SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Every month, Deacon Perry Owens Sr. estimates he spends at least $100 on bottled water. He doesn’t drink the tap water from his Emerald Hills home.
“It has a smell to it, a stench to it and we have tried every home remedy, and we can't get rid of it,” he told Team 10.
The smell from the taps is no longer the San Diego resident’s only concern with the water. Beneath the streets of America’s Finest City, are nearly 2,000 miles of asbestos concrete pipes carrying drinking water to thousands of homes.
“That is shocking and that blows my mind,” said Owens.
The pipes, composed of concrete and asbestos, once known as a “miracle mineral” for its durability, were installed after World War II until the mid-1980s, when the health hazards of asbestos became known.
Decades later, the pipes are starting to crack and reach the end of their lifespan.
Documents obtained by Team 10 show over the past decade, 440 water main breaks have occurred in the city’s asbestos pipes.
That has some concerned asbestos fibers may now be leaching into the water supply.
“As they break and come apart, they will release fibers that will end up in people's drinking water,” said Dr. Arthur Frank, a public health expert and professor of medicine at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Frank travels the world to speak about the dangers of asbestos and has been researching the carcinogen since 1968.
While the science is not yet conclusive, Frank believes tap water that’s passed through pipes containing asbestos can be harmful to human health and cause cancer.
“The fibers end up in the body tissues. People have found it in the esophagus and colorectal tissue and kidney tissue.”
Several studies from 1960 to 1980 in the U.S. and Canada suggested a link between stomach cancer and tap water from asbestos pipes, according to the World Health Organization.
A 1980 study found a ‘significant’ link between asbestos in the water and rates of lung, gall bladder and pancreatic cancers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
More recently in Italy, in 2017, a researcher found water contaminated with asbestos could be linked to gastrointestinal cancers.
“It's the classic case of out of sight, out of mind. The asbestos cement water pipes are buried beneath our feet. Nobody even thinks about it,” said Julian Branch, an advocate for clean drinking water.
He spoke about the dangers of asbestos at an environmental conference in San Diego earlier this year and urged attendees to act.
Team 10 wanted to know how much asbestos could be getting into San Diego’s drinking water.
Documents obtained through public records requests show from 2020-2024, the city took nine tests for asbestos at reservoirs, wells and a water reclamation plant.
A trace amount of asbestos was found in one sample in 2021 at a reservoir.
“For a city of 1.3 million people, doing one or two or a small number of tests per year is totally inadequate,” Frank told Team 10 after reviewing the document.
He said the city needs to be testing water for asbestos fibers after it has passed through the pipes.
City complies with federal standards
“Unless the reservoirs were lined with asbestos there's no reason to think that the water supply in a reservoir is going to contain asbestos other than what occurs naturally,” Frank said.
The city’s public utilities department told Team 10 roughly 15% of all water mains in North America are made of asbestos.
The department said it complies with all federal and state drinking water regulations, but it does not test water in homes, businesses or schools.
“Analyses continue to show that we meet all state and federal standards and that San Diego’s water is of high quality,” said public utilities spokesman Arian Collins.
One federal standard the city must comply with is the Environmental Protection Agency’s contaminant level for asbestos. The EPA allows a maximum of seven million asbestos fibers in one liter of drinking water and believes anything above that may be harmful.
That national standard doesn’t sit well with Owens, who said he doesn’t want to drink even one glass of water that may contain asbestos.
“What is that little bit doing to our bodies? That little bit could be doing so much harm that would eventually land us in the hospital later, so we must fix this issue with our pipes.”
The possible harm from ingesting asbestos through tap water is a matter of debate in some research circles.
Conflicting science
Some studies have cast doubt that ingesting asbestos fibers can cause the same harm as when they are inhaled and become lodged in the lungs.
“I would say that with the scientific evidence that we have today, we really cannot say with any degree of certainty that ingesting asbestos through drinking water causes cancer,” said Dr. Lauren Teras, senior director of epidemiology research at the American Cancer Society.
Teras told Team 10 it’s believed that most asbestos fibers leave the body after they are ingested from water.
She said one weakness with some of the studies done so far is that there could’ve been another factor driving rates of cancer in areas with asbestos cement pipes.
“You can really run into trouble and make assumptions about causation when things are really caused by something else,” she said in an interview from Atlanta.
Teras said water filters, lifestyle habits, and the number of asbestos fibers in the body are all important factors.
She said for this to be properly studied, researchers would collect blood from residents and follow them for at least 20 years.
Teras said it’s reasonable for everyone to take steps to minimize the amount of asbestos they encounter in their daily lives.
“We don't want to find out in 20, 30 years as pipes have been falling apart and more asbestos has been getting into the water, oops, we find that there are higher rates of cancer than we thought.”
Frank said residents living in cities with aging asbestos pipes can filter their water as one measure to protect themselves.
“Home filters of various kinds, either the filters you put on the sink or filters that make ice cubes or the filters that people have on their water containers, will tend to take out many of these fibers.”
City warned to speed up pipe replacement
A grand jury investigating frequent water main breaks in San Diego told the city in 2014 to “aggressively” speed up its replacement of asbestos pipes.
“Picking up the pace of asbestos cement water pipes as the grand jury recommended hasn't happened yet,” said Branch who has spent years pressuring cities to adequately test water for asbestos.
The grand jury warned “the city may be on the verge of a piping crisis” at the time of its 2014 report.
Two years later, a master plan obtained by Team 10 found pipes below streets in downtown San Diego, San Ysidro and the National City area were deteriorating the most.
Since then, the city told Team 10 it has replaced 144 miles of asbestos pipes and water main breaks have gone down 40%.
There are roughly 1,980 miles of asbestos pipes underground throughout the city still carrying drinking water. The city said it costs $5-6 million dollars for every mile of asbestos pipe that is replaced.
Back in Emerald Hills, Owens said he’ll keep buying bottled water and is urging politicians to act.
“Let's not even take the risk. Let's not risk our bodies and our legacies, our kids, the people who may drink this tap water, let's not take a chance. Let's not gamble with our lives.”
