Puerto Rican 'Superfund' Water Is Fine to Drink, CNN Report Finds

Desperate for drinking water, some Puerto Ricans have resorted to collecting water from Superfund sites.

CNN tested the water and found it isn't dangerous to drink after all.

Superfund sites are areas of land in the U.S. that have been contaminated by toxic waste and are in need of cleanup.

For days, the world has watched, stunned and horrified, as Puerto Ricans had no option but to break into a Superfund site in Dorado, so desperate that they were willing to drink toxic water to stay alive.

But a CNN report has found the water at that site isn't toxic, as previously believed. They extracted water from three wells on the site and sent it to the Virginia Tech Water Quality Lab for testing. Two of the wells, the report found, had no traces of contamination, while a third had only a minuscule amount of the industrial chemical PCE.

"This water you sent me is meeting all federal safe drinking water standards," Marc Edwards, the VT professor who ran the tests, told CNN. "How that happened? It could be the way the water flows on the ground (that's) not bringing contamination from the Superfund site to the well. Or maybe they are using some sort of treatment technology."

"I would drink (the water)," Edwards added.