A lawsuit over watershed contamination involving several North Georgia counties is circling around Bartow with many concerned over contaminants in public drinking water. Bartow County Water Department officials said local water is safe and of high quality.
“The water quality in Bartow County in general is very good,” said Daniel B. Manny, P.E., assistant director of Bartow County Water.
Eric Loveland, CTIO for Business Water Solutions, said that his company provides water filtration for businesses wanting better tasting, pure water. He said the idea of getting a filtration system is one that local businesses shouldn’t let go down the drain.
“We recommend all businesses get some sort of water filtration system for a multitude of reasons, the most obvious is convenience for you and your employees and customers,” he said.
Loveland said water coolers are more environmentally friendly than having lots of plastic bottles of water available. He said some filter models add minerals back and “polish” the taste of the water. Minerals need to be added back when the cleaning systm is a reverse osmosis system, he said.
Manny said Bartow County residents shouldn’t worry about news reports dripping the latest about watershed lawsuits. This county’s water is tested regularly and exceeds standards. Typically, water departments only test residential and business water if there are complaints but you can test your water yourself if you are concerned.
Home Depot and other hardware stores have many options for at-home water testing kits.
“The quality of the water provided by BCWD is considered to be high quality. We feel our CCR Report reflects this high quality too,” Manny said.
The CCR Report for 2023 is found on the Bartow County Water Department website. The report has a detailed list of what’s in the water and how much. For instance, there is a small trace of chlorine, and the number range for Total Trihalomethanes in local water is 51. The low range is 15.8 and the high is 71.7 so it falls in line with standards.
Lead, a concern for many people, didn’t exceed standards either. It was about half of what the allowed amount is. All of Bartow County’s numbers were well within health and safety allocations.
Bartow County supplies water to all the local cities outside of Cartersville, plus unincorporated areas. Cartersville has its own water system. Calls were made to the city system water director to answer questions but there has yet to be a response.
The situation stems out of allegations that Dalton Utilities wastewater facilities discharged polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) into the City of Rome’s drinking water. Rome sued Dalton and a settlement was reached to pay $25 million over five years.
Dalton Mayor David Pennington stated that the Georgia Environmental Protection Division will mandate the city clean up the water basin and he expects that will be costly.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed another lawsuit in Federal District Court against the City of Cahoun on behalf of the Coosa River Basin Initiative for allegedly allowing harmful pollutants into drinking water.
That suit came about after December 2023 tests revealed the Oostanaula River, which supplies drinking water to Rome, had PFAS. Further reports indicated the river had been contaminated with the “forever chemicals” for decades and was linked to serious health problems.
It was reported in 2023 that Rome will get $75 million from the 3M company in a PFAS settlement and a judge ordered in November 2023 in another case that the city get at least $233 million to resolve the contamination.
Rome plans on building a new water treatment plant that cleans out PSAs at an estimated cost of $100 million.
A separate federal lawsuit was filed more recently alleging the City of Calhoun allowed the discharge of PFAS into the Coosawattee River watershed, resulting in the contamination of Gordon County’s drinking water.
That lawsuit was filed by the Coosa River Basin Initiative. It states that a private company, Moss Land Company, is the source of the contamination and also names the Calhoun Water Pollution Control Plant in the suit for allegedly allowing or failing to prevent contamination of the Oostanaula River. The water pollution control plant sits next to the river.
Allegations include that the county allowed the Moss Land Company to discharge up to 16 million gallons of treated effluent into the river per day and that the city didn’t disclose the discharge information to the Environment Protection Division in NPDES permit applications for 2016 or 2023.
PFAs are chemicals used in manufacturing. The lawsuit states the typical method of treating wastewater, known as the sludge process, is incapable of destroying PFAS and creates biosolids that are also harmful.
Loveland said PFAS aren’t all harmful to health but it depends on what kind they are.
“PFAS have been around for a long time and there are almost 5000 types of them,” Loveland said. ” They have had many industrial and manufacturing uses through the years, but recent studies have shown that some types of them can have significant health risks.
“The PFAS that you mainly see around NWGA, PFOA, and PFOS, are byproducts of carpet manufacturing, and are two of the PFAS that the EPA recently recommended new, lower limits on.”
Loveland said there are two primary ways to remove PFAS from water and that is by either Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) or osmosis. He gave illustrations of how each works.
“Think of (GAC) as a bunch of Velcro and the PFAS’ chains as the other side of the Velcro. As the water moves across the GAC, the PFAS “stick” to the GAC and the water moves on,” he said.
He said osmosis is like a very small screen that only water molecules can move through with the remaining larger PFAS molecules flushed out by the pressure back into the drain.
The problem is current water pollution control plants often don’t have the methods to rid the water of PFAS. Manny said there isn’t much they can do about them.
“PFAS has been a substance put into the environment by manufacturing and, as a water utility, we are being required to correct a problem that was not created by the utilities,” he said.
Manny said the water department and the City of Cartersville Water Department have discussions with new industries before they build in the county or city. He said both often require the industries to pre-treat water before wastewater is discharged into the systems.
Manny said the water department is concerned about what is going on with water in other cities and is following the Rome and Calhoun cases. Bartow County obtains all of its 7.45 million gallons a day from other municipalities.
According to the Bartow County Water Department website, 93 percent of its water comes from the cities of Adairsville and Cartersville, the Cobb-Marietta Water Authority, the Cherokee County Water & Sewerage Authority, and the Polk County Water, Sewer & Solid Waste Authority. The majority of water from these providers, around 87 percent, comes from surface water drawn from Lake Allatoona.
Seven percent comes from the Boliver Spring Water Treatment Plant, an independently owned and operated county facility in Northeastern Bartow County.
“As mentioned in my previous response, the best BCWD can do at this point is to continue to be involved in the front-end discussions with new developments and holding them to proper pre-treatment requirements, as well as designing and constructing a state-of-the-art WPCP to ensure we remove the contaminants from our waste load allocation,” Manny said.
Like Rome, Manny said Bartow County is working through permitting and design of a brand-new Water Pollution Control Plant to treat wastewater flows in West Bartow.
“Our design engineer for that plant is well informed on PFAS requirements and the design will incorporate all required contaminant removal to ensure we are well below our permitted discharge limits for our waste load allocation, including PFAS,” Manny said.
Manny said local water has better quality than bottled water because municipalities are more stringently regulated than private water bottling companies. He also said he understands the concern over substances in portable water as some raise questions about water additives like fluoride.
“The amount of fluoride introduced into the system is so small,” Manny said, adding that it is less than 1.0 part per million. “In layman’s terms, this would be equal to putting one drop of water from an eyedropper into 10 gallons of water. The amount is rather insignificant and truly not a danger to public health.”
“Again, to reiterate, BCWD’s drinking water is extremely safe to drink, meets and exceeds all regulatory requirements, and is high-quality water provided to the residents of Bartow County,” Manny said.
One way to ensure water is safe is to get a water filtration system. Loveland said public water supplies are stringently monitored and public utilities do a great job of providing potable water. However, the system his company offers makes it easy to run public water through a filtration system at a business where people can use both hot and cold water as well as ice.