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.
Well users around Glenn County are approaching a water crisis
due to ongoing drought conditions. Groundwater supplies are
running lower and lower as many residential wells are drying up
while others are reporting serious water supply issues. In
response, a meeting was held Thursday evening to not only
address the issue but bring forth options for residents in
Orland to connect to a municipal water line.
It is a painful paradox for California, the world’s
fifth-largest economy: Some of the very same farmworkers who
pick our food can’t drink a glass of clean water — or any water
in some cases — from their kitchen sink. While working on
environmental justice issues at EDF for the past six years, I
have had the opportunity to talk with some of these essential
workers, many of whom come from Spanish-speaking countries like
me.
Scientists have found nearly 42,000 potential sources of toxic
‘forever chemicals’ in the surface and drinking water in
communities across the U.S., mostly from landfills, and
wastewater treatment plants. … A 2019 EWG study found 40
percent of the water systems in 72 California counties were
over the EPA’s suggested limit on PFAS. Pictured: The Hyperion
Water Reclamation Plant, a wastewater treatment center in Los
Angeles. Lawmakers in the state are considering
establishing PFAS limits that are lower than the EPA’s, which
are not currently enforceable.
Nearly 800 residents in the Diablo Grande community could run
out of water by the end of the week. Some residents were
upset that their water rates could increase even as they’re
asked to conserve. … Diablo Grande used to be a coveted
community behind a private gate, but some residents feared it
would be abandoned because of ongoing water problems.
Federal and state officials announced Tuesday that Arvin has
finally met the federal Safe Drinking Water Act’s arsenic
health standard after a frustrating, 13-year process that
resulted in five new groundwater wells serving about 20,000
people. Area residents no longer have to use tokens to get safe
drinking water through free vending machines since tests
reported the city’s new wells produce water containing 7.3
parts per billion of arsenic, which is below the federal
standard of 10 ppb and a big improvement from readings of 20 to
56 ppb reported in 2008.
One day in early October, a group of University of California,
Merced, students went to the campus Smart Farm, augurs in hand,
to explore the soil for the best spots to locate moisture
sensors. They were not looking in the root zone to monitor how
much water is available but instead for areas lower in the soil
to study how irrigation and stormwater can travel far enough
beneath the plants to recharge the groundwater below.
Prior appropriation, or the notion of “first in time, first in
right,” has been a prime directive of California water law for
well over 150 years. It has brought us a system that is so
inequitable in its impacts that more than one million residents
of California lack access to safe drinking water, while
industrial agriculture used more water to grow almonds and
pistachios during California’s last drought than all of
California’s residents.
Come Wednesday, Oct. 13, utility services for Imperial
residents more than 60 days past due will start to be cut off,
but the city will continue to offer public assistance services
to help those who are behind in their bills, it was announced
at the City Council meeting this week. Some 164 utility
customers (water, sewer, and trash) are past due 60 days or
more and will be affected this upcoming date, and more than 800
customers are 30 days past due…
While California’s severe drought has hit nearly every corner
of the Golden State, it has delivered a crushing toll to
communities that received little bounce back following the last
drought that peaked seven years ago. Case-in-point? Kettleman
City. Kettleman, perhaps best known to Californians as a Kings
County stopover midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles,
serves as the junction of Valley residents traversing to the
Central Coast via Highway 41 and metropolitan drivers roaring
across Interstate 5.
California’s agricultural empire is facing a shakeup, as a
state law comes into effect that will limit many farmers’
access to water. The seven-year-old law is supposed to stop the
over-pumping from depleted aquifers, and some farmers — the
largest users of that water — concede the limits are overdue.
… The limits on that water use will force many farmers
to scrap practices that relied on unfettered access to that
shrinking underground reservoir.
As the deepening drought threatens to dry up some West Marin
wells in the coming months, the county government wants to tap
into dwindling reservoirs to avoid a potential public health
emergency. The county proposes to truck reservoir water for the
next four months to an estimated 10 to 20 residences in areas
such as Nicasio, San Geronimo Valley and Lucas Valley. The
actual number of residents is not certain, county officials
said, as qualification criteria are still being drafted.
