PORTLAND, Ore. — The Story spent five nights last week reporting on the groundwater crisis in eastern Oregon's Lower Umatilla Basin, where decades of commercial food production have contaminated the aquifer that sits below the region, infusing it with dangerous levels of nitrates that threaten the health of thousands of residents who rely on private wells for drinking water.
The problem isn't unique to Morrow and Umatilla counties — there are similarly polluted groundwater regions in the southern Willamette Valley and northeast Malheur County — but those specific high-pollution zones don't paint the full picture either.
After last week's stories aired, a retired Department of Environmental Quality official reached out about groundwater contamination as a broader issue, arguing that there are a lot more people throughout Oregon and beyond who don't know they might be at risk.
Catch up on last week's four stories and watch the combined special below:
'People are simply not aware'
Commercial and private wells all tap into groundwater beneath the soil, but in many parts of Oregon, that groundwater has become polluted with nitrates, a byproduct of industrial farming and food production. The tricky part is that nitrates don't affect the appearance, taste or smell of water, even when they're present in concentrations that are dangerous to human health.
Greg Pettit spent nearly four decades with the Oregon DEQ, including working as the manager of the agency's water quality monitoring section and later the administrator of the laboratory environmental assessment division. He reached out to KGW and said he thinks there are thousands of additional Oregonians who are drinking contaminated water and don't know it.
"I think that the awareness of the problem is very limited," he said. "And that's part of the problem. People (are) simply not aware that this is a problem."
The lack of awareness has persisted for decades. Pettit has been tracking groundwater contamination since the mid-1980s, when he applied for a federal Environmental Protection Agency grant that funded an initial statewide survey of 380 wells.
The study found extensive contamination, he said, with the worst of it in the Umatilla Basin, the Malheur Basin and the lower Willamette Valley. Nitrates were the most common contaminant, but in some cases, there were also unsafe levels of herbicides and pesticides including ethylene dibromide, which had already been banned as a carcinogen.
Those results led to the adoption of the Oregon Groundwater Quality Protection Act in 1989, which requires the state to protect its groundwater. When areas of high contamination are found, the act also requires the state to put rules in place to clean things up, designating the sites as Groundwater Management Areas.
Weak enforcement
As The Story's reporting last week showed, the pollution in Morrow and Umatilla counties has only gotten worse, even though the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area was put in place decades ago. Pettit said it comes down to politics — most pollution comes from the farming industry, which is very good at pushing back on regulators.
"The political pressure of the (agriculture) lobby in this state and the lack of very specific regulatory drivers to do something — between those two things, nobody's been willing to stick their neck out there and take that issue on directly," he said.
The issue is one of environmental justice, he added, because most of the people being exposed to the worst of the groundwater contamination are people who lack political power and have only a limited voice in their community, often in communities dominated by the agricultural industry.
"It's not a comfortable position to get out and start complaining about agriculture," Pettit said. "You can see the position that puts them in, so there's very little for the people that are being affected. There's a lot of things that make it very hard for them to get the problem changed."
There are also no specific laws focused on testing wells after they're already put in place, so many Oregonians may not realize they're drinking contaminated water. The DEQ and Oregon Health Authority both recommend testing, but Pettit said people only tend to do it in places here the contamination is already well-known, such as the Lower Umatilla Basin. But while there are an estimated 12,000 people at risk in that area, there are about 700,000 people who depend on well water statewide.
"You get in other areas of the state and people think if this water tastes, looks and smells great, it's good water," he said. "So I'm sure that there are — definitely, there are thousands — probably tens of thousands of people in this state drinking from wells that have contaminants in them."
Pettit said various regional groundwater studies during his time at DEQ showed contamination in some wells outside of the designated management areas, in places such as Prineville, Lapine, Medford, the northern Willamette Valley and parts of the coast.
"Not as many wells, and maybe not as high concentrations, but they have contaminants above drinking water standards," he said.
Time to crack down
The groundwater issue hasn't been a primary concern or priority for DEQ, Pettit said, even though he and other top officials have tried to keep it at the forefront. Instead, water pollution lost its urgency in a blizzard of other priorities and federal programs that the agency carries out or monitors — in part because those other programs have very specific requirements.
"If those requirements are not met, there's the ability for people to come in and sue the EPA or DEQ to actually implement those programs the way they're supposed to be implemented," he said. "There's no equivalent overriding federal driver for groundwater."
The federal Safe Drinking Water Act only covers public water supplies, Pettit said, so private well owners are mainly on their own. And the federal Clean Water Act largely ignores groundwater, he added, unless the contamination is coming from a specific place like a landfill.
Now is the time for the state to return its focus to groundwater, he said, and to all the people drinking from potentially contaminated wells statewide. And the best way to tackle the issue is to finally implement mandatory rules that restrict farms and other industries from polluting the aquifers below the ground.
"There's tons of data that shows that specific regulatory programs, when implemented, made drastic improvements in our environmental quality," he said — but the key factor in the success of those programs is that they were mandatory, he added.
"If you look at what has worked historically for the last 50 years, when there have been major new requirements through one of these federal acts implemented," he said, "we can measure fairly drastic improvements in air and water quality — I'm talking about one-tenth the contamination that was there before."