A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project lists a number of water communities in Texas and their arsenic levels. One of the cities on the list was the City of Wolfforth.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, their drinking water standard for arsenic is 10 parts per billion (ppb).
According to the report from the Environmental Integrity Project, Wolfforth averaged about 13.0 ppb in 2014-2015.
Darrell Newsom, Wolfforth City Manager, said the city knows about their levels and have been working to clean their water up. Newsom said in 2012 the city got a notice from the EPA about their levels.
“Prior to that, we’d been looking at a system to take care of this issue as it was,” he said.
The city has been working on a new water treatment facility, and construction is moving along, with the hope that the new facility will open soon.
“It’ll all but eliminate it,” he said referring to the arsenic levels. “We had to pilot that program, that system, and basically show that it would do what the engineers said it would do.”
In the meantime, Newsom said the water is safe.
“It’s absolutely safe to drink. The concentrations that you’ve got with such a low parts per billion content, you’d have to drink many, many gallons per day to get any kind of toxicity,” Newsom said. “Course, nobody wants any arsenic in their water and we’re striving for that, where there’s just less than traces in there, and the same way with the fluoride, we want to get down to an acceptable level.”
