PHILADELPHIA — OK, Philly, you can drink the water without worry now.
“We can all confidently say the threat has passed,” Mayor Jim Kenney said at a news briefing Tuesday evening. “I repeat, all the city’s drinking water is safe to drink.” He even drank a glass himself.
Repeated tests detected no evidence of contamination from the 8,100 gallons of hazardous material that spilled just before midnight Friday from a Bucks County plant and into a Delaware River tributary about 13 miles north of the Philadelphia Water Department’s Baxter water-treatment plant, city officials said.
In fact, Mike Carroll, the city’s deputy managing director, said it would have been impossible for the contaminants to reach the Baxter intake before the gate was closed early Saturday.
While the mayor’s announcement was aimed at quelling anxieties over an incident that, if nothing else was a boon to the bottled-water industry in Philadelphia and neighboring towns, it was unlikely to stop the flood of criticism regarding the city’s response.
An hour after a news conference Sunday to discuss the spill, at 11:30 a.m. Sunday the city posted a notice advising residents to consider using bottled water starting at 2 p.m. That was followed by cellphone alerts.
What followed was a wave of confusion and panic buying that for several hours made bottled water Philadelphia’s most-precious commodity, hotter than milk, bread and eggs during a snow scare. The retail frenzy rippled to the unthreatened suburbs, where supermarket shelves in King of Prussia and Cherry Hill were denuded of water supplies by early evening.
The city said Sunday evening the water would be safe through 11:59 p.m. Monday, later extending the all-clear to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, and then to 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.
Kenney defended the city’s abundance of caution.
“When we weren’t sure, we had to give people some advisory, so people would be safe,” Kenney told reporters earlier Tuesday at an unrelated event. “If we had held on to the information, you would be asking me why we didn’t say anything.”
“The guidance was a suggestion if you feel more comfortable, buy ... get a bottled water,” Kenney added. “I don’t think this is rocket science here.”
Carroll had previously said the city decided to take “the most conservative approach” in advising residents to consider bottled water.
“We cannot be 100% certain there will not be traces of these chemicals in the tap water throughout the entire afternoon,” Carroll had said Sunday morning. Among the chemicals spilled was butyl acrylate, which was one of the chemicals released in the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment.
On Tuesday, in response to questions from Council member Cindy Bass at a budget hearing, managing director Tumar Alexander said: “Our priority was making sure that our citizens were aware.”
“Did we make a couple of mistakes in terms of messaging and wording? Absolutely.”
The city will look at its messaging in the spill’s aftermath and look at how to improve it in the future, Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said.
“Everything gets coalesced into tiny messages on social media, and so something very nuanced became something very short,” Bettigole said. “So, you know, that’s something we want to learn from.”
When the city’s first alerts went out Sunday, officials believed there was a “very low-risk exposure,” and it was also a risk to not tell residents about the potential hazard, Bettigole said. The decision came down to weighing the risk of getting testing results back after potential contaminants may have flowed through taps in the city.
The spill originated from the Trinseo Altuglas facility in Bristol. On Sunday evening, Trinseo — a company with locations in North America, Europe and Asia — said in a statement that the incident “appeared to be a result of an equipment failure.”
The company said the latex emulsion solution — about 50% water and the remainder latex polymer, according to the company — “overflowed the on-site containment system and entered a storm drain, where it flowed to Otter Creek and then to the Delaware River.”
Bettigole said the city acted prudently.
“You’re making decisions with the best information you have at that moment,” Bettigole said. “And the best information we had at that moment was that this is probably an extremely low risk, but people might end up with some contaminant in our water.”
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(Philadelphia Inquirer staff writers Maddie Hanna, Frank Kummer, Lizzy McLellan Ravitch, Rob Tornoe and Nick Vadala contributed to this article.)
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