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.
The trial dates for two related lawsuits filed against the city
of Newport Beach accusing it of negligence in the maintenance
of a water main that burst and flooded a local home twice has
been set for this fall, according to attorney Jesse Creed. Amy
and Marshall Senk have owned their home on Evening Canyon Road
in Corona del Mar since 2002 and, after remodeling it, began
living there in August 2006. In October 2020, a water main
owned and operated by the city failed and burst, which led to
“catastrophic” flooding of the property with 500,000 gallons of
water, according to a complaint filed in Orange County Superior
Court in April 2023 by the Senks’ attorneys from
Panish|Shea|Ravipudi LLP. The damage left in the wake of the
failure made the house uninhabitable.
Is bottled water really “natural” if it’s contaminated with
microplastics? A series of lawsuits recently filed against six
bottled water brands claim that it’s deceptive to use labels
like “100 percent mountain spring water” and “natural spring
water” — not because of the water’s provenance, but
because it is likely tainted with tiny plastic fragments.
Reasonable consumers, the suits allege, would read those labels
and assume bottled water to be totally free of contaminants; if
they knew the truth, they might not have bought it.
… Experts aren’t sure it’s a winning legal strategy, but
it’s a creative new approach for consumers hoping to protect
themselves against the ubiquity of microplastics. Research over
the past several years has identified these particles
— fragments of plastic less than 5 millimeters in diameter
— just about everywhere, in nature and in people’s
bodies.
Jade Stevens stands at the edge of a snowy cliff and takes in
the jaw-dropping panorama of the Sierra. Peaks reaching more
than a mile high form the backdrop to Bear Valley, a
kaleidoscope of green pastures mixed with ponderosa pines,
firs, cedars and oak trees. Stevens, 34, is well aware that
some of her fellow Black Americans can’t picture themselves in
places like this. Camping, hiking, mountain biking, snow
sports, venturing to locales with wild animals in their names —
those are things white people do. As co-founder of the 40 Acre
Conservation League, California’s first Black-led land
conservancy, she’s determined to change that perception. Darryl
Lucien snowshoes near Lake Putt. The nonprofit recently secured
$3 million in funding from the state Wildlife Conservation
Board and the nonprofit Sierra Nevada Conservancy to purchase
650 acres of a former logging forest north of Lake Tahoe.
When the Wilton Rancheria tribe restored its control over a
77-acre parcel outside Sacramento recently, tribal Chairman
Jesus Tarango Jr. couldn’t stop smiling. … For years,
Tarango’s elders had fought to remain on their ancestral
territory in the Sacramento Valley, only to have the U.S.
government repeatedly renege on promises: Officials sold their
land to private buyers and even canceled their status as a
federally recognized tribe. … “Home” means something
different if you happen to be a descendant of the Miwok and
Nisenan tribes that lived on and watched over this part of
Northern California only to watch it fall into the hands of
outsiders, Tarango said. He describes his tribe as “a river
people.” They view the Cosumnes River and the many creeks that
rush over boulders and wind past wooded banks in their homeland
as sacred givers of life and sources of power. Those waters
flow through them too.
Land subsidence remains the biggest issue in the new state
regulation of groundwater. The state Water Board reports that
subsidence measured as much as 7 feet just east of Corcoran
between June 2015 and January 2024. Groundwater pumping west of
Highway 99 has caused the land to sink at least 4 to 5 feet
according to a DWR database. The worry here is the collapse of
water delivering infrastructure. Tulare Lake farmers have been
asked to install metering on their pumps 90 days after the
decision to put the GSA on probation which was made April 16.
That means by mid-July pumpers must install metering as well as
begin reporting how much water they are extracting.
Fourteen months ago, a catastrophic flood upended thousands of
lives in Pájaro, a small Central California farmworker town
filled with immigrants who speak mostly Spanish or Indigenous
languages. A relentless series of atmospheric rivers
transformed the inviting Pájaro River into a malevolent foe
that charged through a crumbling levee and engulfed the coastal
community in floodwaters. Regional and state officials
knew a levee break was inevitable—it had failed at least four
times before—but didn’t prioritize desperately needed repairs
for a town populated by low-income farmworkers. … A
group of Pájaro residents explored the impacts of climate
change on their town through a very personal lens as part of
the Pájaro PhotoVoice Project, organized by the nonprofit
climate justice organization Regeneración. The photos will be
on display at Somos Watsonville, a nonprofit community
center, until June 7.
