By Jim Hinch, Voice of San Diego
This story was first published by Voice of San Diego. Sign up for VOSD’s newsletters here.
Late last year, the Sweetwater Authority water agency made a startling announcement: There were elevated levels of toxic industrial chemicals in the reservoir supplying much of southern San Diego County’s drinking water.
Agency officials said they discovered the chemicals in October during a federally mandated round of testing at the Sweetwater Reservoir in Bonita. The chemicals, known as PFAS or “forever” chemicals, were once widely used in common household and industrial products and have been shown to cause cancer and other health problems in laboratory testing.
The agency hired a public relations firm and embarked on an outreach campaign to alert its customers about the issue. “Sweetwater Authority is committed to keeping you informed,” a PFAS information page on the agency’s website says.
But according to a former agency governing board member, Sweetwater Authority in fact has known for years it had a PFAS problem in its reservoir – and said nothing “because they didn’t want to expose themselves to liability or alarm the public.”
“The agency should be more transparent,” said Josie Calderon-Scott, who served on the agency’s governing board from 2016 to 2024. “They knew this problem existed for a long time before they notified the public.”
An agency spokesperson disputed Calderon-Scott’s claim, saying the agency first learned of PFAS chemicals in the reservoir in October, exactly as it said in its subsequent public announcement of the discovery in December.
“The Authority is committed to transparency and public safety,” said agency spokesperson Jenny Windle.
Calderon-Scott said she first learned of the presence of PFAS chemicals in Sweetwater Reservoir in 2021, when the chemicals were mentioned in an agency board meeting.
Calderon-Scott said she then did her own “research and looking at Sweetwater records” to verify that the chemicals had leached into the agency’s main drinking water reservoir.
Calderon-Scott said other board members, agency lawyers and staff employees discouraged her from disclosing the chemicals’ presence because, at the time, the agency was not required to share the information and doing so might draw unwanted scrutiny or alarm members of the public before the agency had time to plan a response or identify solutions.
Calderon-Scott said she was now speaking out because she was no longer a board member and felt able to discuss sensitive agency issues more openly. She said the agency’s yearslong delay before notifying the public prevented thousands of households, schools and businesses from taking action in response to the possible presence of toxic industrial chemicals in their drinking water.
“They should be doing research and looking at what [home filtration options] they can offer to residents here who don’t have a choice of where they get their water,” Calderon-Scott said. “Why wouldn’t they do more to protect our drinking water and to notify the public? That’s their main mission.”
Windle said Calderon-Scott was simply misinformed about when Sweetwater Authority first learned there were PFAS chemicals in Sweetwater Reservoir.
“I believe the information [Calderon-Scott] shared with you was in error,” Windle wrote in response to a list of questions emailed to the agency by Voice of San Diego. “It is possible she is referencing testing related to wells (not Sweetwater Reservoir), which was done prior to and in 2021. The Authority’s testing of the Sweetwater Reservoir began much later and has been in line with legal and state requirements, with the December 2024 public notification coinciding with updated E[nvironmental] P[rotection] A[agency] guidelines.”
Windle said that “Sweetwater is proactively addressing PFAS concerns and has implemented strategies to ensure community safety and water quality.”
Windle said the agency recently mixed water from an uncontaminated upstream reservoir into Sweetwater Reservoir, temporarily lowering PFAS levels in Sweetwater. And she said this month the agency began the process of hiring an engineering consultant to analyze possible treatment or mitigation solutions for PFAS in the reservoir.
Those steps, she said, are part of an ongoing agency effort to find a “long-term treatment solution.”
The agency’s most recent water quality report posted on its website, which provides water quality information from 2023, shows minimal or non-detectable levels of PFAS chemicals in several of the agency’s water sources, in particular a series of groundwater wells in National City where agency treatment procedures already were filtering out PFAS chemicals.
The report provides no information about PFAS levels in Sweetwater Reservoir. A note in the report states that, at the time, there was “no standard specified or no monitoring required for PFAS chemicals.”
A year later, those monitoring requirements changed when the Environmental Protection Agency approved new rules governing PFAS chemicals in the nation’s drinking water that required water agencies to test for the chemicals, notify the public if they are detected and install new treatment systems to remove or filter the chemicals if necessary. It was those rules that triggered the round of testing in October that led to the Sweetwater Authority’s December PFAS public disclosure.
Despite the agency’s public description of PFAS levels in its 2023 water quality report, internally agency leaders were concerned enough about the issue to join a class action lawsuit filed that year by a nationwide group of public water agencies seeking damages from several of the major chemical manufacturers who made and profited from PFAS products.
In August, 2023, agency board members voted unanimously to join the class action suit, which now is in the midst of a drawn-out settlement process. Water agencies joining the suit were required to submit testing results showing elevated PFAS levels in their drinking water systems.
Calderon-Scott said board members voted to join the suit because they knew there were elevated PFAS levels in Sweetwater’s water system. “There was some knowledge before we joined the lawsuit,” she said. “It was discussed before.”
Voice of San Diego asked Sweetwater Authority to provide the water quality test results that the agency submitted when joining the 2023 lawsuit.
Windle said the agency was unable to provide the test results because parts of the class action lawsuit are still being litigated and the test results remain protected by attorney-client privilege.
She said the agency has provided additional information about the class action suit on its informational website.
Since Sweetwater’s December announcement about PFAS levels, alarm in the community has risen, said Elizabeth Cox, who was elected last year to fill Calderon-Scott’s seat on the Sweetwater Board.
“I’m hearing from members of the community there’s definitely concern,” Cox said.
In March, Chula Vista Elementary School Board members grilled Sweetwater Authority representatives about whether schoolchildren were at risk of chemical exposure from drinking fountains. Agency representatives told board members that Sweetwater meets all current state and federal drinking water standards and is actively working on solving the PFAS issue.
Calderon-Scott said members of several community organizations she belongs to have “asked me for recommendations about what to do” about chemicals in their drinking water.
Calderon-Scott said she used to defend the agency’s water, encouraging constituents to drink tap water instead of buying bottled water.
Now, she said, “I want to say, ‘Don’t drink your tap water unless you protect yourself.’ I’m buying a lot more bottled water. I’m not drinking tap water.”
