Poison in the Water: 17 News special report
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — California’s problem with poor water quality is worsening and Kern County is the epicenter of the crisis.
The number of failing water systems is growing statewide, leaving more than a million residents with contaminated water. Most of those failing systems are in disadvantaged communities, where residents wonder when state regulators will finally ensure they can drink tap water without fearing it may harm their health.
Contaminated water on some school campuses
The days of lining up at a water fountain are over for children at many schools in Kern County, not by choice, but because of failing water systems.
Lakeside Union School District is a prime example. It’s a tiny southwest Bakersfield school district of 1,600 students at two schools, primarily located in a quiet, rural, agricultural area. The district has its own water system, and according to Superintendent Ty Bryson, since 2009, Lakeside has used bottled water because of contaminants.
“The very basic ability for a student to just go to a drinking fountain at recess and get a drink of water is denied to us because of contamination in our water supply,” Bryson said.
Bryson says the district has placed bottled water dispensers in each classroom, hallways, and throughout the school. Students must use paper cups to drink it. It is not ideal, but it is needed with the circumstances.
“It gets very hot in Bakersfield, but we have to make plenty of water available and we have to change it frequently because the bottles get drained especially when it’s warm pretty quickly,” Bryson said.
The state provides the school $28,736 annually to pay for 3,283 gallons per quarter. But the money is set to expire in February, and Bryson says the district has looked toward the city of Bakersfield for help to install a new pipeline or consolidate into the city but both projects were stopped at every turn.
“The city of Bakersfield hired a very good water attorney, and he had that stopped,” Bryson said. “That project stopped in a matter of weeks.”
RELATED: Bakersfield City Council approves funding to upgrade contaminated water wells
Now the district does not know how it will pay for water moving forward.
“We need help. We need someone to continue to push for us,” said Bryson.
17 News reached out to the City of Bakersfield for a response. The city had no comment.
Dangerous water at the tap
This water crisis isn’t affecting just schools, it’s affecting tens of thousands of residents all over Kern County and millions in California. According to state water resources control board data, in Kern, more than 130,000 residents are served by 61 failing water systems, the state’s highest number of failing systems. Those failing systems are utilities that are out of compliance or are consistently failing to meet drinking water standards.
A state audit of safe drinking water found that more than 240 failing systems in the state have been unable to meet drinking water standards for at least three years — more than 150 failing for five years.
Kern County remains a leader in the most problematic systems. In 2017, Kern County had the most wells above the state’s maximum contaminant level in its drinking water, with 110 contaminated wells, according to state data.
RELATED: Bakersfield reaches settlement in toxic drinking water case
Most of the failing water systems in Kern County are not meeting standards because of dangerous levels of three of the most prominent contaminants found in Kern County water: arsenic, nitrate, and 1,2,3 Trichloroprophane or TCP, which is commonly used in soil fumigants.
Cindy Wiedeman was serviced by one of those failing systems for years: Victory Mutual Water Company — a small privately-owned company with two wells on the outskirts of Bakersfield near Shirley Lane and South Fairfax Road.
“It was about two years ago, maybe two and half years ago when I moved into the area, I was told to make sure not to drink the tap water,” said Wiedeman.
Wiedeman said neighbors warned her about the water. She began relying on bottled water and lived in fear of what could happen if she drank the tap water she paid for.
According to the state water board’s website, Victory Mutual has high-risk water quality. The utility exceeds the state’s maximum contaminant level within the past three years and has water with 50% or greater contaminated sources. Due to this, monthly the company notifies the more than 800 people it serves of a possible “increased risk of getting cancer” from specifically the water’s 1,2,3 TCP exceedance level.
President of Victory Mutual, Bill White, said the water system will continue to notify customers of the exceedance level as required but does not see the water as problematic.
“Until somebody shows me proof that they have become sick because of our contaminated water I’m not doing nothing,” White said.
Leaving the choice of whether to use it in their hands.
“I would wash my dishes and then I would rinse them off with bottled water,” said Wiedeman.
A resident still serviced by Victory Mutual told 17 News she doesn’t drink the water and is scared to bathe her children in it.
