Starting February 26, the Kings Water Alliance (KWA) is offering free residential well nitrate testing in Kings County. A rural household in Armona is the first to request testing as KWA expands services into Kings County.
Nitrate is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, and cannot be boiled out of water. Testing is the only way to detect its presence. Most communities in the Central San Joaquin Valley rely on groundwater as their primary source of drinking water. For those on private wells, there is no State-required water quality monitoring that regulated public water systems must abide by. Without testing, high levels of nitrate go undetected.
Nitrate is a nitrogen/oxygen compound that is naturally occurring in soil and plants. Other sources of nitrate in groundwater are septic tanks, animal feeding operations, and fertilizer. Nitrate concentrations above 10 milligrams per liter in groundwater are unsafe for drinking. Nitrate can convert to nitrite which can interfere with the ability of red blood cells’ ability to carry oxygen to the tissues of the body. It is of greatest concern in infants, pregnant and nursing women, and elderly people.
As a water sample from her well in Armona was being taken, Mrs. Lopez said, “…I am going to be checking my water to see if it is health enough for us to be drinking. Especially to be drinking, because I have a 3- year-old granddaughter that I care for, and that was my main thing about checking my water.” This Armona household’s test results showed the family’s water supply is not impacted by nitrate.
However, testing of roughly 1,200 residential wells so far in Fresno and Tulare Counties has shown an average of 41% of residential wells have high nitrate levels. To date, more than 750 households have opted to receive free bi-weekly home bottled water deliveries offered by KWA. There are an estimated 1,300 residential wells in Kings County, and all are eligible for free testing. As more tests are performed, a clearer picture of nitrate levels in rural communities will emerge.
KWA is a non-profit created in 2021 to assess and address likely nitrate contamination in a 1.5-million- acre rural area encompassing ~22% of Fresno County, ~66% of Kings County, and ~3.7% of Tulare County. The estimated 14,000 residential water wells within this area are eligible for free nitrate testing by KWA, and eligible for free bi-weekly home bottled water delivery as a short-term solution if the safe nitrate limit is exceeded.
Five minutes and a well water sample. That is all it takes for the Kings Water Alliance to determine a residential drinking water well’s nitrate status. The application process is fast and simple, with geography as the only eligibility factor for rural residential wells. Residential well users can visit www.kingswateralliance.org/welltest to fill out an application online, or call (559) 549-6747 to apply by phone.