SEVILLE, Calif. — Turn on the tap in Seville. Sand might pour into sinks, toilets and shower stalls. Children aren’t allowed to use drinking fountains at school. Water pipes lie cracked and exposed in a murky irrigation ditch.
It doesn’t take a water engineer to see something has gone terribly wrong here. And it’s not just sand and bacteria in the pipes. There are chemicals in this water that can cause a possibly fatal blood disease in babies.
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OROSI, Calif. — On a crisp winter day, look east from Orosi for a world-class view of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada and California’s purest water on ice.
The snow melts, rushes down through granite canyons to reservoirs and eventually turns farmlands green in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
But somewhere between the glistening snowpack and the verdant countryside, a dangerous change takes place. The underground water becomes tainted with chemicals called nitrates. And the contamination winds up in tap water.
Don’t expect a rush to clean up the tap-water mess in the San Joaquin Valley, say those closest to the problems.
The issues are being studied, litigated and, according to many small-town residents, avoided.
It might take more than a decade of unsnarling red tape before rural residents can stop lugging home five-gallon bottles of drinking water, says the nonprofit watchdog Community Water Center in Visalia.
That just doesn’t work, say folks in small towns.
So what would?
Cotton used to be King around here. It is making a significant comeback this year. Look out for headaches from the defoliant and lots of particulates from the picking and ginning. The diesel pickers, module builders, and trucks will also be adding a lot of NOx emissions meaning increased ozone if it’s hot and increased ammonium nitrate if the weather cools.
They have been in commercials and on billboards urging residents to fight air pollution, and all but one of them is an elected official.
Despite their high profiles, the governing board of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District operates in near anonymity when making crucial decisions about how to clean our dirty air.
This is about to change in a big way. Activist Kevin Hall is back in the air-pollution fight full time after spending several years as a political organizer for Service International Employee Union’s United Health Care Workers-West and ran his own political consulting company in Fresno.
Count on him to thrust board members into the spotlight and make their actions on the air-pollution front part of voter dialogue when they run for supervisorial, city council and mayoral seats.
The green flag flies on Monday. It stands for healthy air inFresno. But last week, experts agree that air quality was unhealthy. The watchdog group Central Valley Air Quality Coalition says the Valley Air District didn’t do enough to warn people of the risks.
Residentes y activistas preocupados por el problema en la región.
For far too many years, the San Joaquin Valley’s legislative needs were ignored by lawmakers and governors who focused their attention on more populous parts of the state. That changed in 2005 when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger created the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley. The public-private partnership has continued under Gov. Jerry Brown.
On Friday, partnership officials will meet in Bakersfield for its 2011 summit, bringing together state officials and representatives of the Valley counties between San Joaquin and Kern. It will be a time to celebrate the partnership’s successes and plan strategies to attack the region’s shortcomings.
Medical science has long known about the effects of nitrate contamination — dizziness, upset stomach, shortness of breath, lung infections, diabetes, possible links to cancer and potentially fatal blue-baby syndrome.
But county and state health departments don’t routinely track these problems, as they do Valley Fever, flu, tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus. The nitrate problems are more subtle, and they’re not specifically listed among reportable diseases for California.
So there are no official answers when someone asks how many babies have died or how many people have gotten cancer linked to nitrate-laced water in Tulare County.
IVANHOE — The plastic Santa Claus beckons motorists. So does the vintage seven-blade Trimmer lawn mower. They start conversations at Elida C. Lopez’s yard sale along a quiet, country road.
She steers you to her best merchandise, a collection of plants for sale or a table covered with blue jeans. And she tells you about the old Ivanhoe train station, where she holds her yard sale.
But it doesn’t take long before she points out a town well right across the street and talks about the tap water.
“I don’t drink it,” says Lopez, 69. “We’ve been drinking bottled water since forever. You hear about those problems up the road in Seville .
“Who knows what’s in the water here?”