Brad Filice

A report on the drinking water in Rifle, Colorado

<— A report on the water in Rifle, Colorado

Most jobs in Rifle, Colorado fall into two categories: day work at the drip gas mines or work on a small farm. And there’s work in Rifle. A few years ago the gas company found new stores of petroleum in the hills above town, attracting new money and new residents. It’s a town of 6,000 people, three schools, one big Wal*Mart and at least a dozen churches.

But the water in Rifle isn’t normal. It smells bad, and if you ask people here, they’ll offer plenty of different reasons.

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Outside the employment office a man told me they need to bleach the water tanks and do a deep cleaning. He knows the guy who built the tanks and pipes in the 1970s and doesn’t think they’ve been dredged in years. Inside the Sports Corner Saloon, a former surveyor for the gas company plainly told me, “there’s a whole lot of turbidity in that ground water…and Benzene, Toluene, you name it.”  Drip gas mining, the local industry, uses explosions in the ground to create mines for petroleum material in the Earth. The drip gas mining is right up where the town get’s their water. And the ground near Rifle is porous–anything that gets into the ground water in one area can spread for hundreds of square miles across the Colorado River basin.

The Colorado legislature has just confirmed the gas companies’ rights to continue using explosions, rather than much safer digging methods, against the wishes of state environmentalists groups.

Before drip gas mining, the locals mined for heavy metals like iron and lead, and it has been reported that the radioactive uranium tailings from these mines glow if you drive by them at night. The other local industry, small farming, uses one of the most common contaminants in American drinking water, animal waste for fertilization.

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Many locals use well water. But the municipal system isn’t much better. A mother of two explained that her brother, an employee at the water treatment plant, alerts her occasionally that “the whole plant smells like fish,” but others in town aren’t so lucky. They find out from signs on the freeway that read “don’t drink the water until further notice,” if they haven’t already noticed that the water is coming from the tap brown. The smell is something like burning mold and plastic, but the town administration says it’s fine to drink. The middle school doesn’t have any filtering system for the drinking fountains. Most of the people here have switched to buying bottled water at Wal*Mart or the “reverse osmosis station down at the car wash.” A few have whole house filtration systems, fewer have faucet mount systems or pitchers. This water problem isn’t new here, though. Steve on 9th’s water “tastes like sh*t” so he’s been getting water from his sisters house on 4th for 30 years. He carries it up the hill in milk bottles, boils it, and then puts it in the refrigerator before he uses any for consumption—whether for him or for his dogs.

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Rifle’s not the only town in America facing this kind of issue with the drinking water.

• The EPA reports over 500,000 violations of the clean water act in the last 5 years, and only 3% of them have been punished.

• 1 in 22 Americans, over 19 million, get sick every year from tap water according the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC)

• 40% of the nation’s drinking water systems have violated the EPA’s clean water standards at least once a year.

• The US Geological survey reports that 43 million Americans drink well water, and 40% of wells have at least one contaminant in violation of safe drinking water standards per year.

None of Rifle’s residents know how dangerous the water might be in their town. They don’t believe the mayor that it is safe, and in the Sportsman’s Saloon, they “ain’t giving that sh*t to any kids.” The owner of the tanning salon thinks it made her husband’s diabetes worse and gave her neighbor’s dog cancer, so she lugs cases of bottled water up to their apartment. Her husband is too weak to carry them, so she carries the cases one at a time. Steve says his brother’s dog died of Parvo from well water. A young mother’s children got sick the first week they moved here, and stayed sick for a month. She says “I hate to even bath them in it.”  Everyone has a story.

<--“There’s a whole lot of turbidity in that ground water…and Benzene,Toluene,you name it.”

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So when you bring up water quality in Rifle, you’re likely to get lots of stories. At first, everybody jokes. But if you ask them what’s happening to fix it, no one really knows.

This is when you see different emotions. No one seems to be helping them. No one is telling them what’s happening. No one can leave Rifle because the work is here, and they don’t have enough saved to find another place to live. Because the water jug from Wal*Mart I sent to P&G wasn’t appropriate for this kind of science, we really don’t know what is in the water in Rifle. But a few weeks after I visited, the state legislature announced a new multimillion-dollar project to clean up the city’s water system. All around the country, there are towns with water as bad as in Rifle, Colorado. And the people might joke about it on the street, but they are living with painful anxiety. Whether it has physically affected them or not, they believe it is causing disease and even death. They are reminded every time they turn on the tap, every single day. Many of these towns have situations that PUR filtration can fix, but few of the people in these towns know it. They are the kinds of towns that PUR filtration was made for. We can not only make their water better, we can really help them live better lives.

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