More than 1 million Californians are affected by unsafe or
unreliable sources of water for cooking, drinking and bathing.
They can lose access to water supplies when their wells run dry,
especially during drought when groundwater is relied on more
heavily and the water table drops. Employment disruptions caused
by the COVID-19 pandemic can impair their ability to pay water
bills on time. Communities of color are most often burdened by
these challenges.
Below you’ll find the latest news articles raising
awareness on efforts to seek water equity written by the staff at
the Water Education Foundation and other organizations that were
posted in our Aquafornia news aggregate.
In just the past month, as California temperatures soared
during a drought so severe some experts say it hasn’t been this
parched in 1,200 years, about 250 wells, mostly in the state’s
bread basket, have gone dry. They’re part of the more than
1,100 California wells that have dried up so far this year, a
60% increase from 2021. While that may not seem like a lot,
given that California has 274,000 wells, it’s an ominous sign
and a personal tragedy for the one million Californians who
struggle for clean water. In many cases, it also pits hugely
important agricultural producers, who rely on underground water
for their crops, against their own workers, who need it to
drink.
Most parents take extra precautions to protect their children
from toxic chemicals — from locking cabinets of cleaning
supplies to scrutinizing ingredient labels. But some toxic
chemicals are near impossible to limit their exposure to.
California can change that. Perfluoroalkyl and
polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, are a class of
over 9,000 industrial compounds that are added to
everyday products to repel stains, water or oil. … Commonly
referred to as “forever chemicals,” they do not break down in
the environment — ever. … According to the nonprofit
Environmental Working Group, these chemicals may be
contaminating the drinking water of up to 200 million
Americans.
-Written by Rebecca Fuoco, science communications
officer at the Green Science Policy Institute; and Arlene
Blum, founder and executive director of the Green Science
Policy Institute and a research associate in the Cell and
Molecular Biology Department at UC Berkeley.
Incarcerated Californians — and those who live in neighboring
rural communities — may be exposed to dangerous levels of
arsenic in their drinking water, a new study has found. Arsenic
concentrations in the water supply of the Kern Valley State
Prison and three nearby Central Valley communities exceeded
regulatory limits for months or even years at a time, according
to the study, published on Wednesday in Environmental
Health Perspectives. To draw their conclusions, the
authors combed through 20 years of water quality data from the
prison and the adjacent communities of Allensworth, McFarland
and Delano, where groundwater aquifers contain unhealthy levels
of naturally occurring arsenic.
Most residents of Puerto Rico still don’t have electricity or
water days after Hurricane Fiona caused floods and landslides.
The widespread damage, just five years after Hurricane Maria
destroyed much of the territory’s infrastructure, revealed how
unprotected the island’s 3.2 million residents are as climate
change makes hurricanes more powerful and rainy. … Latinos
are disproportionately affected by climate-driven extreme
weather … Latinos have a long history of climate and
environmental activism against pollution and climate change.
That includes pushing for fair emissions reduction
policies in California and equitable hurricane
assistance in Texas.
According to the Rev. Dennis Hutson, people used to love the
taste of Allensworth’s water. … Now, many residents of
this historically Black community know that it is not safe to
drink water from the wells in their town. Like many areas
throughout California, the groundwater beneath Allensworth is
tainted with dangerous levels of arsenic, a highly carcinogenic
element that can seep into the water table from
deposits in the soil and bedrock.
A committee of San Francisco supervisors Thursday challenged
Mayor London Breed’s assertion that the city understands the
risk of climate change-related flooding in the Bayview-Hunters
Point neighborhood. Members of the Government Audit and
Oversight Committee reviewed a June report from the San
Francisco Civil Grand Jury that confirmed what Bayview-Hunters
Point residents have been saying: The city is not acting fast
enough on how sea level rise could surface legacy toxic
contamination and spread it in neighborhoods near the Cold
War-era naval shipyard.
