California Drinking Water Regulations Are Putting Cost Over People’s Safety

Health experts have long warned that pollutants like hexavalent chromium, PFAS and arsenic in drinking water are harmful to human health, even at low levels. While efforts to impose stricter drinking water contaminant limits in California, however, are repeatedly stymied by vested interests like polluters and utility groups, it’s the state’s low-income communities and people of color who bear the brunt of lax standards.

Just take the story of public health advocates’ ongoing struggle to protect Californians against the cancer-causing chemical hexavalent chromium, one first brought to the public’s notice by environmental advocate Erin Brockovich.

Earlier this year, the California agency responsible for managing and protecting the state’s water resources — including the drinking water flowing out of California’s faucets — formally adopted a maximum level at which hexavalent chromium can be found in the state’s drinking water.

On its surface, this sounds like a victory, but there’s a catch — the new rule allows for 500 times more of the chemical than was deemed ideal by the state agency responsible for determining health risks posed by long-term exposures to everyday chemicals. That’s even after a marathon regulatory battle spanning decades.

Indeed, it was back in 2001 that officials identified hexavalent chromium for regulatory action. In 2014, the state adopted an enforceable drinking water limit for the chemical of 10 parts per billion (ppb).

A group spearheaded by the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, a business advocacy organization, and a “taxpayer association” challenged that determination in court, arguing the new standards were too financially burdensome to utilities required to filter the chemical out of their water. The Superior Court of Sacramento County agreed, saying state officials had failed to adequately document the financial feasibility of the standard, sending regulators back to the drawing board.

Ten years after the state first instituted a hexavalent chromium drinking water standard, however, it once again adopted a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for the chemical — at the same level as a decade before, 10 ppb.

“We just let all these industries go out and pollute all these areas without any controls for so many years and now we’re stuck cleaning up after them.”

Environmental health experts and community advocates have decried the state’s new regulations, saying the MCL is not nearly protective enough of people’s health. But even against these warnings, it appears that utility groups intend to keep the legal fight over the chemical going.

Furthermore, the decades-long saga surrounding hexavalent chromium highlights a broader concern among health experts and community advocates about drinking water regulations that they say are too permissive and evolve far too slowly: Who suffers as a result?

All too frequently it’s the most vulnerable Californians living in disadvantaged neighborhoods, said Andria Ventura, legislative and policy director for Clean Water Action, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. “Those communities are often already heavily burdened with a whole range of air and water problems that impact them, and a lack of resources to address them,” she told Truthout. “It’s all just pretty horrible.”

How Are Levels Set?

As Tracey Woodruff, director of the University of California San Francisco’s program on reproductive health and the environment, sees it, the heart of the issue is that drinking water regulations, unlike those governing air pollutants, aren’t based on a rich trove of hard scientific data.

“Federal law requires that localities have to monitor for harmful air pollutants, report it to the government, make the data publicly accessible so people can read what the levels are, and then do studies to look at the air pollution and its health effects,” Woodruff told Truthout.

“For water, while there are requirements for localities to monitor for federally regulated contaminants, they do not have to provide the data to a central data base at the U.S. level which would allow people and researchers to do the kinds of studies [needed] to assess their links to health effects,” said Woodruff.

So, how are the standards set?

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) sets public health goals for individual chemicals that regulators use to establish safe drinking water standards. California law, however, doesn’t require regulators to adopt standards at the recommended health goal, but as close to it as is “economically and technologically feasible.”

The cost factor is a salient one for many California water utilities, especially smaller local systems with limited resources, as the state seeks to realize a landmark piece of legislation passed into law in 2012 guaranteeing every Californian the right to “safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water.”

There are currently 386 water systems in the state that are deemed “failing”; collectively they serve over 736,000 people.

This means that they currently or consistently deliver water that does not meet drinking water standards. The task of getting these systems up to speed is an expensive endeavor requiring specially trained personnel at the helm of sophisticated and costly equipment.

The state estimates that over the next five years, some $16 billion is needed to ensure that all Californians have ready access to safe, affordable drinking water. Available state and federal funds cover only a small portion of that projected sum.

“In some ways, it can make sense because the cost can get pretty prohibitive for some of these drinking water utilities,” said Woodruff, about the way drinking water regulations must factor in the expense of implementation.

But the juggling act that drinking water officials must negotiate invariably means that too much deference is given to drinking water companies focused on their bottom lines, Woodruff said, while the industrial polluters who cause the contamination in the first place are rarely held accountable for the full cost of remediating their toxic messes.