“The first thing I noticed is that the water comes out a brown dirty color in the morning and then when you brush your teeth you can notice a difference in the smell. When I’m giving my daughter a bath, I’m super careful to not let her drink any water but she still does it. It’s impossible for her to not drink it even just a little bit because she’s a child,” said customer Laura Argas.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, contaminated water can cause gastrointestinal illnesses, nervous system or reproductive effects, and chronic diseases such as cancer.
The EPA notes two big contaminants that have harmful health effects are arsenic — commonly picked up in groundwater — and nitrate which comes from fertilizers in groundwater. According to the EPA, arsenic has been linked to several cancers, including cancer of the bladder, lungs, skin, liver, and more.
Nitrate, whose greatest use is as fertilizer, is the most serious for infants and can interfere with the oxygen-carrying capacity of the child’s blood. Some symptoms of the effects of Nitrate include shortness of breath and blueness of the skin.
RELATED: McFarland’s water has been contaminated for the last 6 months
According to state cancer data, between 2016-2020, on average 3,322 individuals had cancer in Kern County annually, and statistics show cancer was the leading cause of death in Kern County from 2008 to 2018.
According to a study by the National Library of Medicine, thyroid cancer associated with high nitrate contamination in drinking water wells is prevalent in the Central Valley.
The study also found that Hispanic and Black children and low-income, low-education families were twice as likely to have to drink bottled water compared with white children.
Is consolidation the way out of the problem?
Less than 10 miles south of Victory Mutual, on the outskirts of Bakersfield, you will find the unincorporated community of El Adobe, dealing with a well with elevated levels of arsenic. The community is forced to pay for water but unable to drink it. Kyle Wilkerson is the former president of the El Adobe Property Owners Association, made up of community volunteers who help run the water and finances of the community. Wilkerson stepped down after three years after feeling nothing was changing with El Adobe’s two contaminated wells.
“It’s rusting apart. We’ve had to well patch holes on it because it finally just broke off, stuff is breaking off of it. It’s an old tank from the ’50s and ’60s, these aren’t actually domesticated wells for residential use, these are old ag wells because this used to be Farmland,” Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson said the state promised the association to address the contaminated water making its way to around 84 homes in the community. However, Wilkerson said there has been no progress.
“I’ve asked ‘Hey why are we so far down on the list? Oh, you guys are small?’ OK so the small people don’t count again. I mean it’s like they’re worried about LA, they’re worried about San Francisco, they’re worried about the big cities that get the votes and we’re just a small 84 home association. We’re not big on the list,” said Wilkerson.
The state water board’s answer to this crisis is consolidation, connecting smaller failing systems to larger systems. Since 2019, According to the water board, 95 consolidations have been completed statewide and have provided 78,000 people with safe drinking water. Including 14 other projects consolidating more than 50 systems in Kern County.
“These small water systems don’t have the rates and the economies of scale to be able to effectively treat different contaminants and if something goes wrong be able to replace equipment. So, a lot of what we see especially in your area is a related to the size in the water systems and how resilient they’re able to be because of their small size,” said Altevogt.
According to the General Manager of East Niles, Timothy Ruiz, which in this case is the Larger water system. The utility soon will take over the smaller, failing system, Victory Mutual Water Company, and five other failing systems — Del Oro Water Company, San Joaquin Estates Mutual Water Company, the Wilson Road Water Company, the East Wilson Road Water Company, and the Oasis Owners Association.
“Initially we were looking at consolidating with four water systems because of contaminations due to high nitrates but now they’ve asked us to add a couple others so we went from four water systems to six water systems primarily because of the nitrate level problems but with the 1,2,3 TCP maximum contaminant levels which I think all of those are exceeding the state has also looked at requesting us to consolidate those water systems to provide potable drinking water,” said Ruiz.
Once consolidated into East Niles, the $21 million state-funded project will include a new well, pumping station, and storage tank. The state hopes to address the problems all six communities have experienced with these smaller water systems. However, the number of problematic small systems is increasing throughout the county.
Chief Development Officer for Research for the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Dr. Newsha Ajami, attributes that to size, and says these utilities are typically an issue for historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
“Some of those small systems by nature have been serving disadvantaged communities and it’s not a rule but it certainly happens often that you see that some of these communities have challenges with their water and they are dependent on a very non-sophisticated utility and then on top of that you have a lot of technical-financial-managerial limitations that doesn’t allow the utility to operate in its highest quality,” said Ajami.