Months after a judge ruled the City of San Diego is
overcharging some water customers, the city has yet to pay up,
or make changes to its rates. Attorneys say the delay is
costing taxpayers millions in penalty fees. They filed the
case back in 2017, saying San Diego was violating a portion of
the California constitution, which states governments that
provide services are not allowed to charge more for those
services than it costs them to deliver. … Specifically,
the suit alleged San Diego had been overcharging single family
residential customers in tiers 3 and 4, which are those who use
more water than the average customer.
Severe drought continues to impact California, and many
residents need immediate relief. As summer winds down,
Northstate communities are battling the lowest water levels of
the year as is typically the case in September, and 2022 being
the driest year on record, in the 139 year history of data
keeping in Redding, has only exacerbated the problem. The
Shasta County Department of Resource Management received a
grant of over $2.4 million in July from the state Water
Resources Control Board to be used through 2024. Relief efforts
made possible by this grant include bottled water delivery,
well deepening, repairs and replacement.
Gov. Gavin Newsom will decide on a bill that would give
supplemental aid to farmworkers affected by a drought that is
taking a heavy toll on farms. Senate Bill 1066,
introduced by Valley Democrat Melissa Hurtado, passed the
Legislature and went to Newsom’s desk on Sept. 6. … The
California farmworkers drought resilience pilot project would
allocate $20 million in monthly cash payments of $1,000 for the
next three years for eligible farmworkers. With climate
change and natural disasters becoming more common, Hurtado
joined a group of legislators last year asking Gov. Newsom to
prioritize farmworkers in a guaranteed basic income pilot
program.
State and local governments across the country are suing
manufacturers of toxic chemicals that are contaminating much of
the nation’s drinking water, aiming to shield water customers
and taxpayers from the massive cost of cleaning them up. These
pervasive “forever chemicals,” known as PFAS, are linked to a
variety of health hazards, including cancer. Now, as state
lawmakers and federal regulators get serious about removing
them, scores of governments and water suppliers are in pitched
court battles over who is on the hook for hundreds of billions
of dollars in damage — the companies that created the chemicals
or the customers who are drinking them. … In Orange
County, Calif., water managers found PFAS in dozens of wells
that draw from a vast groundwater basin that supplies 2.5
million people.
Toxic waste lurking in the soil under West Oakland
neighborhoods is the next environmental threat in this
community already burdened by pollution. The stability of
buried contamination from Oakland’s industrial past relies on
it staying in place in the soil. But once the rising waters of
San Francisco Bay press inland and get underneath these pockets
of chemicals and gases, a certain amount of that waste will not
stay in place. Instead, it will begin to move. More than 100
sites — colorless gases in dirt under schools, flammable
chemicals buried in shallow soil near parks, petroleum in
pockets of groundwater from iron manufacturing — lie in wait.
Making good on a promise to replace the word “squaw” from
America’s landmarks and places, the U.S. Board on Geographic
Names has announced the renaming of at least 650 geographic
features. “Squaw,” which originated from the
Algonquian language, was once used to refer to a native woman,
but now is considered derogatory and racist by Native Americans
and others. … Of the 650 new name changes, 80
are in California, at least four are in Fresno County, and one
is in Tulare County. … Five Fresno county lakes and
streams have been changed including “Squaw Valley Basin” which
will now be known as “Yokuts Basin.”
The water scarcity California has been experiencing over the
last two decades is the result of the worst drought to hit the
American Southwest in the past 1,200 years. … [I]ssues
regarding water quality arise due to the state’s high use of
pesticides in agriculture, with several Environmental
Protection Agency-reapproved toxic herbicides not being
regulated by state legislation. From 2004 to 2015, over 2
billion pounds of pesticides have been used in California, with
the most recent numbers indicating an annual use of 209
million pounds. Though it represents only 2-3% of total U.S.
cropland, the Golden State uses up to 20% of all pesticides
employed in the U.S. -Written by Stan Gottfredson, CEO of Atraxia
Law, a San Diego-based firm that helps agricultural workers and
their families affected by paraquat exposure compile the
necessary information to support their Parkinson’s disease
injury claims against liable manufacturers.
