This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Residents of Tucson's south side might remember drinking from the garden hose and bathing their children in tap water. For years, that water was contaminated with industrial solvents that had leaked into the groundwater their wells drew from.
But four decades after Tucson stopped serving contaminated water on its south side, one in three residents who drank it are still reporting symptoms of post-traumatic stress, a new University of Arizona study has found. The researchers surveyed 363 people. Among those who lived, worked or went to school in the contaminated area before 1981, or whose parents did, 34% reported enough symptoms to reach a screening threshold clinicians use to flag post-traumatic stress.
The survey asked whether worry about contamination had led to certain symptoms in the past month—such as avoiding places that brought contamination to mind, sleeping badly or feeling cut off from other people. Reporting four or more of the seven criteria was considered the threshold. The study, published in the Journal of Health Psychology, is a collaboration between the Department of Psychology and the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.
It was led by Harrison Schmitt, now an assistant professor of psychology at Skidmore College, who conducted the study for his U of A dissertation. "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 Department of Psychology. Sullivan's team has since given the same screening to Los Angeles residents whose homes were threatened by wildfires in 2025.
About 35% of them scored at or above the threshold, roughly what the researchers found in Tucson. Sullivan, who studied tornado survivors in Kansas for his own dissertation, has always been interested in technological disasters, which unfold over years and have no single day of visible damage. He spent years going to community meetings on the south side before the survey was designed.
Starting in the summer of 2022, about 20 undergraduate volunteers collected the survey door to door in pairs. Surveys were available in English and Spanish, with each pair including a bilingual student. Many volunteers from the south side learned during the surveys that their own relatives and neighbors had lived through the contamination and rarely talked about it, Sullivan said.
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