“This just speaks to how we just let all these industries go out and pollute all these areas without any controls for so many years and now we’re stuck cleaning up after them,” Woodruff added.

A perfect example of this dynamic pertains to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a family of more than 6,300 different variants used in everyday products including carpets, textiles, food packaging and firefighting products. PFAS exposures have been linked to cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility and increased risk of asthma and thyroid disease.

PFAS chemicals have been prodigiously used for decades. They appear in almost every American’s blood. But there were no enforceable drinking water PFAS regulations until earlier this year, when the EPA set drinking water limits for six PFAS variants.

Powerful groups like the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), however, have pushed back against the new rules, calling them unfeasible “because of the anticipated costs of complying.” Indeed, a variety of water utilities and chemical companies have filed lawsuits challenging the new rules.

“The answer can never be to allow people to drink contaminated water. The answer is to set standards that are as health-protective as possible.”

While these disputes play out in what are sure to be protracted legal battles, California communities already grappling with a host of environmental burdens are disproportionately impacted by PFAS drinking water pollution.

“These are people living in areas where there was dumping of hazardous wastes and a high concentration of industry and factories. These tend to be areas that were originally — even as far back as red-lining — low income communities and communities of color,” said Woodruff, explaining how multiple layers of toxic pollution act in unison to “exacerbate health effects in those communities.”

Who Is Impacted?

Arsenic is one of the top three drinking water contaminants in the state, alongside nitrate and a chemical called 1,2,3-Trichloropropane (TCP). Serious health issues associated with long-term arsenic exposure in drinking water include lung and urinary bladder cancer, diabetes and skin lesions.

California formally revised its arsenic drinking water standard nearly 20 years ago, and is in the process of revisiting it once again. Though arsenic is naturally occurring, it can also be introduced into the drinking water system through industrial and agricultural run-off, making it a bane of the state’s Latinx communities, including in places like the Central Valley, California’s breadbasket. Nor is it cheap to filter arsenic out of the water.

“Arsenic is a good example where the enforceable levels should be lower but the costs go up as you get to these levels,” said Ventura, who added that there are no safe levels of inorganic arsenic exposure. “Given what has happened with hexavalent chromium, there is doubt that public safety will be the priority as some water systems claim the costs will be too high to treat arsenic. But what about the costs of cancer?”

Long-term or high-level exposures to nitrate include major health problems like colorectal, bladder and breast cancer, and thyroid disease. It’s also linked to the potentially fatal blue baby syndrome. The legal drinking water limit for nitrate of 10 ppm was set at the federal level back in the early 1990s. Though the California public health goal for nitrate aligns with this level, growing evidence suggests a lower threshold is required to keep people safe.

Nitrate pollution is a heavily agricultural problem, caused by the over-application of fertilizers. Once again, high drinking water nitrate levels hit California’s poor, rural communities the hardest.

While health experts push for tighter nitrate drinking water standards, there exist state programs designed to restore and protect nitrate-impacted water resources. One of these programs is designed to incrementally decrease nitrate discharges along the Central Coast over the next couple of decades.

“It’s one of the first ag orders of the state which set enforceable limits on nitrate pollution, nitrate discharges and nitrate application,” said Kija Rivers, policy advocate with the Community Water Center, an environmental advocacy group.

But last year, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board stripped the ag order of a regulatory cap on nitrate application and nitrate discharge, at the behest of industry groups that argued, among other things, that the cap would prove too economically onerous to farmers.

Community advocates have decried that decision, saying that the regulatory cap was a necessary tool to protect vulnerable communities in the Central Coast region, those most affected by widespread and increasing nitrate contamination of valuable groundwater reserves.

“We really need to follow the precautionary principle when it comes to matters like this,” said Rivers. “It takes decades for nitrates to get out of our groundwater basins, so you really need to take this battle on nitrate pollution and come at it head on … before it’s too late.”

As Ventura sees it, California’s “backwards” approach to drinking water regulations could be mitigated by more programs to funnel funds to small, disadvantaged water systems, as well as a long-term low-income water ratepayer assistance program. This would help insulate struggling families from rising costs as water systems make much-needed upgrades.

Last month, however, lawmakers in California — a state with the fifth largest economy in the world — sank the latest attempt to establish such a rate-payer assistance program.

At the end of the day, “the answer can never be to allow people to drink contaminated water,” Ventura told Truthout. “The answer is to set standards that are as health-protective as possible and ensure that all systems have the resources they need to ensure the human right to water.”