[Valeria] Contreras lives in Allensworth, a small town of about
500 people an hour’s drive north of Bakersfield, in
California’s Central Valley. She runs her own catering company,
and in her spare time she is also the general manager of the
Allensworth Community Services District, which oversees the
town’s water supply. Back in February, Contreras had no idea
why the water had stopped flowing. And it was her job to fix
it. … Clean, safe and affordable drinking water is
considered a human right under state law, but nearly a million
residents don’t have access to it. Like Contreras, many of them
live in the Central Valley, a patchwork of desert scrub and
irrigated farmland that’s twice the size of Massachusetts and
produces 25% of the nation’s food supply.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the San Luis Rey
Indian Water Authority celebrate the signing of a funding
agreement that provides $15 million in direct financial
assistance to Tribal communities. As California experiences a
third consecutive year of drought – and plans for the
possibility of a fourth dry year to come – many communities
face challenges in accessing clean, safe drinking water. This
funding will help advance water infrastructure projects that
will improve water for families, enhance water supply
reliability, and upgrade existing water infrastructure on
Tribal lands.
For a century, California’s San Joaquin Valley has been known
as “the food basket of the world.” The 27,500-square mile
region currently produces over $34 billion worth of food each
year, a productivity made possible only by its large-scale
irrigation projects and unrestrained groundwater pumping. In
2015, however, California passed the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), making it last Western
state to regulate its groundwater — and bringing the San
Joaquin Valley into compliance with the law will require
retiring over 500,000 acres of its farmland in the next 20
years. While SGMA’s regulations are for the greater good —
achieving sustainable water use in an increasingly
unpredictable climate — they are likely to have negative
effects on the ground.
Like a growing number of Central Californians, [Jesús] Benítez
is bearing the brunt of the state’s punishing drought, which is
evaporating the state’s surface water even as a frenzy of well
drilling saps precious reserves underground. As a result,
the number of dry wells in California has increased 70%
since last year, while the number of Californians living with
contaminated drinking water is at nearly 1 million. The
majority of those people live in low-income communities and
communities of color, state data show — and experts say heat,
drought and climate change are only making those inequities
worse.
New funding from the California Department of Water Resources
promises to help a struggling Tulare County town clean up its
water and turn on its taps. Tooleville, a rural community of
about 200 people at the base of the Sierra Nevada, has only
intermittently had water since its second well recently failed
– the latest victim of California’s intensifying megadrought.
… Even when the well produces water, it’s often contaminated
with unsafe levels of nitrates, a byproduct of nearby
agriculture cultivation that can reduce oxygen levels in the
blood.
California’s water affordability crisis has been simmering for
years as water rate increases have outpaced inflation,
rising 45% between 2007 and 2015 alone. By September 2021,
nearly 650,000 residential and 46,000
business accounts owed more than $315 million in unpaid
water and wastewater bills. Latino and Black
communities have been hit the hardest, with higher average
debt. About half a million account holders had their water shut
off for unpaid bills in 2019, according to state
data. California lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Monday and
Tuesday to offer assistance: A bill that creates a new
state program to help low-income Californians … pay
their water and sewage bills is now expected to be sent to Gov.
Gavin Newsom for his signature.
As California’s water crisis deepens, a new project aims to
help conserve resources and ensure disadvantaged communities
are not left behind. Cadiz Inc. is hanging onto its years-long
goal of storing water before it evaporates and then selling or
giving it away to communities in Southern California. … Cadiz
incorporated owns over 70 square miles of property in the
eastern Mojave Desert and are hoping to turn the land into a
key conservation site. … For decades, the company has
proposed pumping groundwater from beneath the desert and
selling the water to urban cities in Southern California.
