the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease.
“The disease is in your lungs,” Boczek said. “You don’t get sick from drinking [the bacteria].”
More than a century
According to the U.S. EPA, Cincinnati has been a hub for water-quality research for more than 110 years.
The nation’s first water pollution lab opened in 1912 inside the Kilgour Mansion near the Ohio River, a mansion that had been used prior to that as a Marine hospital.
That first Cincinnati-area laboratory focused exclusively on water quality opened 58 years before President Richard Nixon created the U.S. EPA in 1970 and 63 years before President Gerald Ford dedicated the building known today as Andrew W. Breidenbach Environmental Research Center opened across from the University of Cincinnati in 1975.
“Cincinnati was partly picked because of past accomplishments in water research,” said Brian Kleinman, U.S. EPA Center for Environmental Solutions and Emergency Response chief of staff.
The building that Ford dedicated was originally called the National Environmental Research Center. It later was renamed in honor of Breidenbach, whom the U.S. EPA described in a report as “a dedicated leader in many facets of environmental protection.”