Tap water across parts of Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra, Victoria, Queensland and the tourist havens of Rottnest and Norfolk islands has been found to contain contaminants that US authorities now warn are likely to be carcinogenic, with “no safe level of exposure”.
The pollutants have also been detected in tap water in Canberra, the inner Melbourne suburb of Footscray, inner-city Adelaide, the Queensland regional centres of Cairns and Gladstone, Kingborough in greater Hobart and locations across Darwin and the Northern Territory.
Some of the most troubling readings, breaching both Australian and US safety thresholds, were at Norfolk Island, along with the Queensland towns Ayr, Bundaberg and Macknade.In 2020, the chemicals were discovered at 635 times Australia’s safe limit and thousands of times the US enforceable limit in a now-decommissioned bore on Norfolk Island that was being used to feed tap water to the hospital, airport terminal, fire station, council works depot and public toilets.
However, many exceed the new US safety thresholds, which are based on recent scientific evidence showing forever chemicals are more dangerous than previously understood. In cases where the presence of the chemicals was suspected due to past use in firefighting foam, detailed investigations were carried out to determine the risk to drinking water sources, the spokesperson added.
But Lloyd-Smith spurned the claim that widespread testing wasn’t necessary. She argued such an approach posed a real risk of allowing the ongoing contamination of Australia’s drinking water. “Some of the communities would have been drinking PFAS at dangerous levels for years, and possibly decades,” Amis said.
Chartres called on Australian regulators to act swiftly to bring safety thresholds into line with those in the US. Lovell said it was not unusual for guidelines to vary from country to country depending on their purpose, the local context and interpretation of evidence. Australian scientist Dr Nathan Weber, an ORISE fellow at the US EPA, said the risk came from small levels building up in the body over time.
The Australian government confirmed in April that it is contemplating suing Wall Street giant 3M to claw back some of its financial losses from the spread of contamination across the country.3M’s scientists first invented forever chemicals in the 1930s, and their extraordinary capacity to repel water, oil and stains has since propelled the company to billion-dollar profits.
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