SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
RENO -- A federal report shows ground water used for drinking in the Fallon area contains radioactive minerals that exceeded federal standards in 31 of 73 wells tested in the early 1990s, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported today.
State and federal officials said they neglected to consider the U.S. Geological Survey report in their investigation of a cluster of 12 childhood leukemia cases diagnosed in Fallon over the past few years.
The report has surfaced only because a former USGS director thought the information would be important to the investigation and wondered why it hadn't been considered, the newspaper said.
Assemblywoman Marcia de Braga, D-Fallon, learned about the report Tuesday and was outraged that it hadn't been brought up sooner.
"This could turn out to be significant in terms of the leukemia cluster," she said. "Clearly, radiation is one of the listed causes of leukemia. The researchers need to follow up on the radiation levels in the wells."
The significance of the ground water radiation is not clear, investigators said. It will be examined as one of many environmental factors, including agricultural chemicals, jet fuel from the nearby Navy base and other pollutants to be investigated.
The Geological Survey report, released in 1994, showed the shallow and intermediate ground water used for drinking water in the rural areas of the Carson Desert contained high amounts of naturally occurring uranium and radioactivity.
The city's municipal water supply, which serves about a third of the Fallon's population of about 8,300, comes from deeper wells that don't contain dissolved uranium, state and federal officials said.
Radiation is one of the few known triggers of leukemia, said researchers. In the Fallon area, 12 children have been diagnosed with the same type of acute lymphocytic leukemia since 1997, 11 of in the last two years.
Last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set uranium standards for drinking water at 30 micrograms per liter. The 1994 USGS report shows one shallow well logging 310 micrograms per liter and another shallow well measuring 210 micrograms per liter.
The EPA standards do not go into effect until December 2003, EPA senior environmental scientist Jon Merkle said. "That is very surprising that such a recent report took so long to pop up," Merkle said.
The federal uranium limits only apply to municipal drinking water sources, but exposure risks from any source are the same, he said. "The health risks are the same whether your family is getting water from a public well or a private well," Merkle said.
The USGS report also showed radioactivity levels - presumably from the dissolved uranium - exceeded EPA standards in nine of 56 wells in the shallow or intermediate aquifer, the newspaper said.
Dr. Randy Todd, state epidemiologist, said he was unaware of the USGS report until a meeting with state and federal health and environmental officials Tuesday. USGS officials said the report was distributed to state and local officials in 1994 and didn't get much attention at the time.
"I guess it was on a shelf someplace," Todd said.
The report and ground water radiation levels never came up during the three-day Legislative hearing in February or the U.S. Senate hearing on the leukemia cluster last week, deBraga said.
John Nowlin, the former USGS director in Reno, said he called the Reno office two weeks ago to ask about the 1994 report.
"There was no big hue and cry when the report was released in 1994, before the uranium standard for drinking water was adopted," he told the newspaper.
"I knew it had been distributed and discussed back then, but I wondered why it hadn't been mentioned lately."
Todd said the USGS report will be significant in the state's testing of nine private wells used or formerly used by the families in the leukemia cluster. He said those wells are being tested for all contaminants mentioned in the state's clean water law, including uranium and radioactivity.
State health and environmental officials met Tuesday with officials of the USGS, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The officials exchanged information and began to plan a joint state-federal probe of the disease cases and possible causes, Todd said.
"There are a number of agencies whose data might be useful in this," he said. "We have to sift through all the information and come up with protocols for environmental and biological sampling in the area."
Sun reporter
Mary Manning contributed to this story.
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