Jackie Wang, Nicole Tyau and Chelsea Rae Ybanez

News21

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This report is part of the Troubled Water project produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, a national investigative reporting project headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. TCPalm provided the local information.

CASCO, Wis. – Lynda Cochart did not realize her water was contaminated with coliform bacteria until she contracted MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant skin infection. She believed it came from the water in her well. “There’s no other way I could have gotten it,” she said.

A year later, a U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist tested her well and found total coliform bacteria at levels too dangerous to drink.

Cochart lives between two dairy farms with over 1,000 cows each. None of the bacteria the USDA found came from human feces, she said, so the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus most likely came from cow manure. The microbiologist told her to immediately stop drinking the water.

“He said, ‘What I found in your well is what I expect to find in a Third World country,’ ” Cochart recalled. When she told him she still needed to shower with that water, he advised, “Then keep your eyes closed and your mouth shut,” she said.

In California’s San Joaquin Valley, which grows nearly one-quarter of the nation’s food, fertilizer and manure spread on farms’ fields and orchards have contributed to unsafe nitrate levels in drinking water sources. A News21 analysis of Environmental Protection Agency records of community water systems shows 491 instances of unsafe nitrate amounts in many of the region’s 663 community water systems over the past 10 years.

The analysis shows the drinking water of millions of Americans living in or near farming communities across the country is contaminated by dangerous amounts of nitrates and coliform bacteria from fertilizer and manure widely used in agriculture. Community water systems serving over 2 million people were cited for excessive nitrate levels.

Treasure Coast violations

EPA data show 128,286 Treasure Coast residents get their water from a system that has tested positive for total coliform or E. coli in the last five years.

The largest one to test positive, Indian River County Utilities, which serves 110,000 people, found E. coli in two water samples in August 2015, test results show.

Utilities Director Vincent Burke placed customers under a boil-water alert after the county became aware of the test results. Four days later, the alert was lifted after additional testing found no E. coli.

Read more: For the complete Troubled Water project, visit troubledwater.news21.com.

Burke said the way some of the samples were taken, from fire hydrants in suburban areas, likely triggered a false-positive. He said he does not consider the areas that sampled positive for E. coli to be a systematic problem.

In response, the county installed six, locked, surgical stainless steel boxes for roughly $600 to $700 apiece that are designed to minimize the chance of triggering a false positive, Burke said.

The only violation not resulting from a false-positive test that Indian River County Utilities received in the last five years was in early 2016 when it submitted inadequate sampling, DEP spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller said in an email. Eric Charest, the utility's environmental compliance official, disputes that, saying the violation was issued in error.

How enforcement works

Water treatment plants are required to collect samples of their water monthly and submit them to an independent laboratory.

Those results are sent to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which checks whether they’re in compliance with federal drinking water standards.

If a water plant is out of compliance, they can face fines or an order to pay for water treatment improvements.

Stuart had a positive test for coliform in April 2016, according to its annual water quality report. After that, the city conducted a legally required investigation of the water source and found “no deficiencies,” said David Peters, Stuart’s assistant Public Works director. When the city re-tested the water from that location, it tested negative for coliform.

No major, public water systems on the Treasure Coast were cited for violating allowed nitrate levels in the last five years.

Nitrates, coliform

The 5,050 U.S. nitrate violations can largely be traced back to agricultural activity, but the 22,971 total coliform violations could be from either human or animal feces. In heavily farmed areas, much of the coliform bacteria can be attributed to manure.

Those records don’t cover the millions of private wells that many Americans use, which are left vulnerable to pollution of shallow groundwater in agricultural areas. People living farther away from agricultural areas also are vulnerable to farming pollution because contaminants can flow downstream in rivers and groundwater.

Farmers also have the option to use treated human waste as fertilizer. Though it is regulated, and cleaned to varying degrees, a TCPalm investigation found mismanagement of treated human waste presents a threat to waterways, even protected ones such as the Everglades, Florida’s springs and the Indian River Lagoon.

“Now you’re starting to see drinking water utilities spend a lot more money to be able to treat the water and keep their customers safe,” said Kristy Meyer, who oversees the Ohio Environmental Council’s water programs as the managing director of natural resources.

Two of the most prominent farming contaminants in water are nitrates and total coliform bacteria.

Nitrate-related contamination comes from fertilizer for crops and manure. The body digests nitrates and turns it into nitrites, which inhibits red blood cells’ ability to carry oxygen. The EPA limits nitrate levels to prevent infants from contracting blue baby syndrome, a potentially fatal disorder that deprives infants of oxygen. Research indicates that long-term exposure may affect adults as well.

