Iowa town’s drinking water contamination returns after testing ends

John O'Connell holds a jar of tap water in his Nichols home. (Photo by Greg Boll/Special to Iowa Capital Dispatch)

NICHOLS, Iowa — Four years ago, John O’Connell was told the water at his house was finally safe to drink.

For more than a decade, an agricultural company had supplied him and some of his neighbors with bottled water while it attempted to clean the nitrate, herbicides and pesticides from the soil of its former location not far from O’Connell’s back yard.

In December 2018, the now-Colorado company sent him a letter with “good news.”

It said testing by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources “found the amount of nitrate in the drinking water is now below the Iowa drinking water standard,” indicating that there were no more potential health hazards from consuming it.

It said the deliveries of bottled water would cease in two weeks.

O’Connell has been drinking his tap water ever since. The problem is that the amount of nitrate in his water is now higher than it was in that final DNR test four years ago.

Nichols, a town of about 340, is among an unknown number of smaller communities in the state where residents utilize individual, shallow wells for their drinking water. Because they are so shallow – usually less than 30 feet deep – the wells are highly susceptible to contamination.

The DNR doesn’t maintain a list of similar Iowa towns, but department officials can recall several in the area of Nichols, which lies southeast of Iowa City.

One of them was Hills, about 13 miles from Nichols. The city switched to a municipal water supply about 10 years ago. The DNR had determined that a cache of fireworks – which had been buried in the town after a torrential storm soaked the explosives before its Fourth of July celebration – had contaminated the city’s groundwater. The new public water system cost about $5 million at the time.

But despite the DNR’s recommendation that Nichols also switch to a city-treated water system, the shallow wells remain.

A recent test of O’Connell’s water in Nichols by a county public health department — which he requested at the suggestion of Iowa Capital Dispatch — showed that the water has a nitrate concentration that exceeds federal safety standards.

Nitrate limits the amount of oxygen in blood and is particularly dangerous for infants who can suffer from “blue baby syndrome” if they consume too much. It has also been linked to cancers and thyroid disease and might be harmful to fetuses.

Years ago, the DNR had been testing O’Connell’s water every three months, and as soon as the water dipped below the standard, the DNR ceased the samplings. The DNR made that decision despite regular fluctuations in the nitrate concentrations and a recommendation from the testing company to continue the samplings.

“They told us it’s safe,” O’Connell said. “It’s excellent, crystal-clear water.”

Nichols is situated among crop fields in a low-lying area of southeast Iowa.

The water table beneath the surface of Nichols is so high that residents can ram pipes about 15 feet into the ground to pump water for their homes.

There was no need to hire a company and spend thousands of dollars to dig a new well. No surprises on the monthly water bill because of a running toilet.

There are no state regulations that govern how deep those wells need to be and no warning for new residents who might purchase those homes later.

About 25 years ago — after at least one of the town’s residents tested a well and found it was contaminated by farm chemicals — the Iowa Department of Natural Resources sampled most of the town’s wells and found that about 50 of them had nitrate concentrations that exceeded federal safety standards. About 18 of the residential wells had unsafe amounts of the herbicide alachlor, and four had excessive levels of the herbicide atrazine.

Long-term exposure to alachlor can damage the liver, kidneys, spleen and eyes and might cause cancer. Atrazine is a hormone disrupter that can negatively affect unborn children and has been linked to a variety of cancers.  

The DNR suspected two local agricultural suppliers of contaminating the groundwater. After one of them refused to aid the state’s investigation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepped in and declared Nichols a “Superfund site.”

That led to years of water sampling and soil mitigation. Residents with unsafe wells were supplied with filtration systems or bottled water.

Over time, the town’s collective memory of the water troubles has faded. The city clerk, for example, who has lived in Nichols for six years and married someone who grew up there, said in a recent interview he had no idea about the contamination.

And the recent buyer of a house that had the worst herbicide contamination also knew nothing about it.

