State cites dozens for clean drinking water violations
Davalynn Chase doesn’t drink the tap water, she explained, standing outside her mobile home in Midwest City on a scorching July afternoon.
Chase, who has lived in the Village Oaks mobile home park for about five years, said she spends extra money to buy bottled water for her family and pets because she is unsure about the park’s drinking water quality.
The water is mostly clear, but it’s also sometimes white and murky with an odor, making her family question whether they should even be using the water to shower, she said.
“Many of us have kids and we don’t want that for them,” she said.
In the last two years, the state has cited the operators of 36 water systems in Cleveland, Canadian and Oklahoma counties for health violations. The violators range from those
operating single-well systems serving just a handful of public users to municipal water utilities serving thousands.
They include a bar, an elementary school and an Oklahoma City church, where lead levels tested three times the maximum allowable amount. They also include a Canadian County rural water district, mobile home parks like Village Oaks, and city systems in Nichols Hills, Piedmont and Harrah.
“A lot of our systems that struggle with treatment and
(maximum contaminant level) violations are smaller systems that typically serve smaller populations,” said Michele Welsh, the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality’s public water supply compliance manager.
Drinking water quality became a focal point for the nation after the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where budget cuts and insufficient water treatment potentially exposed more than 100,000 residents to high lead levels in their drinking water. The controversy exposed similar problems with public drinking water systems across the country.
Nationally, Oklahoma has one of the highest numbers of health-based water system violations, according to FluksAqua, an online resource for water quality professionals, which analyzed data from the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2016, the violations statewide affected about 16 percent of Oklahoma’s population.
Oklahoma’s public water systems are required to provide the state more than a dozen water quality tests each year. Water systems can send samples to a lab of their choice for analysis or provide their own lab results directly to the department. A state official is sent to inspect the labs once a year.
The state uses about 90 parameters to test the quality of the water.
When serious contaminants are detected above approved levels, the system is required to notify customers of the problem. Contaminated wells are taken offline until water samples are normal two days in a row, said Patty Thompson, public water supply group engineering manager at DEQ.
Depending on the contaminant, it can take from a few days to much longer to fix the problem. On average, violations took 214 days to correct in 2016.
Identifying the problem
As it has been at Village Oaks, safe drinking water is a problem for mobile home parks nationally, with residents complaining about contaminated water or no running water at all.
In the three-county area, 13 mobile home parks received more than a third of the 93 individual drinking water violations issued in the last two years. Five parks received multiple violations.
Well systems, which many mobile home parks rely on, create opportunities for contamination because they retrieve their drinking water from groundwater sources at risk for higher levels of arsenic and nitrates and that are more prone to bacteria, said Shanon Phillips, water quality director at the Oklahoma Conservation Commission, which monitors the water quality of the state’s lakes and rivers.
Poor system maintenance also can be a cause of contamination, Phillips said.
Sandi Wallace, Village Oaks community manager, said water samples are taken and tested once a month. The park doesn’t rely on a well, but instead buys its water from Midwest City. There was a problem with chlorine levels in 2014, she said, but she wasn’t aware of recent violations from the state agency.
Wallace acknowledged residents have complained about the park’s water tasting and smelling like chlorine.
During the two-year period, the mobile home park received six violations for total trihalomethanes, known as TTHMs, which can cause liver and kidney problems and, with prolonged exposure, can increase a person’s risk for cancer.
TTHMs are a byproduct of disinfection chemicals that water treatment facilities around the state use to rid water of organic matter, primarily algae.
“To my knowledge, we’ve got that straightened out,” said Mark Roberts, Midwest City’s water treatment chief plant operator. “(Village Oaks wasn’t) flushing their system like they were supposed to and that was causing them problems.”
Managing city water
Eight of the health violations went to municipal water systems for contaminants ranging from arsenic to uranium.
In 2016, Nichols Hills drilled a new drinking water well after the city’s annual arsenic average exceeded acceptable levels.
“We had a well that was out of compliance, but since then that well has been taken out of existence and been redrilled,” said Randy Lawrence, Nichols Hills public works director.
In Harrah, a problem with naturally occurring radionuclides, including uranium, has plagued the city since about 2010. Exposure to radiochemicals over many years can increase cancer risks. The state cited Harrah for eight violations during the twoyear period.
In such cases, the DEQ typically encourages the owners to find another water source.
That spurred Harrah last year to abandon one well and drill two others in zones free of the radiochemical contaminants, City Manager Earl Burson said. One of the new wells is in use and the other is expected to come online in a few weeks.
“Hopefully (radionuclides aren’t) going to be a problem any longer,” he said.
In addition to mandatory testing, public water systems are subject to unannounced inspections once a year.
On a warm June morning, Travis Mensik strolled through the Midwest City Water Treatment Plant looking for cleanliness, functioning equipment and safety kits.
During his environmental visit, the program specialist for DEQ who inspects plants statewide, watched the water rush into the plant from Lake Thunderbird. He peered into the water clarifying system, and checked the turbidity, or cloudiness, of the water at almost every stop.
Violators usually have about two weeks to correct any problems or can face follow-up violations. In some cases, the state can issue consent orders, formal agreements that detail tasks and deadlines for taking corrective action. DEQ also can fine violators. In the last five years, the agency has levied almost $392,000 in fines to water systems statewide, but collected only about $194,600. Department officials said they work with water system operators to achieve compliance, and in some cases might forego fine collection.
Phillips said multiple violations could possibly indicate a public water system doesn’t know the cause of contamination, or that the problem might be expensive to repair.
“Sometimes it’s because people have limited resources in terms of solving a problem,” Phillips said.
Doing more with less
Before July 2016, the DEQ inspected systems four times each year, but state budget cuts that year forced the agency to scale back inspections to once a year. Since then, the department’s budget has been cut another 5 percent.
Today, the department has 62 people to inspect 1,600 public water systems statewide. The number of inspectors has decreased in recent years.
“We do more with less people,” said Mensik, who’s worked at the department for 20 years.
It’s a similar situation at the Oklahoma Conservation Commission, where Phillips, the group’s water
quality director, worries they may lack the resources needed to combat increasing challenges.
More than 700 rivers and lakes around the state violate Oklahoma’s water quality standards, mostly commonly due to high levels of sediment, nitrogen, phosphorus or bacteria from warm-blooded animals.
“They are everywhere,” she said.
Comparatively, Oklahomans don’t pay much for the water they use, she said, but that might not always be the case.
“I can’t say for sure that we are going to have unsafe drinking water, but I can say it’s going to cost a lot more to provide safe drinking water,” Phillips said.
When residents pay their water bill, they aren’t necessarily paying for the water, she said. The money is most often used to maintain the infrastructure at treatment plants.
Federal money to help with water quality issues has decreased over time, Phillips said. Today, the state receives about $2.4 million from the EPA for such efforts; however, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would eliminate the program.
“I do think that Oklahoma water providers do a good job of providing safe drinking water to Oklahoma citizens,” Phillips said. “But, that doesn’t mean there can’t be challenges or that we don’t need to make investments.”