Majority Latino city endures years of toxic water in health ‘crisis’ (2024)

State and federal records show that in each of the last 16 years, drinking water samples tested in this 17,400-person town near the Texas border have contained illegally high levels of arsenic, including in 2016 when levels reached five times the legal limit.

Naturally occurring in the soil in New Mexico, arsenic seeps into the groundwater used for drinking. In water, arsenic has no taste, odor or color — but can be removed with treatment. Over time, it can cause a variety of health problems, including cancer, diabetes and heart disease, endangering the lives of people in this low-income and overwhelmingly Latino community.

The Environmental Protection Agency has assessed Sunland Park’s water operator, the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority (CRRUA), with 120 “violation points” over the last five years, a calculation based both on the number of times the utility has violated federal standards and the level of seriousness of the violations. For utilities serving at least 10,000 people that recently had a health-related violation, the tally was second only to the 182 points collected by Jackson, Miss., where problems with the drinking water earned national attention in 2022. Sunland Park has even more issues the EPA considers unresolved than Jackson.

Anne Nigra, a professor at Columbia University who focuses on the impacts of arsenic-ladled water on Latino communities and reviewed the utility’s federally mandated water reports, called the situation in the New Mexico town “a public health crisis.”

Experts who reviewed Joe Monge’s medical records said his levels were elevated but not extraordinarily so. A single lab test, however, cannot measure long-term effects of arsenic exposure, and Rosana Monge, 65, and others in this town are convinced the elevated arsenic levels are responsible for health problems including skin lesions and fetal development complications. Despite their pleas at public meetings and elsewhere, they believe the utility has not been taking the issue seriously.

It is not entirely clear why arsenic has been allowed to seep into the water in Sunland Park year after year, though problems with infrastructure, lax enforcement of regulations and general inattention to the problem appear to be contributing factors.

Fifty years after the Safe Drinking Water Act established legal limits for toxins such as arsenic in Americans’ drinking water, some public health experts and former EPA officials say politics and money have played an outsize role in how the agency determines maximum levels of contaminants allowed in drinking water. What’s more, they say some communities across the country repeatedly exceed those levels: More than 7,400 public utilities reported a violation every quarter for the last three years, according to an analysis of the EPA’s enforcement and compliance database.

Those most impacted, experts say, are low-income areas and communities of color, such as Sunland Park, which is 94 percent Latino. Studies show Latinos are exposed to arsenic in their drinking water at higher rates than any other racial or ethnic group, even when controlling for socioeconomic factors. Similarly, Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by lead contamination in their water.

The resulting picture, experts say, is that the world’s wealthiest nation fails to consistently deliver to all its residents one of the most fundamental necessities for human life: safe drinking water.

“Why haven’t we solved these problems? Because we don’t want to,” said Ronnie Levin, a Harvard professor who was a scientist at the EPA for more than 30 years. “It’s shameful.”

Udell Vigil, a spokesman for Sunland Park’s utility, said in a statement the system is challenged by aging infrastructure, new development in the area and a statewide shortage of certified utility operators. He declined to answer questions about arsenic due to the potential of a lawsuit over the issue.

EPA spokesman Nick Conger said ensuring safe drinking water is a “top priority” for the agency, which is making enforcement of the legal limits a priority, and new federal infrastructure investments will help.

In Sunland Park, residents’ complaints mounted in December when caustic soda, used to treat water for arsenic, was dumped into the water at unsafe levels as a result of what officials said was a plant malfunction. CRRUA’s director abruptly retired, and the state’s environmental agency levied a fine.

“I think they were mismanaging at a significant level,” said John Rhoderick, director of the New Mexico Environmental Department’s water protection division, adding that the system is now “on notice.”

Some residents have now taken the first steps toward filing a lawsuit.

“This is a classic example of government at every level failing to protect public health for an inexcusable period of time,” said Erik Olson, a former attorney for the EPA who is now a senior health strategist and advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s outrageous it has been allowed to continue for well over a decade.”

Naturally-occurring arsenic exists in pockets throughout the United States and particularly in the southwest, requiring municipalities to set up treatment plants that use varying techniques and chemicals to separate the arsenic from the water and extract it. The utility serving Sunland Park and the nearby Santa Teresa neighborhood has four such plants.

Because arsenic is completely soluble and easily absorbed by the body, standard tests for water quality sold in stores do not typically detect it, and its range of damage to the human body is expansive. Chronic exposure can cause cancer of the skin, lung and bladder, among other kinds, as well as heart disease. It’s also associated with cognitive impairment, kidney disease, diabetes and lasting harm to fetal development. Ana Navas-Acien, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, called arsenic “one of the most potent carcinogens” found in the environment.

