A third of Tucsonans exposed to solvent-contaminated water still screen positive for trauma

The instrument here is a screen. The study calls its cutoff a threshold clinicians use to flag post-traumatic stress, which is a different measurement from a diagnosis ^[4]. A positive answer records that a person reported symptoms tied to worry about contamination during the past month, so the figure describes current distress and not severity, treatment history, or how many people ever met diagnostic criteria ^[5].

The definition of exposure was broad. It covered anyone who lived, worked or went to school in the contaminated area before 1981, and also people whose parents did ^[4], so some of the people who screened positive never drank the water. The authors describe the pattern as collective trauma: an event shared across a community and passed down through common experiences and stories as well as through personal exposure ^[19].

The comparison neighborhood was selected to match the south side on income, race, ethnicity and housing, so a difference between the two areas would point at the contamination and not at pressures both face ^[15]. The published account reports the 363 surveyed. It does not give the size of the exposed subgroup or the comparison neighborhood's positive rate, so an effect size cannot be computed from it ^[16].

Set the Los Angeles result beside the Tucson one and the two rates land about a percentage point apart ^[10], across exposures with nothing alike in their timelines. One reading is that worry about industrial solvents in the water supply ^[1] holds at that level for forty years ^[2]. Another is that roughly a third of any threatened community screens positive on this questionnaire. The survey reported here does not separate the two.

"It was pretty striking how long the impact of this seems to have been," said Daniel Sullivan, the study's senior author and an associate professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology ^[8][24]. Sullivan works on technological disasters, which unfold over years and have no single day of visible damage ^[11].

The survey took a long time to build. Sullivan went to community meetings on the south side for years before it was designed ^[12], and from the summer of 2022 about 20 undergraduate volunteers carried it door to door in pairs, in English and Spanish, with a bilingual student in each pair ^[13]. Many of those volunteers came from the south side and learned during the interviews that their own relatives and neighbors had lived through the contamination and rarely talked about it, Sullivan said ^[14]. The paper appeared in the Journal of Health Psychology and was led by Harrison Schmitt, now an assistant professor of psychology at Skidmore College, who ran it as his Arizona dissertation ^[6][7].

Any comparison between what these symptoms cost and what the cleanup costs needs two numbers, and this study produced symptom counts ^[5]. Elizabeth Yee, a co-author who collected surveys as an undergraduate and later led the effort to report the findings back to residents, said: "You're talking to people and it's every other house. At a community level, the findings are validating. At an institutional level, it still feels like, 'When is there going to be enough evidence to act?'" ^[17][18]

"They fought their entire lives, not just for restitution, but to be heard and believed," said Alisha Vasquez, a disability culture folklorist who connected the researchers with south side residents and convened the community meeting that shaped how the results are being used for political action ^[20][21].