Water Watch

WITH THE EXCEPTION of life-altering diseases or injuries, most adults cannot recall the countless times they were sick as kids. Viruses and colds flow through children like water from a tap. But in the case of Sam Lei ’26, it was water from a tap that would infect her with E. coli and inspire a potential future career.

When she was 6 years old, Lei, now an environmental sciences major at Santa Clara University, was living with her family in a small village in Guangdong, a province in southern China near Hong Kong. A cup of tea from her grandmother changed her life. While everyone else in her family felt fine, Lei fell violently ill for days from the contaminated water used to brew the tea.

“I remember feeling incredibly dizzy as my fever picked up and I started vomiting,” she says. The infection lasted days and kept her bedridden. “My family was so used to thinking that as long as the water was boiled, it was safe to drink,” says Lei. “I just finished throwing up and realized I was the only one who was affected by the water. Everybody else around me all drank the water, and were OK because they were used to it.”

E. coli wasn’t the only water risk. The village had a long history of growing food for the Chinese government and the military. To keep up with the demand, farmers deployed pesticides for the crops, which leached into the soil and contaminated the groundwater. “It was a lot of stress on the people,” says Lei. “They had to grow a lot of food, but not for themselves.”

FINDING A PATH

As a first-year student at Santa Clara, Lei didn’t know the path she wanted to follow other than she wanted to study climate science in some capacity. She reached out to her advisor Iris Stewart-Frey, professor of environmental studies and sciences, who told her about the Water and Climate Justice Lab, a program Stewart-Frey leads. The lab collaborates with underserved communities in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast.

These are places where drinking water is often threatened by pesticide contamination from the surrounding agricultural elds. The work struck a chord with Lei, who saw issues similar to the tainted water of her family’s village.

“I realized this is where I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to study,” she says.

The lab includes four faculty and seven undergraduate students who meet inside the Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation. Together, they test well water from throughout California’s famed agricultural regions. Recently, the team received a grant of $175,000 from the Rose Foundation. The Oakland-based nonprofit links environmental stewardship and community justice. The money supports work studying nitrates and other contaminants in the sub-basins of the Central Coast. The area includes the Salinas Valley—an agricultural region of flatlands running east from Monterey County’s Santa Lucia mountains, known as “the salad bowl of the world” for the greens, strawberries, and various vegetables grown there. Its lands were perhaps made most famous in the writing of native son John Steinbeck.

The use of nitrates is part of life and work on this land. Farmers in the Salinas Valley and other agriculture centers want to produce the healthiest vegetables they can to maximize profits, says Monterey County Farm Bureau Executive Director Norm Groot. That process includes using fertilizers and other additives to improve the soil and growing plants. Many of those fertilizers are beefed-up versions of what home gardeners purchase at the store, and can include nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.

“All living plants—no matter if they’re a food product or a shrub in your yard—all need nitrogen to create chlorophyll and create growth in the plant itself,” Groot says. “Plants need a wide variety of things to help them thrive, particularly in food supply where there is a need to produce a crop that makes a successful yield, so nitrogen is very similar to the vitamins we take to keep us healthy.” The relationship between commercial farms and rural communities hangs in a fine balance. There are workers and employers, dependent communities sharing one industry and landscape—and its resources. The effects of agriculture sometimes spill over.

While nitrogen is naturally occurring, its use in agriculture increases the risk that excess nitrogen can leach into drinking water. Consuming such water can heighten the likelihood a person will develop thyroid disease, some cancers, and birth defects. In California, where farmworkers live alongside the fi­elds that they work, this risk disproportionately affects poorer, rural communities. These are places where people may not have access to a second source of drinking water or the resources to ­fight if their water becomes polluted.

San Jerardo—a farmworker cooperative community in the Salinas Valley located a few miles outside of the city of Salinas—is one such area where nitrate levels have exceeded the maximum safety standard set by the state for decades. Recently, the community received funding for a new well. However, it, too, started to suffer from nitrate contamination. Community members have spoken to the press about their fear of the water that comes from their taps. While they still pay their water bills, they don’t use tap water to bathe, cook, or clean.

IN SEARCH OF DATA

The rules to keep the drinking water of rural communities safe in California are complicated. This is where SCU’s Water and Climate Justice Lab, and Lei’s work, can help.

Both state and regional agencies have created policies to control nitrate pollution. An order controlling discharge was ­first created in 2004, and has since been updated four times. Limits on nitrate pollution and their enforcement have been at the center of ongoing battles between environmentalists and agricultural industry groups.

“This process of regulating nitrates goes back 25 years, but the program hasn’t been effective in improving water quality or reducing nitrogen levels,” says Nathaniel Kane, executive director of Environmental Law Foundation and an attorney representing San Jerardo Cooperative Inc.

The most current iteration of the discharge order for Salinas Valley was developed in 2021. It was the first attempt by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board to put a numeric limit of how much synthetic nitrogen fertilizers growers can apply to their crops.

“We said those numbers should be stricter, but numeric limits are good,” Kane says.

Agricultural companies disagree, and appealed to a state board. They argued the limit was both too strict and not economically viable. Trade groups like the GrowerShipper Association and California Farm Bureau further argued that a 2018 state ruling supersedes the limit set by the regional water board. In 2023, the state board agreed with the appeal, saying the regional board wasn’t allowed to regulate nitrates by a numeric amount. According to Kane, the decision was in part due to a lack of data on actual levels of nitrates in the Salinas Valley.

