Small Town America Water Crisis

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Small Town America Water Crisis

Small-Town America Has a Serious Drinking-Water Problem

On a sweltering day last July, a team of scientists stood before a crowded room of people from the tiny town of Sanders, Arizona, and showed them a photo of a dilapidated wooden shack covered by hole-filled tarps. This, the scientists explained, was the town's water source.

Tonya Baloo, a longtime resident and mother of two, did a double take. "It looked like a Third World country," she says. "I was like, 'Is this Africa?'"

The well serving Sanders residents  Chris Shuey

The researchers' next image—a chart with a flat red line cutting through yellow bars—was even more worrisome. Tommy Rock, a Ph.D. candidate studying water contamination at Northern Arizona University, explained that the red line was the Environmental Protection Agency's threshold for uranium allowed in public water systems: 30 micrograms per liter. The yellow bars represented uranium levels in Sanders' water supply dating back to 2003. They hovered around 50 micrograms per liter.

For more than a decade, the chart showed, people in Sanders had been drinking contaminated water.

Residents listened, dumbfounded. Sanders sits on the edge of the Navajo Nation; uranium mines, relics of the Cold War, have long dotted tribal lands across the West. Long-term exposure to the heavy metal can cause kidney disease and cancer. But locals had never been notified of the contamination. Nor were they aware of the nearly 200 drinking-water violations that the local utility had amassed over the previous decade, ranging from uranium and bacterial contamination to failure to test the water.

"The initial betrayal," Baloo says. "It was shocking."

Roughly 6 million Americans use one of 2,300 public water systems that qualify as "serious violators"; 99 percent of those utilities serve fewer than 50,000 people.

The meeting happened two months before researchers in Flint, Michigan, revealed that their city's water was laced with lead. In both cases, curious scientists exposed years of drinking-water violations that affected predominantly poor, minority communities. (Most Sanders residents are Navajo and live on less than $20,000 per year.) But unlike urban Flint, Sanders is home to just 630 people and consists of a cluster of single-family homes, a gas station, a dollar store, two churches, and a trading post—all surrounded by miles of red rock and sage brush.

Source: Mother Jones

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