How safe is Bay Area drinking water from chemicals?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced the first federal limits on PFAS — manmade “forever chemicals” linked to cancer, organ damage and other health issues — in the nation’s drinking water. The regulation, which was initially proposed in 2023, requires water systems to reduce levels of six of the most studied types of PFAS to the lowest levels that can be reliably measured with testing. … The Bay Area’s drinking water generally has low levels of PFAS because large water systems in the region get most of their drinking water from pristine sources in the Sierra or local reservoirs in regional parks, according to researchers who study toxic chemicals in drinking water. The city of San Francisco, for instance, gets most of its water from Hetch Hetchy, a reservoir north of Yosemite Valley.
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