While the country may now be cognizant of water contamination and other serious safety gaps prevalent in the regions hit by Hurricane Katrina, health and safety threats are not unique to the Gulf Coast. Threats to security and safety exist throughout the country, and some of these unmet public needs, which receive little media attention, pose even greater threats to public health and safety than risks found in New Orleans. While the examples cited below are by no means exhaustive, they highlight troubling gaps in our security and safety protections. Water Contamination | Facility Security | Bioterrorism and Food Security Water Contamination As soon as Gulf Coast cleanup began, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued warnings for workers to avoid contact with floodwater, which was contaminated with unsafe levels of E. coli, lead, arsenic and various other chemical and bacterial pollutants. This "toxic soup," however, is not isolated to New Orleans floodwaters. In fact, weak regulatory protections have allowed contaminants from construction and factory farm runoff to flow into rivers and lakes throughout the country, and unlike cleanup crews and residents in New Orleans, most Americans are not warned about the potentially hazardous pollutants in waters where they swim and fish. E. coli Contamination According to a report in Grist Magazine, the Des Moines Water Works, which supplies drinking water to the 300,000 residents of the Iowa City area, recorded "E. coli readings up to three times higher than [the New Orleans] toxic gumbo five times in 2005 alone. The river's all-time high was set in 1996, the first year of regular monitoring, when a 100-mL sample contained 154,020 E. coli colonies -- a whopping 770 times higher than the EPA's national no-contact standard." Though the water is sanitized before it reaches the drinking water supply, at its source (the Raccoon River) it is not. Runoff from Factory Farms In the case of the Raccoon River, contaminants from factory farms such as animal byproducts, herbicides and pesticides are largely responsible for the unsafe conditions of the watershed. "Last year, state officials investigating a fish kill in a small creek that empties into the Raccoon found readings of 14 million fecal coliform colonies per 100-mL sample. 'Some of these tributaries at times can be little more than liquid manure,' reported a scientist familiar with the area," according to the Grist article. "Investigators from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources ultimately concluded that manure from a nearby cattle feedlot killed the fish." The Raccoon River is a 200-mile river used by the Boy Scouts and many others for recreational purposes including whitewater kayaking. Unfortunately, the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) watered down already weak EPA draft rules to address pollution from factory-style animal farms--resulting in standards that are more protective of corporate polluters than of public health and the environment. In 2001, EPA reworked a Clinton-era proposal to regulate factory farms, dropping a number of important provisions--most notably one that would have held corporate livestock owners liable for damage caused by animal waste pollution. These owners often evade culpability by hiring contractors to raise their animals, a loophole that would have been closed by the Clinton proposal. The agency also dropped a requirement that would have forced facilities to monitor groundwater for potential contamination by animal waste, which often seeps into the earth, leaving community drinking water supplies vulnerable. OIRA further weakened the standards by broadening a provision that exempts "agricultural storm water discharge" from regulation--legalizing the discharge of raw sewage, bacteria, and other elements from land where waste has been applied. The office also altered a provision to allow facilities to avoid strict federal standards governing the land application of animal waste--instead embracing the industry-preferred approach of regulation by state-level authorities. Runoff from Construction Sites OIRA also tossed out an EPA proposal to limit runoff from construction and development sites, the largest source of pollution in coastal waters and estuaries in the United States. Additionally, the Bush administration has delayed issuing new standards to prevent sewer overflows. In the meantime, more than a trillion gallons of untreated sewage have poured into U.S. waterways, and Americans are still denied even rudimentary public notice of such contamination in the waters where they swim and fish. Overflows of Sewage and Waste In January 2001, at the end of the Clinton administration, EPA proposed standards that would mandate improved sewer capacity, operation and maintenance, and require that sewage facilities notify the public and public health authorities when overflows occur. These proposed regulations were based onconsensus recommendations developed over five years by a federal advisory committee, which included sewer operators. However, upon taking office, the Bush administration froze the Clinton sewer proposal, and more than four years later no action has been taken. To make matters worse, the Bush administration is seeking greater "flexibility" for drinking water systems in poor areas. Each year, the United States experiences about 40,000 overflows of raw sewage and garbage--such as medical waste, toxic industrial waste, and contaminated storm water--into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, and about 400,000 sewage backups polluted the basements of American homes. The vast majority of these overflows is preventable. Chemicals EPA has also failed to regulate certain chemicals that have been known to contaminate drinking water systems--such as the weed killer atrazine, which has contaminated certain drinking water systems at levels 12 times greater than allowed by law. Facility Security Chemical Plants One hundred twenty-five chemical facilities have a "vulnerability zone" encompassing more than one million people who could be killed or injured in the event of a chemical accident or terrorist attack; about 700 facilities put more than 100,000 