VI Responds to Misleading Study on Safety of Plastic Pipe for Water Delivery

Dec. 19, 2020

Below are comments from Ned Monroe, president and CEO of the Vinyl Institute in response to a recently released study by Andrew Whelton about drinking water contamination from the thermal degradation of plastics:

 

“We challenge the usefulness and applicability of the most recent study from Andrew Whelton, an associate professor at Purdue University, which purports to detail the contamination of water delivered by plastic piping damaged as a result of wildfires in Northern California.  Despite the use of sound analytical techniques, Whelton’s study is deeply flawed in how it approaches the design of experiment used to address the original research question.  Essentially, the study fails to present any practical evidence of the effect of fire on safe water delivery.  No credible conclusion can be drawn from this work on how the quality of drinking water delivered by a plastic pipe system would be affected after a fire. The plastic pipe industry is committed to ensuring public health through our high-quality engineered materials and products that enable water security for people around the world.  Whelton’s flawed study is a disservice to communities who need reliable and trusted information on water safety.

 

Specifically:

• Like most construction materials exposed to intense temperatures in a fire, drinking water pipes in-use lose their operational integrity;
• In the case of plastic pipes, they will collapse under the temperature Whelton uses in his study, and will cease to be useful to convey water to a user;
• An independent review after the Paradise fire indicated that the probable cause for contamination was the introduction of BTEX-containing smoke that is drawn into open-ended and broken pipes due to negative pressure during critical firefighting efforts

Click here to see the VI’s full response to the Whelton Study.