Thanks to an order from the Texas Attorney General, Mark Greenblatt, of KHOU-Houston, obtained emails (2-page PDF) which demonstrate the state water advisory council’s conscious effort to effectively defy certain EPA water quality regulations related to radionucleotide content.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality accomplished this trick by subtracting the counting error from otherwise dangerous test results, thus successfully dropping them below necessary thresholds. With the numbers below the threshold, there was no formal violation and authorities could get away with not warning residents about their potentially harmful water supply. The dodge continued until 2008, when it was caught by federal auditors.
