EPA went to Sacramento, not Fresno, on Monday to hear comments about a stricter ozone standard. Why not have this meeting next door in the San Joaquin Valley? This is the place with the nation’s worst ozone problem last year. And this isn’t the first time the Valley led the nation. This is smog central….
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This page features excerpts from news about environmental justice advocacy in the San Joaquin Valley and links to their original sources. Use the features on the right to sort by topic, news source, date, key word or author. You may also subscribe to receive the news by e-mail or through an rss reader. Please note that links to original sources may expire over time.
20-year-old Arvin City Mayor pro Tem Jose Gurrolla often tells the story of how, after spending hours playing under the San Joaquin Valley sun as a kid, he and his friends knew instinctively not to quench their thirst with the water coming out of their school’s taps. Even children know that the water in South Kern County isn’t safe.
Although the state considers access to clean water a basic human right, many Californians in rural communities like South Kern do not have a place to access it. As Gurrolla and his friends knew, the water that comes out of their taps isn’t safe to drink and may not be safe for cooking or even washing. They are often forced to travel miles to find a safe water source, or pay thousands of dollars each year for bottled water. The problem is often most critical for Californians living in high-poverty areas that can least afford the extra expense…
Turlock is one of many San Joaquin Valley cities that rely solely on groundwater for homes, stores, industrial plants and other uses. A severe drought could stress the system, and wells could go offline at any time if they exceed health standards, notably naturally occurring arsenic…
Oil companies in drought-ravaged California have, for years, pumped wastewater from their operations into aquifers that had been clean enough for people to drink. They did it with explicit permission from state regulators, who were supposed to protect the increasingly strained groundwater supplies from contamination. Instead, the state allowed companies to drill more than 170 waste-disposal wells into aquifers suitable for drinking or irrigation, according to data reviewed by The Chronicle. Hundreds more inject a blend of briny water, hydrocarbons and trace chemicals into lower-quality aquifers that could be used with more intense treatment. Most of the waste-injection wells lie in California’s parched Central Valley, whose desperate residents are pumping so much groundwater to cope with the historic drought that the land has started to sink…
In a development that has troubled health advocates, some local pollution regulators have begun arguing that they should not be penalized if Asian pollution is causing local smog to exceed health standards under the Clean Air Act. Spearheading that effort is the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, which regulates industry to protect nearly 4 million people from Stockton to Bakersfield who breathe some of the nation’s dirtiest air. The regional agency has made quantifying Asia’s contribution to local pollution a top priority in the last few years…
Thee amount of toxic chemicals released in California jumped 50% in 2013 over the year before because of a surge in disposal by the state’s largest polluter, a hazardous-waste landfill in Kern County, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency…
Clean drinking water is something many Americans take for granted, but in areas such as south Kern County access to safe water is not guaranteed. A new program called Agua4All is attempting to address that. At a ceremony Thursday in Lamont, the California Endowment, the Rural Community Assistance Corporation and the Community Water Center unveiled the first of what eventually will be 60 water bottle filling stations in the area…
Community and environmental groups filed suit today over the expansion — orchestrated mostly in secret — of a crude oil operation in Kern County that could lead to a 1,000 percent increase in the amount of crude imported by rail into California each year.
The newly opened Bakersfield Crude Terminal in Taft, Calif., has the capacity to receive two 100-car unit trains a day of volatile crude oil from the Bakken shale formation, as well as heavier, highly toxic tar sands.
Today’s lawsuit was filed against the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District for the piecemeal permitting process that allowed one of the largest crude oil operations in California to expand largely in secret, without environmental review of the risks posed by importing millions of gallons a day of toxic, explosive oil from North Dakota and Canada…
A ruling in Washington earlier this month defining dairy manure as “solid waste” could mean tighter regulations and lawsuits against Kings County dairies, according to sources in the industry.
In the ruling, federal court Judge Thomas Rice found that the Cow Palace Dairy, an 11,000-cow operation in Washington, over-applied manure as fertilizer on its cropland. In addition, Rice determined that the excess manure that couldn’t be absorbed by the crops could be regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, a law covering solid and hazardous waste that is normally applied to landfills…
A coalition of environmental activists filed a lawsuit Thursday that attempts to shut down a new oil-by-rail terminal northeast of Taft.
The suit in Kern County Superior Court alleges the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District worked with the terminal’s owner, Plains All American Pipeline LP, to minimize public scrutiny of a facility designed to receive up to two separate mile-long train shipments of oil per day from across North America…