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The specialty item is available from November 6–12 at Steve's Hot Dogs on South Grand.

Thousands of competitors at the American Royal Livestock Show in Kansas City each year show their best livestock. The competition includes children as young as 7.

St. Louis businessman Mohammed Almuttan had a lot to lose, and lose it he has. In 2017, Almuttan was one of 35 individuals indicted in Missouri for their roles in a criminal conspiracy involving the trafficking of synthetic marijuana and cigarettes.

U.S. House Republicans are continuing to use government spending bills to engage in culture war battles, with legislation debated during the past week that would ban pride flags on some federal buildings, strip funding from a new museum for Latino history and target certain LGBTQ and racial equity policies and programs. The hot-button provisions in […]

The post U.S. House GOP in spending bills takes aim at federal LGBTQ, racial equity policies appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The Umbrella Shop is not yet open for business on South Grand, and there’s certainly no sign suggesting otherwise. Yet when the doors are open to the street, people just keep stopping by. 

Theater impresarios Colin Healy and Bradley Rohlf opened their new dive bar/community theater in the space that previously held the late, great Way Out Club, and while the place is still but a few months old, they're already using it to solve one of St. Louis' enduring problems: Where to find some action on Monday night? Hence Stool Pigeon, a night of open-mic comedy hosted by Joshua Slobe each Monday beginning at 8 p.m.

Whether Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher can survive the storm of scandals that has engulfed him over the last month could start to come into better focus after two meetings this week.  The first is on Wednesday, when Plocher will for the second time be the subject of a hearing of the Missouri House Ethics […]

The post Ethics hearing, GOP caucus could determine fate of embattled Missouri House speaker appeared first on Missouri Independent.

When the Taliban overtook Kabul in 2021, Qasim Rahimi went into hiding at a neighbor’s house. Meanwhile, U.S. troops withdrew and took nearly 90,000 Afghan evacuees who were in danger of persecution. Rahimi knew he had to leave, too. “I was a journalist and a director in (the) Afghanistan government when the government fell, so […]

The post Afghan refugees still adjusting to life in Kansas City — and wondering if they can stay appeared first on Missouri Independent.

by Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica, and Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico, photography by Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica

This article was produced in partnership with Searchlight New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches and Searchlight’s free newsletter to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Last year, 63 kids in New Mexico turned 18 and aged out of foster care. It’s a fraught time; after spending their lives in a system that micromanages their every move, the teens are thrust into adulthood, left to fend for themselves while struggling with the aftereffects of a childhood often spent cycling among foster homes. Some thrive. Many do not.

Roughly 30% of foster youth end up homeless after aging out of foster care, national studies show. An estimated 1 in 4 end up incarcerated.

The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department has made efforts to reverse those grim statistics. Notably, CYFD launched its Fostering Connections program in 2020 for youth who age out of the foster system. It offers some assistance with housing, food and behavioral health care.

That’s often not enough, advocates say. Children in foster care experience high levels of trauma and high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions. Adding to their struggles, CYFD has been housing foster children in inappropriate and sometimes unsafe settings, where they can’t get the stability and psychiatric care they need. A 2022 investigation by Searchlight New Mexico and ProPublica found that some of CYFD’s highest-needs kids spent years going back and forth between psychiatric hospitals and youth homeless shelters. (CYFD leadership has previously acknowledged that kids should not be staying in shelters, but that sometimes they “have to make very difficult decisions under extraordinary circumstances.”)

Finding a place to live, getting work, buying a car and navigating the world can be overwhelming for any teen — but it’s even more so for teens who haven’t had supportive families and don’t have an adult in their life who can help.

Even teens who sign up for Fostering Connections can fall through the cracks. It can take months before they start receiving aid through the program, leaving them in limbo at one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives. According to their attorneys, teens can be so traumatized by their time in foster care that they refuse any offer of assistance from the agency after they’ve aged out. They’re determined to leave the state’s orbit completely.

Here are the stories of two young women who aged out last year. Although their stories are different in many ways, one difference in particular stands out: In the months after leaving foster care, one had the consistent support of a caring adult. The other didn’t.

Birdie

Roberta Gonzales, who goes by Birdie, was 10 years old when she and her younger brother were taken out of their aunt’s home in Albuquerque and placed in foster care. Her brother was adopted; Gonzales has not seen him since. But CYFD never found her a stable home.

