A3
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2019
The cost of clean water in Warm Springs
System puts
people’s health
in danger
By EMILY CURETON
Oregon Public Broadcasting
ity collaborative to central-
ize the administration of
customer billing, expertise
and supplies.
Engineer John Warren
said it’s been a win for water
quality, public health and
economic viability.
“We’ve seen communi-
ties that were hundreds of
thousands of dollars in the
red … and after a few years
they are hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars into the
black,” said Warren, a direc-
tor with the Alaska Native
Tribal Health Consortium .
It’s a nonprofi t focused
on meeting health needs,
which estimates roughly 30
villages in rural Alaska still
don’t have running water
and fl ushing toilets. While
Warren credited the non-
profi t with creating sustain-
ability in small-scale sys-
tems, the biggest downside
to utility collectivization, he
said, is cutting off service
for non payment.
“In a very small commu-
nity, it’s diffi cult. It may be
that you’re required to cut
off your uncle, or your aunt,
or your mother. In a lot of
cases that doesn’t happen,
or becomes very diffi cult to
do,” he said.
There are cultural reasons
Native people resist and
resent paying for water, said
Marleah LaBelle, the proj-
ect manager for the health
consortium.
“Historically, tribes lived
on the land and were a part
of the environment. We
had our own uses of water,
through subsistence or per-
sonal use and also a con-
nection through ceremony,”
she said. “This notion that
it’s something to be paid for,
something that somebody
owns, is really different.”
Resistance
In a kitchen on the Warm
Springs reservation, the idea
of paying to get clean water
exasperates
81-year-old
tribal member Arlita Rhoan.
“How are they going
to charge water to people”
who can barely afford their
homes, Rhoan exclaimed.
She said her home won’t
be paid off until 2023, even
though it hasn’t had any sig-
nifi cant updates in decades.
She’s skeptical of what’s in
the pipes, and dislikes the
tap water’s chlorine smell.
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Deschutes risks costly EPA
fi nes. According to a state-
ment from the agency, its
“enforcement and compli-
ance role is geared to fi rst
working with the tribal gov-
ernments … through offer-
ing technical assistance.”
However, “If attempts to
fi x acknowledged problems
using this approach fail to
produce desired results, per-
sistent problems frequently
prompt additional enforce-
ment actions.”
10TH STREET
Alert
Last year, though, plant
operators didn’t add the
right chemicals to sepa-
rate solids from the water.
According to public records,
it took four days before an
alert with highly technical
language notifi ed residents
anything had gone wrong.
The next month, a boil water
notice went out 24 hours
after a main line break, and
lasted eight days before
crews could get the supplies
and assistance needed to fi x
the line.
“The main line is old.
We are very fortunate that it
hasn’t happened again. But
honestly it could,” Macy
said. “We have to get our
plant to operate the best that
it can until we replace it.”
In September , the tribe got
about $1 million in federal
grants to deal with the immi-
nent threat of a system fail-
ure. Macy estimated actually
replacing the plant will cost
$30 million to $40 million, a
fi gure daunting for any rural
community. One key differ-
ence between Warm Springs
and the town down the road
is that in most places, 80%
of the water fund to main-
tain infrastructure comes
from billing customers. On
the reservation, that revenue
stream is next to nil. Only
businesses pay for water.
“What we could do dif-
ferently is we could look at
charging a user fee,” Macy
said.
Charging tribal com-
munities for water when
the system isn’t tied in to
a city is uncommon and
often unpopular, but it’s not
entirely without precedent.
In Alaska, 27 tribes
recently formed a rural util-
Emily Cureton/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Warm Springs water treatment plant engineer Ron Palmer
stands by the ox bow, a side channel dug into the Deschutes
River, where surface water is collected for treatment.
always begin with a drink
and a prayer.
“We are the oldest water
right in the Deschutes Basin,
back to time immemorial.”
That seniority hasn’t
stopped diversions upriver,
where most of the fl ow is
redirected before it reaches
the reservation, its aging
infrastructure and those
struggling with the cost of
replacing it.
Meanwhile, the tribe’s
water treatment plant on the
ASTORIA
TRANSIT CENTER
Miles downstream from
the towns and irrigation dis-
tricts of c entral Oregon, the
Deschutes River becomes
tap water for thousands of
people in Warm Springs.
The reservation has the
largest community water
system operated by a tribe
in the Pacifi c Northwest.
Defi ciencies at the treat-
ment plant risk people’s
health and violate the Safe
Drinking Water Act, accord-
ing to the U.S. Environmen-
tal Protection Agency. But
upgrades will be hugely
expensive, and how to pay
for them hits a nerve in the
community.
At the nearly 40-year-old
facility, leaky pipes elbow
their way through a dark
room where the treatment
process begins.
“If we open this hatch
right here, there’d be noth-
ing but water down in this
pit … nothing but river
water,” said plant engineer
Ron Palmer.
He shined a fl ashlight at
the metal grate under his
feet. The overhead lights
were off, he said, because
of an electrical surge a week
earlier.
“Us and a house are
the only ones out here on
the power circuit,” Palmer
explained as his narrow
beam passed over a pipe
stamped “POTABLE.”
The plant has problems
documented for years, many
stemming from the chal-
lenges of treating surface
water and removing river
sediment. Two major out-
ages last year heightened
scrutiny by the EPA, which
sent a violation notice to
the Confederated Tribes of
Warm Springs in March.
The t ribe sent back a plan of
action, but until the signifi -
cant issues are corrected, the
plant is out of compliance
with federal law that pro-
tects public water sources.
Warm Springs Chief
Operating Offi cer Alyssa
Macy said the water is safe
to drink.
“Now, if there are inci-
dents where we have turbid-
ity issues or other issues with
the plant, we are required by
the EPA to give notice to the
community — and we have
done that,” Macy said.
“We just go ahead and use
it,” she said. “Your food
smells, tastes like — I don’t
care how much seasoning
you put it in, it still tastes
like that water.”
Rhoan grew up collect-
ing water from springs and
creeks on the reservation. She
remembers a little black bug
was her original indicator of
water quality; if the bug lived
in the stream, it was good
to drink. She said she has
watched over the decades as
water quality degrades with
upstream development and
climate change.
“Suppose they start
charging us for water, then
our water really gets con-
taminated. Then what?” she
asked.
She drinks from the tap
using her one special cof-
fee cup, which stays perched
on a window sill above the
kitchen sink. Rhoan said she
ignored the latest boil water
notices, and to her, a famil-
iar source is always more
trustworthy than a foreign
one.
“I buy water when we’re
traveling. I will not trust
other cities’ water,” she said.
Bend quit taking its drink-
ing water straight out of the
Deschutes before Rhoan
was born. A hundred years
ago, fl ooding reservoirs for
irrigation let loose contam-
inants, and health offi cials
declared the river unfi t for
human consumption.
The tribe advocates for
its treaty rights through a
Natural Resources Depart-
ment, with Bobby Brunoe at
its head.
“To this day people are
very aware of water and
how important it is to us,
because it’s in all our cer-
emonies and embedded in
our culture,” Brunoe said,
describing how ceremonies
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