Unlined open-air wastewater pits brimming with the toxic leftovers of fracking and other types of oil and gas development are threatening California’s air and water quality, according to a study by two national environmental organizations.
A visit to a series of wastewater pits in California’s Central Valley that sickened researchers prompted the study, according to the authors. Oil and gas drilling has been generating vast amounts of waste in the region for decades…
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Rodrigo Romo’s daughter is afraid because of the oil and gas drilling activity happening around her school, Sequoia Elementary School in Kern County, Calif. She has trouble sleeping at night and has difficulty focusing in class because she doesn’t know what the industry’s pollution might be doing to her and her classmates. Romo doesn’t know how to answer when she asks him if they’re going to be OK…
It was supposed to be a good day. It was the first day of school and Johanna Romo, 12, had just woken up. It was already hot, and if she had looked out the window, she would have seen smog hugging the valley floor, obscuring the mountains, as it has almost every day this year. But she didn’t have a chance to look out the window.
As Johanna sat up and prepared to put on her school uniform—a blue shirt and khaki pants—her body lurched backward onto the floor, violently shaking…
In the latest salvo targeting California’s petroleum industry, an environmental activist group called Tuesday for a statewide ban on the practice of using unlined sumps to dispose of water that comes up from the ground along with crude oil.
Clean Water Action detailed its case against sumps, sometimes called “surface impoundments,” in a 31-page report alleging such facilities in Kern County have for decades operated with minimal, or in some cases no, oversight…
More than 350,000 of California’s six million schoolchildren attend school within one mile of active oil and gas drilling, and most of those kids are minorities, according to a report scheduled to be released Tuesday by the non-profit FracTracker Alliance…
Teresa DeAnda was one of the very first people I met when I moved to the Central Valley to cover the region for The California Report a decade ago. I decided to take a Great Valley Center bus tour of the valley with some incoming professors at the newly established UC Merced, which was just about to open its doors.
We traveled to rural Tulare County, where DeAnda shared her story about trying to raise seven children near fields where farmers regularly sprayed pesticides…
I first met Teresa De Anda in 2007 when I sat in on one of the monthly meetings of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment’s Delano Advisory Board. I was there to describe my master’s research and ask the community leaders on the advisory board if they would be willing to participate in it. At that time Teresa was the group’s president, and she was quick to say yes. I learned over time that this generosity of spirit was core to who she was…
State officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump nearly three billion gallons of waste water into underground aquifers that could have been used for drinking water or irrigation.
Those aquifers are supposed to be off-limits to that kind of activity, protected by the EPA…
The Association of Irritated Residents, Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club: Kern Kaweah Chapter joined together with Earthjustice to file a lawsuit against California oil regulators.
These environmental groups said the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, approved hundreds of oil drilling permits without the required environmental review…
Environmental groups and local residents sued California oil regulators today for approving a massive number of new oil drilling permits in Kern County without analyzing the risks to air, water and public health, as required by law…