The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 17

FLORIDA A-4 The Orlando Sentinel, Monday, November 23, 1992 Typhoon Gay reaches Guam and Marianas ASSOCIATED PRESS Cub Scout buddies among those killed in devastating storms "--r-'-v TORNADOES from A-1 nadoes Saturday, with heavy damages and numerous injuries, but no AGANA, Guam The outer fringes of Typhoon Gay began lashing Guam and the Northern Marianas with high wind and heavy rain early today. It is the sixth typhoon to hit or threaten the Marianas in three months. "We're just standing by, waiting," said Visi Quitugua, the administrative officer in the mayor's office on Rota, the Northern Mariana island expected to get the brunt of the storm. She said about 70 people had gone to shelters while most of the population was at home, "all boarded up." The U.S. military's Typhoon Warning Center on Guam said the storm was moving west-northwest at 16 mph with sustained winds of 145 mph and gusts to 175 mph.

Guam, with a population of 139,000, was expected to get 125 mph sustained winds when the storm passed over. On Rota, the wind was expected to hit 140 mph. The storm had weakened slightly. On Saturday, Gay was reported to have sustained winds of 180 mph, "I can see for about a 500-yard radius and all I see is devastation all around us. I don't think anything will be salvageable on that trailer lot.

There was a church on Highway 468 that is gone. It's just a slab," he said. Larry Tribble looked for things to salvage in the wreckage of the mobile home his daughter and son-in-law had shared since being married in August. "We got most of their clothes, but that's about it," Tribble said. "All their wedding gifts are gone, and we haven't been able to find photos or any albums." His son-in-law, Corey Adams, was hospitalized with cuts and bruises.

A tornado that struck in western Tennessee overturned a mobile home near Toone, killing an 11-year-old boy, officials said. Scattered damage was reported. Numerous injuries were reported in northern Alabama early Sunday as tornadoes destroyed mobile homes and toppled trees. Downed power and telephone lines made communication with some areas difficult, authorities said. Three people were killed in Georgia, where deputies used dogs to search wreckage.

Hardest-hit was Kennesaw, northwest of Atlanta. Thirty-four people, most with cuts and bruises, were taken to Kennestone Hospital, spokeswoman Diana King said. Sen. Wyche Fowler, who faces a runoff election Tuesday, was involved in a seven-car crash deaths. 1 Among the hardest hit areas was in and around Brandon, where 10 people died.

"It's unbelievable. We're lucky we didn't lose more lives than we did," said W.L. Whittington, mayor of Brandon. A tornado smashed through a mobile home park and then skipped across Brandon to an upscale neighborhood, where it killed a father and son, along with two of the boy's Cub Scout buddies spending the night there. Resident Peggy Nicholson, her voice shaking as she nursed cuts and a swollen leg at a local hospital, described the destruction: "The house was vibrating.

It was real hot, and I knew what it was because it sounded just like a freight train," she said. "I jumped out of bed and the window blew out and I was blown into the kitchen. Then I heard my neighbor screaming, 'Help! Help! Nicholson woke her husband, who ran next door to help the neighbor, Ann Smith, pull her dead husband, Terry, out of the rubble. The Smiths' son Justin, 10, and two of his Cub Scout friends who were spending the night in the upscale Easthaven subdivision also were killed. About 100 rescue workers, neighbors and volunteers searched the nearby woods and yards for several hours before finding the bodies of Justin and his friends, brothers Jeremy Chaz Blackwell Warrington, 7, and Joseph Lee Warrington, 10.

Neighbors and their children hugged and cried in each others' arms as they watched the search. In the scattershot nature of tornadoes, the Warrington boys' home, just blocks away, was unharmed. At the mobile home park, where six people died, rescue workers used doors from smashed houses as makeshift stretchers, said Charlie Wilkinson, civil defense director for Rankin County. Gov. Kirk Fordice toured the Rankin County area about 15 miles east of Jackson.

The storm hit about midnight, leveling houses, uprooting trees and downing hundreds of power and telephone poles. Mike Wood, who lives on a hillside about a half-mile away from the Brandon mobile home park, described the scene. with gusts to 220 mph. For Guam, the storm was expected to be comparable to Typhoon Omar, which hit the U.S. territory Aug.

28 and caused $500 million in damage. Hurricanes are called typhoons west of the international date line. ASSOCIATED PRESS An aerial view Sunday shows the damage left by a tornado that hit Channelview, Texas blamed on the storm, but was not among the 22 people injured. At Woodstock, about 75 people worshiping at the Mount Carmel Baptist Church escaped injury when a twister blew the steeple off, throwing it 200 yards into the church cemetery. Ann Cleveland said they were singing when they heard the tornado and ducked under their pews for cover.