The state and East Niles have been working on this consolidation for years, and according to Ruiz, it could take four to four and a half more years to complete. But Ruiz says with a larger water system taking over, like East Niles, the issue of contaminants can be addressed, and the community will have water checked daily.
“The water systems were probably maintained by those who lived in the community, and from my experience seeing what happened is some of those people either retire or move out or pass away and so there is a question of who is going to maintain the water system, who is going to replace the valves, who is going to service the well, and I think that becomes quite a task for those people there,” said Ruiz.
The state also plans to consolidate El Adobe into nearby Lamont Public Utility District. That project includes drilling three new water wells, destroying three old wells, and constructing a new water distribution system. Lamont Public Utility District General Manager Scott Taylor said the plan has been in the works for more than eight years.
“We’ve been in that process to consolidate, we’re still in that process, and the consolidation is going to happen. Rome wasn’t built in a day, we can’t build two miles of road, 81 connections plus all the infrastructure that goes along with that at the snap of a finger,” Taylor said.
But El Adobe can’t afford to wait several more years, according to Kyle Wilkerson.
“It irritates me because when we go to the meetings and stuff to let the association members know what’s going on with the water because that’s usually what they ask, ‘Hey have you heard anything with the water?’ Well, the last update is that they’re going to postpone it for another three years. I can tell it frustrates them because we can’t give them a better answer,” he said.
To make the project happen, the state water board gave Lamont District a $25.4 million grant to wrap Lamont and El Adobe into a new, consolidated, upgraded system that will supply safe and affordable water to over 20,000 residents.
Lamont has had its own problems with contaminants, with the water district currently listed on the state water board’s website as a failing water system with high-risk water quality. Yet, Taylor stands firmly behind the fact that the water is filtered and no longer contaminated and that the water quality is an issue all systems face, from small to large, in Kern.
“The whole Central Valley Basin has contaminant issues, TCP… 1,2,3, TCP, that’s common knowledge throughout the water arena. We’ve installed and built water treatment systems, to remove those contaminants,” said Taylor.
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The state estimates the consolidation project won’t be completed until June 2025, which has caused more frustration in El Adobe, but Ajami said she is not convinced that the states plan to consolidate multiple systems is the best solution.
“If you have six challenged systems by connecting them, you’re not going to solve the problem. Six broken systems together are not going to build a whole system, they might actually cause more problems for each other because they still don’t have a lot of capacity or still don’t have the right accounting mechanism in place or might not have the right technologies in place, so it doesn’t necessarily get them anywhere,” said Ajami.
Ajami suggests the state put funding into the smaller water systems individually to increase staffing and address the challenges with each head-on or a virtual consolidation.
“We can actually consolidate, not necessarily be connecting pipes but rather than that we can have a virtual utility which sort of brings in a handful of experts: financial experts, technical experts, managerial experts that can actually provide services to multiple utilities at the same time without necessarily connecting them physically,” said Ajami.
On Sept. 25, 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 685, making California the first state in the nation to deem access to clean, safe, and affordable water a human right. As Wilkerson continues to use contaminated well water in El Adobe, he wonders if promises from the state of consolidation are true.
RELATED: EPA sets first-ever national limits for ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water
“I’m really doubtful, just because I’ve been promised for 11 years that it’s going to be soon. Two years, oh I’m sorry, nope five more years. Nope, now we’re at another six more years, and then there’s my 11 years that I’ve been here, and I’ve been promised that it’ll be tied in, and it hasn’t happened,” said Wilkerson.
And as Lakeside Superintendent Ty Bryson thinks of his classrooms of children forced to use filtered bottled water rather than a drinking fountain, he also is doubtful after no change.
“When we first started on this in 2016, 2017, I was really charged and enthusiastic that we were going to have something that was going to be able to be done to help these kids and help them have that basic drinking water provided and one of the veteran administrators here in Lakeside that had been around for a long time said we’ve done this before it’s not going to happen and he was right. “I don’t think anything can be more of a priority than having safe clean drinking water and I wish it was more of a priority in Sacramento than what it is,” said Bryson.
According to the state water board, this issue is a priority for the state. Although the timeline to complete consolidation for many of the systems will be a few more years, Andrew Altevogt with the state water board says this step is all part of the board’s plan to address failing water systems in disadvantaged communities.
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