Sometimes there’s a little to say about a lot of things. Welcome back to Variable Flow.
Don't Blame the Victim
wazn't me
Congress is considering PFAS liability exemptions for water and sewer systems under CERCLA (aka Superfund), which seems like a good idea. Utilities are big, fat targets under CERCLA’s strict, joint-and-several, and retrospective liability standards. Making water and sewer utilities—and their customers—legally responsible for PFAS contamination that they didn’t cause and are trying to remove would heap even greater burdens on PFAS-impacted communities. Uncertainty around liability will slow PFAS treatment and disposal where contamination is severe. Holding utilities liable for PFAS pollution also strikes me as profoundly unfair. Opposition to the proposal seems to follow from skepticism about weakening CERCLA generally, with little apparent thought for utility customers' culpability or pocketbooks.*
The bill got an interesting public hearing last month. We’ll see how it progresses in a 119th Congress that isn’t passing a whole lot of legislation. Speaking of which...A Bemusing Rejection
i sez no
President Trump just issued the first veto of his second term, denying funding for an Eastern Colorado water development project called the Arkansas Valley Conduit. The president’s statement on the veto cites program costs and a concern for protecting taxpayers from a bad investment. I don’t know enough about the Arkansas Valley Conduit to evaluate its merits, but it’s hard to square the president’s appeal to fiscal responsibility with his support for a Big Beautiful Bill that added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lauren Boebert, suggested that the veto might be retaliation for her position on the Epstein Files. The bill passed overwhelmingly in both House and Senate, so it's possible President Trump is just firing a fiscal shot across the budgetary bow.
Congress may well override the veto if House and Senate leaders bring it to a vote, which will matter for people in Eastern Colorado. For the rest of us, the important lesson here is that depending on federal funding for water means depending on federal politics for water. Caveat emptor.
PFAS Perfidy?
fur realz? or statiztikul kwerk?
A recent article in PNAS made a splash with the provocative title “PFAS-contaminated drinking water harms infants,” drawing coverage in The Washington Post, The Guardian, among other high-profile outlets. Consulting with trusted toxicologists and drilling down into the study itself leaves me with the uncomfortable feeling that the study is econometrically-fueled clickbait.
The statistical modeling in the paper is genuinely impressive. The authors identify community water systems proximate to PFAS groundwater contamination sites, then use groundwater flow direction from those sites as a kind of quasi‑random assignment. The heart of the analysis is a comparison of infant health records from mothers who were downgradient from contamination sites with mothers who were not. The idea is that people aren’t aware of groundwater hydrology when making residential choices, so we can think of upgradient vs. downgradient residence as random. The authors attribute health differences between babies born to downgradient mothers and babies born to all other mothers.
This is a clever, elegant identification strategy and the kind of creative analysis that we should celebrate. Unfortunately, the strength of the statistical modeling doesn’t quite justify the strength of the study’s conclusions. I’m not a toxicologist or epidemiologist (neither are the paper’s authors), but a few things trouble me about this study:
- “PFAS exposure” is based on groundwater contamination above 1,000 ppt of PFOA or PFOS. Contamination at such extremely high levels almost certainly originates from large industrial or legacy sites, which means the groundwater might contain a whole cocktail of unobserved toxins. That’s a problem because…
- The authors don’t account for any other types of contamination at the well or water system level. Any co‑occurring groundwater contaminants that travel along downgradient pathways are indistinguishable from PFAS in the statistical models, but that doesn’t stop the authors from blaming PFAS for all health effects. Also…
- The authors assert that PFAS in groundwater gets into babies’ bodies through community water system wells.** Thing is, desipte the paper's title, it doesn’t include any data on PFAS in the water that people actually consume. PFAS levels in EPA’s UCMR5 dataset for New Hampshire are orders of magnitude lower than the groundwater contaminant levels modeled in the paper. It’s hard to square the UCMR5 data with the paper’s assertions. The up/downgradient assumption of quasi-randomness is doing an awful lot of work here, which might be a problem because…
- Infant mortality and health problems are exceedingly rare in New Hampshire (thank goodness!). Deep in study’s supplemental appendix the authors report just 56 deaths out of the 11,539 births in their dataset; preterm and low birth weight infants are similarly rare. So the study’s conclusions rest on a very small number of bad outcomes and are thus highly sensitive to misclassification, public health coding errors, and outliers. Just a handful of data mistakes could radically change results.
None of this stops the authors from making big, bold, alarming claims about drinking water. Hopefully scientists more qualified than I will respond with rigorous analysis in the appropriate scientific fora to help us understand how seriously to take these findings. Alas, any corrections are unlikely to draw the same rabid media attention. As Jonathan Swift observed: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it."
Flags ≠ Fouls
five yardz fur illeegul proseedur
Watching the Citrus Bowl last week, I was struck by how the ACC referees working that game called holding penalties far more often than Big Ten crews I’d seen officiating the same teams earlier in the season.
It’s not that Michigan and Texas players suddenly became sloppier—it’s that officiating standards vary widely across conferences. Comparing Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) compliance or violations across states or counties risks the same mistake fans make when judging football teams by penalty counts.