Tractor-trailers were blown' off Interstate 75 in the Atlanta area, backing up traffic for miles. A narrow line of thunderstorms spawned tornadoes that raked southern and central Indiana during the afternoon, damaging homes, businesses and downing trees and power lines. At least eight people were injured. Four people were injured and several homes were damaged on the eastern side of Indianapolis. Power was knocked out to about 11,000 homes.

ft son counties in the northern part of the state and in Walker County northwest of Birmingham. Georgia: Storm damage was reported in Cobb, Cherokee, Douglas, Carroll, Spalding and Lumpkin counties in the northern part of the state. The town of Kennesaw in Cobb County was heavily damaged. In Woodstock in Cherokee County, about 75 people were injured when a twister blew the steeple off their church. Indiana: The worst damage was reported around Indianapolis, where at least 20 homes were destroyed.

Kentucky: Storm damage was reported in Carroll County, midway between Louisville and Cincinnati, Ohio. Compiled from staff and wire Texas: At least a dozen tornadoes hit Houston and parts of southeast Texas, causing extensive damage. Louisiana: Homes and trailers were destroyed in the town of Iowa, near Lake Charles in southwest Louisiana The towns of Wilson and McManus in East Feliciana Parish north of Baton Rouge also suffered heavy damage. Mississippi: The worst damage was in Brandon, east of Jackson. A tornado smashed through a mobile home park, then skipped across the town to a residential neighborhood.

Alabama: The towns of Ashland and Wadley in eastern Alabama were hit hard. Some Ashland residents were moved into the National Guard Armory. Storm damage also was reported in De Kalb and Madi ASSOCIATED PRESS Jim Salie hugs his daughter Kjmberty Clark and her child Jordan Clark after examining tornado damage to their home in Muscogee County, Ga. iWater regulations designed to protect residents may instead deprive them Nationally, EPA says, 70 percent of all reporting and testing violations involve small suppliers. Dewey Wilson, vice president of the rural water association in Florida and general manager of a small utility in the Panhandle, does not dispute the figures.

But he said many violations are minor, such as being a few days late in conducting required tests. Other violations can be attributed to budget realities, he said. "A lot of the noncompliance is a matter of finances," said Wilson, who runs Regional Utilities of Walton County. "They can't afford to do some of the tests." Wilson said he does not believe that the problems of small utilities are creating a significant health risk. Even when testing schedules are followed, the DER says, it can take several months to resolve a case of contaminated drinking water.

In the meantime, consumers are drinking it. Several weeks or more can pass from the time a sample is taken until the results come back from a laboratory and are reported to the DER. In most cases a utility then has a month before it has to take a second test to confirm the presence of a toxin. If the second test is positive, the utility can be allowed weeks to run several more confirming tests before the public must be notified. That scenario assumes that the utility has not dragged its feet and is not already a month or more late in taking the initial sample that first leads to the contamination discovery.

And even if utilities test their water on schedule, there is no guarantee about the accuracy of the samples. The state takes the word of water suppliers that they are following guidelines regarding where and how to take their samples. "It's on the honor system," DER's McNamara said. "I have no way of knowing whether Joe Blow out there takes his samples from bottled water." Paul Morrison, head of compliance and enforcement for the DER drinking-water program in Orlando, said his office has made a big push this year to get all utilities to test their water and report the findings. He also is trying to speed up the process of confirming contamination findings and to reduce the time it takes to notify consumers about bad water.

The office has improved its computer tracking of problem utilities and stays on top of them with let-, ters and telephone calls until the situation is resolved, Morrison said. Utilities that fail to comply can be fined. "This is a. concern to us because people are drinking that wattr in that time," he (said. will be regulated in the future.

Congress has already mandated that when the EPA finishes with the 83 chemicals, it will have to come up with drinking standards for 25 new contaminants every three years. "We are trying to make sure that what we do is needed rather than this shopping list approach that Congress has left us with," said Phil Vorsatz, head of the EPA's drinking-water program for the Southeast. Treading water Regardless of whether the EPA slows the tide of new regulations, Florida and most states already are struggling to maintain the integrity of current drinking-water standards. It is common, for example, for DER inspectors to ignore their own rules requiring them to visit and examine each of Florida's 7,300 public water suppliers once a year. The DER simply does not have the manpower.

As a result, some utilities operate outside the agency's scrutiny for two years or more. Although the DER is responsible for upholding EPA's drinking-water guidelines in Florida, the agency has relinquished that role in 11 counties the most recent, Volusia because it does not have the resources to police every water supplier. "It's a recognition of the fact that 70 people in the DER drinking-water program can't regulate the more than 7,000 water systems in Florida," said Van Hoof-nagle, head of the program for the DER. The agency's records show why many utilities in the state require constant monitoring. The most recent DER figures show that from December 1991 through last July, public water supplies exceeded safe-drinking standards 589 times, ranging from relatively minor violations such as too much sediment to more serious bacterial or chemical contamination.

