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Over 80 Percent of China's Well Water Is Polluted (voanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: 32.9 percent of the 2,103 underground wells tested in China received grade 4 for water quality -- meaning they're only fit for industrial use and are not safe for drinking water. Another 47.3 percent received a grade 5 for water quality. "These latest statistics are an indicator of how bad the underground water quality is. The sources of pollution are widespread and include a lot of agricultures. I think that would be the main source of pollution," Dabo Guan, professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain, told the New York Times. "From my point of view, this shows how water is the biggest environmental issue in China. People in the cities, they see air pollution every day, so it creates huge pressure from the public. But in the cities, people don't see how bad the water pollution is," said Guan. According to statistics from the country's Ministry of Water Resources, 70 percent of lakes used as a water source, 60 percent of underground water, and 11 percent of water in reservoirs did not meet the country's safety standards. Even though the study measured water sources close to the surface, the results are shocking and depict the adverse effects air pollution has in China currently and in years to come.
Except for the 13 million people in the US drinking well water with elevated levels of Arsenic. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/... For that though, I think Bangladesh is #1.
Yes - absolutely. George H.W. Bush's administration got the 1990 extensions to the clean air act passed that were very successful. Environmental protections used to be bipartisan.
Then one party (I'll let you guess which) abandoned any pretense of care for the environment and have actively pushed back against any environmental protections (and not just regarding climate change). That isn't to say under the democrats it has been perfect either. The Flint water crisis was primarily due to Michigan but the Feds (EPA) were asleep at the wheel too.
Middle class people in China mostly drink bottled and filtered water -- though they do cook with tap water. It's really the poor who get stuck drinking the tap water. Of course there was a study a few years ago showing that about half of the bottled water was no better than tap water, and some was actually worse....
They weren't measuring "well water" as you mean it. They were using shallow wells that were underground surface water, and wells that drained from lakes. Aquifer ground water isn't what was measured.
""In Chinese cities, drinking water often comes from deep underground sources, which are not easily polluted,"
The deep well water is fine. The shallow wells that pull mainly pooled surface water. None of TFAs showed a well. All the "pollution" was shown in surface water only. This looks like more FUD. And from what I can tell from reading TFA, pulling from a lake is considered an "underground well" by the measurement standards used. How's the tap water in Flint doing?
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