Ramon Chavez was a 7-year-old in Culiacán, Mexico, when his
parents told him that they were traveling to the United States.
He thought he was going to Disneyland. They ended up in
Stratford. … Land sinks here, sometimes at nearly
historic high rates of more than 1 foot per year, because of
excessive groundwater pumping. Out of its four wells, Stratford
can only rely on one — the others are unreliable and are
unusable.
The Yurok reservation where [Georgiana] Gensaw lives sits on a
remote strip of land that snakes shoulder to shoulder with the
final 44 miles of the Klamath River alongside the misty
Northern California coast. In 2001, drought descended on the
Klamath Basin, the watershed that feeds the river. Due to a
history of water mismanagement in the basin, combined with an
historic drought, the river is sick—and the Yurok are too. The
salmon they’ve long depended on as both dietary staple and
cultural cornerstone have become scarce.
On the dusty, often unpaved roads that cross the Navajo Nation,
pickup trucks hauling water are a common sight. Navajo Nation
residents are 67 times more likely than other Americans to lack
running water in their homes. But outside more than 500 homes
on the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico are devices
that aim to help tackle this plumbing poverty. These
“hydropanels” absorb water from the air and deliver it straight
to a dispenser inside the house. Each one produces around five
liters (1 gallon) daily …
Water scarcity will be the biggest climate-related threat to
corporate assets like factories within the next few decades
… A lack of water is triggering violent conflict in
places like India’s Northern Plains … Sydney will endure
shortfalls within 20 years if the city continues growing at its
current rate, according to a recent estimate, while
residents of San Jose, California, (the “Capital of Silicon
Valley”) are being threatened with penalties if they
don’t cut their water use by 15%. Kenya’s drought has
been declared a national disaster.
Until recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive orders indicated
that the moratorium on termination of water service to
residential customers and small businesses in critical
infrastructure sectors for nonpayment would expire on Sept. 30,
2021. California’s Budget Act, which created the California
Water and Wastewater Arrearage Payment Program, previously
contemplated the moratorium ending on that same date, with
certain exceptions relating to the Arrearage Payment Program.
Development for new housing in the City of Corcoran has
received a sizable boost in the form of $1.5 million in State
funding for clean drinking water. On Wednesday morning, State
Assemblymember Rudy Salas (D-Bakersfield) presented a check for
$1.5 million to the City at the Corcoran Water Treatment Plant.
The money will go toward the creation of a new well north of
Corcoran.
If the California Department of Water Resources says it, it
must be official: “Most of the Delta qualifies as an
environmental justice community,” said DWR environmental
program manager Carrie Buckman at a recent Delta
Conveyance Project Environmental Justice webinar. It was a
welcome statement of a fact that Restore the Delta documented
five years ago. The event was sponsored by the DWR and
was the last of four such webinars this summer. More than 100
people attended mid-program, and there were still about 75 by
the start of the Q&A portion of the agenda ninety minutes
in. -Written by Tim Stroshane, Restore the Delta’s policy
analyst.
[Siskiyou] county has attempted to restrict access to
irrigation water on the grounds that it’s being wasted on weed,
which many Hmong farmers grow to eke out a living from the
otherwise barren land in Mount Shasta Vista. To the Hmong,
mostly first- and second-generation refugees from Southeast
Asia, it’s felt like an attempt to drive them out of a
conservative and majority-white county, the latest chapter in
a long legacy of anti-Asian racism dating back to
California’s gold rush.
A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday ruled that an environmental
group can press ahead with claims that a toxic chemical in a
central California city’s drinking-water system qualifies as
“solid waste” under the federal Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (RCRA). Overturning a lower court ruling, a split
panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the
city of Vacaville can potentially be held liable under the RCRA
for transporting in its water pipes the carcinogen hexavalent
chromium, which an environmental group claims is the result of
commercial pollution at a site where the city draws its water.
