How SF keeps drinking water ‘pristine’ amid statewide cleanliness issues

Thanks to Hetch Hetchy , The City has some of the cleanest tap water across California.

But for nearly 1 million people statewide, healthy drinking water remains out of reach.

That’s according to the California Water Resources Control Board’s fourth annual Drinking Water Needs Assessment report, which evaluated the health of the state’s drinking water.

The report, released late last month, provides key data points for the state’s SAFER program. The 2019 Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience effort attempts to establish strategies ensuring all Californians receive safe and affordable drinking water as quickly as possible.

Last year, 385 of the state’s water systems — serving 913,000 Californians, about 2% of the state’s population — failed to meet drinking-water standards, meaning they didn’t provide water “which is at all times pure, wholesome, and potable.” This could indicate the water in those systems violated standards for chemicals or bacteria, or didn’t meet treatment or monitoring requirements.

More than half of those failing systems serve disadvantaged populations, while two-thirds of them serve communities where the majority of residents are people of color.

Meanwhile, 1.54 million Californians received their drinking water from systems the report identified as in danger of failing.

Experts and advocates who spoke to The Examiner unanimously used one word to describe the most pertinent solution to address the water issues plaguing the state: consolidation.

In other words, getting big municipalities with access to dense water resources to absorb smaller, struggling water systems.

“Consolidation is a hugely important potential solution,” Laura Feinstein, program director at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, told The Examiner. “Larger systems just have just a bigger pool of revenue that they’re pulling from every year, and they can pool some of these common costs and spread them across more customers.”

There are currently more than 7,000 water systems throughout the state, which is, in itself, a major part of the problem, the experts said, and why 2% of the population lacks clean drinking water access.

“In the state of California, we have over 7,000 water systems and around 3,000 community water systems,” said Andrew Altevogt, deputy director with the State Water Resources Board. “If you compare that to other utility sectors, it’s literally orders of magnitude larger.”

“Most of what we see with failing water systems are issues with small water systems,” said Altevogt, who worked on the Drinking Water Needs Assessment report. “The very small ones are the ones that have the most problems because it’s really hard to run a water system and all the treatment and all the things that need to happen when you don’t have that economy of scale and you don’t have the support for a larger rate base.”

“You just don’t have the money even to have trained and licensed engineers running the system,” Feinstein said. “You don’t have the money to drill the deep wells that access the higher-quality aquifers.”

San Francisco is, in some ways, the poster child for the difference it makes when a large population is served by a consolidated water system. The City’s water is managed by a single public utility, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission .

“The big thing is that San Francisco has one water system,” Feinstein said. “It has a lot of resources, it’s highly professionally run, they’re able to maintain their treatment systems well, and, therefore, they’re able to consistently deliver safe drinking water.”

And, for nearly 100 years, San Franciscans have received their drinking water almost exclusively from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a rich snowmelt-fed body of water in the Yosemite Valley.

“Having Hetch Hetchy is really the primary reason [San Francisco has clean water],” Altevogt said. “That’s unique, having a dedicated reservoir that feeds all the way down and is allowed for growth.”

“The watershed is a national park, and so it’s undeveloped ... and the water is pretty pristine,” said Richard Luthy, a professor of environmental engineering and water quality at Stanford University. “It’s disinfected on its way to us, but other than that there’s no other treatment. We’re kind of unique like that.”

San Francisco is one of just five water systems that has not received a failing report since the state began evaluating them in 2017.

The City is in a unique position even compared to some of the other counties in the state. Los Angeles County is home to more than 200 water systems, many of which are small and have their own issues, Altevogt said.

Luthy said that while the Needs Assessment report didn’t outline anything new, it “serves to document more or less what the problem is, and also how the state funding program is hoping to help address that.”

But the costs of those fixes remain a significant hurdle for water advocates. The report estimated that it will cost roughly $16 billion over the next five years to ensure safe and affordable water to all Californians.

“One of the things that the report points out is we don’t have the funding to do it,” Altevogt said. “Even combining all the funding that we know about, combining all the water systems that we know about, we still have that huge gap.”

But Altevogt said that since SAFER was established and his team began releasing these reports, their data has made a difference.

Since the state started the SAFER program, the water board has distributed more than $831 million in grants for drinking-water projects in California’s disadvantaged communities. Since 2019, more than 2,590 failing water systems have returned to compliance with drinking-water standards, benefiting more than 2 million people.

“I think we’ve been able to make some headway in terms of getting systems back in compliance, doing consolidations — but there’s still a lot to be done,” he said. “It certainly helped to daylight what the issues are.”

Luthy said that even though San Franciscans have had the luxury of never having to worry about clean drinking water, that doesn’t mean they should ignore the issue.

“The reality is, it’s a statewide problem,” he said. “We’re all going to have to chip in, such as through our taxes through the state, to help solve this. So it may not be a problem that’s facing you right now, but you have an obligation, as a citizen of the state, to provide safe, adequate, wholesome water for all the people of the state. We have what’s called a human right to water. It’s a statement, and it’s an aspiration. And we all have to recognize that.”