Enviros and brewers question Portland filtration proposal

Regna Merritt from Oregon Wild, writing an op-ed in today's Oregonian:

For over a century, the Portland area has enjoyed some of the finest drinkingwater in the world -- and saved hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. It's all thanks to our protected Bull Run Watershed, the source of our clean, pure water. Tomorrow, that century of protection is on the line, and the purity of our drinking water could go right down the drain.

The Portland City Council will vote on a water treatment proposal at City Hall. Oregon Wild, along with many others, opposes the Water Bureau resolution before the council. The bureau's decision to rely on expensive chemical filtration could force measures that are unnecessary, wasteful and will degrade our water and watershed.

The current resolution has many flaws. By selecting the most expensive and chemically intensive option for direct filtration, this plan would eliminate any possibility of future relief from Congress to avoid the onerous obligations of LT2. The resolution would allow efforts to secure an administrative variance from the rule to continue, but would give the Water Bureau total control over the final decision about whether, when and where to short-circuit these efforts and continue with construction of a treatment plant. 

And: 

Chemical filtration is the opposite of green and sustainable: It comes with a heavy carbon footprint. On top of that, treatment will change the taste, smell and feel of our water forever with the addition of substances with names like cationic polymers, ferric chloride and aluminum sulfate. To add insult to injury, once Portland water becomes run-of-the-mill treated water, there could be demands to open the Bull Run watershed to harmful logging and development that will pollute its water and increase the risk of fire.

In recent days, the Craft Brewers Alliance has come out in opposition to changing the current treatment of Bull Run water, the centerpiece of a brewery renaissance that has put Portland on the map. "It's not what's wrong with Portland water; it's what's right with it," said Sebastian Pastore, vice president of brewing operations at Widmer Brothers.

Read the rest here.

Discuss.