Instead, she spent the rest of her childhood in residential treatment centers, first in San Marcos, Texas, and then at Desert Hills, one of several mental health facilities in New Mexico that have shut down in the last five years amid allegations of abuse, lawsuits and pressure from state regulators.

By 2019, with fewer residential treatment centers at its disposal, CYFD was increasingly relying on youth homeless shelters to house high-risk kids, including some who were suicidal. Once there, many teens routinely experienced mental health crises or ran away. When no shelters were available, CYFD would house some of them in its Albuquerque office building.

Gonzales was one of these teens. The cots and bean bag chairs at the CYFD office were too uncomfortable to sleep on, she recalled. “I usually just slept on the floor.”

Gonzales turned 18 last year and, after a stint in Las Cruces, moved back to Albuquerque.

One of her favorite things to do was attend services at places like Calvary Church, which hosts community events like an annual Fourth of July fireworks show, or Sagebrush Church, both in Albuquerque. She said she liked the pastors and the music.

Gonzales attends a service at Sagebrush Church in northwest Albuquerque.

As a former foster youth, Gonzales was entitled to housing assistance from CYFD. The agency helped her start the paperwork when she was 17, but as her 18th birthday came and went, she was unclear how the system worked and still had no idea what help she would get or when. Her former caseworker called to check on her periodically, she said. But she never seemed to get the help she needed.

“I got kicked out [of foster care] on my birthday and now I’m homeless,” she said. “CYFD just left me to do this on my own.”

When asked for comment, a CYFD spokesperson said that “Fostering Connections benefits are generally seamless.” It might take time for some youth to receive benefits after they turn 18, but “CYFD staff does assist with the paperwork and resources,” the spokesperson said.

After Gonzales aged out, an uncle gave her a little money to pay for food, clothes and shelter. The money went fast. Within weeks, she was broke. She lived briefly with a cousin before moving into a Christian adult homeless shelter.

But she found the shelter’s tight quarters and strict rules too stifling and soon decided to leave. She spent much of her time at the Alvarado Transportation Center bus stop downtown, sometimes riding the bus around town to pass the time.

While waiting to catch a bus, Gonzales notices a man lying on the sidewalk. Thinking he might have overdosed, she reaches out to touch him and realizes he is scarcely breathing. She calls 911 and then sees the man has resumed breathing more normally. Her bus arrives moments later, and she hops on with her new friend.

For a brief period, Gonzales’ uncle paid for a room in a motel so she could have a safe place to sleep for a few nights. The room — complete with a clean bed, pillows and private bathroom — was like heaven, she said.

Later that week, Gonzales went to Calvary Church, where a volunteer offered to pray with her and another woman joined in. Gonzales had told pastors at both Calvary and Sagebrush churches that she was homeless and living on the street. One pastor prayed with her and signed her up for a baptism.

A volunteer at Calvary Church leads a prayer.

Before going to Calvary Church, Gonzales had met a group of people who offered to take her to the Savers thrift shop so she could get some new things to wear. Someone had stolen her belongings, so she was ecstatic about the shopping trip. She eagerly tried on her new clothes in the Calvary Church parking lot and carried the Savers bag with her for days, with all her possessions inside.

After trying on clothes, she had no plan for where to sleep or what to do for food — that night or in the days ahead. She looked for somewhere to sleep after midnight. She found a ledge in front of her favorite bus stop.

But when a security guard spotted her and told her to leave, she walked across the street and settled on the sidewalk.

The following afternoon, Gonzales started to have difficulty breathing and began to feel very hot. After she called 911, paramedics met her under an overpass.

She was taken to the University of New Mexico Hospital and wheeled to a room. “It feels like I’m dying,” she told doctors.

Gonzales had previously been to the UNM Hospital, for various issues, and some of the nurses knew her by name.

Being at the hospital wasn’t so bad, she said — it was a comfortable place to sleep for the night, and she could charge her phone.

“Any changes to your address?” doctors asked her while preparing a nebulizer to stabilize her breathing. “I have no address,” she replied.

She stayed at the hospital for several days while the staff monitored her lungs. Doctors later diagnosed her with Castleman disease, a rare disorder that affects the lymph nodes.

More than a year has passed since then. When contacted this fall, Gonzales said she’d reconnected with her mother and talks to her regularly. She said a CYFD Fostering Connections worker has been in touch with her and checks in periodically over the phone. Although CYFD provides job assistance for youth who age out, it hadn’t helped her find a job, she said, so “I’ve been looking myself.” The agency hadn’t helped her find housing either, she added. She did find a place to live, briefly. But it didn’t last.

