LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Now that the Environmental Protection Agency is putting limits on some forever chemicals in drinking water, utilities across the country will have to take action. They've got five years to comply. Some water authorities have a head start. In California's Orange County, treatment plants to remove those chemicals, known as PFAS, are already up and running. NPR's Pien Huang checked it out.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Yorba Linda is a small, sunny city southeast of Los Angeles. It's known for being the birthplace of Richard Nixon. Is it also home to the largest PFAS water treatment plant of its kind?
TODD COLVIN: Currently, yes.
HUANG: In the world or the U.S. or both?
COLVIN: U.S.
HUANG: Todd Colvin is the chief water system operator at the Yorba Linda Water District. It provides drinking water to 80,000 people. In the last few years, construction took over the back of their parking lot. Now we're looking at a series of giant tanks.
COLVIN: You know what, it looks like a large propane cylinder, honestly - very large. It holds 4,500 gallons.
HUANG: Imagine a huge propane tank 10 feet tall, multiply that by 22, arrange them in a double row - not quite the length of a football field. That is the largest resin PFAS water treatment plant in the U.S. Inside each tank are special plastic beads that pull PFAS out of the water. Every gallon of water they pump from the ground passes through these tanks for treatment before going to people's homes. Mark Toy, the general manager at the Yorba Linda Water District, says they built this behemoth because they had a big PFAS problem.
MARK TOY: In February 2020, we had to take all our wells offline because the raw water that we were pulling from our wells was laden with PFAS.
HUANG: Some of these PFAS chemicals have been linked with various health problems. And in Yorba Linda, all 10 of their wells exceeded California's recommended PFAS levels. Those took effect in 2020, four years before national limits came down from the EPA. Toy says it's put California cities ahead of the curve.
TOY: And I thank my lucky stars we were on the front end of that.
HUANG: The next city over is Anaheim, best known as the home of Disneyland. On this trip, I skipped Space Mountain and went to a paved industrial lot a few miles away.
MIKE LYSTER: This would be about the size - a little bit larger than a basketball court.
HUANG: Mike Lyster is a spokesman for the city, which boasts the second-largest PFAS water treatment plant of its kind in the U.S.
LYSTER: So at a time, we were the largest. Kudos to Yorba Linda, and we're glad to see somebody else beat it because that means somebody else is addressing the issue.
HUANG: Back in 2020, when California's PFAS rules came into effect, Anaheim took three-quarters of its wells offline. Now, if the water has too much PFAS in it, a water utility can either switch to a source with no chemicals in it or filter them out. And at first, both Anaheim and Yorba Linda switched to mostly using water imported from northern California. But Lyster says that water costs twice as much.
LYSTER: Our expense went up about $2 million a month.
HUANG: So Anaheim fast-tracked construction of those big filtration tanks to get their wells back in action. And then, this past April, the EPA set national PFAS standards that are even stricter than California's. So Anaheim's remaining wells are now considered contaminated. Lyster says the city will expand its PFAS treatment capacity.
LYSTER: If we look at all 19 wells, we are looking at $200 million, so the largest water project in our utilities' history by dollar amount.
HUANG: Across Orange County, more than a hundred wells have exceeded the EPA's new standards. Fixing the problem could cost $1.8 billion over 30 years. Across the country, the EPA estimates thousands of water systems serving 100 million people have harmful levels of these chemicals in their drinking water.
But where is all this PFAS coming from? Jason Dadakis is an executive director at the Orange County Water District. It's a public agency that manages the groundwater and helps pay for the treatment plants. One culprit, he says, is the Santa Ana River.
JASON DADAKIS: We do believe that the river has historically been a source of PFAS to the groundwater basin. And our current testing still shows some low levels of PFAS in the river today.
HUANG: The Santa Ana River is almost 100 miles long. It flows through mountains, and canyons, the cities and suburbs of San Bernardino and Riverside. Dadakis says along the way, the river picks up PFAS.
DADAKIS: We find it in some of just the natural runoff that goes in the river during the winter, during storms. We also detect some PFAS coming out of the sewage treatment plants upstream.
HUANG: There's also the legacy of factories and military bases in the area. At least Orange County got a head start on solutions. But with the size of the PFAS problem across the country, its claims on having the largest PFAS treatment plants in the nation could soon be eclipsed.
Pien Huang, NPR News.
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