State won't punish city for crypto-reporting error

Baker City will have to correct an omission in the annual water quality report it mailed to its 4,400 customers this summer.

But the city apparently won’t be punished for failing to tell residents that two  water samples collected during 2010 contained cryptosporidium, a microorganism that can cause diarrhea and vomiting in healthy adults, and in rare cases can prove fatal for people with severely weakened immune systems.

The annual report, known as a Consumer Confidence Report, lists information about the city’s water system, including the results of tests for various contaminants.

The document, as the city noted in the most recent report, is required to alert consumers to “what substances are in their water and in what quantities.”

The federal Safe Water Drinking Act requires cities and other entities that manage public drinking water systems to send the report to their customers each year before July 1.

The annual report covers the previous year’s test results — the report Baker City mailed earlier this year deals with 2010 data.

The flaw in that report, said Bill Goss of the Oregon Drinking Water Program, is that it does not mention that during 2010 the city tested for, and found, crypto.

City officials admitted publicly in late October of this year that they did receive those positive test results, in early September of this year.

Of 24 water samples tested between April 2010 and March 2011, three contained a relatively small amount of crypto — one sample each from April 2010, October 2010 and January 2011.

The city’s most recent Consumer Confidence Report should have noted the two positive tests from 2010, Goss said.

“We ask that the city include that information in its next (report),” he said Monday.

The 2011 report, which the city must distribute by July 1, 2012, must mention the two positive crypto tests from 2010, and the single positive test from 2011.

The state does not intend to sanction the city for the error in this year’s report, Goss said.

He said he “misspoke” when he told the Herald earlier this month that the city was not required to report the positive crypto tests to the state or the public.

Goss said state officials make sure that cities distribute Consumer Confidence Reports each year, but the state doesn’t review those reports for accuracy.

Goss also clarified another aspect of Baker City’s crypto testing, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency required the city to conduct.

He said earlier this month that the city was not required to send to the state the test results as soon as they were received, but could instead send the entire batch of 24 lab reports once the one-year test regimen was finished.

In fact, Goss said, both federal law and an Oregon administrative rule require the city to send individual test reports as they’re received.

Baker City did not do so, he said.

Goss noted, however, that the Drinking Water Program does not have enough employees to review individual test results.

Even if the city had complied with the requirements and sent lab reports as they were received, the state would not have examined them until the one-year test schedule was completed.

Goss said the state has not been sending violation notices to cities that fail to forward individual test results, so Baker City will not face any sanctions for its failure to properly submit reports to the state.

In explaining why city officials did not include the two positive crypto tests in this year’s Consumer Confidence Report, Michelle Owen, the city’s public works director, said earlier this month that she reviewed some, but not all, of the 24 lab reports the city received during the April 2010-March 2011 testing period.

Each of the reports she looked at were among the 21 that didn’t detect crypto.

City officials said they learned in September of this year, when all 24 lab tests were combined, that the three reports did show the presence of crypto.

City Councilor Beverly Calder said she was surprised, and disappointed, to find out that councilors, as well as the public through the Consumer Confidence Report, had been misled.

“I expect that the staff reviews the (water sample) results and provides all relevant information to the council. Obviously something failed. There was extremely relevant information and it was not given to the council.”

Calder pointed out that the City Council discussed crypto several times after testing started in April 2010. The city plans to spend an estimated $2.5 million to install equipment that inactivates crypto by subjecting water to ultraviolet light — a project that would be required regardless of whether the tests found crypto.

The city’s deadline to install that equipment is Oct. 1, 2016.

“Every time crypto was discussed we should have had all pertinent information,” Calder said. “We were under the impression that every single test was zero (for crypto).”

Test-reporting gaffes notwithstanding, the most vital issue for the city, Calder said, is whether the presence of crypto in those three samples represents a health threat to people.

Based on information given to the Council by state officials, she doesn’t think so.

Two of the three water samples that tested positive contained a single crypto “oocyst” — the microscopic particle by which the parasite is spread — in 10 liters of water.

The third positive sample contained two oocysts.