When Noah Williams was about a year old, his parents took him
on a fateful drive through the endless desert sagebrush of the
Owens Valley—which the Nüümü call Payahuunadü—in California’s
Eastern Sierra. Noah was strapped into his car seat behind his
mother, Teri Red Owl, and his father, Harry Williams, a Nüümü
tribal elder who loved a teachable moment. “Hey look—that’s our
water!” he liked to tell Noah whenever they drove past the
riffling cascades of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. … In a
state shaped by water grabs, drought emergencies, and “pray for
rain” billboards, Payahuunadü is the locus of
California’s most infamous water war—the fight
between Payahuunadü residents and the city of Los
Angeles, over 200 miles away. … Around 1904, Los Angeles city
officials came up with a plan to take the valley’s water for
themselves.
Beyond a chain-link fence topped with spiraled barbed wire,
swaying coastal grasses conceal a cache of buried radioactive
waste and toxic pesticides from a bygone chemical plant.
Warning signs along the Richmond, Calif., site’s perimeter
attempt to discourage trespassers from breaching the locked
gates, where soil testing has detected cancer-causing gamma
radiation more than 60 times higher than background levels in
some places. For most of the 20th century, the former
Stauffer Chemical Co. disposed of thousands of tons of
industrial waste near its factory grounds along Richmond’s
southeast shoreline. … In a January letter to Albany and
Berkeley city officials, [the State Water Board] wrote
that the landfills “may have accepted industrial waste
materials that could present a risk to water quality, human
health, and the environment.”
After yearslong battles with the city of San Diego over
crumbling stormwater infrastructure in their southeastern San
Diego neighborhoods, hundreds of people whose homes and
businesses were damaged by flash flood waters in January are
now suing the city. The $100 million mass tort lawsuit has
nearly 300 plaintiffs — homeowners and renters as well as
business owners in the communities of Southcrest, Logan Heights
and others along the Chollas Creek watershed. The lawsuit
contends that city leaders have known for years that the creek
and stormwater infrastructure around it are in urgent need of
attention.
Residents of Allensworth are finally getting attention from a
company that installed and then abandoned hydropanels, which
make water out of thin air, several years ago. As SJV
Water reported in March, residents were frustrated they
couldn’t get support from Source Global, the company behind the
panels, after the panels had fallen into disrepair. Following
SJV Water’s story, Source Global dedicated a staff person to
oversee operations in Allensworth, said Kayode Kadara, a
community leader in Allensworth. … Kadara said Source
Global staff has been making calls to residents in town with
the hydropanels and technicians have come out to perform upkeep
and check the hydropanels. Kadara’s own hydropanels at home
were serviced. The hydropanels at Allensworth’s community
center still aren’t working though, said Kadara.
Related San Joaquin Valley drinking water article:
[Residents of the Friendly Acres mobile home park in Red Bluff]
learned in March that their well water had high levels of PFAS.
Those are chemicals used to make everything from nonstick
cookware to water-resistant clothing to cleaning products.
Officials from the California State Water Resources Control
Board held a meeting for tenants that month, warning them about
the contamination and providing bottled water. Kimberlee says
that meeting was the first time she had ever heard about PFAS.
That’s despite Friendly Acres having high levels for at least
four years, according to public data.
Twelve years after California became the first state in the
nation to declare a “human right to water,” achieving this
basic societal goal of securing clean water for all 39 million
state residents is more daunting than ever. This is a moral
imperative for one of the largest economies in the world. There
is no good reason for clean, safe water to be elusive to an
estimated 1.2 million Californians who get their water from
failing water systems beset with financial problems and safety
concerns. But there is an undeniable reason: The state’s water
system was in far worse shape than previously thought.
California needs to drill more than 55,000 new wells and fix
nearly 400 failing public water systems. -Written by Tom Philp, Sacramento Bee columnist.
