The state this week released a more detailed ranking of the riskiest places to live in California — and Fresno, by far, still leads the pack.
Last year, The Bee’s series “Living in a Toxic Land” broke the news about the rankings, which showed west Fresno as the riskiest place to live in all of California. San Joaquin Valley ZIP codes dominated the list.
This analysis looks at air, water, pesticides, poverty, language barriers and many other factors. The cumulative-impact approach is gaining steam in science circles.
In the latest state analysis, drinking water quality has been added — a factor that kept many Valley locations among the riskiest places…
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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.
A long debate over how much hexavalent chromium is too much in drinking water resurfaced last week as state health leaders produced the nation’s first drinking water standard.
Although the carcinogen has shown up in water wells throughout Stanislaus, Merced and San Joaquin counties in higher concentrations than most other places throughout the United States, the new standard suggests Modesto has little to worry about. Some wells in Patterson, Newman and Los Banos, however, have produced samples that would not meet maximum contaminant levels…
Gema Perez says her southeast Bakersfield neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of supermarkets, and the few there are either too expensive or have an extremely limited selection.
“When I want fruits and vegetables, I have to drive far away, or I go to a community garden where I grow my own,” she said in Spanish through a translator.
So many Kern County residents say the same of their own neighborhoods that the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index recently ranked Bakersfield in the bottom 10 metro areas nationwide for access to fresh produce…
Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Stockton, has asked President Barack Obama to create a federal task force by executive order to better focus Uncle Sam on the Valley’s needs.
“This region has significant social, economic, and environmental challenges that warrant attention from your administration,” McNerney wrote the president this week.
The congressman is being reserved. The San Joaquin Valley – Stockton to Bakersfield, 4 million people – has crying needs that have long gone unmet by state and federal governments.
From America’s most endangered river, the San Joaquin, to its dirtiest air, in Arvin, to the bankruptcy and crime crisis of Stockton, the Valley bristles with needs Uncle Sam could better address…
Kettleman City’s residents are going to pay more for water as they wait for the construction of a new treatment plant. It’s just a question of how much.
That was the take-away from Tuesday’s Kings County Board of Supervisors meeting as officials laid out their plan to try to contain those costs.
Joe McGann testified on behalf of the Kettleman City Community Services District that residential rates need to go up 10 percent and commercial rates need to rise 28 percent just to pay for delayed infrastructure improvements — and that doesn’t include the cost of operating the new plant once it’s built.
A key part of the plan is Chemical Waste Management Inc., the company that operates the largest toxic waste landfill in the western U.S. a few miles from the town…
County supervisors and officials have often linked the expansion of Chem Waste’s hazardous materials landfill to plans to provide Kettleman City with clean water from the California Aqueduct.
Now it looks like they’re upping the ante.
A item on the agenda for Tuesday’s supervisors meeting suggests that the Kettleman City Community Services District could risk losing an $8 million state grant to build the new water system if Chem Waste doesn’t get its permit expansion soon for the Kettleman Hills facility near the town…
With this article, we develop the Drinking Water Disparities Framework to explain environmental injustice in the context of drinking water in the United States. The framework builds on the social epidemiology and environmental justice literatures, and is populated with 5 years of field data (2005–2010) from California’s San Joaquin Valley. We trace the mechanisms through which natural, built, and sociopolitical factors work through state, county, community, and household actors to constrain access to safe water and to financial resources for communities. These constraints and regulatory failures produce social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants. Water system and household coping capacities lead, at best, to partial protection against exposure. This composite burden explains the origins and persistence of social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants.
Some of the approximately three dozen residents who have been evacuated for nearly two weeks due to a toxic gas leak in Arvin have been temporarily moved into apartments, paid for by Petro Capital Resources LLC.
The eight Arvin homes on Nelson Court were evacuated March 18 when gas from a pipeline, owned by PCR since 2012, leaked into the soil and eventually polluted the air within the houses…
Picture an area the size of Rhode Island covered in plowed dirt, just waiting for hot summer winds to blow it into the air.
That’s the situation facing air pollution control officials, farmers and the residents of the southern San Joaquin Valley as they head into hot summer weather with a patchwork of hundreds of thousands of acres of fallowed fields to deal with…
California regulators are concerned about high nitrate levels in groundwater across the state.
“State officials tested several areas five times, and found that Tulare and Los Angeles counties have high concentrations of nitrate contaminating their groundwater, and many agricultural communities even have them in their wells,” ABC 23 recently reported…