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.
At its meeting on January 17, 2023, the Porterville City
Council unanimously approved to support the County of Tulare’s
request to provisionally use City water to serve homes across
Tulare County on temporary household tanks. Due to a road
closure caused by flooding on Avenue 368 in Visalia, contract
water haulers for Self-Help Enterprises were unable to access
the Bob Wiley Detention Facility well, which provides source
water for 389 homes each week. With no other available water
resources and the inability to access the well, the City
Council agreed to the support the access to its water on an
emergency provisional basis until the road is repaired and the
well can again be accessed.
On a brisk afternoon in mid-January, Eloy Ortiz is pacing the
back alley behind a white house in Watsonville, California, in
the heart of California’s strawberry industry. The house is
under an evacuation warning after weeks of torrential rain, but
that hasn’t stopped hundreds of women and children from
crowding around the back gate. … Ortiz is a board member
and volunteer with the Center for Farmworker Families, a
nonprofit that assists farmworker communities throughout Santa
Cruz and Monterey Counties on California’s Central Coast. The
group has been distributing food for over a decade, but this is
a big crowd, even by their standards. Many of the women in line
pick strawberries for a living, and the crop has taken a
beating from California’s winter storms. Farmers face up to
$200 million in damages, according to the California Strawberry
Commission.
In the warmth of Arizona’s winter sun, 50 residents gathered in
front of neighborhood activist Cody Reim’s house last weekend,
eager to discuss a solution to their problem. Despite living a
few miles from a river, their community has no water supply
services. … In Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated
community with no municipal government, near Scottsdale, the
fashionable, wealthy desert city adjoining the state capital of
Phoenix, none of the homes are connected to a local water
district. There is only one paved road, no street lights, storm
gutters, or pipes in the ground. Instead residents have wells –
or water tanks outside their homes, which they used to fill at
a local pipe serviced by Scottsdale.
The saga over connecting Exeter and Tooleville’s water systems
entered its most important phase to date on Jan. 24., in which
an agreement will now be sent to the state for
review. City manager Adam Ennis said that the approval of
the consolidation agreement between Exeter and Tooleville will
be one of the last steps before they can execute the project.
The agreement outlines the responsibilities of Tooleville
Mutual Non-Profit Water Association (TMNPWA) and Exeter for
making the water connection a reality. Exeter is now awaiting
approval of this agreement from the State Water Board, and if
it is approved, they will finally be allowed to break ground on
the project. This was a long time coming, as the city has spent
years working on a solution to Tooleville’s water woes.
A Maricopa County judge in Arizona denied residents emergency
relief over their Scottsdale water source that has been cut off
since Jan. 1 because of drought conditions and despite repeated
city warnings to find an alternative water source. The action
for an emergency stay was brought by some residents of the
nearby unincorporated community of Rio Verde Foothills who saw
their deliveries of water run dry at the beginning of the year
due to action by the city of Scottsdale, whose leaders said
they repeatedly warned the community that continued deliveries
were unsustainable due to drought.
As of Friday morning, more than 600 colonias were without
running water in Tijuana and Rosarito, where residents say
service has been spotty since last year. Facing the possibility
of running out of water, Tijuana’s State Commission for Public
Services, CESPT, turned to the San Diego County Water Authority
for help. Agreements in place between Mexico and the United
States allow for water deliveries in times of emergency or
severe drought. So last week, the San Diego-based agency began
sending water to Tijuana. Compounding the problem is the
deterioration of Tijuana’s main aqueduct that delivers water
from the Colorado River, the city’s main source of water. So
far, repairs are taking longer than expected.
In September 2020, workers in Brawley near the Mexico border
began loading dump trucks with soil from the site of an old
pesticide company. As an excavator carefully placed the
Imperial County waste into the vehicles, a worker sprayed the
pile with a hose, state records show. … Shipping documents
indicate the soil was contaminated with DDT, an insecticide the
federal Environmental Protection Agency banned decades
ago and that research has linked to premature births,
cancer and environmental harms. The Brawley dirt was
so toxic to California, state regulation labeled it a hazardous
waste. That meant it would need to go to a disposal
facility specially designed to handle dangerous material – a
site with more precautions than a regular landfill to make sure
the contaminants couldn’t leach into groundwater or pollute the
air. At least, that would have been the requirement if the
waste stayed in California. But it didn’t.
