Aqua Pennsylvania and Abington Township commissioner John Spiegelman addressed the salty taste many in greater Glenside have been experiencing in their tap water.

Aqua published the following on Friday, February 14:

Aqua Pennsylvania customers might notice that their drinking water has a slightly salty taste. This change is largely attributed to the runoff of road salts used on roadways, parking lots, and other treated surfaces in response to winter storms and icing conditions. Road salts are typically made up of a combination of sodium, chloride and calcium, all of which are naturally occurring and can be found in drinking water on any given day. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) do not have drinking water standards for either sodium or calcium. EPA and DEP have a secondary standard for chloride, however secondary standards are not considered to have any public health risks. The issue is further exacerbated from low stream flow from the persistent drought which has the effect of limiting dilution of the chloride concentrations.  Barring additional salting of roads, the salty taste in the water should pass within a few days. We thank our customers for their patience and understanding. 

Commissioner Spiegelman’s post from today aligned with Aqua.

“The sodium from rock/road salt does make its way into our drinking water, yielding a salty taste. However, the non-salt chemicals in road salt that make it toxic are (along with lots of other pollutants) filtered out by Aqua’s systems before they get to our taps,” Spiegelman said in a post.

According to NBC10, the issue is occurring in southern New Jersey as well.

Commissioner Spiegelman’s full post is below:

Because this the first substantive winter weather we’ve had in years (including two years ago, where not a single flake of snow made its way to the ground), there is definitely more road salt being used—by PennDOT, by individual municipalities, and by both residential and commercial private property owners—than there has been in quite some time. This certainly results in more sodium, and its associated taste, ending up in all of our region’s waterways and watersheds, which are, like all aspects of our environment, interconnected and interdependent. More on this sodium in a minute, but it’s important to note that the non-salt chemicals in rock/road salt that make it toxic to ingest are, like lots of other pollutants, filtered out by Aqua before the water gets to our taps. And Aqua tests Abington Township customers’ (along with all of their other customers’) drinking water frequently at many different locations, one of which is at the water tower complex on the 1000 block of Edge Hill Road (which is two blocks from my house).

Getting back to the sodium issue, another issue that yields a higher sodium content and taste in our tap water is the massive drought that affected our area for much of the summer and the entire fall. Although the recent snows and rains have been bolstering the regional water table, it’s still much lower than it was, say, this time last year. The combination of a lower water table than we’ve had in years + the introduction of more salt than we’ve used in years has lead to some folks’ tap water tasting—and, in fact, being—saltier than usual. Because pretty much all Aqua water is blended—with Abington’s blend coming from the Neshaminy Treatment Plant, the Abington Well, and (to a much smaller extent) the North Hills Well—the level of salty taste is going to vary from neighborhood to neighborhood and even block to block, and also throughout the course of any given day. (This is a similar drought-related phenomenon to what occurred back in November, when folks throughout a wide swath of Aqua’s PA service area experienced tap water smells and tastes that were alternately described as chlorine-y, metallic/rusty, or plastic-y. (I was in that latter category.)

The additional sodium/saltiness from increased winter salting affects pretty much all of Aqua’s sources, and Aqua indicated that Neshaminy (which processes a huge volume of water from many points of origin) was particularly affected. Abington Hospital is an area of the Township (my neighborhood, in fact) that gets a larger percentage of water sourced from Neshaminy. They also perform their own water testing, as they serve tap water to a population of patients that includes more folks who, for various reasons, are going to be more sensitive to increases in consumption of sodium and other substances. That’s why, upon finding higher levels of sodium in the tap water than they want to be serving to their patients (but still nowhere near the levels that would trigger Aqua to issue an advisory or a warning), they switched to bottled water and their fresh water reserves.

The hospital, Aqua, our Public Works Department, and our Township Manager have all been in communication, and between Aqua taking steps to add more unaffected water into the system at Neshaminy (which is what they did in response to the November smell/taste issue) and the rain that we’re getting right now, it is expected that this salt situation will be remediated within a day or so. Meanwhile, anyone whose tap water is tasting salty and who is concerned with elevated sodium consumption might want to—out of caution and for their own peace of mind—switch to drinking water that’s been filtered via a reverse osmosis system or, more immediately, purchase some jugs of distilled water.

SIDE NOTE: Any suggestion that the sodium content/salty taste in our tap water is due specifically to the Township Public Works Department oversalting is definitely not accurate. As I mentioned above, this season’s weather has required municipalities throughout our region, as well as PennDOT, to treat roads more aggressively, and that means more salt use. Now, the exploration of alternate methods of treating/deicing roadways is a worthy undertaking, as environmentally friendly and sustainable best practices should always be essential considerations. But some of the most sustainable approaches, such as using beet juice or various agricultural/dairy brines, lose their efficacy in the lower temperatures that we’ve already experienced multiple times this winter. And sand can be complicated and very expensive to clean up, and in some sensitive waterways it can be just as damaging as salt. The ideal solution might well exist, but while we search for it (as we should), we also need to deice the roads now.

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