Water toxicity: what EPA doesn't know ...

The Clean Water Act charges the Environmental Protection Agency with policing the release of toxic chemicals into the nation's rivers, lakes, and streams. By law, industrial firms may not release anything into these waters without first obtaining an EPA permit to do so.

These licenses to pollute usually carry a series of conditions, such as an upper limit on the amount of each toxic chemical a polluter can release and a requirement that each polluter monitor what it discharges. But a new analysis of federal records by the General Accounting Office (GAO), a congressional watchdog agency, concludes that most of the industrial chemicals dis.charged into U.S. surface waters are not being controlled by these permits.

GAO auditors focused their analysis on industries manufacturing pesticides, prescription drugs, and pulp or paper. They cross-checked chemicals identified on each of the manufacturers' water-discharge permits with data from federal watermonitoring surveys and federally mandated annual inventories of toxic releases by the companies.

Some 77 percent of the toxic pollutants discharged by these 236 companies were not listed on their permits, GAO notes in its report, released March 23. Indeed, for about 85 percent of the facilities, GAO says, "The majority of the toxic pollutants they discharged were not controlled through the permit process."

Most of these chemicals were not among EPA's 126 "priority" pollutants - theoretically, the most noxious. However, GAO points out, even the nonpriority pollutants reported here "are recognized as human health risks." Since most pollution fell into this second category, GAO concludes that "EPA's emphasis on priority pollutants is of limited value in resolving the [water toxicity] problems faced by the nation."