Public Health Crisis Looms as California Identifies 600 Communities at Risk of Water-System Failures A new report puts into focus for the first time the scope of the state’s drinking-water problems and what it will take to fix them.
This article originally appeared in The Revelator. Tara Lohan
May 7, 2021
Listen to editor Maureen Nandini Mitra’s conversation about drought and water equity in California with Camille Pannu, a professor of law and community development at UC Irvine, and Nataly Escobedo Garcia, water program policy coordinator for Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability on KPFA Public radio.
A familiar scene has returned to California: drought. Two counties are currently under emergency declarations, and the rest of the state could follow.
Water infrastructure in the small community of Woodville, Calif. | Tara Lohan / Revelator
A familiar scene has returned to California: drought. Two counties are currently under emergency declarations, and the rest of the state could follow.
It was only four years ago when a winter of torrential rain finally wrestled the state out of its last major drought, which had dragged on for five years and left thousands of domestic wells coughing up dust.
That drinking-water crisis made national headlines and helped shine a light on another long-simmering water crisis in California: More than 300 communities have chronically unsafe drinking water containing contaminants that can come with serious health consequences, including cancer. The areas hardest hit are mostly small, agricultural communities in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys, which are predominantly Latino and are often also places classified by the state as “disadvantaged.” Unsafe water in these communities adds to a
‘I’m scared of getting sick from the water’
Some rural California communities have waited nearly a decade for state regulators to repair their tainted drinking-water systems. Image credit: Martin do Nascimento for the California Health Report May 5, 2021
When Ramona Hernandez turns on her kitchen faucet in El Adobe, an unincorporated town just a few miles southeast of Bakersfield, the water that splashes out looks clean and inviting. But she doesn’t dare drink it.
“You worry about your health,” she said in Spanish as she sat in her tranquil front yard one morning early this spring, her elderly mother-in-law working in the garden behind her.
Politics
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51
“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune “They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.” –Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
Biden Administration
“The American Rescue Plan as Economic Theory” [J.W. Mason]. “The size and design of ARPA is a more consequential rejection of this [prevailing macroeconomic] catechism. Without being described as such, it’s a decisive recognition of half a dozen points that those of us on the left side of the macroeconomic debate have been making for years. 1. The official unemployment rate is an unreliable guide to the true degree of labor market slack, all the time and especially in downturns. … n… 2. The balance of macroeconomic risks is not symmetrical. We don’t live in an economy that fluctuates around a long-term growth path, but one that pe
A familiar scene has returned to California: drought. Two counties are currently under emergency declarations, and the rest of the state could follow.
It was only four years ago when a winter of torrential rain finally wrestled the state out of its last major drought, which had dragged on for five years and left thousands of domestic wells coughing up dust.
That drinking-water crisis made national headlines and helped shine a light on another long-simmering water crisis in California: More than 300 communities have chronically unsafe drinking water containing contaminants that can come with serious health consequences, including cancer. The areas hardest hit are mostly small, agricultural communities in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys, which are predominantly Latino and are often also places classified by the state as “disadvantaged.” Unsafe water in these communities adds to a list of health and economic burdens made worse by the ongoing pandemic.