Testing the Waters

While working as part of a Yale research team that conducted interviews with residents in their homes about the age of their wells and how long they had lived in their houses, Helen Siegel ’19 MEM, ’24 PhD headed outdoors and turned on the spigot.

She let it run for a count before collecting a water sample. Then she did the same with the inside tap. This field work took place in the northern Appalachian Basin, where wells could be tainted with heavy metals and sulfur from mine drainage or emerging contaminants, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). After they collected the samples, the team sent them for analysis at Yale and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

Siegel collected samples at homes in three states for three years while working toward her doctorate at the Yale School of the Environment.

“I was really interested in this balance between work that was highly technical scientific research and work that produced results (that could be used) to improve equity, and that had a real impact in the world,” Siegel says. “I wanted to not just understand fundamental mechanisms related to water resources but also to drive better and more well-informed policies.”

She conducted her first analysis in northeastern Pennsylvania, a landscaped dotted with well pads, used in the process known as fracking (hydraulic fracturing). The following summer, she was in southeastern Ohio, and in 2020, she collected samples in West Virginia. Her research focused on which factors, whether natural or human caused, contribute in what degrees to groundwater contamination and how to craft policy that is most responsive to these specifics.

Siegel’s analysis across the three states found that the process of fracking was not a major polluter of water, but spilled fracking waste, agriculture, and road salt were causes for concern, as were leaching and discharge from old coal mines. Importantly, the relationship between coal mines and water quality proved to be heavily contingent on the topography and underlying geology of the area. She hopes these insights can be used to craft more science-based policies on issues such as the protective setback distances from a fracking well pad. In an effort to promote a more continuous water monitoring system, Siegel and her colleagues also explored ways in which homeowners themselves might measure proxies to signal troubling shifts in water quality — high pH levels and changes in oxidation, for instance, often corresponded with elevated levels of arsenic. These are things that homeowners can monitor relatively inexpensively.

“Helen’s research shines a light on the chemical quality of domestic well waters within the Appalachian Basin, which is critical because these drinking water supplies are rarely monitored. By identifying natural processes and human activities that are most likely to degrade groundwater quality, her research makes an important contribution to informing decisions intended to safeguard drinking water supplies in this region,” says James Saiers, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Hydrology, who was her faculty advisor.

Now a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, Siegel is partnering with several underserved communities to develop research agendas that serve the distinct needs of communities in the Austin area. She is sampling for PFAS compounds to map racial disparities in exposure rates and is designing experiments to understand why their water, which comes from a private provider, sometimes emerges from the tap brown or red.

“We’re hoping to tackle some of these concerns from the basic science side of things while also building capacity among those most affected, recognizing that they hold a distinct form of expertise when it comes to solving these problems,” she says.