people at risk; and roughly 3,000 facilities put at least 10,000 people at risk. All told, one in six Americans lives in a vulnerable zone. A recent report by the 9/11 Commission found progress on the nation's chemical security infrastructure sorely lacking. Disturbingly, no federal law regulates these vulnerability zones in terms of size, chemical intensity, or population at risk. Companies are not even required to assess and consider inherently safer methods of operation. A legislative proposal introduced in 2002 that sought to bolster chemical security was thwarted in Congress. On April 27, 2005, a panel of government officials and security experts told the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that chemical security remains a looming problem the federal government refuses to address. Proving the point, on that very same day the House Committee on Homeland Security rejected an amendment to improve security related to shipments of dangerous chemicals. Nuclear Plants Safeguards protecting nuclear facilities are also sorely lacking. Although the phrases "dirty bomb" and "radiological device" have achieved wide circulation since 9/11, the administration has not addressed securing the more than 100 potential dirty bombs already in the United States: the 103 nuclear reactors in 65 power plants across the country. In fact, according to 9/11 Commission staff, nuclear power plants were among the ten targets originally planned by al Qaeda for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, a 2003 report by the Government Accountability Office "identified three major deficiencies in the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s] oversight of nuclear plant security," according to a joint report by Public Citizen and Greenpeace. A year later, it found that little had been accomplished to address the serious shortcomings highlighted by the GAO, including: the NRC's assessment of individual plant security plans is merely a "paper review" and lacks detail sufficient to determine whether plants can repel an attack; security plans are largely based on a template that often omits key site-specific information; NRC officials do not typically visit plants to obtain site specific information; NRC readiness tests at all facilities will take three years to conduct; and the NRC does not plan to make the improvements to its inspection plan recommended by the GAO in 2003, such as following up to see whether cited violations of security requirements have been corrected. In March 2005, NRC proposed weakening fire safety regulations at power plants by making it more difficult to safely shut down a reactor in the event of a fire caused by a terrorist attack. The proposed rule will allow plant operators to rely on manual rather than automatic shut-downs of equipment. In 2003, NRC found that many plants were out of compliance with fire protection regulations. Rather than raise the bar on protection, NRC decided to lower the standards instead and put workers and surrounding communities at risk. Security assessments of nuclear facilities were mired i n conflicts of interest when the same company used to assess nuclear facility security also provided security guards for more than half the nation's security facilities. Nuclear facilities have been plagued by other safety issues as well. A nuclear facility in Arizona was recently discovered to have a serious design flaw that went undetected for 19 years. The NRC rejected a petition in May for a new regulation to require battery back-ups in sirens used to alert people of a nuclear accident. Thus, if a power failure and nuclear accident occur at the same time, families living near a power plant may not be alerted. At the same time, the Bush administration missed a 2003 deadline to provide families living near nuclear power plants with potassium iodide pills that could protect them from radiation poisoning in case of a nuclear accident. Bioterrorism and Food Safety The Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 required FDA to develop new regulations to protect our food supply. Yet the regulations promulgated provide little protection, prompting former Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson to call the nation's food supply an "easy target" for a terrorist attack. For instance, one of the rules--administrative detention of food products that pose a serious health threat--is only effective once a threat has been detected, but, as Thompson pointed out, only a very small percentage of food supply is ever inspected. If food threats are not discovered, administrative detention can do little to protect the food supply. Another rule requiring advanced notice of food shipments arriving in the U.S. was significantly weakened by OIRA. The original proposal, issued in February 2003 for public comment, required importers to notify the FDA by noon the day before a shipment was to arrive. The final standards, however, require just eight hours notice for shipments arriving by sea, four hours for those transported by air or rail, and only two hours for shipments coming by land. Even more likely than the threat of bioterrorism is the threat of food contamination by listeria, salmonella or E. coli. Listeria alone causes 2,500 cases of illness each year, 500 cases of which aredeadly. Unfortunately, FDA and USDA have issued only weak or watered-down regulations to protect the food supply from these prevalent food-borne contaminants. We Can Do Better These case examples of unmet needs in the areas of water contamination, facility security, and bioterrorism highlight the important role the federal government must play in protecting the public from harm. As individual citizens, we are defenseless from large-scale harms and must pool our resources into equally large-scale public institutions capable of supplying national solutions to national problems. Rather than seeking to cut the costs of Gulf Coast reconstruction by eliminating programs and lifting federal protections, government leaders should see Hurricane Katrina as a case in point of the consequences of government failure to address the public's unmet needs and as a tragic reminder of their important duty to keep America safe.