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.
Coalinga usually gets its water through an aqueduct which runs
from the San Luis Reservoir, about 70 miles northwest of the
city. But as the West’s megadrought pushes reservoir
levels to precarious new lows, the US Bureau of Reclamation
this year reduced the amount of water Coalinga could take from
the reservoir by 80%, city officials told CNN. The
restriction left Coalinga short about 600-acre feet of water
through March 2023 … With the city on track to run out
of water by mid- to late November, officials turned to the
increasingly expensive open market to make up the difference.
They finalized a purchase from a California public irrigation
district last week. The city’s price tag for life’s most
basic necessity was roughly $1.1 million dollars. … [T]he
same amount of water used to cost $114,000.
The Hoopa Valley Tribe alleged in a lawsuit Monday that the
federal government is violating its sovereignty and failing to
collect money from California farms that rely on federally
supplied water to pay for damages to tribal fisheries. The
tribe, which has a reservation in northwest California, says in
its lawsuit against the Biden administration that the Trinity
River that it relies on for food and cultural purposes has been
decimated by decades of the federal government diverting water.
The suit alleges the U.S. Department of the Interior has failed
to follow laws that require the contractors who use that water
to pay money for habitat restoration projects. It says those
contractors owe $340 million for environmental restoration work
along the Trinity River and other places damaged by water
diversions.
Flooding from a storm event so severe that it occurs only once
every 100 years would cause far greater damage to life and
property in the Los Angeles Basin than federal emergency
officials have forecast, according to UC Irvine researchers who
warn also that Black and low-income communities would be
hardest hit by the disaster. … [T]he paper is among the first
to examine how whiplashing weather extremes due to climate
change may impact the Los Angeles Basin — a region whose
development was guided by deep social and racial divisions that
favored white residents. In the Los Angeles Basin, researchers
found that Black, Latino, and Asian residents were —
respectively— 79%, 17%, and 11% more likely than white
residents to be exposed to waist-high flooding.
A decade ago, California became the first state to
“legislatively recognize the human right to water.” Part of
that right is a guarantee to keep water affordable. That’s
proving to be a challenge in the Golden State as drought years
and utility bills stack up. Since the beginning of 2022, the
cost of water in California has shot up 40%, further straining
those who’ve struggled through a pandemic and now record
inflation to keep up with their service bills. Already, a 2021
survey found state households had amassed $1 billion in unpaid
water bills. An estimated 12% of Californians had overdue
payments —$500 on average — with the most debt
disproportionately accumulated in Black and Latinx
neighborhoods.
Today, a nationwide coalition of 50 citizens’ groups and
community advocacy, environmental justice, and environmental
advocacy organizations, together representing tens of millions
of people, in partnership with Earthjustice, petitioned the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to improve its
oversight of water pollution from industrial-scale concentrated
animal feeding operations, commonly known as Large
CAFOs. … According to the report, CAFOs cause
disproportionate harm to communities of color, low-income
communities, and under-resourced rural communities … To
petitioners’ knowledge, this report is the first to describe
the unequal harm that CAFOs impose on environmental justice
communities in the Central Valley.
The 2022 California legislative session, which closed in
August, included three bills aimed at addressing sources of
per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS describe a
large category of man-made chemical compounds that repel water,
dirt, oil, and grease. The chemical properties of PFAS have
made them particularly desirable for use in food packaging,
stain- and water-repellant fabrics, and nonstick products.
However, PFAS’s unique chemical properties also make them
resistant to degradation in the environment, earning them the
moniker of “forever chemicals.” PFAS have been found to be
highly mobile in the environment, susceptible to traveling
through soil and seeping into groundwater or to traveling long
distances through the air.
The California Department of Justice on Wednesday issued a
“legal alert” intended to help protect people from water
shutoffs as the state continues to struggle with drought,
rising prices and the lingering economic effects of the
COVID-19 pandemic. State Attorney General Rob Bonta said
he issued the alert partly as a response to an estimated 40%
increase in the price of certain types of water transactions so
far this year and the fact that roughly 1.6 million
Californians have fallen behind on their payments as of January
2021. … The alert was sent to drinking water systems to
remind them of the protections codified in the state’s Water
Shutoff Protection Act.
California has long had a mismatch. “Where the waterfalls and
where the people are. Much of the water, about two-thirds, fall
in the Sierra Nevada, but most of the population is in the
Central Valley, the Bay Area, along the coast or in Southern
California,” said Carrie Buckman, Environmental Program Manager
with Delta Conveyance. … Pushing a pipeline plan, like the
Delta Conveyance project, on many different occasions seemed
dead in the water. The area referred to as the Delta goes
from Sacramento to Tracy and the Bay Area to the ocean. Fifty
percent of California’s water moves through these waterways.
