Teresa Blazer looks at Oregon Health Authority information about her home's water system in Shady Cove in May 2024.
Justin Higginbottom / JPR
Teresa Blazer has lived at Rogue Meadows for nine years. It’s a tidy mobile home park in the town of Shady Cove, just off the Rogue River where her retired husband regularly catches his daily limit of Chinook and coho salmon.
In February, by chance, Blazer found out she had been drinking dangerous levels of arsenic. She was asking a neighbor in a nearby park that shares well water about a boil notice she had received after a water line broke. The neighbor, instead, brought to her attention a different letter from park management that revealed their well water had above the federal legal limit of arsenic.
“They had received this notice in January about high arsenic. And I was like, ‘Well, our park never received that. I wonder why?’” says Blazer from her home, which today has stacks of printouts from the Oregon Health Authority’s website displayed on a table.
Blazer, who has that unique energy of a semi-retired mother with a son now out of the home, started digging into public data from the OHA about her water system.
“I found out as I looked through our backlogs of our community well… that we’ve had an ongoing arsenic problem for not just the last several months but actually for the last several years,” she says.
She’s spent days at this point going through records at her computer with her little chihuahua, Dia, sitting patiently by her side.
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She found out her park’s water system had a running annual average of arsenic — averages of water samples taken over the span of months — above the federal limit last year. The same goes for 2021 and 2020. Meanwhile, the park has had a spattering of individual tests above that limit going back to 2008.
Public notices are required by state rules if water contamination levels go above federal limits. But she says those notices have reached residents inconsistently at best. Residents should have been issued notices in 2020 and 2023 according to the OHA’s website. Blazer says she didn’t get those. Although she says she did receive notices in 2018 and 2021.
Blazer also found, again through the OHA’s website documenting the agency’s interaction with her park’s water system manager, that their well’s arsenic treatment system has been waiting on final approval by the OHA to show its effectiveness at removing the metal for the last three years.
She’s stopped filling Dia’s bowl with tap water.
“It’s definitely something that I have discussed with my own primary doctor, just in recent months since this started,” says Blazer. “And she’s very concerned about it. She advises me not to drink the water.”
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Drinking water with high levels of arsenic over the long term can cause cancer, skin lesions, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and impact neurological development in children.
Blazer lost so much confidence in the park managers and the OHA that in March she started testing the water out of her faucet herself. As she would find out, that was a good idea.
Teresa Blazer is seen at her home in Shady Cove.
Justin Higginbottom / JPR
She says a sample she took on March 16 had twice the legal limit of arsenic. By coincidence, her park’s water manager took a test on that same day. The results they sent to the OHA said otherwise.
“Their tests came back very much below the legal limit. So they were saying that our water was completely safe and there was nothing to worry about,” says Blazer.
Tony George, drinking water program coordinator for Jackson County, says he’s been working with the park owners on their arsenic problem.
Ron Kelso, the owner of one of three parks on the water system, says they are following state regulations to guarantee the safety of their water. Tom Jarmer, who owns Blazer’s park, didn’t respond for comment.
George, with Jackson County, says the conflicting results of that March 16 test are because the park’s water manager mistakenly took a sample from the wrong water source. After retesting, Blazer’s results were proven correct.
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George explains that ridding a water system of arsenic contamination can take some time.
“Arsenic isn’t an issue that’s an overnight fix,” says George. “[The park owners] have been working on their arsenic treatment system, they’ve upgraded it, they’ve spent tens of thousands over these last few months.”
George says that the Rogue Valley is known to have relatively high levels of arsenic in its geology.
“Arsenic, it’s naturally occurring. It’s found in the Earth’s crust,” he explains. “There’s certain areas like Southern Oregon that have an increased concentration of arsenic in the geology.”
George says that concentrations of arsenic can increase as wells are drawn down, like during drought, and that might be what’s happening in this case.
Concerns around state drinking water regulation
But the issues at Blazer’s home reveal wider concerns about the regulation of Oregon’s drinking water. The OHA doesn’t usually audit test samples or check to see if residences receive public notices — that is, unless a resident like Blazer makes waves.
That means it can be left to chance for the agency to come across mistakes or even wrongdoing. For example, in 2012, a Coos Bay and North Bend water treatment supervisor pleaded guilty to falsifying samples when testing for coliform bacteria in city water. That was stumbled upon by someone on the water board.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the OHA said the lack of legal access to private property and a lack of funding prohibit the agency from conducting independent monitoring for all public water systems. The statement also explains that it’s not feasible or practical for the OHA to check if all residents received required public notices.
Back at Rogue Meadows in Shady Cove, sometime after Blazer started raising issues with the OHA, all residents began getting notices about their water’s arsenic levels, likely thanks to her pressure on agencies and park owners.
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Carrie Youtsey, a 79-year-old resident who has lived at the park for decades, doesn’t think the notices go far enough. Although the letters note that there are health risks for long-term consumption of arsenic at levels above the federal limit, it also tells residents that this contamination is not an emergency and that residents should perform no corrective actions (Blazer says that park owners have told residents they can continue drinking the water).
Youtsey thinks the water has had an impact on older residents and she no longer trusts the park owners.
“All I know is that the person that’s in charge now? I wouldn’t trust him any further than I can spit and I don’t spit very far,” she says.
The OHA says they have an agreement with the park owners to finally get their arsenic treatment system approved, which will ensure arsenic levels are below the federal limit. In an emailed response the agency also says that a test in June showed no detectable levels of arsenic.
But Blazer, who at this point has mile-long email chains with the OHA, Jackson County and state senators, isn’t taking their word for it.
“I’m going to continue testing. I know it costs me a lot of money, but I’m going to continue to test and every time the water operator here does his own test, I’m going to be doing one right after that,” she says.
She says some residents have started chipping in for the costs of those tests. For them, Blazer’s filling a gap in the guarantee of clean drinking water — something they think the state should have done from the beginning.