“I’m homeless again,” she said in September. Until she can find stable housing and a job, she’s living at a homeless shelter in Albuquerque.

It doesn’t always happen this way. With the right support, youth can thrive after foster care.

Nevaeh

Nevaeh Sanchez was 15 when CYFD investigators determined she needed to be taken into foster care. She and her younger brother had been living with their father in a run-down house in Española that didn’t have running water.

When a caseworker arrived to pick her up, she and her brother were driven not to a foster home, but to a youth homeless shelter in Taos, where they lived alongside other kids with nowhere to go.

CYFD told Sanchez and her brother they would be in the shelter for just a few days while the state found them a relative to stay with, or until the agency’s investigation was complete and they could return home. But the days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months. “We didn’t even know we were in the [foster] system until two months in,” Sanchez said.

Three months after her arrival in Taos, shelter staff kicked her out after finding marijuana in her room. CYFD moved her to a homeless shelter in Santa Fe. Then the agency moved her to another shelter in Albuquerque, then to another. And another. Between shelter stays, she would sleep in CYFD’s Albuquerque office building.

“It’s all just a waiting game” until they can find you a bed, which was inevitably at a shelter, Sanchez said. Kids say this “shelter shuffle,” as it’s known, makes them feel like the system has given up on them.

Last year, with the help of her mentor, Sanchez found a rental with a bedroom of her own.

Many of the teens Sanchez lived with in the shelters had nobody to support them and found themselves thrust into adulthood alone after aging out of foster care. But in this respect, Sanchez was lucky.

When she was taken into the system, a judge assigned Lori Woodcock to be her court-appointed special advocate, or CASA — a volunteer trained to support children in foster care.

CASAs have a critical role: They gather information about a child’s foster care case, recommend services and advocate for the child’s best interest in court proceedings. The help they’re allowed to provide, however, is mostly limited to issues related to the court case.

Sanchez needed help with real-world issues — finding a job, getting to work, finding a place to live.

“As a CASA I couldn’t drive her to appointments or job interviews, or any of the things she actually needed help with,” Woodcock said.

So Woodcock quit her role as a CASA volunteer, opting instead to work independently as a mentor to Sanchez. Working outside the foster care system, she was able to give Sanchez the help she needed to get on her feet.

Lori Woodcock helps Sanchez with paperwork to buy a car.

The Fostering Connections program offers some services for teens when they turn 18 to ease the transition out of foster care. But Sanchez said she didn’t get any help at the time of her birthday.

Sanchez had spent nearly all her time in foster care living in the shelter system, where the staff monitored the children 24/7. She always shared a room with other kids and needed permission to use her phone, go for a walk or even close a door.

But when she turned 18, with the help of Woodcock, she found a rental with a room of her own.

“I’ve never had a chance to live” before now, she said. “I’ve been surviving.”

“People don’t understand how lucky they are that they get to sleep in their own bed,” Sanchez says. “It’s crazy, I’m like, I can close my own door, I can be in my room all day, I can be on my own phone.”

In May 2021, Sanchez applied for a job as a cashier at the Frontier, a popular restaurant across the street from the University of New Mexico campus. She held the job for two and a half years — even earning three raises for good performance.

“She’s thriving,” Woodcock said.

Another huge step was getting her own cellphone.

During her time in foster care, Sanchez’s phone use had been regimented. Most shelters prohibit phones entirely because of liabilities and safety protocols.

Last summer, she bought a phone with her own money.

“You weren’t allowed anything near the internet, near a computer, near a phone or anything, unless it was completely authorized,” Sanchez says.

But there was an even bigger milestone to tackle: getting a car. With a vehicle of her own, she wouldn’t need to rely on others to get to work or to appointments in a city as sprawling as Albuquerque.

She had already gotten her driver’s license. But Sanchez had no savings. It was nearly impossible to find a used car that she could afford.

Then Woodcock saw a 2001 Dodge Neon for sale. She purchased the car outright for Sanchez, who reimbursed her over the following months.

It was a momentous step.

Woodcock works with Sanchez to navigate the paperwork for her car. “It still doesn’t feel real,” Sanchez said later that day. “I don’t have to be scared anymore. I don’t have to depend on other people.”

She’s now paid back the entire cost of the car — $3,000.