The EPA’s history of regulating arsenic is typical of how the agency has dealt with other water toxins, former EPA officials said. After the Safe Drinking Water Act was first adopted in 1974, the arsenic level was set at 50 parts per billion (ppb) — or 50 micrograms of arsenic per liter of water. Even then, former officials said evidence had emerged from the scientific community demonstrating its detrimental effects on the human body and suggesting public health would be improved by a lower level.

The level was lowered once, in 2001, to 10 ppb, but some experts believe it is still too high.

While the EPA sets federal toxin levels, nearly all states — including New Mexico — bear the responsibility for monitoring public water utilities and flagging violations, officials said. States can also set their own contaminant standards as long as they are not looser than the EPA’s. New Jersey and New Hampshire have the level at 5 ppb for their states, as do some European countries.

“There was a lot of pressure from industry,” said James Elder, who worked at the EPA for 24 years and headed its Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water in the early 1990s, where he advocated for lowering toxin limits. “The history of arsenic is exemplary of how tortuous the process still is in regulating contaminants in drinking water.”

Regularly consuming drinking water with just 3 ppb of arsenic creates a 1 in 1,000 increased risk of bladder or lung cancer, according to a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report. “With carcinogens … there is basically no safe limit,” said Sydney Evans, a senior science analyst at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research and advocacy group.

Sunland Park was founded in 1984, a decade after the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Bordering Texas and Mexico, the town lies in stark desert terrain among beige mountains dotted with brush. The city is laid out as a collection of neighborhoods that dot Mcnu*tt Road like a string of pearls lying alongside the Mexico border. Cargo trains wind through the tall mountains, as does a multimillion-dollar wall along the international border, erected from private funds raised by an organization chaired by former Trump White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

A limestone cross that glimmers in the near-constant sun here sits atop Mount Cristo Rey, a popular mountain for pilgrims in this Catholic-dominant region. It overlooks a city where many residents say they have been concerned about the water for decades.

In the 1980s, the worry was a landfill and its accompanying incinerator that burned medical supply waste from New Mexico and El Paso. The residents said their health suffered from the water and air pollution it created.

Monge and her husband were among a group of more than a hundred residents, called the Concerned Citizens of Sunland Park, who spoke out against a permit for the landfill.

The protesters sold gorditas and other homemade food to pay for trips to the state’s capitol in Santa Fe to protest the permit. They blocked traffic and called for public hearings. Newspapers around this time reported children who were born with brain defects, as well as worms and high lead levels in tap water. Finally, in 1991, the incinerator company’s permit was denied and the state required the landfill to install a new liner to protect groundwater.

Today, Sunland Park remains a working-class community where 84 percent speak Spanish at home, with more than double the national poverty and uninsured rates, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In a place with few professional opportunities for young people, some of the loudest voices about the water quality are the same voices that spoke up more than 30 years ago: what’s left of the Concerned Citizens protesters — retirees who are no longer working full-time and know the city’s history.

“Back then the people were stronger. Nowadays, many people are older and we can’t even carry the gallons” of store-bought water, said Elvia Acevedo, 65, in her living room where cases of bottled water are stacked. “I want to fight and get justice. For those who can no longer.”

It’s not entirely clear how the problems with arsenic in the water began, but state and federal databases show violations piled up for years, even before several regional utilities were combined to form CRRUA in 2009.

At the state level, the New Mexico Environment Department is controlled by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat elected in 2018. Matt Maez, a spokesman for the department, said the state has struggled to fix the city’s water because of budget cuts enacted under Lujan Grisham’s Republican predecessor, Susana Martinez.

Several of CRRUA’s seven board members, most of whom are elected officials, declined to comment. One, Alberto Jaramillo, who is also a city councilor, told The Washington Post he only recently learned about the area’s history of elevated arsenic. But he said he drinks the tap water and believes it is safe.

“I haven’t read what arsenic does to your body over time, but if somebody says that I got cancer because of this or that, I want to see the proof,” Jaramillo said.

Sunland Park residents woke up one morning at the end of November and turned on their sink faucets and shower heads to see a slimy, oily goo emerging from their taps. Residents reported the problem immediately but that day passed, and then the next, and CRRUA said nothing. Finally, on the fourth day, CRRUA and Doña Ana County issued a notice that the water was not safe to drink, and had not been for days.

Local officials doled out bottled water. State officials investigated, discovering that the machine in charge of releasing caustic soda, used to treat arsenic, had malfunctioned, causing an unhealthy amount of pH buildup in the water. In all, residents were without potable water for six days.

As state officials investigated, they found something else: The water had illegally high levels of arsenic. Three of the four arsenic plants “have been offline and bypassed for over a year,” the state said in a violation notice it sent to CRRUA, which did not account for the arsenic violations occurring in prior years.

CRRUA’s executive director, Brent Westmoreland, retired in December. He did not respond to requests for comment.

