Not a drop (of tap water) to drink in San Lucas, California

SAN LUCAS, California — Posted in the front office of the San Lucas elementary school are the usual notices — a newspaper clipping about a local boy playing college football, an autism flier, a calendar. The warning about nitrate contamination in the drinking water is to the right of the cafeteria menu (Fridays are always pizza) and directly below the note about the sale of school “spirit paws.”

For three years, residents of this unincorporated farming community of about 80 homes in California’s agriculturally rich Salinas Valley have not been able to drink the water. It may seem remarkable that a community in California, one of the wealthiest states in one of the wealthiest countries, does not have safe drinking water. But for the residents of San Lucas, water problems are nothing new.

When she was a child, remembered Lucia Velazquez, now 31, there was black sediment in the water. More recently, residents describe the water as milky white. One thing it has never been? “It’s never, ever been clear water,” she said.

In 2012, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 685, establishing every Californian’s right to “safe, clean, affordable and accessible” drinking water. Assembly Member Luis Alejo, a descendant of some of the first farmworkers to join Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in Watsonville, California, in the 1970s, is among those trying to make this a reality through legislation, such as the Safe Drinking Water Small Community Emergency Grant Fund, which was approved by Brown in October 2013.

The problem is particularly bad in the agriculturally rich Central Valley and Central Coast, where much of the nation’s produce is grown and the majority of the population relies on groundwater. According to a 2012 study by the University of California at Davis, nitrate — mainly due to nitrogen in fertilizer — is one of the state’s most widespread groundwater contaminants.

In the Central Coast’s Salinas Valley and the Central Valley’s Tulare Lake Basin, as many as 254,000 people are at risk of nitrate contamination in their drinking water. Nitrate concentrations have exceeded the maximum permissible level in the water systems of more than 50 percent of the population at least once from 2006 to 2010. Most are protected by water system treatment, but about 10 percent are not.

The problem is expected to only get worse as more than 50 years of nitrogen from animal waste and fertilizer use continues to make its way into aquifers. Those most affected are those least equipped to handle the problem: small farming communities like San Lucas, with limited resources for drinking water treatment and infrastructure adaptations.

There isn’t much to the San Lucas County Water District, just a few employees who staff the office, a rented house on Main Street, a couple times a week. Phone messages go unanswered for days, and emails are problematic. (The district relies on dial-up Internet service.) Formed in 1965, the district does not have anywhere near the funds or resources of its counterparts in larger cities and towns. It has never had high quality water.

Nitrate binds to the hemoglobin that oxygen needs to access in order to circulate in the blood, said Richard LeWarne, assistant director of the Monterey County Health Department’s environmental health bureau. Because nitrates are chemicals, boiling the water just concentrates them. While other contaminants like arsenic are more chronic — people usually must have a long exposure to them before they start feeling effects — nitrate is acute. If levels are high enough, you will immediately feel the effect, said LeWarne.  

“Your cells are not getting the oxygen needed for them, so it’s like you are starting to suffocate,” he said.

It is particularly dangerous for infants under 6 months old and pregnant women because infants and fetuses typically do not have as many hemoglobin receptor sites for oxygen as adults do. Several years ago there was a very serious case, believed related to nitrate in the water, in Monterey County of blue baby syndrome, so named because infants turn blue from lack of oxygen, said LeWarne. 

Velazquez stopped giving baths to her youngest daughter, Lily, out of fear for her health. “Even though she is not 3 yet, I give her showers,” said Velazquez. “No baths anymore. I don’t want her to drink the water.”

“Fortunate” is relative, though. For Bert Moreno, the water situation in San Lucas is “horrible, a nightmare.” At a little before 11 a.m. on a Friday in late September, he was waiting at the water district to talk to someone about water safety. A resident of San Lucas since 1992, he has several rental properties in the community and wanted to make sure he gave his tenants the correct information. Although he showers in the water, he said it leaves his skin itchy, and he didn’t think it was safe to bathe infants with it. When he washes his clothes, he said, they become discolored and smelly.

“What you can use it for is to flush the toilets. That’s about it,” said Moreno, 65.

The bad water has been blamed for everything from ruining clothes and killing parakeets to preventing community growth. At one time, there were plans to build low-income housing in San Lucas and bring children from an adjacent district to the school. That came to a halt when the quality of the water was called into question, said Kenia Acevedo, part of the Salinas Valley Safe Drinking Water Project for the nonprofit California Rural Legal Assistance.

“It really hurt the development overall of the community, bringing funding sources and having more resources coming into their community,” she said.