Brow furrowed, sitting behind the royal blue fence encircling Sam Lena Library, Nolan Montufar is deep into reading the book he just borrowed: “How to Give Up Plastic.”
Nolan biked to the library that’s a few doors down from South Tucson City Hall. As a native Tucsonan, he says he’s familiar with the region’s legacy of water pollution, especially within the small municipality of South Tucson — the self-proclaimed “Pueblo within a city.”
“As far as the plastics in food and water and in the atmosphere, I think it hasn’t been given the appropriate attention that it warrants,” Nolan says.
For decades, South Tucson residents have grappled with water contamination linked to industrial waste, including trichloroethylene, or TCE, and more recently, PFAS compounds known as “forever chemicals.”
A 2025 national study suggests that in counties with both poor water quality and high social vulnerability, such as low-income households, residents are keenly aware that their water is not only lower in quality, it’s also less accessible and less reliable.
The study, co-authored by Alex Segrè Cohen, a professor of science and risk communication at the University of Oregon, describes water injustice as “the unequal access to safe and clean drinking water that disproportionately impacts low-income households and people of color.”
An estimated 30 million Americans “live where water systems operate unsafely,” the study states. Arizona counties are among those identified as hotspots, where clusters of water system violations overlapped with vulnerable communities.
“Folks who are experiencing water injustice — they know it. They can feel it, and their sense that the water quality isn’t good enough is often accurate,” Cohen said.
A history of water injustice
South Tucsonans’ exposure to water contamination from TCE dates back to the 1950s when companies, including Hughes Aircraft, dumped the industrial solvent near the airport.
The contamination affected the neighborhoods “roughly south of 22nd street, north of Los Reales Road, east of Interstate 19 and west of Del Moral Boulevard,” according to research from the Pima County Library. The pollution led to a Superfund designation on the south side of Tucson and more than $130 million in legal settlements by 2006, along with ongoing cancer screenings for those affected through El Rio Pueblo Health Center.
Cancer screenings
Nathan Holaway, an El Rio spokesperson, said that since 2003, the health center has provided services, including medical visits, laboratory and screenings to uninsured, low-income residents on the south side of Tucson who may have been exposed to water contamination.
Those who qualify for testing receive services on a sliding fee scale and can reach out to El Rio at: 520-670-3909.
Other contaminants, including a carcinogen known as 1,4 dioxane, resulting from “pollution from the same compounds that contained TCE,” were detected in Tucson’s groundwater. In 2014, an Air Force-funded treatment plant opened near the Tucson Airport Remediation Project plant, known as TARP, which “was built in response to the TCE lawsuit.” In 2021, the plant temporarily closed amid a contamination spike in PFAS chemicals that may have been linked to firefighting foam used at the Air National Guard base until 2018.
The plant reopened in 2022 with a new step in the filtration process for eradicating PFAS. The water produced is reclaimed water, or used for non-drinking purposes such as watering golf courses, according to Natalie Deroock, a spokesperson for Tucson Water.
In May 2024, the EPA issued an emergency order under the Safe Drinking Water Act directing the U.S. Air Force and Arizona Air National Guard to take action to address PFAS contamination in the TARP well field, and ultimately restore the drinking water source.
The military must meet “their responsibilities for protecting drinking water supplies in Tucson, including communities with environmental justice concerns,” the order stated.
Air Force officials responded to the EPA in an October 2024 letter, committing to a plan to address PFAS contamination linked to its facilities at the Tucson International Airport Area Superfund site. The plan includes collecting contamination data, conducting pilot cleanup studies, and working with Tucson Water to cover both past and future PFAS-related costs.
ADEQ recently announced it will be testing known PFAS contamination in Tucson at Shannon Road/El Camino Cerro and Miracle Mile/Silverbell landfills.
Filling in gaps, monitoring water contamination
Cohen stressed inequities for Indigenous communities, including “the lack of data related to tribal lands and their drinking water systems” — a gap that can skew national datasets.
Arizona is home to 22 federally-recognized tribal nations.
Cohen and her research colleagues relied on manual searches to fill in missing information for Indigenous communities.
This lack of information is particularly problematic as the report states that “Indigenous peoples in the United States are 19 times more likely to live in a home without indoor plumbing than less marginalized populations.”
Despite making up just 1.3% of water systems in the dataset, tribal systems accounted for 3% of all violations and had the second-highest average number of annual violations per facility, according to the report.
Alma Suarez, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, said that “tribes are sovereign nations with their own governments and environmental agencies,” and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has jurisdiction over water quality on tribal lands.
