City Urged to Scrutinize Its Water Supply

Saying he fears for the safety of the city’s water supply, the general manager of the county’s largest water district Tuesday urged the Oxnard City Council to begin a heightened monitoring program for all its water sources.

“This is just the prudent thing to do,” said Don Kendall, general manager of the Calleguas Municipal Water District.

Kendall said his suggestions for an extensive data-gathering effort stem from a discovery last year of extremely high levels of nitrate contamination in several of Oxnard’s city wells.

Nitrates can cause fatal oxygen deprivation in small children and can be harmful to the elderly.

Kendall’s presentation to the council, outlined in an eight-page proposal, drew a terse response from officials at the United Water Conservation District, whose water was named by some critics as a possible source of the contamination.

“We are puzzled why he is suggesting that the city do things we’ve already been doing for years . . . ,” United officials wrote in a faxed statement. “Overall, the monitoring program proposed by Mr. Kendall does not appear to be well thought out. . . . His whole list looks like a shotgun approach.”

There are several theories about where the nitrate contamination originated. They include the possibility that runoff from heavy agricultural use on the Oxnard Plain has penetrated the water supply. Nitrates come from human or animal waste and can be found in fertilizers.

Another notion--one that United calls absolutely incorrect--is that the district’s highly touted program to replenish the underground basins with water diverted from the Santa Clara River may be to blame. That theory is based on the premise that the river water, which is partially fed by a waste-water treatment plant before it reaches United’s Freeman Diversion Dam, is of poor quality.

United has vehemently denied any problems with the quality of the river water, saying the nitrate contamination is likely the result of Oxnard over-pumping its wells.

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United recently spent $75,000 on a study to prove it was not to blame for the contamination. The results of that study have been questioned by some environmental officials, most recently by the California Regional Water Quality Board, which expressed concern in a letter to United that some of the report’s conclusions are not supported by data in the report. Meanwhile, the question of precisely where the contamination came from remains unresolved.

Oxnard used to blend United water with supplies from the State Water Project, provided by the Calleguas district. Ever since the nitrate problem was discovered, Oxnard has been buying all of its domestic water from Calleguas at a discounted rate.

But the availability of that discounted surplus water is running out, and Kendall said the price will probably rise early in 1997, prompting Oxnard to return to blended water.

Among his recommendations to the City Council on Tuesday night, Kendall urged the city to obtain operations plans for all of Oxnard’s suppliers, namely his own district, the city’s wells and United. He told council members they should ask for watershed sanitary surveys and monthly compliance reports, as well as monthly checks for cryptosporidium, a bacterium that is potentially fatal to those with weakened immune systems.

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Kendall also suggested daily monitoring of the water that United uses to recharge the aquifers, specifically for levels of nitrate, sulfate and total dissolved solids--minerals--the three components that were unusually high in Oxnard’s wells.

But Kendall said he isn’t trying to blame United for Oxnard’s problem.

“I don’t want to give the impression we are pointing fingers at anyone,” Kendall said before Tuesday’s meeting. “All we are saying is we don’t see how the city can address its concerns unless they have enough data. I think that in our view the Freeman Diversion is an excellent project. Again we’re just concerned about the quality of the ground water supply.”

In a statement, United said it already has a comprehensive monitoring program in place, in some cases more stringent than that suggested by Kendall.

“He suggests the city monitor weekly for turbidity and chlorine residual, when in fact we must monitor every four hours,” officials said. “Some constituents he recommends frequent monitoring for are not found in our water, and longer intervals are adequate.”

Council members had little response to Kendall’s presentation, but Mayor Manuel Lopez said in an interview before the meeting that he has questions about what role, if any, the Freeman Diversion project may be having on the nitrate levels in Oxnard’s water.

“One of the concerns that has made kind of a mark in my mind is the sources of pollutants upstream from us,” Lopez said. “There is some waste water treatment that we should be concerned about. We have to either say there is nothing to it or say that there is. We have to decide one way or another.

“The purity of our water is very, very important.”