Edison misses some drinking water tests

Southern California Edison apparently missed or did not complete 93 state-mandated drinking water tests here over the past half-decade, according to a recent mail notice from Edison.

That’s out of 8,000 tests a year, according to an Edison spokesperson.

Edison reports that it has changed internal procedures to prevent a re-occurrence.

Edison recently notified Island water customers by mail.

The City Council is aware of the issue.

Edison briefed each of the council members individually before the notice went out, according to Jay Martin, production manager of the Pebbly Beach Generating Station.

“ This was a report over years, a thousand plus reports with only 93 issues, from missing reports, or unrecorded. I personally do not have fear on water quality,” wrote Mayor Anni Marshall in an email.

“I’m responding as an Edison employee. The City has no position/involvement on this,” wrote Councilmember Mary Schickling.

During a July 9 interview, Martin said the water in Catalina is tested daily.

“We take thousands of samples here on Catalina, say 8,000 different constituents per year,” Martin said. In this case, “constituents” refers to chemicals the company is required to test for in drinking water.

According to Martin, In May, Edison was notified by the state Water Resources Board that 93 samples were missing or not reported.

“I believe 56 of those samples were indeed collected, but unfortunately were not properly reported as was mentioned,” Martin said.

In some instances this was due to miscommunication among SCE, our contract laboratory and the state, and then in other instances, other samples were just not meeting the water reporting criteria,” Martin said.

He explalined that water samples have to be sent to the lab within a certain amount of time.

“And then on Catalina Island there a lot of things that you can run into, different circumstances, logistics, delayed transportation from the island, but they have to get to the laboratory in a certain amount of time to be qualified, to be able to do a report on those samples,” Martin said.

He said that even though those samples weren’t reported, they were still considered in past consumer confidence reports.

He said that even though the samples were good, and met standards, they weren’t good enough to be reported to the state.

Martin said another 37 samples were missed.

He said the previous samples were good and the next samples were good.

“During that time where the we had that missed samples, there was really no indication that the water quality did not meet health standards between samplings, even though they were missed,” Martin said.

The Islander said it sounded like comparatively speaking, it was really a small number of samples that were missed or misreported.

Martin said that was correct.

Later, Martin said the City Council seemed to understand.

Martin said that since Edison had learned about the missing samples, the company had improved the process. “We’ve worked with our contract laboratories to improve the sampling testing process and how we do that,” Martin said.

“And then internally we’ve implemented additional internal controls to ensure that necessary drinking water quality samples are collected, properly analyzed and reported to the state as required,” Martin said.

He said Edison now has verifications performed by two separate SCE employees.

“So we doubled up our internal controls to make sure that doesn’t happen any anymore.

And then you know, the last thing our water department’s doing is working closely with the state Water Resource Board and the contract laboratory people that we use to resolve data reporting issues,” Martin said.

He said Edison takes these matters seriously.

The notice that Edison sent out said the most recent water test results met State and Federal water standards.

Background

“Our water system failed to fully monitor, or report as required for drinking water standards during the past 5 years (with one instance occurring in 2016), and therefore, was in violation of the regulations,” the Edison notice said.

“Even though this failure was not an emergency, as our customers, you have a right to know what you should do, what happened, and what we did to correct this situation,” the notice said.

“Catalina Island’s drinking water is tested routinely to ensure public safety, but 93 sampling events were not reported correctly or were missed,” the notice said.

“From 2016 through 2018, one constituent in 2016 was not sampled,” the notice said.

“After an investigation of the 93 sampling events, we concluded that 56 were indeed conducted, but laboratory analysis issues occurred and those results were not reported to the State as required by regulations,” the notice said.

“However, the unreported lab results show that the concentrations of the constituents were within drinking water standards,” the notice said.

“The remaining 37 sampling events were missed, so we cannot be sure of the concentration of those constituents at that time. Of those, 9 samples were missed from a well that has not been operational since 2018 and 4 were from a well that was not operational for most of 2023,” the notice said.

“However, the results from samples collected in previous and subsequent years complied with drinking water standards,” the notice said.