Generations were raised on the idea that Australia had the world’s best drinking water. It was an enduring ideal behind which authorities hid or ignored information about what was happening to our water supplies. It also allowed them to attack those who dared suggest something might be wrong.
For years, Herald investigative reporter Carrie Fellner has been carrying out ground-breaking journalism on the links between so-called “forever chemicals” (known as PFAS) and water contamination. In the past 18 months, she has written disturbing stories about sickness and death in Wreck Bay, an Indigenous community on the NSW South Coast next to a Defence base that used PFAS in toxic firefighting foam. She also revealed that testing found millions of Australians were drinking contaminated water; when she approached water providers, they said their water was safe because levels of forever chemicals detected were well within Australia’s drinking water guidelines.
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Following some of our reports, a federal parliament inquiry was announced to look into the dangers posed by cancer-causing forever chemicals, including the adequacy of Australia’s drinking water guidelines, which permit a carcinogenic forever chemical in tap water at 140 times the level the United States will allow.
A US policy shift in April found there was no safe level of exposure to the probable carcinogens. In August, Fellner reported Sydney Water had confirmed forever chemicals had been detected across our city’s drinking water supplies. A week or so later, Sydney Water quietly closed a feeder dam in the Blue Mountains.
Now the National Health and Medical Research Council is to slash allowable levels of three different kinds of PFAS in tap water and introduce limits on a fourth. Depending on the chemical, the new guidelines are both more stringent and less stringent than the US limits. They will force a clean-up of tap water supplied to hundreds of thousands of Australians.
For many water suppliers, the new limits will not mean much. For others, massive problems lie ahead. Governments will need not only to work out how they will meet the limits but also how long they will take to fix systems. This could be a daunting prospect for some authorities, such as in the Blue Mountains, where the main drinking water supply for 41,000 residents is contaminated at levels more than triple Australia’s proposed new guidelines. Further, there are concerns that the patchwork nature of water authorities across Australia may result in a non-uniform response.
For too long, key people who should have known better have been constantly playing down concerns over PFAS and accusing us of scaremongering. Now, by their own admission, they are saying there are water supplies with unsafe levels of dangerous chemicals despite all those assurances that everything was fine.
The Herald has sought to shine a light on the issue of PFAS for many years, and we have repeatedly called on authorities to act decisively to protect public health by adopting the US standards. The NHMRC’s new limits are welcome, tardy and a vindication.
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