Some studies predict an average person would have to ingest between 10 and 30 oocysts to be infected. Although a person with a severely compromised immune system — an AIDS patient, for instance, or a person undergoing cancer treatment — could become ill from fewer oocysts.

An article published in 1994 in the New England Journal of Medicine, chronicling the nation’s largest outbreak of illness caused by crypto, in 1993 in Milwaukee, Wis., noted that: “the peak concentration of oocysts in the water probably far exceeded one oocyst per liter.”

That equates to 10 oocysts per 10 liters — a concentration 5 to 10 times greater than in the three Baker City samples that tested positive.

A complicating factor is that there are several strains of crypto, some more infectious than others.

There never has been a confirmed case of crypto-related illness traced to Baker City’s drinking water.

Unlike some water contaminants such as arsenic, the federal government has not established a “maximum safe” concentration for crypto, below which there is no risk to human health, said Hanady Aisha Kader, who works at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 10 office in Seattle.

“Even a low level of cryptosporidium in water may be of concern for the severely immunocompromised because the illness can be life-threatening,” Kader wrote in an email.

However, estimating the health risk based on water sample tests such as those Baker City conducted from April 2010 through March 2011, is difficult, Goss said.

For one thing, the number of oocysts in a 10-liter sample of water represents only a “snapshot” of the water supply. Trying to extrapolate from those results how many oocysts an average person might take in over a period of time is not a precise calculation.

For another, lab tests don’t always detect every oocyst in a sample of water, Goss said.

Nor can labs distinguish between active and inactive oocysts, he said — and inactive oocysts don’t cause illness.

A technical bulletin from Oregon’s Office of Environmental Public Health puts it this way: “Direct measurement of numbers of oocysts in drinking water supplies is very difficult. The presence of oocysts does not directly translate into a health risk, and the absence of oocysts does not mean that there is no risk.”

Dave Leland, who manages the state’s Drinking Water Program, said the difficulty in quantifying the risk posed by crypto is one reason the EPA did not set a “safe” threshold for the parasite as it does for many other contaminants.

Instead, the federal agency requires that cities install equipment certified to inactivate a certain percentage of crypto.

Because crypto has been found in Baker City’s water, it must install equipment that inactivates at least 99.9 percent of oocysts (the minimum requirement, which could apply to others cities, is 99-percent inactivation).

Leland said Baker City’s test results — 21 of 24 samples showing no crypto, and the other three detecting either one or 2 oocysts — represents a “really low” threat of infection.

Considering that crypto is “ubiquitous” in surface water sources, Baker City’s numbers are “very low,” he said.

“Actually we would be surprised not to find any oocysts in surface water,” Leland said.

Baker City is unusual among Oregon cities in that the city doesn’t filter its drinking water.

Just three other cities also can meet federal drinking water standards without filtering water from surface sources such as streams — Portland, Bend and Reedsport.

Each of the four has high-quality water sources that come from areas where people rarely go, Leland said.

Like Portland’s well-known Bull Run watershed, on the west slopes of Mount Hood, Baker City’s 10,000-acre watershed, in the Elkhorn Mountains about 10 miles west of town, is a forested area closed to the public with rare exceptions (hunters, who have to obtain a permit from City Hall to enter the watershed, being the main one).

“These four cities must continue to meet very strict criteria to remain unfiltered,” Leland said. “They have to prove it every year.”

That proof includes a regular battery of tests, as well as an annual inspection by state officials.

Portland and Bend have completed their testing regimen for crypto, Leland said.

Portland tested a total of 10,000 liters of water (Baker City tested 240 liters) without detecting any crypto.

That’s the main reason Portland has requested an exemption from the crypto treatment requirement, Leland said.

Bend tested 24 samples — one contained a single crypto oocyst, and one contained two oocysts.

Reedsport is in the midst of its testing schedule, but so far it hasn’t found any oocysts, Leland said.

Although the EPA has no “safe” threshold for crypto, Goss said Oregon does not require cities to issue warnings to the public about crypto — a typical one is a “boil” order, as boiling water for one minute inactivates crypto — unless there is evidence of an illness outbreak traced to the water supply.

Positive tests, such as the three in Baker City, don’t trigger such warnings, Goss said.