Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Back on the subject of NDMA being detected in a drilled well south - east of Chemtura (rural residence), apparently Chemtura are beginning to think that the home's water softener could be to blame. Allegedly their are some kind of resins inside the water softener which could react with nitrates or nitrites , common in rural water supplies courtesy of fertilizers etc.. Without commenting on that scenario I will suggest this. Dichloromethane also known as methylene chloride was also detected. Hydrogeologist Wilf Ruland was quoted in the CPAC minutes of the March 29/10 public meeting as saying that Dichloromethane was a false positive as this is a chemical he sees far too often, as it is used for cleaning lab equipment. My response to his comment is this. It's now 2010. Are our labs so incompetent that they can't rinse test tubes, beakers etc. with distilled pure water? Secondly the Varnicolor Chemical Union St. site had a ton of Dichloromethane in their groundwater. Thirdly I've lost count of the number of times "experts" have told me that Dichloromethane and other chemicals are false positives, including the excuse that it's used for cleaning lab equipment and hence cross-contaminates the water sample.

2 comments:

  1. Hey dad--It depends on how they're doing the testing. If its gc, stuff like DCM is tough to measure because it goes thru the machine really quickly...and because part of the process involves DCM washing between samples. Any ideas how they go about it? If I know the method, I can ask around about how likely a false positive is.

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  2. Sorry I don't. Can you check out the possibilities regardless? agm

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