For the past 20 years, National Cancer Institute researcher Mary Ward has been researching drinking water contaminants, focusing on nitrates and cancer risk. She followed a group of people in Iowa to do so. Though studies need to be repeated before drawing conclusions, she said her research suggests drinking water with high levels of nitrates increases the risk for gastrointestinal and urinary tract cancers.

Algae blooms

Fertilizer and manure not only increase nitrates in drinking water sources, but also fuel algae blooms that make water unsafe to drink and harder to treat. Cyanobacteria grows in phosphorous-heavy waters, which is primarily caused by manure and fertilizer runoff.

Also known as blue-green algae, cyanobacteria becomes problematic for drinking water systems in treatment facilities, which apply chemicals to kill the cyanobacteria. When the cell dies, it releases cyanotoxins, which can have health effects ranging from fever to pneumonia to death, according to the EPA.

“The blue-green algae is not regulated. There’s no EPA requirement to test for it,” said Bill Stowe, the CEO and general manager of Des Moines Water Works. “We test for it because we know from our experience that it is an adverse risk that is unregulated now, but smaller communities don’t have the resources or knowledge to do that.”

Blooms are often spotted in Lake Okeechobee, the second largest freshwater lake entirely in the continental U.S. The lake, a popular spot for boating and bass fishing, is also a drinking water source for Okeechobee and a backup for West Palm Beach.

Beyond the problems cyanotoxins create, the chemicals that kill the algae react with organic material in the water and create disinfection byproducts (DBPs), which increase cancer risk. The News21 analysis showed that water systems across the U.S. were cited over 28,000 times in the last decade for exceeding the DBP legal limit, exposing over 25 million people to unsafe levels of DBPs.

None of the major drinking water systems on the Treasure Coast were cited for exceeding allowed DBP levels nor failing to properly report test results.

Cyanotoxins and cyanobacteria “are significant risks for us because we increase our use of chlorine,” Stowe said. “When you increase one, you increase the likelihood of creating carcinogens.”

The other major source of water contamination from farming is total coliform bacteria from raw, untreated manure. When rain falls on recently fertilized fields, it pushes contaminants from the surface deeper into the soil, and eventually into groundwater. People can see and smell the brown water from their taps. But in the days before or after, water can continue to be contaminated even if the water runs clear.

Drinking water with total coliform bacteria can cause gastrointestinal illnesses, which are linked to diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea and fever.

Voluntary regulation

Thousands of dairy farmers around the U.S. store their cows’ manure in separate forms: liquid into a large pit and solids heaped into soft, dry mountains. Hog and chicken farmers also store vast amounts of manure to use later as fertilizer.

In Florida, Okeechobee and Lafayette counties lead the state in dairy production, according to Florida Dairy Farmers, an organization that promotes the state’s dairy industry.

Dairy farmers usually take the liquid manure and apply it to their fields where they grow corn and alfalfa to feed their cattle. But when a farmer applies too much manure for plants to absorb, the rest finds its way out.

The EPA started regulating what goes into federal waterways in the 1972 Clean Water Act amendments, but farming is exempt unless the EPA designates it a CAFO, or concentrated animal feeding operation.

Nutrient management plans are intended to hold farmers accountable for what they apply and how much of it. States decide if they require these plans and how detailed they need to be.

Farm money shapes policy

If an aquifer is contaminated, the private wells that draw water from it become contaminated too.

For over three decades, the American Farm Bureau Federation has pushed to exempt farming from environmental regulation. For example, fertilizer and manure are not regulated by the Clean Water Act because agricultural activities are considered “nonpoint source pollution,” which means it comes from many sources.

In 2015, a federal judge ruled that over-applied manure could be regulated as waste after examining a case brought against a Washington dairy.

The American Farm Bureau alone spent almost $3.8 million in lobbying nationally in the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The center also reported agribusiness organizations – which include farming, food production and stores – spent $127.5 million last year in lobbying the federal government.

Agriculture often points to septic tanks as the primary contributor to nitrate pollution. Yet according to the federal conservation service, manure from a dairy milking 200 cows produces as much nitrogen as is in the sewage from a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people.

George and DeGroot criticized the terms “corporate” and “factory farming,” arguing the words are only used as fuel for environmental activists to attack farms.

“What is factory farming?” DeGroot asked. “To me, I always considered that to be kind of a good thing, comparing me to a factory that is very organized, very smooth, efficient. That’s what it feels like to me.”

TCPalm reporter Lucas Daprile and News21 reporter Andrea Jaramillo contributed to this article.

Read more

For the complete Troubled Water project, visit troubledwater.news21.com.