2 Safe Drinking Water— Safe Sites Interaction between the Safe Drinking Water Act and Superfund, 1968–1995 Jared N. Day n December 16, 1974, President Gerald Ford signed into law the Safe ODrinking Water Act (SDWA). This legislation granted the U.S. Environ- mental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to regulate levels of contamina- tion in the nation’s drinking water supplies. Built on the loosely enforced and incomplete standards of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) from 1962 (see Chapter 3), EPA gradually developed a more sophisticated “multiple barrier” approach to water protection that required different actions: assessing drink- ing water sources, monitoring wells and collection systems, and improving the qualifications of operators and technical staff at the state and local levels. As their primary measure of contamination, the U.S. Congress and EPA established a series of National Drinking Water Regulations—legally enforce- able standards that applied to all drinking water supplies. These regulations usually took the form of maximum contaminant levels (MCLs), a set of strict numeric values established by EPA that included radionuclides as well as organic, inorganic, and microbial contaminants. With these regulations, Congress significantly expanded EPA’s powers to regulate toxic contaminants compared with the narrow 1962 PHS standards, which applied only to bacte- riological contaminants. Along with the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972), SDWA became part of the central legislative bedrock on which EPA attempted to regulate environmental threats to public health. Later environmental legislation built on the regulatory procedures and rules established under SDWA. Laws such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976); the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976); the Compre- 17 18 PART I: INSTITUTIONS AND PERFORMANCE hensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CER- CLA) (1980); and important reauthorizations of CERCLA and SDWA in 1986 and later further expanded EPA’s regulatory agenda. The laws routinely taxed the agency’s scientific, technical, and administrative capacities. Addi- tionally, the inherent tension between the SWDA’s legislative goals set by Congress and EPA’s administrative and scientific resources and capabilities created a series of unintended consequences within the drinking water pro- gram itself and in other programs and agencies. The origins and implemen- tation of SDWA showcase these tensions as MCLs—the complex regulatory standards designed strictly as water regulations in the 1970s—became central regulatory standards for EPA’s largest toxic substance program, Superfund. The information in this chapter is gleaned from congressional hearings, EPA records, federal archive materials, interviews, and related primary docu- ments as well as secondary sources. The first section is a review of the histor- ical context in which the safe drinking water program was created. In the next section, I explore the primary measurements developed by EPA to deter- mine drinking water safety—the MCLs—and the agency’s initial efforts at developing them. In subsequent sections, I examine the creation of the Superfund program in 1980, the conflicting ideological views of Congress and President Ronald Reagan’s EPA, and the eventual clash over cleanup standards and timetables. Also explored are the landmark 1986 reauthoriza- tions of SDWA and Superfund, in which Congress imposed strict rules, schedules, and mandates on both programs. One of the central elements of the Superfund reauthorization was the linkage of Superfund cleanup stan- dards to the MCLs proscribed by SDWA. This linkage had important long- term consequences for both programs from the late 1980s through the 1990s. Origins of the SDWA Standards Regime Congress grappled with safe drinking water legislation throughout the late 1960s. The PHS water quality standards proved inadequate in the face of ris- ing public concern about drinking water quality and the expanding complex- ity of America’s water contamination problems. Although the PHS standards set limits on many known bacteriological, organic, and inorganic contami- nants, the regulations were binding on only about 700 interstate drinking water carriers, fewer than 2% of the nation’s water supply systems (Train 1974, 562; see Chapter 3). Even though the standards had a broad effect because all 50 states adopted them as regulations or guidelines, enforcement on the federal and state levels was abysmal. In 1969, PHS began a compre- hensive review of 969 water supplies to inform a revision of its standards. In their final report, PHS officials found that 41% of the systems studied did CHAPTER 2: SAFE DRINKING WATER 19 not meet state or federal standards (U.S. PHS 1970; U.S. EPA 1971, 20–21). In addition, states seldom monitored their drinking water supplies, especially in small communities (Cotruvo and Vogt 1990, 7). Despite these shortcomings, Congress’s goals in 1968 and 1969 were quite modest: to revise and update the PHS standards. For example, the PHS administrator described the proposed Safe Drinking Water Act of 1969 as “proposals limited to minor, technical, or clarifying amendments” (Johnson 1968). A series of federal studies from 1972 through 1974 quickly brought national attention to the weaknesses of the PHS standards. EPA Region VI’s landmark 1972 publication, Industrial Pollution of the Lower Mississippi River in Louisiana, and an equally important 1974 EPA follow-up were key to set- ting in motion a series of similar public and private investigations into drink- ing water quality. The Mississippi River study, which included studies of con- tamination in the drinking water supplies for the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, found high concentrations of 86 contaminants, including 66 organic compounds from one supplier (U.S. EPA 1972; Environmental News 1974, 1–3; Pontius 1999a). In 1973, a General Accounting Office study of water supplies in Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia found that of the 446 systems studied, only 60 fully com- plied with the PHS bacteriological standards (Symons 1984, 34). These federal studies were followed in quick succession by independent investigations that exposed similar (or worse) problems. Consumer Reports published a damning three-part report on water quality standards based on its investigation. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) conducted another study of the New Orleans water supply and found that residents drinking treated Mississippi River water had a higher probability of developing cancer than people in surrounding areas who drank water from groundwater sources. In addition, on December 5, 1974, CBS television aired a program with Dan Rather entitled “Caution, Drinking Water May Be Dangerous to Your Health” (Harris and Brecher 1974; Pontius and Clark 1999). After these and other investigations (and the resulting wave of negative publicity) surrounding drinking water contamination, the pressure for meaningful change became inexorable. After more than four years of off- and-on efforts, Congress finally enacted legislation to develop a national pro- gram to protect the quality of the nation’s public drinking water systems. The architects of the 1974 Safe Drinking Water legislation tried to establish a cooperative program among local, state, and federal agencies and require the creation of primary drinking water regulations that would ensure safe drink- ing water for consumers. These regulations were the first to cover both chem- ical and microbial contaminants and the first to apply to all public water sys- tems in the United States. The House of Representatives passed a Senate- 20 PART I: INSTITUTIONS AND PERFORMANCE amended bill on December 3, 1974, and President Ford signed the SDWA 13 days later (Pontius 1999a). The 1974 act specified the process by which EPA was to adopt national drinking water regulations. Interim regulations, later renamed National Interim Primary Drinking Water Regulations, were to be adopted within six months of enactment of SDWA. In this chapter, most references to SDWA “standards” refer specifically to these and later interim standards. By March 1977, two and a half years after SDWA’s passage, EPA proposed Revised National Drinking Water Regulations based on a National Academy of Sci- ence (NAS) study of health effects of contaminants in drinking water. EPA went through a two-step process. First, it needed to publish recommended MCLs (RMCLs), later renamed MCL goals (MCLGs), for contaminants thought to have adverse health effects on the basis of the NAS study. The RMCLs needed to be set at a level, with an adequate margin of safety, such that no known or anticipated health effect would occur. These levels were to act only as health goals and were not federally enforceable (Pontius and Clark 1999). In a second step, EPA officials established MCLs as close to the RMCLs as the agency thought technologically or economically feasible. If it was not fea- sible to determine the level of a contaminant, SDWA authorized EPA to estab- lish a required treatment technique instead of an MCL. Together, the MCLs and treatment techniques would eventually comprise the final, federally enforceable National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (Pontius 1999a). The Challenge of Establishing MCLs EPA took on a complex task that would severely test the agency’s administra- tive, scientific, and financial resources over the next 26 years. Both govern- ment studies and private