Water supply cut near Tokyo due to toxin contamination

[KiwiElf]

Water supply cut near Tokyo due to toxin contamination
AFP May 20, 2012, 6:06 am

http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/1...contamination/

TOKYO (AFP) - The water supply to tens of thousands of households near Tokyo was cut off Saturday after local checks found it was contaminated with a cancer-causing chemical.

The city of Noda, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from central Tokyo, said it had stopped supplies to a major part of the city. Most of the neighbouring city of Kashiwa also has no tap water supply.

Water supplies have been cut to a total of 210,000 households in Chiba prefecture, where the two cities are located, according to Jiji Press news agency.

Television footage showed residents queuing up with plastic containers to get water from trucks sent by the cities. Authorities have not determined the cause of the contamination although reports said industrial wastewater was suspected.

Authorities in Chiba and Saitama prefectures, which both neighbour Tokyo, found water taken from the Tone River or one of its branches was contaminated with higher than allowed levels of formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde is a colourless chemical with a pungent odour, classified as a human carcinogen by the Lyon-based International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Chiba stopped taking water from a branch of the Tone River after detecting elevated levels of formaldehyde.

The worst reading was seen in Saitama, which temporarily stopped taking water at a filtration plant that on Friday detected contamination of 0.200 milligrams of formaldehyde per litre (1.06 quarts), more than two times the 0.080 milligram national limit.

Water intake was resumed in Saitama Saturday as the level significantly dropped below the limit, according to prefecture officials.

"The water poses no health risks," local waterworks official Akiyoshi Fujimura said, noting none of it had been supplied to households and that the threshold itself was set on the assumption of consumption over a long period.
"We had hardly detected formaldehyde in check-ups before... We have to find the cause," he told AFP by phone, adding waste water from a factory could be responsible.

[Debra]

Wow, thanks for that find KiwiElf. Water is a subject very much on my mind at the moment.

How this contamination scare came to be, is conjecture at this point but I am sure that they have some firm opinions as to what has caused it. My mind raced quickly through contamination post Fukishima and then to the possibility that this is biological warfare and deliberate contamination of drinking water supplies. I wonder how much they are going to reveal as the days progress?

As I said, water is chief in my mind at present - as I investigate the horrible truth that whole parts of our oceans - some as big as Texas they say moving around the earth - are so impregnated with the decomposition of years of plastic dumping, that plastic is now the composition of the ocean. This is real. Every country in the world - that has silently made plastic a part of the fabric of its society, is accountable. Yet, no countries have taken responsibility, or to work together to do something about it.

It is has come to the point that we are now eating our own sh!t.

If you would like to view more about this condition, here is the link for a very good little documentary - well part of a bigger one called Garbage Island - that may indeed have some bearing on the final results of what is happening to the water supplies in Japan.
http://www.seathos.org/vice-magazine...n-gyre-part-3/

Cheers

Post Update Here is the trailer for Garbage Island:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wNXGJ11RaEA