The head of the Anchorage Water and Waste Utility has issued a statement confirming that staff at the Eklutna Water Treatment Facility had indeed expressed concern about the irritation some had experienced due to handling fluoride, which is added to the water system.

“AWWU staff did express to the Mayor that the handling of the fluoride chemical used to add to our water is a dangerous hazardous chemical. While they are professionals and well trained in handling it, the general sentiment of the operators who work with it would be to prefer not to handle it as they have experienced occasional unreportable health and irritation effects after handling it, even with all the proper OSHA compliant protocols and PPE being used,” wrote General Manager Mark A. Corsentino.

Corsentino was responding to wildly inaccurate and speculative reporting in mainstream media and leftist blogs that the mayor had endangered the public by temporarily shutting off the fluoride after his tour of the Eklutna. …

Corsentino backs up the mayor’s reporting of the incident.

“It was brought up that while its addition is an Assembly ordained requirement, fluoride is not necessary for safe drinking water, and many municipalities around the world had stopped adding it to public water systems over the last decade. From a strategic standpoint, AWWU has an approximate $1M proposed upgrade to rehabilitate the fluoride system in the near future; and, if it was to come up with the community and Assembly for removal, now is the time to bring it up before money is spent for an expensive upgrade,” Corsentino wrote.

“The mayor took that into consideration in his decision, with concurrence from AWWU, after we let him know the system is oftentimes down and offline for corrective and preventative maintenance reasons. We let him know that we have learned that it can be down for hours and days at a time without any code issues because fluoride has a long residual in our water system, which would allow ample time to reverse his decision before any impacts would be towards meeting code. It is in fact down as of yesterday for an equipment failure, and we expect to have it up and running early next week when repair parts arrive,” Corsentino reported in his statement.

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