Preview:
(ABC 6 News) — If you live in a mobile home, a new study says your drinking water may be unsafe.
The Associated Press reports 68% of mobile home parks that run their own water systems violated safe drinking water rules in the last five years.
For comparison, city water systems come in 20 points lower at 48%. More alarmingly, many parks go completely unregulated.
The study comes after EPA research into a cancer cluster in California traced back to high arsenic levels.
Nationwide, nearly 17 million Americans live in mobile homes.
Read MoreOur thoughts on this story:
Great headline for sensationalism, but then you read in the article that it’s NOT 68% of mobile home parks that supposedly have water issues but only 68% of those with their own well water. But then the argument gets even weaker when it’s revealed that the “68%” number is not rooted in science but merely an estimate based on a micro-sampling of a few small trailer parks in western states, which sometimes have a very high degree of carcinogens in their water supply that can’t be cured with simply chlorine. The reality is that maybe 10% of U.S. mobile home parks are on well water and, of those, all of the institutional-quality ones are tested monthly and in 100% compliance. So when you take the supposed 68% and apply it to roughly 10% of mobile home parks on well water, that’s just 7%. But then you take off all those professionally-managed parks and leave just those nasty 1-star slum trailer parks down by the river and you are probably at 2% or less of all parks. So shouldn’t the headline actually read “New Study Shows Drinking Water in 98% of Mobile Home Parks is Safe”? Absolutely!