“She’s my role model,” Sanchez said of Woodcock. “I’m very glad that that woman found potential in me and helps me with my life. She sets me up for the right path.”

“Having even one single caring adult in a young person’s life can absolutely mean the difference between success and failure after leaving foster care,” said Annie Rasquin, executive director of CASA First, the office where Woodcock worked before leaving to help Sanchez.

The gaps in the CASA system have always been a problem, Rasquin said. Inspired in part by the success of Woodcock’s work with Sanchez, CASA First established a mentorship program this year. It trains volunteers to give extra support to foster teens who need it.

The small responsibilities adults have to manage — like changing a first flat tire — feel like big accomplishments, Sanchez says.

In October, Sanchez started focusing on her GED full time. In the coming years, she said she hopes to start a business as a cosmetologist or tattoo artist. Her Fostering Connections worker has helped her in making plans for the future, she said.

In the past, “I had nothing — 100% no control over my life,” she said. “I’m finally getting up for the first time.”

Sanchez in the yard of the home where she rented a room last year

How This Story Was Reported

Photojournalist Kitra Cahana set out in the summer of 2022 to document what happened when foster kids turned 18 and “aged out” of the child welfare system. The reporting was part of a project she did with Searchlight staff writer Ed Williams and ProPublica about New Mexico’s treatment of teenagers in foster care. Cahana spent five days shadowing and photographing Gonzales over the course of a week, including a stay at a motel until the early hours of the morning; she spent an additional five days with Sanchez over the course of several weeks. On other occasions, she met with the women to chat, grab some food, talk about their experiences and discuss the extent to which they felt comfortable sharing their stories with the public. Williams followed up with Gonzales and Sanchez this fall to find out how they’ve been faring. The women granted full access to both Cahana and Williams. They said they wanted the public to understand what foster teens go through.

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by Agnel Philip

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As far as state and federal officials are concerned, the drinking water in Smithwick, Texas, is perfectly safe.

Over the past two decades, the utility that provides water to much of the community has had little trouble complying with the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is intended to assure Americans that their tap water is clean. Yet, at least once a year since 2019, the Smithwick Mills water system, which serves about 200 residents in the area, has reported high levels of the synthetic chemical 1,2,3-trichloropropane, according to data provided by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that collects water testing results from states.

The chemical, a cleaning and degreasing solvent that is also a byproduct from manufacturing pesticides, is commonly referred to as TCP. It has been labeled as a likely carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency for more than a decade. There have been few active sources of TCP since the 1990s, but its legacy lives on because it breaks down slowly in the environment.

How it got into the Smithwick Mills water supply is a bit of a mystery. There are some farms in the area, but it’s unclear whether they have used pesticides containing the chemical, and there are no known industrial sources nearby.

The TCP levels in the Smithwick Mills system are alarming to those who study water contamination. As with many chemicals, there’s limited information on TCP’s long-term effect on humans. But research involving animals shows evidence that it increases cancer risks at lower concentrations than many other known or likely carcinogens, including arsenic. Because of this, in 2017, California state regulators set a maximum allowable level for TCP in water of 5 parts per trillion. Water quality tests from the Smithwick Mills utility have revealed an average TCP level of 410 parts per trillion over the past four years — more than 80 times what would be allowed in California.

But the utility hasn’t taken any action. It doesn’t have to. The chemical isn’t regulated in drinking water by the EPA or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which means neither agency has ever set a maximum allowable level of TCP. It’s not clear why Smithwick Mills was even monitoring for the chemical, though state officials said many utilities receive results for TCP as part of routine lab tests for a variety of chemicals that get reported to state regulators.

Residents said they received no notices about the high levels, which weren’t shared in the town’s annual consumer confidence reports from 2019 to 2021, the first three years TCP was recorded in its water. TCP test results appeared in the 2022 report, which the water utility sent to residents after a ProPublica reporter reached out to the company earlier this year.

Jerri Paul, who has lived in Smithwick for three years, said she’s disappointed in the lack of communication from the water system and regulators. She has little hope that Texas officials will act on their own, because the state government has generally been reluctant to expand environmental regulation.

“I just don’t see them doing something above and beyond what the feds do,” said Paul, who is a member of the Smithwick Mill Estates property owners association board. The community is made up mostly of working-class people and retirees, many of whom don’t have the resources to buy bottled water, she noted. “We’re really dependent on the federal government doing something and saying that this is a contaminant that is not acceptable.”

