Philadelphia – Philadelphia officials on Sunday night backed down from a suggestion earlier in the day that residents consider using bottled water instead of tap water for drinking and cooking after a chemical leaked into a tributary of the Delaware River, a source of drinking water for some 14 million people in four states.
The earlier advisory, issued Sunday morning, came after a pipeline ruptured at Trinseo PLC, a chemical plant, late Friday, sending around 8,100 gallons of a water-soluble acrylic polymer solution. to Otter Creek in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, officials said.
Officials stressed that no contaminants had been found in the city’s water system.
Officials said that residents, out of an abundance of caution, might consider purchasing bottled water because, they said, they could not “be 100 percent sure that there will be no traces of these chemicals in tap water throughout the afternoon.”
At a news conference later Sunday, Michael Carroll, Philadelphia’s deputy managing director for Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability, said such measures were unnecessary.
“If you want to store water, you should feel free to take it out of your faucet, keep it in a bottle, you can put it in a jug, put it in your fridge,” he said. “There is no need right now for people to run out and buy bottled water.”
Also, he said, the possibility of contamination was decreasing over time. Helicopter overflights revealed no visual evidence of plumes in the river, and tests revealed no contamination levels near a water plant intake.
However, the spill, which occurred more than a month after the catastrophic release of chemicals in a derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, was fresh in the minds of Philadelphians.
On a Facebook page showing the city’s earlier press conference, commenters drew parallels to the Ohio derailment and expressed a reluctance to drink the municipal tap water.
Videos on social media showed a rush to buy bottled water and local television news also showed residents emptying supermarket shelves of bottled water.