Last year Newsweek ran a story with state-by-state comparisons of SDWA violations, and a recent Charleston Gazette‑Mail article declared that West Virginia has the “worst” health‑based drinking water violation rate in the nation. The headlines are alarming and commit the same inferential fouls as football fans who scream about holding penalties. Under the SDWA, contaminant limits, monitoring processes, and enforcement standards vary considerably across states, so the same water quality might be recorded as a violation in one state but not another. And violations occur at the level of water systems, not states or counties. To say “West Virginia has the worst water” is like saying “the ACC has the dirtiest football players” because its referees throw more flags. Both claims conflate differences in oversight with differences in performance, and both commit ecological fallacies by attributing performance to geographic areas based on individual behaviors.
If we want to understand water quality and regulatory compliance, we must look at utilities and systems, not state or county tallies. Otherwise, we’re just counting flags and mistaking referees’ whistles for the game itself. Statistical analyses of SDWA violations must adjust for state-level variation and shouldn’t compare aggregate violations by state or county.†
Management Musketeers
Xavier University in Cincinnati just announced a new master’s degree program in water utility management. The 16‑month, mainly online program aims to prepare current and aspiring utility leaders to manage water, sewer, and stormwater systems, with a blend of coursework on business management, rate setting, water policy, strategic planning, communication, and more. Xavier’s new program enjoys imprimatur from a veritable alphabet soup of water sector orgs (AWWA, WEF, AMWA, NACWA).
I’ve long believed that the American water sector needs a serious utility management grad degree, and I’m cautiously optimistic about Xavier’s. Formal graduate degrees facilitate career advancement for water sector executives, especially among racial/ethnic minority professionals. For many years, a handful of colleges have offered “utility leadership” certificate programs of varying and sometimes dubious quality; they usually feature lots of networking, and they're long on storytelling but short on disciplinary training.
Xavier’s new program looks different—in a good way. The curriculum seems to encompass the kind of broad principles and specific skills that an effective utility leader needs. I’ll withhold endorsement until I see some syllabi and assignments, but this professor’s immediate impression is that Xavier’s program is a smart, serious endeavor. Hopefully the courses will be led by expert faculty, conveying command of generalizable theory and building real methodological skills. I wish Xavier success—may it inspire similar efforts elsewhere.Nixon Goes to China
For those of us who care about rural water systems, consolidation isn’t a threat—it’s the key to their sustainability. Last fall the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) issued a statement of principles to guide consolidation. In substance, three of the four principles are actually what political scientists call procedural constraints to slow or stymie consolidation.
But! The final principle is about creating positive incentives for high-performing utilities to engage in consolidation efforts.
More important than any of the NRWA’s four principles is the fact that the organization is speaking openly about consolidation with tact, not hostility. That’s a welcome development. NRWA's long record of dedication to rural America has made them a trusted voice in quarters of the country that suffer most from the water sector's fragmentation. The whole country stands to benefit from NRWA's leadership as we tackle that thorny issue.
The arc of safe drinking water is long, but it bends toward consolidation.
Etc.
Des Moines Water Works takes on bottled water with a campaign to build trust. \\ AI isn’t coming for water or sewer operators’ jobs. \\ JXN Water loses its court fight to get SNAP participant data as a way to auto-enroll customers in an assistance program. Legal objections to data sharing in Mississippi ring hollow when it’s already happening in other states. \\ Empirical analysis confirms that utilities with better operators deliver better water. \\ Water finance nerds ought to read the un-Googleable John Ryan’s InRecap blog. It’s often deep in the weeds but holy pants it’s smart. \\ Data centers suck (literally).
* Maybe environmental lawyers looking for paydays, too.
** The PNAS paper explicitly excludes private wells, which is weird and unfortunate. Compared to community water systems, private well water quality is much less rigorously monitored and probably more vulnerable to contamination. An up/downgradient comarative analysis of private wells could yield very important results.
† A disturbingly common sin of inference.
Thank you for your breakdown of the "worst water" study. I helped a few people with messaging after it made news. I started with what has been effective before when it comes to people using the EWG's "standards." Once those points are made, it takes some – but not all – of the air out of the balloon. Especially since this study was so content-friendly.
Re: the PNAS paper, thanks for the work here as well. Unfortunately, that study title is now written in permanent ink. I have been dealing with "Every baby in the Cape Fear region has been poisoned by the water!" for years now; it's Emily Donovan's go-to move (as you can see during the congressional testimony you linked to; I watched in full last week).
During her testimony, she doesn't present any actual data from the Cape Fear Region because we don't have demonstrated PFAS-related cancer clusters here in SE NC; I know, I've been part of a blood and urine study since 2018. But no one challenges her when she starts to sob about the children whose cancer she states was caused by the water.
(FYI, I've helped activists in actual PFAS hotspots, and those plights are real and disgusting. She's just way out of line when it comes to this region, and it continues to hurt progress. CFPUA put in ~$50 million in GAC here, and significant portions of the population – like the ones you focused on in your book – still won't drink the water.)
By the way, despite the Guardian coverage that went after Republicans and AWWA, the hearing revealed bipartisan agreement not to go after public service providers.