State finds widespread water contamination of ‘forever chemicals’
pinpoint its sources. Only a small fraction of California’s thousands of drinking water wells were tested in this initial study. Officials said they planned to examine many more, but have not committed to future statewide testing.
The results offered the clearest picture yet of California’s exposure to a public health crisis that is playing out nationally.
‘‘This has the potential of being an enormously costly issue both on the health side as well as on the mitigation and regulatory side,’’ said Kurt Schwabe, an environmental policy professor at the University of California, Riverside.
‘‘It’s going to be one of the defining issues in California, environmentally, for decades.’’ About half of the wells sampled did not have the chemicals at detectable levels — a result that state officials said was a hopeful sign the contaminants may not have spread as widely as they have in other states. Yet testing found contaminated drinking water in communities across California, from densely populated cities with large and complex water systems to mobile home parks that depend on a single private well.
Clusters of contaminated wells were found in Southern California, in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
In some cases, the results had an immediate effect –the city of Anaheim has shut down three of its drinking water wells so far this year in response to elevated levels of the chemicals.
Exposure to the chemicals, commonly known as PFAS, has been traced to kidney and testicular cancer, as well as high cholesterol and thyroid disease. Mothers and young children are thought to be the most vulnerable to the chemicals, which can affect reproductive and developmental health.
Scientists have called them ‘‘forever chemicals’’ because they persist indefinitely and accumulate in the human body.
The chemicals were developed in the 1940s and used in countless household products, from Teflon cookware and Scotchgard to waterproof clothing and food packaging. They were also a key ingredient in firefighting foam used on military bases.
– LA Times