The fact that neither of the two companies believed to be the sources of contamination were fined gnaws at some. One of the companies had closed its facility and razed all of its buildings about a decade before the DNR and EPA investigations.

“It had the look of a coverup,” said Darrell Mattingly, a former Nichols mayor and restaurant owner who now lives in nearby Muscatine.

A complacent community

Years before the DNR started looking into Nichols, there were indications of troubling groundwater pollution.

The south side of town was underwater in 1993, when repeated heavy rains caused widespread flooding in the Midwest.

As a result, Muscatine County health officials tested wells in the area for bacteria and nitrate and found that most of them had unsafe nitrate concentrations. But nothing was done.

“Most residents were not particularly alarmed by their nitrate problem,” the county health department later told the DNR.

The DNR launched a larger investigation into the contamination in March 1997 that included a citywide survey of the private wells. That was spurred by a resident’s complaint about well contamination.

As the state prepared for the testing, it sought support from the community that would be crucial for it to be successful. Representatives of the DNR and the state public health department met with the Nichols city council, its mayor and its Iowa House representative.

The efforts were publicized by local media, and in July 1997, the DNR held a town meeting that was attended by about two dozen residents and a lot of press. It lasted about 90 minutes. The public officials stressed that pregnant women and young children were most at risk.

The DNR had garnered enough support for the testing, and later in July, a team of state and county officials went door-to-door to sample the town’s water.

The results of those tests showed a definitive pattern of contamination — a plume that was apparently moving east to west through the town’s groundwater.

Monsanto, a prominent producer of the chemicals that had invaded the water, said it would tap into its Well Assistance Program to install charcoal filters at homes and would consider helping fund a public water system.

Those filters are effective at eliminating the threat of pesticides but do nothing for nitrate. Monsanto offered them to 24 residents, along with a two-year supply of filters and said it would retest the water once each year.

A community water supply could draw deeper, less-contaminated water and treat it more effectively, but it would cost millions. It was the surest way to solve the town’s water quality issues.

In the meantime, the DNR planned more sampling of the areas that were likely the source of contamination.

Most of the town’s sandpoint wells were completely unregulated by the state when they were installed. They are created by driving metal pipe that is typically less than 2 inches in diameter into the sandy, low-lying ground near rivers, where the water table is relatively close to the surface.

In October 1997, surveys were mailed to each house to gauge the level of interest in a public water supply. About 60% of those who responded said they favored the idea. But by that time, Monsanto had decided it was unlikely to contribute money to fund the project.

Some in town were miffed by the state’s insistence that they move forward with the project. In particular, the DNR officer who was the main liaison to the town had “a swagger to him that wasn’t a good swagger,” recalled Mattingly, the former mayor.

“I don’t know what he had up his craw, but he was an ass,” Mattingly said.

By February 1998, the plan had completely fizzled.

“It is my understanding that persons on the city council have suggested to (the DNR liaison) that he not return to Nichols,” an attorney who represented one of the companies suspected of contamination wrote to the DNR.

The town’s residents were ambivalent about their water, and the chief of the DNR’s Compliance and Enforcement Bureau noted that problem in an emailed response to the attorney:

“The citizens are not drinking safe water,” Michael Murphy, the DNR chief wrote. “The filters provided by Monsanto will remove pesticides; they do nothing for nitrate, and if not closely maintained, may exacerbate bacterial problems. That is not a permanent solution.”

Some in town figured they had been drinking the water all their lives and hadn’t suffered any negative health effects. Others knew the water was bad and didn’t drink it, and they didn’t want to spend a bunch of money to fix the problem.

“We just deal with it,” said Heather Bixby, who bought her house more than 20 years ago and raised four kids there. “I don’t want to worry about a high water bill.”

She first moved to town with her parents as a teen and later bought the house next door. Both homes are near one of the contaminated sites and until about four years ago, the family had their wells tested every three months to monitor the nitrate levels.