A representative from Corix Utilities, which operates the Smithwick Mills water system, said in a statement that the company’s review of the tests didn’t show a danger to the community’s residents and that the system is in compliance with drinking water standards.

TCP has been found in far more drinking water than just in this small Texas town. When the EPA last conducted nationwide testing about a decade ago, the chemical was detected in the water of 6 million people (though, at the time, not in Smithwick). Four million of those people were served by systems with average concentrations above California’s standard.

TCP is one of more than a dozen unregulated contaminants that have been found in the country’s drinking water. During the past decade, regulators have identified at least one of these substances at levels that could impact human health in the tap water of 61 million people, according to a ProPublica analysis of EPA data. Nearly 16 million of these people were exposed to potentially dangerous levels of possible or likely carcinogens, including TCP. And over the past 25 years, the agency has identified more than a hundred other water contaminants, including industrial and agricultural chemicals and microorganisms, that may present risks to humans. The potential health effects of these substances include developmental delays, reproductive issues and cancer.

During the Past Decade, the EPA Found Unregulated Contaminants at Potentially Unsafe Levels in the Tap Water of 61 Million People Note: Potentially unsafe levels refer to the systems where the average sample result was higher than the EPA’s health-based “reference concentrations.” The population figures represent those served by publicly regulated community water systems. The EPA does not regulate water quality for private well users. Source: ProPublica analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data (Jason Kao/ProPublica)

Experts and activists say this demonstrates fundamental shortcomings in the country’s approach to environmental threats. The Safe Drinking Water Act, designed to protect the nation’s water quality, requires an extensive, multistep process before adopting new standards. Critics say the EPA has struggled to move contaminants that have been on its radar for a decade or more through this process in a timely fashion.

The EPA’s inaction on these chemicals “just illustrates how broken the system is,” said Erik D. Olson, a lawyer who worked at the EPA during the Reagan administration and is now senior strategic director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. “The law really is incredibly cumbersome and difficult, and there’s just a lack of political will to regulate a lot of these things.”

An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that while the agency views TCP as a potential contaminant of concern, it hasn’t collected enough data on it. Before regulating a new contaminant, the agency must show that doing so will provide meaningful health benefits based on the law’s criteria.

“EPA must make regulatory determinations based on the best available data and peer reviewed science,” the spokesperson said in a written statement. The agency did not make officials available for interviews.

Action Is Rare

In 1974, soon after expanding regulations for surface water pollution through the Clean Water Act, Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act, directing the EPA to protect the nation’s tap water. But within a decade, many lawmakers felt the legislation hadn’t done enough. In 1986, Congress passed amendments to the law that directed the agency to regulate more than 80 additional contaminants, including bacteria, viruses and chemicals such as cyanide and PCBs, within five years; the EPA would have to add another 25 contaminants every three years after that.

The agency struggled to comply with the mandates and missed deadlines for setting standards. Many small water utilities and some states said that the EPA’s rulemaking process didn’t prioritize contaminants with the greatest health risks. So, in 1996, following this pushback, Congress amended the law again with the stated goal of basing the agency’s rulemaking process on “sound science.”

The amendments created a much more complex, multistep process for regulation proposals. The EPA would need to demonstrate not only that a contaminant was a danger to human health, but that it was found widely enough in drinking water to warrant regulation. The agency also had to show that the benefits of regulating the contaminant would outweigh the costs — a tricky calculation that requires the agency to weigh the known tangible price associated with treatment and cleanup versus often uncertain projections about the health impacts of newly studied substances.

“The activities of Federal agencies would not, as some have said, grind to a halt,” Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona assured Americans in a New York Times op-ed in 1995 as the amendments were being debated.

Since then, the EPA has reviewed data on more than 35 unregulated contaminants, including sodium and the explosive RDX, through the primary process laid out in the 1996 amendments. None have yet been regulated.

In the vast majority of those cases, the agency decided there wasn’t enough evidence that the benefits of regulating a contaminant outweighed the costs. In one case — the chemical perchlorate — the agency initially decided in 2011 that it would set a maximum level, before reneging. (A federal appeals court recently ordered the agency to go through with its rulemaking process and set a standard for this chemical.)

The EPA has developed other regulations since 1996, including mandated treatment techniques and revisions to existing standards, the agency said in its statement to ProPublica. It also followed specific directives Congress made through the amendments to set limits for a handful of new contaminants using the law’s required cost-benefit analysis.

