Forever chemicals had been found at high levels in the dam which feeds into the drinking water supply to around 41,000 residents. Now authorities have stepped in.
which challenged the official position that routine monitoring of tap water was unnecessary because there were “no known PFAS hotspots in the catchment”.After initially dismissing thereporting, authorities quietly commissioned tests that reveal the true extent of contamination. WaterNSW revealed on Wednesday that the presence of the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in the Blue Mountains water supply had been traced to Medlow Dam, a remote water source off Beauchamp Road in Medlow Bath.
The levels detected in the plant were within Australia’s drinking water guidelines but about quadruple what the US will allow its citizens to be exposed to after its dramatic policy shift in April found there was no safe level of the “probable carcinogens”.They were also about 300 times higher than the levels in Warragamba dam, Sydney’s main drinking water source.
The agency launched a statewide program in 2016 to determine the extent of forever chemicals pollution across NSW and identify significantly contaminated sites. One of the forever chemicals detected in Medlow dam, perfluorooctanoic acid , was recently declared carcinogenic by the World Health Organisation.
Halpin said a source of confusion for private industry was why they had to pay to clean up water discharged into the environment to a level up to 304 times stricter than what is permitted in Australia’s drinking water.
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