There’s a 1970s era Chevy Malibu in her front yard with a supercharger sticking out of the hood and a stripped-down mudding truck in the single-car garage. She and her husband, Dixon, like to spend weekends crawling tough terrain. On a recent weekend, the Bixbys hosted five of their grandchildren — including an infant — while some of their children went to Des Moines for a Rob Zombie concert.

Like some in town, they don’t have the financial means to pick up and leave just because the water is bad. Bixby said she buys packs of water from a Walmart in Muscatine to drink.

“I just don’t drink our water,” she said.

When Bixby’s previous shallow well became plugged by sediment, her husband pounded a new pipe into the ground.

Reluctant companies

For years before the state and federal investigations into Nichols’ groundwater contamination, it was apparent that something was amiss on the west side of town where the now-razed Amoco Cropmate site was located.

A local farmer had noted to the DNR that “not many weeds grow in this area.” O’Connell, the neighbor of Bixby who had lived there since 1984, had noticed it, too.

“The ground was pretty much dead for a long time,” he said. “Nothing would grow.”

Amoco had been bought by United Agri Products by the turn of the century, and it, along with Monsanto, largely complied with requests from the DNR to help remedy the situation.

Amoco had operated at the 7.5-acre site from 1967 to 1987, according to DNR records. Historical aerial photos of the site showed it had three buildings with three large holding tanks, 10 smaller tanks and trailer-mounted tanks that were thought to contain fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. 

The entire site was razed in 1987, and the DNR later found that “soil removal action taken when Cropmate left the site in 1987 was not as complete as initially indicated.”

United Agri Products indicated it had no records of significant spills of the products there.

“Small spills and leaks common to such an operation likely occurred, but were addressed by employees at the time of occurrence,” the company reported to the DNR.

About a year after the start of the DNR’s investigation — in February 1998 — United installed nine monitoring wells around the perimeter of the site to test for contaminants. 

Initial test results showed significant nitrate contamination of up to 419 parts per million. That is about 42 times the federal threshold of what is safe to drink – 10 parts per million.

Late that year, United began supplying bottled water to a total of 13 households in the southern part of town. Two residents who were offered the free water declined it. Those deliveries of water continued for 20 years as the company and the DNR waited for nitrate concentrations to decline to a safe level.

In May 2001, the company planted 900 hybrid poplar trees on the property to help clean the soil, at the direction of the EPA.

The next month, the EPA declared Nichols a Superfund site, which enabled the agency to take action against United Agri Products and Nichols Agriservice.

Nichols Agriservice, which still operates just north of the former Amoco site but is under different ownership, was initially reluctant to aid the DNR and EPA investigations and blamed nearby farmers and flooding for the town’s problems.

An attorney for Nichols Agriservice accused the DNR of targeting the company against the wishes of the town. The company is the largest employer in Nichols.

“No constructive action has been taken to address the groundwater contamination on the north part of Nichols,” the DNR wrote to the EPA in September 1998. “Nichols Agriservice, the potential responsible party for the Nichols Agriservice site, has resisted taking any meaningful action to investigate the extent and potential source(s) of the groundwater contamination.”

The company had been among the first in the state to install a concrete containment structure to hold its fertilizer and herbicide tanks to prevent spillage into the soil, although the DNR discovered notable cracks in the structure. It was built in 1987, when the state first required the containment structures.

In December 2000, nearly three years after the start of the investigations, Nichols Agriservice agreed to install four monitoring wells and subsequently constructed a new building to house its herbicide and fertilizer products.

Initial test results showed nitrate contaminations as high as 34 parts per million – about three times what is considered the safe limit.

In a November 2001 administrative agreement with the EPA, Nichols Agriservice said it would continue to monitor the groundwater and remove contaminated soil from its property. Four months later, in March 2002, the company excavated 300 tons of contaminated soil from its property — roughly 10 times more than it had expected to remove.

Nichols Agriservice was subsequently sold to new owners. The former Amoco Cropmate has been succeeded by at least two companies, most recently Nutrien Ag Solutions, of Loveland, Colorado.

Neither company was ultimately fined for contaminating the groundwater. It’s unclear how much they spent to mitigate the contaminations of their sites.

