Nitrate contamination remedies expensive
Alameda Times-Star (CA) - Saturday, May 22, 2010
Author: Julia Scott San Mateo County Times

Most small communities with serious nitrate problems can't afford expensive water treatment plants. That means the 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.

Other California communities will be facing the same tough choices in the coming years. California's population is projected to increase 53 percent by 2050. Of the 50 million people who will one day call this state home, many will settle in the greater 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.

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

Studies have shown that although 3.5 percent of public water supply wells in the Central Valley exceed the public health limit for nitrates today, an additional 13 percent of wells are at substantial risk of contamination.

Solving the groundwater problem will take imagination — and a lot more money than the state is spending. California voters have passed two water bonds since 2002, worth more than $8 billion. Roughly $2 billion was allocated for clean, safe drinking water.

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.

It's too late to prevent nitrate contamination in many Southern California groundwater basins, especially in heavily urbanized portions of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Today, residents pay high water bills to help fund multimillion-dollar nitrate treatment plants in places like Pomona and Riverside.

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 nitrate, 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 Cal State East Bay and a former groundwater research scientist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

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, multibillion-dollar industry without these fertilizers."

Learn more about nitrates at www.CaliforniaWatch.org.

This story was produced in collaboration with KQED Public Radio for California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

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