Rain-swollen water levels at two Kenyan hydroelectric dams are
at “historic highs,” and people downstream should move away,
the Cabinet said Tuesday, ordering residents of flood-prone
areas across the country to evacuate or they’ll be moved by
force. Kenya, along with other parts of East Africa, has been
overwhelmed by flooding that killed 66 people on Monday alone
and in recent days has blocked a national highway, swamped the
main airport and swept a bus off a bridge. More than 150,000
people are displaced and living in dozens of camps. With
seasonal rains forecast to increase, the Cabinet said residents
of areas that have had flooding or landslides in the past and
those living near dams and rivers that are considered at high
risk will be told by Wednesday to evacuate. Those who refuse
will be moved by force.
One of the most terrifying features of the climate crisis is
how it jeopardizes our access to water, without which we cannot
live. Some two billion people lack safe drinking water, while
about almost two thirds of the human population suffers water
scarcity for some part of the year. This in turn imperils food
security, since agriculture is impossible without
water. As climate change exacerbates water shortages,
water profiteering is making the problem even worse. The
barbaric capitalist insistence on treating water as a commodity
incentivizes scarcity and hoarding, as well as imposing ever
more extreme levels of thirst upon the world’s poor. -Written by Liza Featherstone, the author
of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of
Consultation.
Prosecutors have accused Dennis Falaschi, 77, a gregarious
local irrigation official [with the Panoche Water District], of
masterminding the theft of more than $25 million worth of water
out of a federal canal over the course of two decades and
selling it to farmers and other local water districts.
According to the allegations, proceeds that should have gone to
the federal government instead were used to benefit Falaschi,
his water district and a small group of co-conspirators, much
of it funneled into exorbitant salaries and lavish fringe
benefits. … Some farmers who relied on Falaschi and his
irrigation district were outraged — at the government. They see
him as the Robin Hood of irrigation. … For more than a
year, Falaschi maintained his innocence, insisting there had
been no theft. Then this spring, his attorneys filed paperwork
that said he was prepared to change his plea. Exactly what he
will plead guilty to remains unclear.
A water transfer from a small western Arizona town to a growing
East Valley community has some observers concerned. About a
decade ago, a company called Greenstone bought nearly 500 acres
of land in the town of Cibola, in La Paz County. But, a few
years later, Greenstone sold the water rights for that farmland
to Queen Creek. In the process, the company made about $14
million in profit. Since then, La Paz and two other Arizona
counties have sued the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, arguing the
agency didn’t consider the long-term implications when it
approved the deal. A judge this year sided with those counties,
and told the bureau to essentially redo its environmental
assessment of the arrangement.
A generational issue for the families living in San Lucas
continues as they’ve gone decades without drinking water. Soon
federal, state, and local leaders will secure nearly a million
dollars to build a pipeline to King City. Advertisement “The
kids couldn’t even be bathed in the water. That’s how bad it is
that babies are not able to get bathed. That means there’s
something really wrong,” said Fray Marin-Zuniga, a San Lucas
resident. Plants not growing, animals dying, young children
unable to bathe, this is the reality for those living in the
unincorporated South Monterey County town of San Lucas. “Back
when I was in school here, because I graduated from San Lucas
School, the water was yellow,” Martin-Zuniga said.
Martin-Zuniga has lived in San Lucas his entire life, he shows
KSBW the dry skin condition that he’s developed on his arm. He
says as the years go by, the need for clean water has never
wavered.
California may be a leader in the fight against climate change,
but the state is years, even decades, behind other states when
it comes to granting environmental rights to its citizens.
While a handful of other state constitutions, including those
of New York and Pennsylvania, declare the people’s rights to
clean air, water and a healthy environment, California’s does
not. That could change as soon as November. Under a proposal
moving through the Legislature, voters would decide whether to
add one sentence to the state constitution’s Declaration of
Rights: “The people shall have a right to clean air and water
and a healthy environment.”
More than a year after floods devastated the small town of
Woodlake in Tulare County, residents finally feel hopeful about
the future thanks to new infrastructure projects and an ongoing
lawsuit they are bringing against local governments and other
agencies. In March of 2023, homes in northwest Woodlake
were hit with floods after historic storms and snowpack brought
a deluge onto the valley floor. It took many residents months
and tens of thousands of dollars to repair their homes.
Residents banded together and took legal action against what
they said was a government failure to properly prepare and
respond to the floods.