Water System control: Public vs. Private

Rialto, CA to discuss outsourcing Water Department to American Water - http://goo.gl/OMhc

CDPH Questions Livingston's financial ability to provide safe water  - http://goo.gl/lCdP

Two of my recent Tweets are an excellent example of the issues facing water systems all over California and the entire country in regard to how those systems will continue to provide clean, safe drinking water to their customers in a world where providing that service gets ever costlier.

 

Rialto, CA, a Southern California city of 100,000 whose motto is “Bridge to Progress”, wants to outsource the operation of its drinking water, waste water, and recycled water systems to American Water (AWK), the largest investor owned water utility in the United States. Existing Rialto employees are concerned they will lose their jobs when the private operator takes control, and rate payers are worried that rates will increase – a lot. Both concerns are valid. Some, perhaps many, of those employees will indeed lose their jobs, no matter what anyone in the Rialto city government or American Water says. It’s just a fact, and everyone should acknowledge that. And rates will rise – how could they not? Rialto is selling off the operations because it’s costing them too much money and they can’t make ends meet. As elected officials, the City Council has a hard time raising rates to make ends meet, because it will mean the end to their political career. What better answer for them than to sell of the operations and let someone else be the bad guy for raising rates? And rates will need to be raised, not because American Water are greedy capitalists, but because water systems are expensive to operate, get more costly every day, and the money to run them has to come from the rate payers. It’s that simple. People have to get used to paying for water what its worth, something completely foreign to most Americans, who pay more for their entertainment in the form of a cable TV bill than they are willing to pay for life sustaining water. Go figure.

Livingston, CA, is located in California’s great central valley half way between Stockton and Fresno with a population of 14,000. The city motto is “The Last Stop”, and I have no idea what that means. But they are approaching their last stop in their operations of their water and waste water systems; combined budgets for those services are $1.6 million in the red, or $114 per capita, and the total is growing by the day. The situation is growing serious enough that the California Department of Public Health is concerned that the city may not be able to operate their water systems, and that the citizens of Livingston are in jeopardy of losing their source of safe, clean water. And all because those same citizens don’t think it’s their responsibility to pay for the guarantee of safe water; that they should not have to pay for water based on how much water they actually use; and that they should pay only a fraction (less than half) of what it would actually take to keep the utilities solvent. And by refusing to pay, they immediately put themselves and their children at risk: one of Livingston’s wells, a well used as a source of supply, exceeds the secondary Maximum Contaminant Level for manganese, which has been identified in recent studies as a potential cause of reduced intelligence. Perhaps that explains things.

Both of these cities are facing issues of how to pay for rising costs of providing drinking water and waste water services to their citizens. Each is going through pain and suffering, in a very real sense, in dealing with those issues and we can only hope that those same citizens will see the importance of supporting the very services that keep them alive.

Coliform Bacteria - How to Define "Safe" Water

How to Define "Safe" Water? Southern California study highlights the limits of bacteria used as fecal indicators - http://goo.gl/C9LF

I recently made reference to this headline in a Twitter post, and how true it is. For both water in the environment and drinking water, the EPA relies on the occurrence of fecal indicators, which are usually bacteria that can be found in sewage. These are often referred to as Coliform bacteria, or total Coliform. The 14th Edition of Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater defines total Coliform as a group of bacteria which is aerobic and facultative anaerobic, gram-negative, nonspore-forming, rod shaped bacteria which ferment lactose with gas formation within 48 hours at 35°C. This definition may define a particular type of bacteria, many of which may be found in mammalian intestinal tracts, and particularly in human intestinal tracts, but there are, unfortunately for us, many bacteria that fit this definition that can also exist quite nicely in the “outside world”, so to speak. When these bacteria are found in a water sample, it is looked upon by most of the regulatory community as an indication of possible fecal contamination of that water. But in fact, that may be very far from what is actually happening. It may just be indicative of a case where that bacterium is naturally prominent in the local area.

For example, I have seen test results from groundwater wells that are total Coliform positive, indicating a potential for fecal contamination. When the bacteria causing this sample of water to be total Coliform positive is analyzed further to see exactly what species of bacteria are present, it turned out to be Enterobacter cloacae. This bacterium does indeed occur in the intestinal tract of humans and other mammals. It also occurs in the guts of insects; in the soil; in surface and ground waters; on plants; and even inside of various fruits. The point here is that many of these bacteria that are used as indicators of potential fecal contamination can live almost anywhere. They are the epitome of an opportunistic life form: they don’t need oxygen, but can live in its presence; they can tolerate a wide range of temperatures, pH’s, moisture conditions, etc.; and they can use many sources of energy as a food source. Because of their flexibility, they can live almost anywhere, not just the mammalian gut, so their use as an indicator of fecal contamination of water is questionable. A better method would be to use a more specific group, such as fecal Coliform bacteria, or even a single organism, such as Escherichia coli, also known as E. coli. And, in fact, the regulatory community, with the EPA in the lead, is beginning to come around to this way of thinking as exhibited in new and pending regulations. The recently enacted Groundwater Rule uses E. coli or other very specific fecal organisms as the indicator; and the EPA is proposing changes to the Total Coliform Rule that also reflect the reality of the ubiquitous nature of Coliforms in the environment. That, in my opinion, is a trend worth furthering.