Reporter finds efforts to monitor groundwater contamination leave much to be desired

By Leah Beth Ward
Yakima Herald-Republic

Last January, the Washington State Health Department put out a brief press release announcing that nitrate levels at an elementary school in rural Central Washington tested two-times over the federal limit considered safe. The school had a private well.

Bottled water was trucked in and the problem was resolved by drilling a deeper well. The matter was seemingly put to rest by health officials.

But if the school had problems, I surmised that other rural homes with private wells might also be contaminated. This heavily agricultural region is ringed with dairies, which spray liquid manure on crops. Dairy manure is one major source of nitrate pollution. Poverty is high, septic systems are old and wells are shallow. As many as 30,000 people, mostly farmworkers, depend on private wells.

The project, “Hidden wells, dirty water,” became a shoe-leather and Open Records Act investigation that found a failure of government regulatory practices, heavy influence on the state legislature by the dairy industry and an impasse among state agencies responsible for clean water – both drinking and groundwater.

Much of the data came from a groundwater study performed by a private, nonprofit organization several years earlier that had been all but ignored. The data was organized in a software program I didn’t know how to use. We are a 38,000-circulation newspaper without a lot of resources.

As a result, I had to print out well data and reconstruct my own spreadsheet showing the latitude and longitude of contaminated wells. The data didn’t use physical addresses or names of well owners because the researchers had promised them confidentiality. There is a lot of fear among poor rural residents that the government will take their water away.

But the latitude and longitude were enough for our information technology people to help me build a Google interactive map that allows readers to enter their address and determine if they live near a contaminated well.

Finding human stories wasn’t easy. There is a high level of mistrust among rural Latinos toward the media, and I didn’t want to devalue their properties. But I enlisted support from local health outreach workers who knocked on doors with me to find people with problem wells.

Through Open Records Act requests – about 10 of them – I obtained never-before-seen urgent memos written by lower-level state employees who had been trying to get something done about the wells without success. These records armed me for key interviews with agency heads who report to the governor. They also created “secret” support and help for my work with key sources in those agencies.

Once I began to piece together the narrative picture, the obstacles began to slip away. But like a lot of projects, I went up some blind alleys, such as believing for a time that schools were covering up water problems.

Technology was an obstacle for a time as well because the paper couldn’t afford the ArcView software that would have allowed us to build a better map than Google, with more data and geographical and geological information.

It pays to learn up front the laws governing drinking and groundwater quality. I found lots of competing jurisdictions and conflicting understandings of who was responsible for what. That, of course, became part of the story.

Leah Beth Ward is a reporter at the Yakima Herald-Republic in Washington.