Fear By Beer-makers About EPA Forced Change To Portland's Bull Run Waters
Portland's brewmasters say its wrong for the federal Environmental Protection Agency to apply one standard to all open drinking water systems across the entire United States.
But forcing all open public water operations to install filtration systems by 2014 is EPA's answer to the the spring 1993 cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. EPA does not want to make any exceptions to its one-size-fits-all mandate.
Station KGW captured reaction to the coming deadline to filter water from Portland's pristine Bull Run Watershed this past weekend at the city's 22nd annual beer festivill.
"We have wonderful composition water -- the way it comes to us is perfect," said Kurt Widmer, co-founder of Widmer Brothers Brewing. He wonders why on earth anyone would want to tamper with perfection.
Brewmaster Karl Ockert with Bridgeport Ales wonders how a change will affect flavor. "It might jeopardize the delivery and the performance of the water," Ockert speculated.
Even the environmental group Oregon Wild questions the need for filtering the Bull Run waters. It says:
The Bull Run Watershed enjoys unique federal legislative protections. The Bull Run is a forested and undeveloped watershed on federal land, with restrictions on logging and entry of human and domestic animals (sources of viruses, bacteria and protozoa). These stringent watershed protections, some in place for over one hundred years and some legislated as recently as 2001, have increasingly been recognized by the EPA and the drinking water industry as the most cost effective strategy for protection of superb water quality. There have never been any demonstrated outbreaks of cryptosporidium associated with Bull Run water. LT2 (the filtration rule) completely disregards the effectiveness of a closed, pristine, water source like Bull Run in preventing disease outbreaks.
It somewhat ironic to note that the Milwaukee outbreak was caused by cryptosporidium oocysts that passed through the filtration system of one of the city's water-treatment plant. More than 400,000 were stricken by the crypto parasite.