U.S. Rep. Josh Harder didn’t have to convince an overflowing
crowd in French Camp this week that the Delta Tunnel is a bad
idea. Instead, the town hall served as a sort of call to arms
for those who do not want to support what many called a “water
grab” by Southern California in the longtime-going war of words
and policies in the fight for ownership of the state’s water
resources. A crowd of more than 150 Wednesday night gathered in
the community room at Health Plan of San Joaquin on Manthey
Road to listen to harder speak about one of the state’s most
studied, talked about and debated issues — water. The hour-long
meeting saw discussions on flooding, water storage and, of
course, the divisive Delta Tunnel, a $16 billion project from
that would divert water from the Delta down to our SoCal
neighbors that is supported by both Gov. Gavin Newsom and the
Department of Water Resources.
While California’s drought outlook is improving, the State is
continuing to proactively prepare for a return to dry
conditions amid climate-driven extremes in weather. Today,
Department of Water Resources (DWR) is officially launching a
standing Drought Resilience Interagency and Partners (DRIP)
Collaborative, which will include members of the public.
Community members and water users are encouraged to apply.
Initiated by Senate Bill 552, the DRIP Collaborative will
foster partnerships between local governments, experts,
community representatives and state agencies to address drought
planning, emergency response, and ongoing management. Members
will help ensure support for community needs and anticipate and
mitigate drought impacts, especially for small water supplier
and rural communities who are often more vulnerable to
droughts.
Access to safe, affordable water is a necessity for human
health and well-being. But when droughts strike areas that are
already water-stressed, water providers are forced to enact
measures to curtail water usage or invest in supplies from more
expensive sources, which can increase costs for consumers.
According to a recent study from the Fletcher Lab at Stanford
University, published in Nature Water, these measures can
disproportionately affect water bills for low-income
households, making water more costly for the most vulnerable
people.
As damaging as it was for more than 32 trillion gallons of rain
and snow to fall on California since Christmas, a
worst-case global warming scenario could juice up
similar future downpours by one-third by the middle of this
century, a new study says. The strongest of California’s
storms from “atmospheric rivers,” long and wide plumes of
moisture that form over an ocean and flow through the sky over
land, would probably get an overall 34% increase in total
precipitation, or another 11 trillion gallons more than just
fell.
Eating one freshwater fish caught in a river or lake in the
United States is the equivalent of drinking a month’s worth of
water contaminated with toxic “forever chemicals,” new research
said on Tuesday. The invisible chemicals, called PFAS, were
first developed in the 1940s to resist water and heat and are
now used in items such as non-stick pans, textiles, fire
suppression foams and food packaging. But the indestructibility
of PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, means the
pollutants have built up over time in the air, soil, lakes,
rivers, food, drinking water and even our bodies. There have
been growing calls for stricter regulation for PFAS, which have
been linked to a range of serious health issues including liver
damage, high cholesterol, reduced immune responses and several
kinds of cancer.
Up and down the coast, they have endured torrential rain, flood
waters, mudslides, lighting strikes, and downed trees, often
with little more than tents or bridges for shelter. “The water
backed up to my tent, it’s still going,” said Maurice, who
lives in San Francisco and who declined to provide his last
name. “Ninety percent of my stuff is still wet. I’m trying to
salvage the stuff I do need to keep on going.” … The storm
has placed a spotlight on the Golden State’s staggering
inequality, and its decades-long failure to adequately shelter
and support its homeless residents.
Rebekah Rohde, 40, and Steven Sorensen, 61, are two of at least
14 people killed by the recent storms — and both were unhoused.