“The law says there has to be a timeline for ending the pollution and it doesn’t have to be immediate, (but) while it’s being debated, thousands of people across the state are being impacted.”

To solve the numbers problem, in 2023 the state board decided to convene an expert panel of scientists to analyze the data and come up with a new plan. In the meantime, they forbade the regional water board from limiting synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.

“It’s been nearly two years now, and that expert panel has not yet convened and it could be years before they could get the panel together and incorporate an enforceable permit,” Kane says. “The law says there has to be a timeline for ending the pollution and it doesn’t have to be immediate, (but) while it’s being debated, thousands of people across the state are being impacted. In the meantime, pollution is going to continue, with the most acute risk being for newborns because elevated nitrogen levels affect the ability of blood to carry oxygen. It is also tied to cancers in some individuals.”

ACADEMICS IN COMMUNITY

Stewart-Fry learned how the dearth of data impacts advocacy from an attorney with the California Rural Legal Assistance, which works with Kane’s environmental law group on some issues. It was at an environmental conference where the lawyer heard Stewart-Fry speak and approached her about the need for data to inform and bolster advocacy efforts on behalf of communities experiencing water contamination from increased nitrate concentrations. The pair agreed to find ways to collaborate.

“What really appealed to me was their interest in helping communities and seeing their work have a tangible impact,” says that lawyer, Marisol Aguilar, deputy CEO and executive vice president for California Rural Legal Assistance. “Academia has a reputation for working in a silo or being a bit isolated, but their desire to truly understand the community needs in order to tailor their work was inspiring. They could very well do great work and research, but taking the extra step to partner with current advocacy efforts sets the water project apart as a true partner in the fight for justice.”

As a law firm, Aguilar says CRLA does not have the nuanced knowledge to understand technical reports around water contamination or to analyze the data and ascertain the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from those reports that will ultimately shape the response to water pollution. But SCU’s water lab does.

“It has been great to lean on their expertise in this area to help us, the communities, and state agencies better understand the data gaps and the impact of those gaps on addressing water contamination,” she says.

The work came together at the 2023 state water board hearing on whether regional rules could be applied to protect the farmworkers living in San Jerardo. Trying a new tactic, the legal assistance group argued that removing limits on the use of nitrogen fertilizer would disproportionally affect rural, mostly Hispanic farmworker communities in the Salinas Valley, a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The Water and Climate Justice Lab program compiled data that showed the numbers of wells exceeding the limit for nitrates overlayed with demographic data, which told a compelling story of how close these contaminated wells are to farmworker communities compared to more affluent, white communities, says Elias Rodriguez, an attorney with CRLA.

“Academia has a reputation for working in a silo or being a bit isolated, but their desire to truly understand the community needs in order to tailor their work was inspiring.”

“Their data allowed communities and their lawyers to craft a clearer picture of the discriminatory nature with which farmworkers are impacted by agricultural operations,” says Rodriguez. In part because of that information, the federal Environmental Protection Agency found that there was sufficient disparity to begin an investigation, which is on hold as the lawsuit continues.

BUILDING THE CASE, IN THE LAB

Sam Lei is on a six-hour journey searching for heavy metals under extreme solar heat. Inside the lab, Lei stands in front of an inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometer—a machine that eectively replicates a miniature sun by creating a superheated ball of plasma using a radio frequency that ignites argon gas inside a vacuum chamber.

Water samples collected by students in the eld are in tubes. A robotic arm brings them into the machine. They instantly vaporize as they hit the plasma. The vaporized samples pass by a strong magnet and the elements that make them up are pulled apart. Those that are lighter are pulled further than the ones that are heavier. In this way, the machine creates a spectrum of all the different elements detected in a given water sample.

“We use methods defined by the Environmental Protection Agency,” says environmental studies and sciences Assistant Professor Will Rush, who runs the lab in the Sobrato Campus. “There is a standard suite of chemicals we’re looking for and the standards we calibrate the machine against,” he says. “This is the same process government labs are using whenever they’re testing water samples, (but) we’re doing it at a private facility for those people who wouldn’t have access to those government resources.” The fine-tuned process is extremely accurate.

“Using this, we can detect contaminants in water down to a few parts per trillion, which means if you went out to a lake with an eyedropper and squeezed a few drops into the water, we could tell,” Rush says.

The entire process has one goal: Find problematic levels of heavy metals, like lead, arsenic and uranium in farming communities throughout California.

“We found a lot of uranium in some of the (Central Valley) samples,” Rush says. “We are mostly concerned about arsenic and uranium because those were two prominent metals that residents kept asking us about, so they clearly had a history with both these elements. When we tested them, we saw results four to five times higher than allowed.”

With the new grant funding, Stewart-Fry wants the lab’s data to have lasting implications on communities. “There are several smaller communities who rely on smaller, self-contained [water] systems who have been running into contamination issues that have lasted for a while,” she says. “After a period of years, these wells have more agricultural contaminants in them and a lot of fixing those issues hinges on getting enough data.”

This means the testing continues—and the data set that could help solve the clean water puzzle for some of California’s most vulnerable is being built on the Misson campus. “I’m hoping this project is at least one of the steps toward creating the water quality we all deserve,” Lei says.