Weeks before the November 8 election, national political debate
centers on control of Congress. In rural southeastern Arizona,
however, the kitchen table issue strikes closer to home. Voters
in parts of Cochise and Graham counties will decide whether to
join the state’s more populated districts and regulate
groundwater extraction. Orchards, vineyards, and dairy farms
have moved into this dusty corner of Arizona where large-scale
irrigation has caused drinking water wells to go dry and the
land to subside, damaging highways. … In California and
New York, voters will be asked to approve multibillion-dollar
bond and taxing measures to benefit air, land, and water.
A study from the University of California, Berkeley and
Virginia Tech has found high concentrations of arsenic in the
water supply of the Kern Valley State Prison and the
surrounding communities in the California Central Valley. By
looking at 20 years of water quality data, the study found that
for months or even years at a time, arsenic levels in the
prison and the communities exceeded the federal limits.
In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency reduced the
maximum acceptable arsenic level from 50 parts per billion
(ppb) to 10 ppb. The new law did not go into effect until 2006,
yet Kern Valley Prison opened a year before that with no plans
for arsenic remediation, even though data showed the prison
would not meet federal standards.
The day the family moved to Kansas Settlement [in Cochise
County, Arizona] they lost their water. When Duckels
turned on the faucet, she heard a spitting noise, but nothing
came out. It didn’t take long to find the source of the issue:
The aquifer beneath her house had dropped below the bottom of
her well. … The growing water shortage is driving
freedom-loving denizens of the Willcox Basin to a radical
solution: state regulation. In two weeks, basin residents will
vote on whether to establish new restrictions on large
groundwater wells, the first such referendum in state
history. If voters approve the new rules, it would constitute a
sea change in Arizona water politics.
Clean drinking water has been the city of Pleasanton’s top
priority these past few months after long-lasting PFAS
chemicals were found in the city’s groundwater wells, which are
also reaching the end of their useful lives and require
rehabilitation or replacement. PFAS, or per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances, are chemicals with components that
break down very slowly over time, which the city has been
working on addressing since it had to shut down one well due to
PFAS back in 2019. The three city-owned wells account for about
one-fifth of Pleasanton’s potable water supply.
Amid a tidal wave of bad news – from inflation and the war in
Ukraine to climate change and divisive politics – there is one
story that might trump all others in importance, and yet it
receives the least sustained global
attention: water. We hear about water troubles,
episodically. In between those times, we turn it on and turn it
off. But pause and think: After Hurricane Ian, we watched in
horror as homes and possessions floated down flooded streets in
Florida … Periodically, our newscasts
show firefighters in California evacuating people from
their homes and trying to put out massive blazes with limited
supplies, fighting climate change and heat. … America is
not alone in its water nightmare. Outside the United States,
the water picture gets even more grim. -Written by Tara D. Sonenshine, the Edward R. Murrow
Professor of Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Coalinga city officials estimate their small town will run out
of water by Dec. 1. The city, which is typically allocated
10,000 acre-feet of water, has only been allocated about 2,000
acre-feet this year, according to Pro-Tem Mayor Ray Singleton.
And that supply is almost gone. … The California valley
city, located inland between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is
home to an estimated 17,465 people. All the people
living in Fresno County, where Coalinga is located, are
experiencing a drought. It is the second driest year to date
over the past 128 years, according to the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
Several months ago, Rosario Rodriguez faced a financial dilemma
that has become all too common for millions of drought-weary
Californians — either pay the electric bill, which had
skyrocketed to about $300 during a scorching summer in western
Fresno County, or pay the $220 combined water, sewer and trash
bill…. For a family of four living off $25,000 a year, a
water bill of more than $200 a month is an economic burden.
Now, with 1 in 10 California households falling into arrears on
water payments, calls are mounting for the state to step in and
help.
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.”
State work to improve wildlife habitat and tamp down dust at California’s ailing Salton Sea is finally moving forward. Now the sea may be on the verge of getting the vital ingredient needed to supercharge those restoration efforts – money.
The shrinking desert lake has long been a trouble spot beset by rising salinity and unhealthy, lung-irritating dust blowing from its increasingly exposed bed. It shadows discussions of how to address the Colorado River’s two-decade-long drought because of its connection to the system. The lake is a festering health hazard to nearby residents, many of them impoverished, who struggle with elevated asthma risk as dust rises from the sea’s receding shoreline.
As California slowly emerges from
the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, one remnant left behind by
the statewide lockdown offers a sobering reminder of the economic
challenges still ahead for millions of the state’s residents and
the water agencies that serve them – a mountain of water debt.
Water affordability concerns, long an issue in a state where
millions of people struggle to make ends meet, jumped into
overdrive last year as the pandemic wrenched the economy. Jobs
were lost and household finances were upended. Even with federal
stimulus aid and unemployment checks, bills fell by the wayside.
Across a sprawling corner of southern Tulare County snug against the Sierra Nevada, a bounty of navel oranges, grapes, pistachios, hay and other crops sprout from the loam and clay of the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater helps keep these orchards, vineyards and fields vibrant and supports a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy across the valley. But that bounty has come at a price. Overpumping of groundwater has depleted aquifers, dried up household wells and degraded ecosystems.
