“It’s just a mess,” Vonda Johnston said with a sigh, summing up her Lamont area neighborhood’s ongoing struggle for regular access to running water — a struggle residents hope will finally be resolved soon. Last Friday, the tiny community’s last remaining well literally ran dry, forcing neighborhood residents to bathe at truck stops, leave the dishes undone and flush toilets by dumping buckets of water into their tanks. Wednesday, county agencies stepped in at the request of Kern County Supervisor Karen Goh to provide an emergency supply of potable water to about 65 affected families near Lamont who are served by the small, private Athal Mutual Water Co….
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California’s next big step in recycling – composting its meat scraps, broken egg shells, coffee grounds and other detritus of eating – is straining the state’s ability to effectively manage the ever-growing and sometimes dangerous industry.
In October, 16-year-old Armando Ramirez and his brother, 22-year-old Heladio Ramirez, died of poisoning after Armando had been cleaning out a stormwater drain at the Community Recycling & Resource Recovery composting facility near Bakersfield. Heladio had gone down a hole and into the drain to rescue his brother.
The two undocumented workers inhaled hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas that sewage can generate. According to county documents, the facility near Lamont used discharged sewage water from an adjacent utility district to moisten its composting piles.
On February 2, 2012, the Ninth Circuit published a decision that could disrupt federal highway funding and transportation improvement projects across the country.
Host: Dolores Weller, Associate Director, CVAQ
Guest(s): Dr. Alex Sherriffs joins the show to talk to us about his recent appointments to the Valley Air Board and to the California Air Resources Board. Dr. Sherriffs shares the importance of these roles, some of the hot topics he anticipates addressing, and observations in his practice related to air pollution.
The report provides a comprehensive analysis of how neighborhood differences in a range of social, economic and environmmental conditions are linked to health outcomes in the San Joaquin Valley. It finds that the conditions in low-income and non-white neighborhoods make it more difficut for people in these neighborhoods to live healthy lives.
There isn’t supposed to be much fracking in California. In the past, the state’s Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) has said that it “does not believe that fracking is widely used” in the state. More recently, the division allowed that the practice is “used for a brief period to stimulate production of oil and gas wells,” but added (PDF) that “the division doesn’t believe the practice is nearly as widespread as it is in the Eastern U.S. for shale gas production.”
Californians, then, should be able to breathe a sigh of relief, since the controversial practice of fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, has been linked to a host of environmental problems, including air pollution, groundwater contamination, and possibly even earthquakes.
But according to a report (PDF) just released by the Environmental Working Group, fracking is much more common in California than the regulators would like you to believe.
Scientists reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that even short-term exposure to air pollution can increase your risk of having a heart attack–highlighting the critical importance of clean air safeguards.
For years, scientists have been accumulating evidence linking air pollution with heart attacks. The new research pulled together dozens of studies conducted in five different continents, and found that breathing polluted air for less than seven days–and in some cases even a single day–was associated with a higher risk of heart attacks.
Of course, there are ways to lower your risk of heart attack–eating right, exercising, taking prescribed medication. But choosing not to breathe isn’t one of them.
A new report that is based on broad analysis of the links between social, economic and environmental conditions and health in the region was released Wednesday at a press conference in downtown Fresno, a Fresno State press release said.
“Place Matters for Health in the San Joaquin Valley: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All” is a report by the Central Valley Health Policy Institute at Fresno State and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
The study was facilitated by a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The study found that social, economic and environmental conditions in poor and minority neighborhoods have had an adverse effect on the health of many of the residents who live in those areas.