America’s Failing Drinking Water System

In Buffalo, New York, 64 percent of houses are more than 80 years old, giving the city the distinction of having the oldest urban housing stock in the United States. Unfortunately, the pipes that bring water to those homes are often just as old, exposing many residents to lead, a neurotoxin. Nearly 6 percent of Buffalo’s children have elevated lead levels in their blood, which is triple the exposure rate of Flint, Michigan, a decade ago.

Telling already struggling families that lead is likely contaminating their drinking water is incredibly difficult, says Stephanie Simeon, executive director of Heart of the City Neighborhoods (HOCN), a local nonprofit that works to support community development. And not being able to provide a solution, she explains, feels like a disservice. “I can't tell people ‘don't drink the water,’ because it incites fear in an already traumatized community. And I don't have another resource for them.”

But with an estimated 40,000 water service lines in Buffalo containing lead—more than half of the city’s total—addressing the problem can’t wait. Last summer, HOCN and other community groups partnered with NRDC and the national nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice to pinpoint where Buffalo’s lead pipes are. Now, with support from water analytics company BlueConduit, the city plans to use that data to create an online interactive map.

City officials say that replacing all of the lead pipes could take decades—and up to $500 million. To date, the city has removed fewer than 2,000.

“We are not giving up,” Simeon says. Until those pipes are gone, she’ll be fighting to get free water filters into homes as a temporary solution. She’s also calling on others to sound the alarm.

Activist Medcalf describes the bodies of her fellow Houston residents as “toxic soup.” She knows from experience. After developing seizures and losing the use of her hands in college, Medcalf discovered she had elevated levels of 19 heavy metals in her blood. Medcalf has since dedicated herself to spreading the word about the pollution problems of her hometown, the country’s fourth-largest city. Houston is home to nearly two dozen Superfund sites—areas so contaminated that the EPA has prioritized them for cleanup—and according to Medcalf’s THEA, there are another 2,000 former and potentially polluted industrial sites in the metro area.

Making matters worse, Houston recently discovered it also has a widespread PFAS problem. Scientists have linked exposure to these synthetic “forever chemicals”—so named for their inability to break down—with cancer, developmental issues, and immune system problems. A recent peer-reviewed study, conducted by NRDC scientists in collaboration with community groups like THEA, found very high levels of PFAS at multiple sites across Houston.

Medcalf explains that many of the chemicals they discovered are unmonitored short-chain PFAS, inaccurately touted by manufacturers as safer than longer chain varieties since they don’t stay as long in a person’s body. They still pose a high risk in Houston, where various other pollution sources are already wreaking havoc on residents’ health.

“We're talking about communities who are exposed to low-level contaminants on a regular basis, so the body burden is already high,” Medcalf says. “Over time, the body is not going to excrete the short-chain PFAS as quickly as someone with a lower body burden.”

After Hurricane Harvey flooded the city in 2017, for instance, THEA found PCBs in the water of one property owner. That same property owner recently discovered they also have a PFAS contamination problem. “It’s very unsettling,” says Medcalf, adding that the residents who are aware of the exposures are left feeling scared and defeated.

Poor drinking water quality has plagued Puerto Rico for years. In 2015, more than 3.4 million Puerto Ricans, 99.5 percent of the island’s population, drank from water supply systems with violations under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Two years later, Hurricane Maria wiped out infrastructure, exacerbating Puerto Rico’s drinking water problems. The situation remains dire. According to EPA records, the public water system for Metro San Juan, for example, leads the country in SDWA violations. The system, which serves more than 1.1 million people, is the largest public water system on the agency’s list of “serious violators.”

The reasons behind the island’s water problems are varied, explains Osvaldo Rosario, an environmental chemist and longtime professor and researcher at the University of Puerto Rico. They include a history of widespread industrial pollution, sewage contamination due to underdeveloped water treatment infrastructure, poor land management, and a lack of enforcement of the SDWA and other environmental laws.

For instance, the EPA directly attributes 15 Superfund sites on the island to the pharmaceutical industry, which is one of Puerto Rico’s largest; it is also one of its biggest polluters of groundwater. The coal industry is another. Decades of coal ash pollution have exposed tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans to unsafe drinking water.

There is a silver lining, Rosario notes. “As people become more intolerant of the loss of quality of life, and the loss of quality of water, you begin hearing them raise their voices more and more.”

“People should be able to turn on their tap and drink the water that comes out. It’s that simple,” says Kelsey Hinton, who is the communications director for Community Water Center (CWC), a nonprofit with offices in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast. Yet, 11 years after California declared that access to safe, clean, and affordable water is a human right, about a million Californians still don’t have safe drinking water. And the problem disproportionately impacts small, rural communities of color, particularly Latine farmworker communities. In these areas, groundwater is often contaminated with agricultural runoff, which includes high levels of pesticides as well as nitrates due to fertilizer use or waste from large-scale livestock operations. Exposure to nitrates, which are colorless and odorless, has been linked to thyroid disease and cancer and has been known to cause pregnancy complications, birth defects, and “blue baby syndrome,” which can seriously threaten the health of infants.

“So you might be looking at a clean glass of water, and smelling it, and thinking that you're fine, but you could be really harming yourself without even knowing,” Hinton says. That’s where CWC comes in. The advocates help community members who have private wells access water testing while also helping residents on public supplies find information on their water quality—and in their own languages.

California’s climate whiplash between drought and flooding has made an already difficult situation worse. Very dry years have left communities with little to no drinking water, and less water can further concentrate the contaminants that are already present. Meanwhile, flooding can wash waste from ranches and dairy farms into water supplies, leading to bacterial contamination.