Health officials in Maine say they are working with water utilities to stay below maximum contaminant levels for hexavalent chromium.
That's after a report from the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, pointed to thousands of public utilities nationwide that had traces of the compound, along with arsenic, nitrate or a combination of the three.
Exposure to these chemicals at high levels can cause harmful health effects in humans including cancer. But according to publicly available water quality reports, Maine water utilities that were flagged in the EWG report are in compliance with federal standards.
In a statement, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services said utilities are required to notify customers if there are too many pollutants in the water.
Recent water quality reports for the Greater Augusta Utility District, Brunswick & Topsham Water District, Brewer Water Department and Old Town Water District showed there have been no issues in the past year. All these communities showed to have water systems with hexavalent chromium plus either arsenic or nitrate in an EWG map.
"The Environmental Working Group has compiled drinking water data from state regulatory agencies and compared it to alternative standards it used to produce this report," the statement said. "In some cases, these alternative limits are many times lower than [those] set by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), or, are for chemicals not currently regulated under the SDWA."
Even though Maine utilities are in compliance with those federal standards, EWG called for stricter limits.
Maximum contaminant levels, or MCLs, are the highest possible level of a pollutant that can legally be found in drinking water. They are typically measured in parts per billion or micrograms per liter of water. The MCLs are laid out in the Safe Drinking Water Act and reviewed at least every six years.
Emily Carey Perez De Alejo leads the Maine-based nonprofit Defend Our Health. She said stricter federal standards would ultimately improve health by incentivizing keeping more pollutants out of public water.
"Water coming from our taps is generally safe," she said. “The water utilities are members of our community and are really trying to provide the safest and best water quality that they can to communities, but they need us to take regulatory and legislative action to help drive that change."
The Environmental Working Group also called for utilities to treat multiple pollutants at once rather than chemical-by-chemical.
When asked to comment on the EWG report, the U.S. Enviornmental Protection Agency sent a statement saying the agency is "committed to ensuring that Americans can rely on clean and safe drinking water as part of the agency’s Powering the Great American Comeback initiative."
The state Department of Environmental Protection did not return requests for comment
