MTBE, Ozone

Hey guys, since we got into a discussion about MTBE this last class I thought it would be good for us to have some resources on it. The USGS water use estimates say that 37% of the US population gets its drinking water from ground water, and that ground water and surface water also interact. General references on ground water from the EPA and the USGS are pretty interesting. Here is an article on MTBE contamination frequency in wells from the journal Ground Water. And, finally, the National Institute of Environmental Health and the Centers for Disease Control fact sheets on MTBE.

And, we were also talking about ozone. We'll get into the effects of ozone and ozone depletion up high (stratospheric or "good" ozone) after break, but I wanted to give you guys the fact sheet on low-level or "bad" ozone. Oxygen is super-powerful stuff, and O3 is highly reactive even by oxygen standards. We use it to kill organisms to purify our public drinking water. Here is the fact sheet on the effects of high- and low-level ozone from the EPA.