The Sacramento County Coroner reported Monday that both were
found with trees collapsed onto their tents. It’s a tragic —
and telling — convergence of two California crises: extreme
weather and worsening homelessness. The current series of
storms (“parade of cyclones” is the latest National Weather
Service warning) pummeled communities with as much as 8 inches
of rain and wind gusts of nearly 70 mph, causing power outages,
school shutdowns and flood risks, especially in coastal regions
and areas burned by wildfires. They include the coastal enclave
of Montecito in Santa Barbara County, where evacuations were
ordered on Monday, five years to the day that mudslides killed
23 people and destroyed 130 homes.
President Joe Biden has approved three bills that will improve
access to water for three tribes in Arizona amid an unrelenting
drought. One of the measures that Biden signed Thursday
settles longstanding water rights claims for the Hualapai
Tribe, whose reservation borders a 100-mile (161-kilometer)
stretch of the Colorado River as it runs through the Grand
Canyon. Hualapai will have the right to divert up to 3,414
acre-feet of water per year, along with the ability to lease it
within Arizona.
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has initiated a
statewide effort to sample over 1,200 public water systems
across the state for 29 different kinds of a hazardous chemical
known as PFAS. The goal is to produce a detailed map
showing the presence of PFAS in drinking water supplies, the
first step toward cleaning up contaminated water sources. PFAS,
short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of
manufactured chemicals that have been used since the late 1940s
in a wide variety of products and industries, and can now be
found globally in water and soil. A growing body of evidence
has shown that long-term exposure, even to low traces of these
chemicals, can cause severe health issues.
The cost of delivering safe, clean
tap water to every household and
business in a community is massive. In fact, it
may be among the most expensive of all
human undertakings. That is why only the wealthiest
countries have achieved it at high rates and
why 2 billion people on our planet still lack
it. Paying the monthly bill that
comes with good tap water service is unpleasant, but
it beats the alternatives. While it would be nice if
some benevolent entity would
bear the cost of delivering safe, clean
tap water, the reality is that communities that
rely on someone else to
pay for their water systems often
have inadequate or failing service. -Written by Kathryn Sorensen, former
director of Phoenix Water Services and
current director of research at the Kyl
Center for Water Policy, Arizona State
University; Bidtah
Becker, director of the Navajo Nation
Division of Natural Resources; and Manny
Teodoro, associate professor of public affairs
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When the Colorado River Compact was
signed 100 years ago, the negotiators for seven Western states
bet that the river they were dividing would have ample water to
meet everyone’s needs – even those not seated around the table.
A century later, it’s clear the water they bet on is not there.
More than two decades of drought, lake evaporation and overuse of
water have nearly drained the river’s two anchor reservoirs, Lake
Powell on the Arizona-Utah border and Lake Mead near Las Vegas.
Climate change is rendering the basin drier, shrinking spring
runoff that’s vital for river flows, farms, tribes and cities
across the basin – and essential for refilling reservoirs.
The states that endorsed the Colorado River Compact in 1922 – and
the tribes and nation of Mexico that were excluded from the table
– are now straining to find, and perhaps more importantly accept,
solutions on a river that may offer just half of the water that
the Compact assumed would be available. And not only are
solutions not coming easily, the relationships essential for
compromise are getting more frayed.
A pilot program in the Salinas Valley run remotely out of Los Angeles is offering a test case for how California could provide clean drinking water for isolated rural communities plagued by contaminated groundwater that lack the financial means or expertise to connect to a larger water system.
Martha Guzman recalls those awful
days working on water and other issues as a deputy legislative
secretary for then-Gov. Jerry Brown. California was mired in a
recession and the state’s finances were deep in the red. Parks
were cut, schools were cut, programs were cut to try to balance a
troubled state budget in what she remembers as “that terrible
time.”
She now finds herself in a strikingly different position: As
administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s
Region 9, she has a mandate to address water challenges across
California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii and $1 billion to help pay
for it. It is the kind of funding, she said, that is usually
spread out over a decade. Guzman called it the “absolutely
greatest opportunity.”