The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona leads the Tribal Water Systems program, which has provided technical assistance to improve drinking water quality and wastewater regulatory compliance among tribal utilities since 1983.
Other, more recent programs like the Initiative on Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities was created to address the lack of drinking water access in Tribal households through federal and legislative advocacy.
The EPA sets standards under the federal Safe Drinking Act, a law that establishes contaminant limits to ensure drinking water is safe from harmful pollutants.
Twelve Arizona counties, including Pima and Maricopa, had water violation scores higher than 85.8% of all other counties in the United States, according to the study’s data spotlighting 2019 EPA data.
ADEQ oversees nearly 1,500 water systems serving more than 7 million residents and focuses on protecting drinking water, groundwater and surface waters in Arizona’s desert environment.
Suarez said since the 2014–2019 period covered in the study, ADEQ has fortified its monitoring standards and added assistance programs, such as one that provides 11,300 Arizona residents, whose water exceeds safety standards, with a source of alternative drinking water since 2023.
“Arizona’s regulated water systems are performing well today,” she said in an email to Arizona Luminaria.
However, arsenic and nitrates were among the most cited contaminants in the state’s 2023 Drinking Water Annual Compliance Report with 13 public water systems reporting arsenic violations and 15 public water systems reporting nitrates violations.
That same year, Tucson’s water quality report showed that the region’s system did not exceed federal contamination limits. Tucson Water additionally voluntarily tested 15 sampling sites for some unregulated contaminants that may pose health risks. While contaminants were found in a limited number of samples, none exceeded proposed federal health advisory standards, according to the 2023 Contaminants of Emerging Concern Sentry Program Report.
Still, PFAS chemicals plague Pima County residents’ water.
According to a 2024 ADEQ report, Pima and Yavapai counties tied — at 19 — for the highest number of public water systems with PFAS levels above federal safety standards. About 17% of the 115 water systems tested in Pima County exceeded safety limits, ranking it the third worst in the state, behind Santa Cruz and Gila counties.
Public trust in drinking water
Cohen’s study explored how water system ownership — public vs. private — might shape these perceptions.
In socially vulnerable counties, she found that people tend to distrust public water systems more than private ones, possibly due to “a long history of a complicated relationship between minority and marginalized communities and the governments that report to serve them.”
Researchers also found that “more privileged counties feel more vulnerable when there are more private systems.”
Suarez said that “regardless of ownership, all systems must meet the same health-based standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act.” She added that “smaller systems — whether public or private — can face greater challenges due to limited financial and technical resources.” Efforts to address challenges, she said, include technical assistance, compliance programs and operator certification support.
Cohen’s findings suggest that past water safety violations and social vulnerability shape perceptions of water quality.
To address residents’ concerns, ADEQ has expanded community outreach, hosting public meetings to discuss PFAS, sending direct mailers, and launching online tools like the Safe Drinking Water Database and MyCommunity platform for transparent access to local water data. Suarez said ADEQ also has increased funding, enhanced monitoring and coordinated proactive PFAS testing — launched statewide in 2022 — as part of the state’s efforts to safeguard drinking water.
“Building public trust in drinking water quality is a key priority,” she said.
Nolan, the native Tucsonan, appreciates ADEQ’s efforts, however, he’d like to see more outreach and education with younger audiences, particularly about microplastics.
“I think children, as soon as they can understand English grammar, should be fully immersed in the fact that these things (contaminants) are here to stay. They’re not going to disappear or go to some ‘plastic heaven,'” he says. “They’re here, and they’re not degrading.”
Listening to community voices
Jose Andres Garcia is a Pima Community College student and says he knows classmates whose loved ones have been harmed by poor water quality.
“I’ve heard people in my class who have had grandparents affected by this,” he says of South Tucson families. “They’ve gotten cancer and a lot of people died from, you know, these water poisonings. So I really think it affects a lot of people even though it’s not generally talked about a lot.”
Garcia is concerned about the lack of water quality data on tribal nations. He called for greater resources to support Indigenous communities’ water quality testing. “So they could be able to collect that data and we could have an accurate report on what the situation is,” he says.
Cohen shares that concern, especially after her team noticed the federal dataset used in the study was temporarily removed without warning earlier this year.
“These questions about who is being marginalized and left out of conversations, who’s experiencing the brunt of climate and environmental impact, we can’t measure that if we don’t have data,” she said.
Listening to and leveraging the voices of those most negatively harmed, she said, is crucial to remedying decades of systemic injustice.
“What type of advocacy efforts or elevation of their messages and stories can happen so that we can change the … impacts so that it’s not disproportionate and inequitable?” Cohen said.
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