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• May 17, 2010

• Julia Scott, California Watch; May 17, 2010

John and Rosenda Mataka never gave a thought to their tap water until 1995, when the city of Modesto took over the town of Grayson's water supply wells and informed everyone that they had been drinking nitrate-contaminated water for more than a decade.

Modesto officials began conducting regular tests of Grayson's two production wells. The state Department of Public Health reacted to the results by requiring the city to install a treatment plant to rid the water of dangerous nitrate levels.

"I was angry. We just weren't told. Every year, they said the water was fine," said Rosenda Mataka, who raised her son, Emiliano, on compromised tap water.

Although Emiliano and his parents show no indication that their health has been harmed by the water they drank for years, the Matakas worry about the long-term health impacts of exposure to tainted drinking water. Tap water spiked with high nitrate levels can lead to "blue baby syndrome," which cuts off an infant's oxygen supply. Some studies have found connections to certain cancers in lab animals.

Grayson's water treatment system provides an oddly incongruous sight: an assortment of gleaming pipes and tanks that tower above apricot orchards and alfalfa fields, with a tall fence wrapped around them and a big warning sign that says "Caution: Chlorine."

Accidental landmark

It's Grayson's accidental landmark, a symbol of the hidden legacy that has prevented this rural outpost of 1,200 from becoming the prosperous Modesto suburb it could have been.

In a way, Grayson is lucky. Most small communities of its size with serious nitrate problems can't afford expensive water treatment plants. That means those communities, made up largely of low-income families who work the fields, end up drinking whatever comes out of the tap, even if the water violates public health standards for nitrates.

At least 1 million Californians rely on private wells that have no public health oversight. These residents are at high risk for nitrate contamination because their wells are shallower than municipal wells. Nitrates are colorless and odorless, making them hard to detect without lab testing.

At the other end of the spectrum, cities in Southern California have spent millions of dollars on nitrate treatment plants because they have no other choice — dirty or not, the groundwater is crucial to meet population growth while access to imported water shrinks.

The Irvine Ranch Water District, for instance, built a $33 million system to remove nitrates in 2007. It costs an additional $2.3 million a year to operate and maintain. The plant itself serves 50,000 water customers in Orange County.

Of the 50 million people who will one day call this state home, many will settle in the Los Angeles area, Inland Empire and parts of the Central Valley — areas that overlie some of the most nitrate-contaminated groundwater in the state.

City planners are looking to groundwater to supply one-third of the water needed to accommodate California's coming population boom, or 1.1 trillion gallons per year — more than any other source, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Looking around Grayson today, it's hard to believe that the town was once in the running to become a suburb of Modesto. Twenty years ago, a developer was planning to build a 633-unit subdivision at the site of a peach orchard in Grayson.

Those dreams were dashed shortly after Modesto installed a denitrification plant. Although it can barely afford it, the city spends $800 per acre-foot to make water drinkable for Grayson's residents — up to $19,440 a month, four times the cost of the treated Tuolomne River water that Modesto pipes to half of its 210,000 residents.

Another problem is the leftovers: Grayson's ion exchange process leaves behind hundreds of tons of saline brine that can't be recycled or reused, so Modesto pays extra to export four truckloads of it each week to a San Francisco Bay Area wastewater plant. At those prices, the city quickly concluded that it couldn't afford any new water connections in Grayson and banned them outright. The ban is still in place today, minimizing the area's population growth.

"If water wasn't a problem here, the whole area would be developed in a heartbeat," said John Mataka, who works for Stanislaus County as a behavioral health specialist. He and Rosenda both advocate for environmental justice issues with a variety of local and state organizations.

Experts say the slow spread of nitrates underground has already affected millions of Californians, mostly due to leaky septic tanks and intensive nitrogen fertilizer-based farming over the last 60 years.

Nitrates are the leading cause of well closures in California. Scientists say that if nitrate concentrations don't taper off, the pollution will eventually sink deep enough to affect the well water that millions of Californians depend upon.

The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that the cost of treating all the polluted groundwater in California over the next 20 years, including nitrates, would amount to $7.5 billion.

An expensive problem

Times have changed since the 1970s, when water managers could just shut down a well and dig a new one if nitrates became a serious problem. Atwater says the causes of nitrate contamination were ignored for too long, creating a problem for everyone in the region.

In Modesto, the city has had to shut down 10 of its 140 municipal wells because of nitrate contamination in the past 15 years, and there will likely be more, said Allen Lagarbo, deputy public works director.

"All cities on wells in this area start developing contamination problems eventually," he said.

The combined population of cities in the Sacramento Metro region and San Joaquin Valley is projected to top 9 million by 2030. The population in the Central Valley has doubled every 30 years since 1900 as residents move onto former farmlands.

Meeting future water demands is not as simple as building a new generation of nitrate treatment plants, as Modesto discovered. The most common technologies to remove nitrates, ionic exchange and reverse osmosis, can be expensive and cumbersome.

"We do this crazy thing now and take pristine, beautiful water and put it on our farms, and the minute it soaks into the ground, it's filled with nitrates and pesticides, and then we ask cities to clean up marginal water and use it as drinking water," said Jean Moran, professor of earth and environmental science at 裸聊直播 East Bay and a former groundwater research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A Sacramento solution?

In the Central Valley, farmers may soon face regulations on their use of fertilizer similar to an order imposed on dairies in 2007. The agricultural industry wants those rules to remain voluntary and says it would be unfair for regulators to require farmers to comply with strict statewide water quality standards.

Nitrogen fertilizer use in California has stabilized at an average 700,000 tons each year, but it's unclear whether voluntary strategies have made a difference in nitrate levels so far. It took 50 years to detect nitrate problems in many areas, and it will take decades to see changes, experts say.

One option would be to require farmers to limit the amount of fertilizer they apply to their fields. That would require new legislation. The State Water Resources Control Board does not have the authority to impose those limits.

Lawmakers have directed hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid to small communities struggling with nitrates, and established demonstration projects for good farming practices through the University of California. But when it comes to tackling fertilizer, results have been mixed.

State Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez, D-Shafter, calls nitrates "a backwater issue in Sacramento."

"These are the kinds of things public policy makers need to hear," he said. "It's always difficult to get any of these things on the radar screen. ¶ We've got to get our farmers to recognize the long-term impact of these materials on water systems. People say it's the end of a major, multbillion-dollar industry without these fertilizers."