Home FEATURE STORY Ruben Luna Bruce Brummel Libby Thompson Bill Sinn Dave Erickson Tom Schultz Anna Sutton Anonymous Dana Weese Bill Fleming Update:Nicor denies contamination issue again Denise CrosbyDenise Crosby weighs in. Find out more. The Documents View Gallery Download .pdfs The Culprit? Workers at the Nicor plant in Aurora believe methylene chloride was leaking into drinking water at the plant How can your water go bad ? Without a fairly simple device, it’s easy for polluted water to back up into your shower. Download the page Read More Peril in the pipes Backflow problems have had serious consequences in the United States. Find out more. Additional Links Nicor Co. Information via Google Nicor Corporate Homepage OSHA Homepage Credits Story by:
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Donnell Collins
How can your water
Go Bad?
Download the .pdf What's odorless, tasteless and can tackle an entire college football team?

The 1969 Holy Cross varsity squad discovered the answer to that riddle the hard way. That year, 90 out of 97 players on this Massachusetts college team contracted Hepatitis A, forcing the school to cancel the season after just two games.

The culprit that knocked out the strong, athletic young men was nothing more intimidating than a drinking fountain on the practice field. Bad plumbing allowed infected water to be sucked into the city's pipes, flowing back to the fountain from which the players were gulping.

It seems improbable that something as supposedly harmless as water can cause so much sickness, but public health officials and local plumbing inspectors are well aware that faulty plumbing is responsible for many illnesses that people typically attribute to the 24-hour flu or "something I ate."

"It happens on a daily basis," said Donald Smith, president of Chicago Backflow Inc., the nation's largest backflow prevention company. "In most instances, people go to a restaurant and get an upset stomach. They blame it on the food. That's not it. It's the water."

What failed the Holy Cross players and caused hundreds of illnesses around the country every year is a phenomenon called "backflow" — when defective plumbing allows toxic chemicals ranging from urine to fertilizer to be sucked back into the drinking water in a home or office.

More than a dozen past and former employees at Nicor's Aurora facility believe their damaged digestive systems, memory problems and persistent dizziness are caused by the same glitch. They believe that in the break room at the company's office at 408 S. River St., where employees routinely filled up coffee pots and water jugs, a pipe was directly connected to the building's boiler system — a claim city documents support.

After years of drinking water that was contaminated with methylene chloride at three times the levels allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency, some Nicor employees fear irreparable damage has been done to their bodies.

"I really don't think I'll be around for another five years," said Ruben Luna, a former Nicor worker.

'Difficult, technical program'

Stopping backflow on a single pipe is fairly simple, but protecting an entire water system — in a large town like Aurora, for instance — is a major challenge.

"It's a difficult, very technical program, which relies heavily on the plumbers in the state," said Dave McMillan, field operations manager in the Division of Public Water Supply for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. "We take these situations very seriously because some of the industrial solvents could (create) a very high risk to someone getting sick."

Although the EPA has made major strides in recent years to ensure cities have backflow prevention programs, a 2002 EPA study still documented an average of 390 people per year sickened by backflow incidents nationwide over the last three decades. The same EPA study also notes that due to lack of awareness and the sometimes brief duration of the incidents, there might be up to 10 times as many system failures, most of which go unreported.

"Yes, this is something that happens and, yes, it should be prevented," said Ron Kovach, a treatment specialist in the groundwater drinking water branch with U.S. EPA. "There are acute and there are chronic problems with this." Despite more than a dozen employees with similar symptoms, Nicor insists no employees were at risk by drinking water at work.

"Nicor Gas at all times has responded aggressively and thoroughly in investigating all complaints made about the drinking water in order to ensure the quality of our employee's drinking water," spokesman Annette Martinez wrote in an e-mail.

"Water quality assurance was confirmed and reconfirmed by independent agencies responsible for the monitoring of water quality."

However, city inspections show that Nicor's pipes could allow methylene chloride into water used for drinking at more than three times the EPA allowable limit.

It's not uncommon — the EPA has documented backflow incidents that led to severe illness, death and, on at least one occasion, exploding toilets.

'Dizziness, nausea, and memory loss'

In 1992, Donald Smith owned a fire protection company, installing sprinklers in buildings all over the Chicago area. But his company was running into a persistent obstacle: Whenever they put in sprinklers, they needed to have the plumbing inspected for backflow prevention devices. It was an expertise few people had because so little was known about the phenomenon.

When water comes into your house or business from the city main, it's clean. Once inside the building, it splits into various pipes, depending on the purpose.

Pipes that lead to drinking water or bathroom sinks are separated from places where they mix with chemicals like the fire-fighting foam in Smith's sprinklers. Although there are many variations, in their simplest form backflow devices make pipes a one-way street, preventing contaminated water from moving back into clean pipes.

Without backflow protection devices, problems can start if there's a significant drop in pressure.

At Holy Cross, hoses that were being used to fight a fire down the street started sucking urine lying on the field back into the city pipes. (Apparently, an infected player had urinated on the field during practice.) When the pressure returned, the water was already tainted and players were quarantined for weeks.

According to the EPA, other people have faced more serious consequences. In 1985, the pressure from a New York hospital's air conditioning system pushed ethylene glycol into the water and a woman died from exposure during dialysis treatment.

During separate 1989 incidents, propane reversed into water pipes. In Connecticut, two homes started on fire and thousands of others were evacuated. Then, back-pressure from a propane tank car injured three people in Arkansas when their toilet exploded after flushing.

These dramatic events helped the EPA slowly push cities to put in ordinances to protected the water supply from backflow.

"That was fine and dandy," Smith said. "But no one had the funding and no one had the expertise."

Where the EPA saw the need for containment, Smith spotted a business opportunity. He became a certified sprinkler inspector. In 1993, he opened Chicago Backflow Inc., a company that installs and inspects backflow protection devices for private companies. Business has grown every year.

That's partly because, even in cities that protect the public water supply inside the building, there's little to stop bad water from mixing with good. For instance, both city and company tests indicated methylene chloride leaking into the water from a room inside the Nicor structure.

According to an EPA study, long-term exposure to methylene chloride at even low levels can lead to an increase in liver cancer and lung cancer in animals. For Nicor workers, the same study includes a haunting prediction: "The major effects from chronic inhalation exposure to methylene chloride in humans are effects on the (central nervous system), such as headaches, dizziness, nausea, and memory loss."

'On the leading edge'

Over the last decade, local towns have catalogued thousands of connections to make sure that contaminants can't move from a home or business and get into the public water supply.

But even if the backflow protection had been in place at Nicor to keep the boiler water from moving to other buildings, there were few means by which city regulators could watch how it moved inside Nicor's offices.

In January of last year, Aurora launched an aggressive campaign that seeks to check and annually inspect backflow devices inside buildings — not just at the point where building water systems connect to the city's main line.

"It's not exactly a pilot, but we're on the leading edge here," said Daryl Devick, the city's director of public works.

Smith applauds Aurora's work but realizes that, fortunately for his business, there's plenty of work to be done.

"I think the EPA guidelines are sufficient; they may need to be enforced a little stronger," he said. "The towns that haven't done as good as Aurora need to get on the ball a little bit."