“We basically have a disagreement among scientists”, Governor Pat McCrory said Thursday afternoon in response to a reporter’s question after a highway ribbon-cutting in Fayetteville.
Advertisement
The state epidemiologist in the division of public health resigned yesterday in protest over the McCrory administration’s handling of a controversy stemming from Duke Energy’s handling of well water surrounding coal ash sites. He’s so sure about that decision he said he’d tell a neighbor, “I would gladly drink her water any day, for the rest of my life”. And, when the issue concerns the safety of well water, you think twice about publicly attacking a scientist for expressing his view that the water ought to be more, not less, safe to drink.
A state toxicologist says officials in North Carolina Gov.
“We’re providing all the information necessary to ensure that we have safe drinking water and the public knows exactly what the value of that drinking water is”, Gov.
McCrory worked for Duke Energy for almost three decades prior to his election. McCrory denies showing any favoritism. State agencies were required to follow the law, Rudo said, and he checked the calculations setting the stricter standard with federal health authorities based on the latest studies of cancer risk.
Toxicologist Ken Rudo says in a statement issued by his attorneys late Tuesday that the state’s environmental and health agencies previous year agreed on a safety standard for hexavalent chromium in groundwater after intense scientific discussions.
Rudo’s job is to perform human health risk assessments related to chemicals in water, soil and air.
“Dr. Rudo believes that he has been personally and wrongfully impugned by state officials for the past week for his having the temerity to merely speak the truth”, Philbeck said.
But if the 2015 standard for hexavalent chromium were applied evenly, it would mean North Carolinians who depend on the 900,000 wells in the state would be urged against using it, Williams and Reeder said Tuesday. Williams did not respond Wednesday to an interview request.
Advertisement
The state Department of Health and Human Services, where Rudo has worked for almost 30 years, initially applied a far looser standard – a level for public water supplies set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the 1990s and required by a 2008 state law, Rudo said. Statements by McCrory’s chief of staff, agency spokesmen, Department of Environmental Quality Assistant Secretary Tom Reeder and Williams all claimed Rudo has acted alone to establish what levels of hexavalent chromium were toxic and was somehow acting without the knowledge of his superiors and colleagues. Staff at the state environmental department found untenable that he limited his threshold to only those well owners near the coal ash ponds. Duke denies its massive coal ash dumps are the source of the harmful chemicals showing up in residential wells, though it agreed to voluntarily provide bottled water to the affected households ringing its power plants.