Matt Culp, a senior environmental specialist for the DNR’s contaminated sites division, said there were a confluence of uncommon factors that led to the groundwater contaminations. The facilities released the chemicals into the ground on the west side of town, where they flowed east with ease in a shallow, sandy aquifer with vulnerable, shallow wells.

“It’s an issue that’s kind of timeless,” Culp said. “These sites kind of resurface every once in a while.”

DNR testing ceases

The water quality issues in Nichols “would be less likely to exist if the state had a law which would require wells to be at least 30 feet deep,” a DNR officer noted early in the state’s investigation.

Culp disagrees. It’s true that shallower wells are more likely to be at risk of contamination, but there are other factors to consider.

“The real world is just more complicated than to say, ‘Thou shalt always drill to this depth,’” he said.

When the DNR assesses the susceptibility of community water supplies, it focuses on the thickness of the confining layer that lies between the land surface and the water aquifer. That layer is made of materials such as clay and shale that slow the flow of water.

Aquifers with confining layers thinner than 25 feet are considered highly susceptible to contamination. Aquifers have low susceptibility when the layers are at least 100 feet.

Alluvial aquifers like the one beneath Nichols do not have a confining layer. And sandpoint wells have no depth requirements under Iowa law.

“We don’t recommend people install them or use them for drinking water,” said Erik Day, who oversees the state’s private well permit program.

The state started to require permits to construct private wells about 20 years ago – long after the sandpoint wells of Nichols were driven into the ground – and wells in basements are no longer allowed.

Drilled wells are often required to be at least 40 feet deep but in certain situations can be as shallow as 20 feet.

The DNR does not track which towns rely primarily on sandpoint wells. Most residents of Fruitland, a town of about 950 that lies 12 miles southeast of Nichols, have them, and many of the wells have nitrate concentrations that exceed safety thresholds, according to county tests.

The DNR asked the EPA to take over the Nichols investigation and cleanup in late 1998 — about two years after it began. The EPA oversaw it for about 16 years, until all that remained was long-term monitoring of a handful of residential wells near the former Cropmate site. The EPA asked the DNR to resume its oversight role in 2014.

“Nitrate is the contaminant of concern, and concentrations and extent of the plume are stable and slowly declining for several sampling rounds,” Culp noted at the time in an email.

By 2016, just one of the residential wells had nitrate concentrations that exceeded the federal drinking water standard: John O’Connell’s.

That year, his quarterly tests showed concentrations of 11, 13, 11 and 9.3 parts per million.

The final test was below the 10 parts per million safety threshold, but the company that was testing the water, Cardno, recommended the testing continue.

“At this time, the limited data does not support any long-term trends related to seasonal variations,” the company wrote.

But five days after that letter, the DNR released Crop Production Services (now known as Nutrien Ag Solutions) from its testing requirements.

“Monitoring data compiled over the past year has demonstrated decreasing concentrations of nitrate in groundwater, and the amount of nitrate found is below the Iowa drinking water standard,” a DNR attorney wrote to the company.

But in September 2022, O’Connell’s water had nitrate in a concentration of 10.6 parts per million. Culp suspects that agricultural fertilizers that are applied to farmland near Nichols is a likely contributor to that contamination.

“If a well that was previously below – has finally fallen below the standard – starts to show a trend, or if it bumps up a little bit over 10, we don’t rush back in there,” Culp said. “We just don’t have the resources or the time to do that. What would draw us back into a situation like that would be that if there were reported to us a growing trend of nitrate, in this case, concentrations that were beginning to impact the town again.”

Municipal water unlikely

There has not been a concerted effort to retest the town’s wells for contamination. The citywide sampling conducted by the DNR 25 years ago in Nichols was expensive, time-consuming and required significant coordination with city officials and residents, DNR records show.

Private well owners in Iowa can often have their water tested by county officials for free, but only a handful have done so in Nichols in the four years since the DNR’s sampling ceased. The tests measure concentrations of nitrate and bacteria.

