Toxic drilling mud has the potential to harm more people than the mud engineer who comes into direct contact with the substance. And while the drilling rig employee carries the most risk of inhaling floating asbestos fibers when drilling mud is mixed from its original powdered form, it’s what happens after the drilling mud is spent that has many residents of the Central Valley area of California concerned…
News
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.
Maricela Mares Alatorre says she has a “hate-hate” relationship with Kettleman City’s water, which contains unsafe amounts of naturally occurring arsenic.
“Usually, very early in the morning or late at night, there’s like a petroleum smell, like gas,” Alatorre says. “Sometimes during the day, while we’re washing the dishes, we’ll have a white dish, and all of a sudden, we’ll see the water is totally brown.”
Mares Alatorre is the leader of a community group called People for Clean Air and Water that has spent decades fighting for health and environmental justice in Kettleman City. In recent years, they’ve focused on halting the planned expansion of the nearby hazardous waste landfill, which is already the largest in the western U.S. The battle became a national story around 2009, when a cluster of birth defects was discovered in the town…
Berta Diaz doesn’t drink or cook with the water that comes out of her tap. That’s because she received a letter from the Tulare County Department of Health telling her the water was contaminated. “Public Notice: Nitrates,” it read in big black letters.
According to the Community Water Center, a local advocacy group, Diaz’s central California community has dealt with nitrate levels above the national standard intermittently for nine years. The contaminant can cause “blue baby syndrome,” a condition that can result in sudden infant deaths, as well as some kinds of cancer, skin rashes and birth defects…
A coalition of environmental and public-health groups scored an important victory today when a regional water board voted 4-1 to kill a waiver that for years has allowed oil companies to dump toxic drilling muds in California’s Central Valley without regulation or reporting.
The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Board initially proposed to renew the existing regulatory waiver, which allowed oil and gas well drillers to dump drilling muds without complying with requirements that apply to other types of waste discharge, such as such as pollution-control measures, monitoring and reporting. But after several advocacy groups raised concerns about the health and environmental risks of chemical-laden drilling muds, the board withdrew its proposal and decided to allow the waiver to expire…
According to the last census, most of Fresno’s population – eighty-five percent according to the most recent United States census – consists of minorities, women, youth, the elderly, and low-income people. But the 1% of the population that cycles regularly comes from the remaining fifteen percent of Fresnans! That one percent is largely male, white, able-bodied, middle-income and young or middle-aged. They have easy access to the present system that offers the finest riding experiences..
This summer, Latino families filed suit to force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prevent discriminatory pesticide practices that allow children to be exposed to high levels of harmful chemicals. The EPA previously found that Latino schools are affected more than schools made up of other ethnicities.
In other words, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) exhibited discriminatory behavior in the way it issued permits for pesticide use. This was the EPA’s first ever finding of racial discrimination by one of its funding recipients…
Asthma hits school-aged kids at higher rates than other age groups, according to the California Department of Public Health. It is especially hard to breathe for students in the San Joaquin Valley, and administrators are asking parents to take action before it’s too late.
Fifth grader, Karyna Rios uses a machine called a nebulizer to take medication for ten minutes, four times a day…
California faces significant challenges in years to come as it grapples with increasing demands to move goods within and through the state, while meeting increasingly stringent air pollution standards, requirements and goals.
This report is designed to help the California Cleaner Freight Coalition (the “Coalition”) evaluate local, regional, and statewide proposals to introduce new zero- and low-emission strategies and technologies that aim to address the state’s growing freight transport demands while concurrently meeting increasingly stringent air pollution and other environmental requirements…
Keep your eye on the new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy. She has an ambitious agenda on climate change, fracking, dirty drinking water and smoggy air.
And she has spirit, if her meeting with The Bee’s editorial board last week was any indication. She wants to cooperate with state and local leaders, but she’s not giving up her role as environmental watchdog…
The Legislature will return to Sacramento in January and will immediately face a trio of questions about water.
Can California break the gridlock and move forward on investing in a sustainable water supply for our future?
Can legislators from every region of the state come together on an affordable plan that benefits everyone..?