Kimberlee has lived at the Friendly Acres Mobile Home Park in Red Bluff, California for over 30 years.
She has plenty of fond memories of this place, near a bend in the Sacramento River and surrounded by walnut and olive tree fields in Tehama County. Just behind the property is a ranch that’s home to the famous bucking bull Red Rock, who she remembers as a calf, depicted in the rodeo movie “8 Seconds.”
For decades she drank water from her tap without thinking twice.
“Our water here tastes wonderful. I mean, it's well water. It's cold. It's good water. Other than finding out this,” says Kimberlee, who wants to use only her first name because she fears retaliation from the owners of the park.
She and other residents learned in March that their well water had high levels of PFAS. Those are chemicals used to make everything from nonstick cookware to water-resistant clothing to cleaning products. Officials from the California State Water Resources Control Board held a meeting for tenants that month, warning them about the contamination and providing bottled water.
Kimberlee says that meeting was the first time she had ever heard about PFAS. That’s despite Friendly Acres having high levels for at least four years, according to public data.
In 2019, California passed legislation that created requirements for water system managers at locations monitored for certain kinds of PFAS. For example, if a lab detects the presence of PFOA — one of thousands of PFAS analytes — then that result needs to go into the water system’s yearly consumer confidence report.
If the PFOA contamination is high enough, then the water source needs to be closed or treated. And if that doesn’t happen, residents need to be notified. The law lists a number of ways that notification can happen: a direct letter or email or a posting in a public area.
According to Kimberlee, that didn’t happen at Friendly Acres until this year. According to the law, she should have been notified years ago. The Tehama County Environmental Health Department confirmed that meeting by state officials in March was the first for the park.
Anna Reade, who researches PFAS at the environmental non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, says long-term contamination at Friendly Acres could cause serious health effects.
“So if you think about PFOA or PFOS, which is what we're talking about in these wells, they have what we call half-lives of four, five, 10 years. What that means is that it takes years for a PFAS that we ingest to eventually come out,” says Reade.
The non-profit has found PFAS contamination often occurs in low-income areas. A report this year by the group says around 69% of disadvantaged communities in California — a state designation related to public water systems — have PFAS in their water and nearly a quarter of those communities have the highest levels of contamination in the state. Reade says that a possible reason for this is that low-income communities are more likely to live near sources of PFAS like industrial areas or landfills.
That’s why California began monitoring the well at Friendly Acres. It’s near a site long used for industrial manufacturing, currently owned by food packaging maker Reynolds Consumer Products, with high PFAS levels in its groundwater. A spokesperson for Reynolds says no connection between that site and Friendly Acres’ contamination is known and that the company removed PFAS from their manufacturing process in 2022.
Reade says that PFAS molecules are highly mobile in groundwater.
“They move really easily from the source out and that's why we’re finding PFAS everywhere we look,” she says.
The residents at Friendly Acres now know the dangers of drinking their water. That’s not the case at Pinegrove Mobile Home and RV Park in Crescent City, according to one resident.
Tenants warned a resident named Holly about the water when she moved in 13 years ago.
“We know it's horrible because it tastes bad. It looks horrible. My hair is never clean. I actually do the final rinse in the sink with bottled water,” says Holly, who also wants to use only her first name because she fears repercussions from the property’s owners.
But no one has come by to tell her about PFAS or its dangers, even though her park has had levels requiring by law that she at least be notified. Public monitoring data shows high contamination from 2019 to 2021. There’s no public testing data for the park for the last few years.
Holly says she drinks her tap water if it’s boiled. But boiling doesn’t get rid of PFAS.
She says she’s had cancer four times — three since living at Pinegrove.
Former California State Assembly member and the author of California’s PFAS bill, Cristina Garcia, says her legislation was an effort to quickly address contamination without waiting for regulations.
“So it's like, what can I get today that moves the ball forward and starts to empower consumers to not only make educated choices but to start to pressure their water providers,” says Garcia.
But she recognizes that pressure doesn’t work as well if residents don’t know if their water is contaminated in the first place. She says bigger water providers, who have more resources and more to lose, are more likely to follow the rules compared to smaller companies like mobile home parks.
Last month the Environmental Protection Agency set the first-ever national limit, called a maximum contaminant level, for certain kinds of PFAS. Public water systems have three years to test for the chemicals and five years to lower PFAS levels in their water if they’re found to be over the maximum contaminant level.
New federal funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will provide some $1 billion dollars to address contamination across the country. The EPA says the rule will reduce exposure to PFAS for around 100 million people and prevent thousands of deaths.
But experts say that dealing with contamination at small water systems, like Friendly Acres or Pinegrove, can be costly for operators who lack the resources of large water systems.
“Small water systems in general have a lot of trouble with water quality,” says Greg Pierce, director of the Human Right to Water Solutions Lab at University of California, Los Angeles. “You really want economies of scale for the water system. That's what makes it most efficient.”
Pierce says it will be a massive undertaking to enforce the new federal PFAS rules at places like mobile home parks.
Those small water systems in California may have already had trouble following state laws.
Back at Friendly Acres, Kimberlee says she’s thought about whether PFAS has impacted her health. She also has asthma and carries around a portable breathing apparatus. But she says she’s not overly concerned about the contamination. She’s more worried about her rent going up again.
“I mean, at this point, we're already saturated,” she says.