In January, the New Mexico Environmental Department issued a report that found 58 “significant deficiencies” in CRRUA’s water system. The state is now cracking down, levying a $251,580 fine in March. Then, a top environmental official sent a letter to the state’s attorney general and auditor urging an investigation into CRRUA for “potential violations of consumer protection laws and possible waste, fraud, and abuse of state and federal funds.”

State investigators also paid an unannounced visit to Sunland Park on March 15 and took 10 water samples, finding one was above legal arsenic limits. The state has now demanded CRRUA turn over records related to its water testing.

CRRUA is appealing the state’s administrative order. In a letter to the state, CRRUA board chair Susana Chaparro said the utility was proud of “ongoing improvements” since January. “What we were handed did not occur overnight and cannot be fixed overnight,” she said.

The water utility also recently hired its first public information officer to communicate with its customers. Its website is now regularly updated, and notices have begun to go out with Spanish translations. CRRUA recently posted a video demonstrating how its staff samples water to test for arsenic. The utility’s interim executive director Juan Carlos Crosby said in a county board meeting on April 9 that CRRUA was more than halfway through correcting the deficiencies identified by the state and is now testing for arsenic twice a month.

Eric Lopez, a consultant who recently began overseeing the arsenic plants, said CRRUA is also adding new technology to be able to monitor the water’s chemical and contaminant levels remotely.

But many residents are unconvinced that change will come without more dramatic intervention from state or federal agencies. Resident Lorenzo Villescas, 68, said officials had a playbook for what was happening in Sunland Park.

“I compare this to Flint,” he said, referring to the Michigan city where problems with lead in the water sparked national outrage 10 years ago this month. There, “the authorities denied it was bad, too.”

Residents have been pleased by the new attention from state and local officials in recent months but have wondered if it’s only come about because newer and wealthier residents in growing developments around the city have also now been affected.

“They discovered this now because the water came out bad in the new areas, where the rich people live,” said Isabel Santos, 65, a former interim mayor and city council member who was also once president of the Concerned Citizens of Sunland Park and now wants to revive the group.

Villescas has lesions on his skin and wonders if it is from drinking the arsenic-laden water. So does Maria Lucero, 66, whose family helped found this town but is now looking to move out because of the water.

Irene Rodriguez, 62, is surrounded by cancer: Her husband, her mother and three of her four siblings were diagnosed with it. They only recently started to wonder if their water was to blame. She has stopped even brushing her teeth with it.

Ofelia Garcia, 81, said many of her friends and neighbors have died of thyroid cancer. “A lot of people down here die from cancer. But we don’t know if it’s from the water for sure,” she said.

At a ranch full of high-end horses that compete at a local racetrack, horses kept dying, said a former employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending the utility. He said he quit and now only gives the horses he raises bottled drinking water.

Acevedo said she drank the tap water here for a long time, including when she was pregnant with her son Mikey. She said he was born with Down syndrome as well as thyroid problems, asthma and diabetes, while her other two children, who were born in California before she moved to Sunland Park, were born healthy.

In March, three friends of hers who were born and raised in Sunland Park died of cancer. She blames the water.

“People are dying from this,” she said. “We’re paying for something that’s poisoning us.”

With residents distrustful of the utility, it is common in Sunland Park to see water bottles piled up in garbage cans and stacked by the dozens in living rooms and kitchens. Some people drive to nearby El Paso for water while others say they boil the water before use, which experts said actually concentrates arsenic rather than removing it.

In a door-to-door survey conducted by Empowerment Congress in March, 317 out of 490 people said they were not using the tap water to drink or cook.

About 11 years ago, Monge’s husband developed prostate and thyroid cancer. Several years ago, he began to hallucinate and grew weak. She took him from doctor to doctor in hopes of finding out what was wrong. His February death was officially attributed to Parkinson’s disease. A bugler played “Taps” before the decorated Vietnam War veteran was buried on a crisp March morning in Arlington National Cemetery.

Monge, who has lived in town for over 40 years, now wonders if other conditions in her family — one of her daughters was born premature at two pounds, another one developed a tumor in her late teens, while Monge herself was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — could be related to prolonged arsenic exposure.

Experts say arsenic can cause many of the conditions cited by residents though such diseases are also rampant in low-income communities of color even without dangerous water conditions. “There’s a lot of parts of injustice in poor, Latino communities. … But how do you just nail down one? How do you just say — look, is this the thing that’s killing you?” asked Israel Chávez, a lawyer representing residents.

After Monge spoke at the CRRUA board meeting about her late husband, Vivian Fuller, a field organizer for Empowerment Congress, cast aside her pre-written notes for public comments, and issued a new plea to the board members.

“People are dying. Our community is dying,” she said. “There’s nothing that we can do unless you all help us.”