Legislation for Toxic Secret chemical 1,4-dioxane dies in Florida House

Florida legislation to prevent a repeat of Seminole County’s unpublicized mass exposure to the toxic chemical 1,4-dioxane has been largely ignored by the House of Representatives and appears to have no chance of passage.

“I’m sure this is a great disappointment to those people who have had to deal with it,” said Linda Stewart, an Orlando state senator who introduced a Senate version of the legislation. “We still don’t have any requirement to know if it’s in our water.”

As the Orlando Sentinel revealed in its 2023 Toxic Secret series, for many years and potentially decades thousands of residents of Lake Mary, Sanford and part of Seminole County were provided tap water containing 1,4-dioxane, an unregulated solvent that has been deemed likely to cause cancer.

Utility officials of the two cities and the county finally learned of the chemical’s presence in drinking water about a decade ago but never told residents about it beyond brief, bureaucratic references at the time in annual utility reports.

Sanford and Seminole County were able to reduce concentrations to below voluntary guidelines and Lake Mary started a high-tech treatment plant in 2021 that strips away nearly all of the chemical.

Still, 1,4-dioxane is not subject to state or federal rules that require corrective action or any public notification regarding the chemical by water providers. In contrast, such rules do apply to the 90 contaminants regulated in drinking water by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

That lack of regulation spurred the filing of bills in the current Florida legislative session, seeking to set an enforceable limit for 1,4-dioxane in drinking water, to require testing for it and to mandate public disclosure when it is detected in drinking water.

The enforceable limit would be 0.35 parts chemical per billion parts of water, a tiny concentration that is currently the state and federal guideline for safe consumption of water containing 1,4-dioxane.

The limited research on the health effects of consuming the chemical in water has not involved humans, which a new and major study at Yale University seeks to address.

Stewart’s measure in the Senate got a promising start, passing unanimously in the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources.

In the House, corresponding legislation was filed by Republican Rachel Plakon of Lake Mary, who is serving in her first term as a state representative. Her district takes in nearly all of the area in Seminole County where tap water has been tainted by 1,4-dioxane.

The bill was referred to three House committees, getting neither debate nor a vote in any of them as the legislative session progressed. Now, with this year’s session set to end on Mar. 8, the clock has all but run out.

In seeking to learn why her bill was sidelined by House leadership dominated by her political party, the Orlando Sentinel contacted Plakon’s office several times but got no response.

A third local lawmaker, Sen. Jason Brodeur, R-Lake Mary, filed a bill that calls for regulating 1,4-dioxane – not in drinking water but in treated wastewater. The chemical is added to or occurs in trace amounts in many consumer products, including detergents and cosmetics, and winds up in sewage.

For the state of New York, 1,4-dioxane in treated wastewater has been a big problem because its drinking water aquifers are vulnerable to wastewater contamination.

In Central Florida, the Floridan Aquifer is significantly but not perfectly shielded from industrial chemicals by thick layers of sand, clay and rock.

But Brodeur’s bill has also stalled.

“We did our best to advance the bill,” said Brodeur aide Victoria Mohebpour. “Because of the lack of movement in the House, the legislative timer ran short on it and ultimately missed its opportunity to be a ‘live’ bill for purposes of becoming law.”

Last summer, the Orlando Sentinel published its Toxic Secret series revealing the long but previously undisclosed history of how 1,4-dioxane contaminated a Seminole County portion of the Floridan Aquifer, the region’s key source of drinking water, and tainted the water systems of Lake Mary, Sanford and west Seminole County.

The state of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection has been seeking to confirm the source of 1,4-dioxane and whether it migrated underground from a shuttered telecommunications factory in west Lake Mary.

Opening in the 1960s and producing electronic components for telephone systems, the plant is commonly identified as belonging to the industrial giant Siemens, the company that last operated it, but it is owned, according to state records, by General Dynamics, also a previous user of the manufacturing site.

In the early 2000s, environmental investigators documented that 1,4-dioxane was among the many chemicals contaminating soil and groundwater at the factory.

By then, scientists were warning that 1,4-dioxane at polluted manufacturing sites can blend readily with groundwater and spread rapidly through aquifers.

At the Siemens plant, investigators also found fissures in the underlying geology that may have funneled 1,4-dioxane into the aquifer.

It wasn’t until the mid-2010s that the chemical was detected in Lake Mary, Sanford and west Seminole County drinking water. Those findings were a result of one-time, nationwide research testing ordered by the EPA to evaluate the presence of chemicals of emerging concern.

As required, the two cities and the county reported those detections in their annual water reports at the time but provided little context and no reference to 1,4-dioxane having been categorized by the EPA as likely to cause cancer.

Although 1,4-dioxane remained in their water systems, its presence was not again publicly acknowledged until the Orlando Sentinel began its inquiry early last year.

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