When there’s arsenic in the water, but ‘we have nowhere to go’
In California’s Eastern Coachella Valley, some of the state’s poorest workers toil in fields and groves of date palms. … Three times a week, Pascual Campos Ochoa, 26, loads up a duffel bag with a brown fleece blanket and a plastic container of oatmeal. A van picks him up from the dusty trailer park where he lives — where stray dogs wander among the carcasses of old cars and working electricity is not a given — and takes him to a clinic for kidney dialysis. Still, it was not until recently, he said, that he considered that his health problems may be tied to … the water tainted with high levels of arsenic that spewed for years from its aging pipes.