There were no tests of Nichols water by Muscatine County in 2019 or 2020, county records show. There were four tests in 2021, and one of them revealed unsafe nitrate levels in a well about one block south of O’Connell’s house. In 2022, there were two tests, including O’Connell’s that showed unsafe nitrate concentrations. County records did not include data from the last month and a half of that year.

It’s unlikely that Nichols will have municipal water service in the near future. Aeneas Schmitz, the city clerk for Nichols, said city leaders are focused on a sewer project that is expected to cost about $1.3 million and might begin this year. The work would include repairing sewer lines that have the potential to leak into the groundwater that residents drink.

Schmitz said there has been no serious talk about a municipal water system and that he didn’t know what it might cost to build one.

There are two municipal water supplies within about five miles to which Nichols could potentially connect. To the north is West Liberty, a city of about 3,800 that Water Superintendent Danny Goodale said lacks the capacity to provide water to Nichols. To the west is Lone Tree, a city of about 1,300. Lone Tree City Clerk Steph Dautremont said she didn’t know whether the town could provide water to Nichols. She said there have been no discussions about such an arrangement.

A similar project is underway in western Iowa to connect Lanesboro, a town of about 120 people, to Lake City water. It’s expected to cost about $3.7 million.

Nichols’ elected city leaders have not responded to multiple requests to comment for this article.

Iowa offers low-interest loans to fund municipal drinking water projects through its State Revolving Fund. The federal government also supplies grants for water infrastructure projects in small communities.

Still, many Nichols residents prefer the autonomy of their private wells. There are no monthly water bills, and the water costs depend on how much electricity it takes to operate the well pump, which can be less than $5 per month.

O’Connell said he was dismayed that the amount of nitrate in his water might now be higher than it was four years ago, but he will likely keep drinking it.

“I’m not overly concerned about the nitrate level being over the safe limit,” he said. “I still drink the water. I think it would be much worse for infants or young children but doubt it will bother me much.”

An investigative timeline

Documents from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chronicled their investigations into the contamination of Nichols’ drinking water:

LATE 1996 — DNR receives complaint of pesticide releases from Amoco Cropmate.

JANUARY 1997 — DNR field staff start investigation.

MAY 1997 — DNR meets with city officials to discuss city-wide sampling.

JULY 1997 — DNR holds a public meeting in Nichols to discuss sampling.

JULY 25-26, 1997 — City-wide sampling is conducted by the DNR and Muscatine County Health Department.

AUGUST 1997 — Test results show widespread well contamination.

SEPTEMBER 1997 — Monsanto collects 65 well samples for its independent testing. The results confirm what the DNR found.

OCTOBER 1997 — A city survey of residents shows 60% of residents favor a municipal water supply. Monsanto supplies filtration systems for about two dozen houses. The systems remove pesticides and herbicides but not nitrate.

FEBRUARY 1998 — Nine monitoring wells are installed around the perimeter of the former Cropmate site.

AUGUST 1998 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says Nichols will be evaluated as a potential Superfund site.

OCTOBER 1998 — The DNR asks EPA to take the lead in the investigation.

NOVEMBER 1998 — United Agri Products, Amoco’s successor, agrees to provide bottled water to 13 houses.

DECEMBER 2000 — Nichols Agriservice installs four monitoring wells and later starts construction on a new building to house herbicide and fertilizer products.

MAY 2001 — About 900 hybrid poplar trees are planted along southeastern and southerwestern property lines of Crop Mate site to help remove contaminants.

JUNE 2001 — EPA designates Nichols a Superfund site.

NOVEMBER 2001 — EPA issues administrative consent order for Nichols Agriservice to evaluate for soil contamination at the facility, remove contaminated soil and monitor the groundwater.

SEPTEMBER 2002 — EPA issues administrative consent order for former Crop Mate site for long-term groundwater monitoring and excavation of contaminated soil.

The post Town’s drinking water contamination returns after testing ends appeared first on Iowa Capital Dispatch.