Steve Via, director of federal relations at the American Water Works Association, which represents utilities, said the agency is right to carefully consider costs before adopting new standards. Unnecessary regulations, he said, add a burden on systems that could lead to significant rate increases for customers.

“We need to protect public health, but we need to focus available resources,” he said, noting that the EPA was justified in not regulating some contaminants that weren’t widespread. “The best way to make that call is through a benefit-cost analysis.”

One family of chemicals has caused such an outcry that the streak could end soon. The EPA proposed this year to regulate a small group of perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also dubbed “forever chemicals.” The substances, which by some estimates number in the thousands and which got their nickname because they may may persist for centuries in the environment, were used in firefighting foam on military bases and nonstick materials like frying pans. They first garnered mainstream attention in the 2000s when residents in Parkersburg, West Virginia, sued DuPont, alleging the company knew that the chemicals it used at its Teflon plant there were toxic and had still exposed workers, livestock and locals to them. The company settled the lawsuit, which was portrayed in the 2019 film “Dark Waters.”

Studies have shown that prolonged exposure to PFAS in water may lead to cancer, decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, immune system suppression and other adverse health effects.

The agency first gathered data on the prevalence of six PFAS chemicals from 2013 to 2016, during the same time it was testing for TCP. It found at least one PFAS chemical in the water of 17 million people, according to an analysis of EPA data.

It turns out that was a vast underestimate, in large part because the tests used at the time weren’t sensitive enough to detect PFAS at very low concentrations. Follow-up testing has uncovered additional contamination: A 2020 study based on data from all 50 states estimated that the chemicals were likely present in the water of more than 200 million people.

Amid this heightened scrutiny, the Biden administration committed to take action, leading the EPA to announce in March that it would limit six chemicals from the PFAS family. For those who have been pushing for stricter drinking water standards, the proposal has provided some hope that the agency will act on other tap water threats, though this situation was unique because of the public scrutiny around the chemicals in recent years.

Waiting for Action

Of the more than 60 other “contaminants of concern” the EPA has identified, about 20, including TCP, are possible or likely carcinogens, and nearly 30 may have reproductive and developmental impacts.

For many of those contaminants, however, there is still uncertainty about the exact human health impacts. Scientists can’t do randomized controlled experiments on humans — the gold standard used to establish cause and effect — because it is unethical to expose people to substances that might cause serious health issues. Instead, human health data typically comes from observational studies, in which researchers recruit volunteers and follow their health outcomes over time. But these are expensive, difficult to conduct and come with their own uncertainties because they are not perfectly controlled experiments.

As an alternative, researchers often turn to controlled studies conducted on rodents or other animals to project what the effect might be in humans. In the case of TCP, researchers identified a link between the chemical and cancer in mice and rats in the 1990s, but to date no large-scale studies have investigated its effect in humans.

“A lot of times people who are not trained formally as scientists or researchers hear those uncertainties up front and say, ‘Oh well, this isn’t good enough, we need to wait,’” Sydney Evans, senior science analyst at EWG, said of findings on the health effects of TCP. “One of the issues with the way that contaminants and chemicals are regulated, especially drinking water contaminants, is that it takes entirely too long. And in the meantime, so many people are being exposed, just because we can’t be 100% certain.”

There is also limited information on the contaminants’ prevalence. The EPA has collected national drinking water data on less than half of its list of contaminants, and it can only monitor for 30 of them every five years. Some advocates for increased drinking water regulation say this limit, which was part of the 1996 amendments, makes it hard for the EPA to stay on top of emerging threats.

Not every small water system is required to participate in each testing round, and even among those that do, the data collected may not be useful to regulators. For example, during the monitoring period for TCP, the lab tests the EPA directed utilities to use couldn’t detect the chemical at low levels, similar to the testing sensitivity issue the agency faced in monitoring for PFAS. In 2022, the agency demurred on taking action on TCP, in part because it had no data on how widespread the chemical was at these lower levels. The agency declined to comment on why it didn’t use more sensitive tests that were available.

As with PFAS, follow-up testing by states and local utilities have found more people exposed to TCP than was initially documented, according to the Environmental Working Group data. ProPublica’s analysis of the data shows that since the EPA stopped its monitoring, TCP has been found in water systems serving an additional 6 million people, though many states recorded few or no tests during that time period. While many of these detections were in California, which requires testing, Texas documented TCP contamination in water from Smithwick Mills and dozens of other utilities.