Records also show that in any given month 20 percent or more of the utilities in Florida are not testing their water for contaminants or have failed to report their findings to the state. That percentage was running as high as 50 percent just a few years ago mainly because the DER had even fewer people to oversee utilities then than it does today. "Four or five years ago the situation was pathetic," said Alex Alexander, head of the DER in Orlando. The smallest utilities account for the majority of the violations, particularly those involving failure to test water or report the findings. Operators of the small systems often do not have the sophistication of huge utilities or the staff or resources to stay on top of EPA guidelines.

But small utilities also account for most of the state's water suppliers. About 900 utilities in Florida serve between 500 and 3,300 customers. Another 6,000. serve fewer than than 500 people. simply to uphold the nation's clean water guidelines, according to a study released in June by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

At the same time, the total cost to utilities to com-ply with those guidelines is expected to reach $3 billion a year for the next 20 years. That does not include the estimated $150 billion that water systems will need to spend in that time on capital improvements, primarily "for repair, replacement and growth in the basic infrastructure needed to simply deliver water to the customers," the GAO report stated. Those fiscal shortfalls have a direct effect on the quality of the water we drink. The EPA estimates, for example, that if the nation's 100,000 public water suppliers fully implemented water filtration, nearly 90,000 cases of acute stomach and intestinal inflammation could be avoided each year. Utilities say they agree with many of the EPA's requirements but argue that not all of them are practical or make sense.

Water suppliers complain that they must test for some chemicals at ridiculously small levels and for others that simply do not exist in public water supplies. A clear case of EPA excess, utilities say, involves the chemical dioxin. Starting in January, utilities in Florida and the rest of the country will have to test for the poison at levels measured in parts per trillion. One test will cost a thousand dollars or more, and very few laboratories throughout the country are certified to analyze the chemical at such minute levels. But the biggest problem with the requirement, according to people such as Richard Dunham, head of water quality for the Orlando Utilities Commission, is that "there's no dioxin in Florida's drinking water." The chemical, which is present in some surface waters, has never been found in Florida's drinking water.

The EPA acknowledges that its rules and regulations can be burdensome and costly but says that it is under congressional mandate to come up with safe drinking standards. Since 1986 the agency has been working to establish safe levels for 83 chemicals and has nearly completed the job. And, the EPA says, those rules have reduced and will significantly reduce the public health risk from drinking contaminated water. The agency estimates that new rules taking effect this year regarding lead testing and water treatment will give additional protection to 140 million people nationwide, including 18 million children. But EPA administrators concede that not all regulated chemicals represent the same health hazard as, say, lajd.

The agency is trying to establish a more risk-b3sed, scientific analysis for contaminants that WATER from A-1 'vate wells. Shelter Cove's problem might not be unique. The park has been under a DER water advisory "since the mid-1970s. But after Shelter Cove's developer lost the property to the federal government three years ago in a court foreclosure, residents paid a company to handle testing and treating the water. 'Tests consistently have shown the water to be free of "contaminants.

"Nobody's boiled the water out here in three years. We don't even think about it," said Darel Heyne, who has three children and has lived in the park with his Sue, for nine years. Nevertheless, DER has asked a circuit judge to down the water supply if state concerns are not addressed. "The water may be fine, but we don't even know 'how the system was built," said Joe McNamara, head the drinking-water section for the DER in Orlando. He said he understands that Shelter Cove residents cannot afford a new water system and hopes that the federal government will foot the bill, be-' cause it now owns the property.

He said the DER is sympathetic to the families but is simply following 'the state's rules and regulations, most of which are dictated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The Shelter Cove situation is an example of the growing crunch that public water supply systems are facing in trying to meet tightening and costly drink- ing-water rules and regulations. Many small water suppliers are in danger of clos- Jng down. That could force their customers to dig pri-vate wells, which are at highest risk for contamina-'tion because they draw from the shallowest parts of Florida's underground water supply. "That is a vast fear of mine," said Gary Williams, 'executive director of the Florida Rural Water Associ- ation, which represents more than 500 small water suppliers in the state.

"We are going to lose all the I public health protection that has been provided" by the regulated utilities. Out of control I Utilities of all sizes and the states that regulate them say they are buckling under the cost of imple-menting the EPA's drinking-water rules. State offi-" rials and water suppliers say they face a growing list of regulated chemicals, expanded monitoring and a massive program of lead and cop- per testing that also could force utilities to add ex- pensive water treatments. States and the federal government are expected by ,995 to fall $170 million fehort of the money needed.