Some San Diego area residents told to boil tap water due to E. coli in water system

Some residents in the San Diego area have been told to boil their tap water and use bottled water for drinking and cooking because of the presence of E. coli in their water system.

California American Water, the public utility company that services the affected areas, issued the advisory Thursday for residents of Imperial Beach, a city of more than 25,000 people, as well as some parts of nearby Coronado, San Diego and Chula Vista. Affected residents should also discontinue nonessential water use such as outdoor irrigation, the company said.

California’s Division of Drinking Water, which regulates public drinking water systems, recommends letting tap water boil for three minutes to kill the bacteria.

California American Water said in a release that it expects to resolve the problem within 48 to 72 hours. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The City of Imperial Beach said Thursday night that residents can pick up a case of water at California American Water’s operation center in Imperial Beach.

E. coli is a bacterium that can contaminate food or water. Infections can cause vomiting, severe stomach cramps and diarrhea that is often bloody, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

NBC 7 San Diego reported that the mayor of Imperial Beach, Paloma Aguirre, said the San Diego Department of Environmental Health and Quality indicated that the first sample that was positive for E. coli came back Monday. Subsequent testing showed contamination before the advisory was issued, Aguirre said.

“Our ocean water is poisoned, our air is poisoned, and now our drinking water is tainted. It is beyond time to declare the egregious environmental and public health disaster harming communities of color in San Diego a State of Sewage Emergency,” she wrote Friday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

According to NBC 7, several schools in the San Ysidro School District closed on Friday out of an abundance of caution due to the water contamination. The Chula Vista Elementary School District has shut off water, except for toilets, at five schools and is providing water bottles, hand sanitizer and hand washing stations, NBC 7 reported.

Most people who get E. coli infections recover within a week and some people exposed don’t get sick at all, depending on the strain. But certain cases can be severe, even life-threatening. People who are young, elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised are more likely to suffer severe outcomes.

It’s not yet clear what the source of contamination was in this case, but E. coli in drinking water is often a sign of fecal contamination, according to Georgia Kayser, an assistant professor of global and environmental health at the University of California, San Diego.

After a storm, for instance, runoff or flooding can carry feces from the land into surface water that feeds drinking water systems. Over the weekend, the San Diego area was inundated with heavy rain and winds from Hurricane Hilary, which weakened to a tropical storm before reaching Southern California.

“When you have a big rain event, you have a lot more water to treat. Sometimes that can overwhelm systems,” Kayser said. “Sometimes, too, that rain event pulls a lot of E. coli off all the surrounding area into, say, a surface water source or reservoir or some sort of lake or creek that’s being used for for drinking water.”

Kayser said water lines can be decontaminated by flushing out the system and treating the water. Generally, though, water systems treat water sufficiently so that E. coli never winds up in people’s tap water, she added.

“It’s more rare to see these advisories, but they do happen,” she said.

Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com