Additional Testing Has Found More People Exposed to TCP Than Initially Documented Source: ProPublica analysis of Environmental Protection Agency and Environmental Working Group data (Jason Kao/ProPublica)

Alan Roberson, executive director at the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators, said the EPA should make a greater effort to provide final determinations on these contaminants of concern, including decisions to take them off its candidate list. There are three chemicals, for example, that have been on the list since 1996 without any final determination, according to the ProPublica review.

“They need a process for having a more manageable list and then doing the research to move it forward,” Roberson said. “Let’s make sure we have the stuff we need to make decisions, either up or down, on a regular basis.”

Leadership Void

In the absence of direction from the federal government, some states have acted on their own. In 2018, New Jersey joined Hawaii and California in regulating TCP. The limits vary widely, however. Hawaii’s TCP standard, which was enacted in the 1980s and revised 20 years ago, allows up to 600 parts per trillion in water.

Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the division of drinking water with California’s State Water Resources Control Board, said the state’s laws allow it to be more aggressive in targeting health risks in drinking water. Unlike the EPA, which has to determine that the benefit of a drinking water standard outweighs the cost, California regulators are directed by state law to set a maximum level as low as possible, so long as most water systems can afford to implement the treatment.

“That is why I like our system better than the federal government’s,” he said. “It can be incredibly hard to calculate the benefit of the health outcome.”

If Smithwick Mills had been in California, the water utility would have had to drastically reduce the levels of TCP in its water to comply with the state’s standard, either by installing treatment technology to remove the chemical or changing its water supply. At minimum, residents would have been notified of the contamination levels. But since the system is in Texas, the chemical’s presence went largely unnoticed until now. State officials said they have no plans to regulate TCP.

Paul, the Smithwick resident, said what’s most unsettling is that no one seems to know how TCP entered the community’s water supply. For years, Paul drank only bottled water because she didn’t like the taste of what came from the tap. But after learning about her town’s TCP test results, she stopped giving her dog water from the tap, and now uses bottled water even to make bird feed and water her plants. She uses tap water only for cleaning and bathing.

“I don’t trust it for anything else,” she said.

How We Measured Drinking Water Contamination

To determine the scope of drinking water contamination from unregulated substances, ProPublica analyzed water quality test data compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency and Environmental Working Group.

The EPA data, which came from the agency’s two most recent Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule periods, showed that during the past decade 61 million people were exposed to dozens of unregulated contaminants in their drinking water at potentially harmful levels. During the UCMR periods, which occur every five years, the EPA directs water systems to test for up to 30 contaminants. If a contaminant is detected at levels that exceed a certain threshold, known as the minimum reporting level, the utility must report the concentration found. The EPA also provides health-based “reference concentrations” for many contaminants. Using the results from the past two completed periods (2013-2016 and 2018-2021), we calculated average concentrations for each contaminant for every community water system in the dataset (treating nondetections as zeroes) and tallied the population served by systems with average concentrations higher than the reference concentration. For the majority the only contaminant found was chlorate, which is a disinfectant byproduct. Water from systems serving nearly 16 million people contained possible or likely carcinogens, though that figure doesn’t include PFAS chemicals since the EPA hadn’t yet determined that they were possibly carcinogenic at the time of testing.

The EPA data has some significant limitations. First, while every system serving more than 10,000 people must participate in UCMR testing, smaller systems are not required to. Instead, the Safe Drinking Water Act requires the agency to collect test results from a “representative sample” of small systems. Further, the tests cover a limited snapshot in time. Because the contaminants aren’t regulated, there is no requirement for systems or states to keep testing past the monitoring period.

To find the other communities affected by some of these contaminants, we used EWG’s Tap Water Database. Researchers with the environmental advocacy organization obtain the data from places that continue to test for unregulated contaminants beyond the end of monitoring periods. EWG checks the data against public sources to ensure that the samples in its database represent those taken after the water is treated.

The organization shared test results for some of the most widespread contaminants found during the EPA’s monitoring rounds, including 1,2,3-trichloropropane and PFAS. The data is complete for all states through 2019. The organization has released more recent data where available.

By comparing the water systems where additional testing has found 1,2,3-trichloropropane contamination to the EPA’s original monitoring results, we determined the chemical was found in the water of an additional 6 million people.

Clarification, Nov. 6, 2023: The figures in the second graphic have been expanded to include the tenths decimal place so it’s more clear why the two sides are different sizes.

Maya Miller and Max Blau contributed reporting.

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