Director says water is safe

Business has picked up slightly at Anthony’s Pure Water Systems in Costa Mesa ever since reports of tap water tainted with trace amounts of prescription drugs have made headlines around the country.

“A lot of people have called and want to know what the remedy is and how to address it,” said Anthony’s owner Anthony Monkiewicz, who has sold water filtration systems in Costa Mesa for about 15 years. “I’m very careful not to alarm people about their drinking water, but this is something that is slowly and surely not positive and getting worse.”

Monkiewicz said the only way to be sure pharmaceuticals are filtered out of tap water is to invest in a reverse osmosis filtration system for the home, which costs about $500 for a good system. He’s offering free home consultations in the wake of media revelations on prescription drugs in tap water.

Local experts said they were not surprised at revelations in an Associated Press investigation released earlier this week identifying trace amounts of pharmaceutical chemicals in the drinking water across the country, but added that the local drinking water “far exceeded” existing state and federal standards for safety.

The Associated Press investigation has already led two U.S. senators, including Sen. Barbara Boxer, who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, to push for hearings on the issue.

Both Costa Mesa and Newport Beach get their water from pumps monitored by the Orange County Water District, which is supplemented by the Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District.

Drinking water in Newport-Mesa is a touchy subject. Residents in Newport Beach opposed to the addition of fluoride to their drinking water last year rallied enough support to make the city council send a letter to the water district asking for a delay in fluoridation plans, which went forward anyway.

“We should be looking at our water more carefully, because we don’t have a lot of it and the stuff we do have is contaminated,” Newport Beach resident Dolores Otting said.

Otting led the charge in Newport Beach last year against fluoridation and has been an outspoken advocate for clean drinking water.

“People are bathing their babies in Viagra and not even realizing it.”

Newport Beach resident Larry Porter said media reports of prescription drugs in the water came as no surprise to him — he hasn’t trusted tap water in years.

“Pharmaceuticals just get right on by [the filtration process] because they’re small,” Porter said.

Porter, who also actively campaigned against fluoridation in Newport Beach, first became interested in water quality in the mid 1990s when he became involved in water issues relating to Newport Bay.

“Water is the second most important thing in your life,” he said. “Air is No. 1, water is No. 2 and the human skulduggery is at a max when it comes to the water business.”

Now Porter uses only bottled water from a commercial service at home, and he also invested about $15 in a water tester that detects dissolved solids in water.

Metropolitan’s Jensen Treatment Plant in Granada Hills was one of the plants whose test results were scrutinized by the Associated Press, though that water is not likely to reach Newport-Mesa residents, Water Quality Manager Mic Stewart said. Metropolitan conducted its own study of such contaminants in its Jensen plant in 2006, which was examined by the reporters.

A plant in Yorba Linda that supplies water to Newport-Mesa was not studied, so officials aren’t sure if there are also trace elements in local water supplies, he said.

“The issue of pharmaceuticals has been around for a few years — you just really couldn’t detect it, because you didn’t have sufficient analytical capability to do that,” he said. “Now that the technology has improved a little bit, we wanted to look in our source water.”

Stewart said that the district came across what he characterized as extremely minute traces of anti-anxiety and anti-epileptic medications — about one part for every trillion parts of water, he said.

“An easy way to picture is imagine filling the Rose Bowl full of water, and adding 10 drops of the contaminant,” he said. “Not very much at all — it’s actually incredible; we even have technology that can detect it.”

Newport Beach Director of Utilities Steve Myrter was quick to assure residents that the water they drank was safe.

“Our responsibility is to provide very safe water to our customers and residents, and we’re required to make sure our water exceeds state and federal standards,” he said. “They do.”

Mesa Consolidated Water District Quality Coordinator Tracy Manning echoed Myrter’s assurances.

“We’ve been watching this story closely,” she said, adding that residents should properly dispose of their medications. Many people flush old pills down their toilets, she said.

According to UC Irvine Professor of Public Health Oladele Ogunseitan, the real danger lies in the fact that no one really knows what public health ramifications these minute traces of pharmaceuticals could have.

“Some people are taking medications that these chemicals may interact with, and it’s simply not advisable to expose everyone to them,” he said.

Ogunseitan said local agencies should begin looking into outfitting their operations with methods to perform reverse osmosis on the water — one of the few chemical processes that would clean the water of such traces, though Myrter said the cost for the Metropolitan Water District would be astronomical — in the billions.

Despite the promises of officials, some residents are still concerned about the state of the area’s drinking water.

Those interested in learning how to safely dispose of their prescription medications can consult information available at https://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/WPIE/HealthCare/PPCP.htm#WhereHGP

CHRIS CAESAR may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or at chris.caesar@latimes.com. BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at brianna.bailey@latimes.com.