The Environmental Working Group came out with a report in December that found hexvalent chromium (chromium-6) in many US cities, including San Jose. We had a Water District Board meeting the next day that said the District hadn't found any in its tests from our water treatment plants. However, the District went back through its records and informed us that it had subsequently found testing records for groundwater. The treatment plants only get surface water, but groundwater could be contaminated from natural sources, and that appears to be the case here. Making things worse, the state has significantly reduced the proposed safety level to one that's extremely low, 0.02 parts per billion, something that most labs can't even test.
The good news, such as it is, is that the proposed levels are only proposed, there is no existing level, the District is not in violation of any regulation, and the levels that are ultimately considered appropriate may not turn out to be as strict as first thought.
On the other hand, the levels found in groundwater were a median of 1 part per billion, with a high of 23 parts per billion. Obviously, that's a far cry from .02 ppb. We don't know where the official level will ultimately end up, but we may have a problem.
Anyway, we talked about it at the February 1 meeting, Item 5 (although not until near the end of that item, close to the end of the day).
Unrelated item from that same meeting was Item 4, water treatment. It occurred to me when I looked at the map that our west side treated water system could be connected fairly easily to the Hetch Hetchy water system in Mountain View, and since Hetch Hetchy is connected to our east side treatment system in Milpitas, we'd have a (somewhat) interconnected treated water system. Might be something worth investigating.
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