Seville’s 400 residents have lived years with tainted drinking water from their only well, but they say there is a new problem in town — water-hogging marijuana gardens.
The outdoor gardens planted in the last year are taking so much of the town’s water that it sometimes takes 45 minutes to fill the kitchen sink for dish washing, they say.
But it appears little can be done to fix the problem in this Tulare County community north of Visalia.
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Traditionally, rural residency was thought to be associated with better health: clean air and water, active outdoor lifestyles and occupations, and a low incidence of crime and/or personal health risk behaviors, such as smoking. Urban life, especially within the inner city, was regarded as associated with poverty, unhealthful housing conditions and crime.
The latest measures of health outcomes in California tend to belie the notion that rural people have better health outcomes. The ten counties with the reportedly worst health outcomes in the state are those tending to have the greatest percentage of rural residents. All ten have vast areas of fisheries, timber, ranch and farmland that serve as the basis of many residents’ livelihoods. From the bottom of the list in ascending order are Del Norte, Siskiyou, Lake, Trinity, Yuba, Kern, Inyo, Tulare, Madera and Modoccounties (University of Wisconsin et al, 2010). Ranking first among all of the state’s 56 counties in reported health outcomes is Marin County.
“How do you learn about the problem and the power you have to bring about change?” This is a guiding principle of the Community Water Center (CWC), which is dedicated to education and advocacy around drinking water issues in California’s Central Valley.
Susana De Anda and Laurel Firestone, the co-founders of CWC, met in 2004 at the Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment (a long-time grant partner of the Women’s Foundation of California). Through their work at CRPE they became aware of the crisis that Central Valley inhabitants face when it comes to obtaining clean, safe drinking water. Seventy-five percent of the nitrate health standard violations that occurred in California in 2007 were found in the San Joaquin Valley. A disproportionate number of the communities affected are low–income communities and communities of color.
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Sixteen years ago, soon after she gave birth to her first baby, Maricela Mares-Alatorre joined residents of three small California farmworker towns who alleged they were being discriminated against by environmental regulators, because all three of the state’s toxic waste dumps were located in or near poor rural Latino communities.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which received that civil rights complaint when Bill Clinton was president, hasn’t addressed it and all the dumps continue to operate.
In short, an air monitoring site showing the highest rates of ozone pollution in the Valley–in Arvin–was moved so that the readings make the job the state agency is doing look better.
The air monitor at the Bear Mountain site has collected data since 1989, causing Arvin to light up as the smoggiest place in America. The California Air Resources board (CARB) moved the air monitor to a more favorable site for two reasons: (1) they couldn’t resolve a beef with the leaseholder of the original site and got booted out; and (2) they need to meet federal ozone standards by hook or by crook.
As a result, a monitor that registered 66 violations at the old site read 28 violations this year. Air readings taken at one site cannot be compared to readings taken elsewhere: it’s like comparing a kiwi to a pear. This invalidates the prior 20 years of data.
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Problem of dirtiest air in the nation disappears by simply removing the air monitor.
Central and Southern California community groups filed a complaint about toxic waste dumps with the Environmental Protection Agency 17 years ago and never received a response. Tired of waiting, they have filed a federal lawsuit.
Kettleman City, Buttonwillow and rural areas of Imperial County are home to the only toxic waste dumps in the state. Grassroots community groups say that locating the dumps only in low-income and predominantly Latino areas violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any recipient of federal money from discriminating on the basis of race or national origin.
Last Monday, Lindsay resident Luis Medellín faced the state Senate Committee on Environmental Quality and shared the concerns of Latinos from San Joaquín Valley communities who do not have access to safe drinking water.
Medellín testified in support of Assembly Bill 938, which would require public water system operators to notify residents of water quality problems not only in English, but also in Spanish and in the language spoken by any non-English speaking group that exceeds 10 percent of residents served by the water system.
The San Joaquin Valley’s air may suddenly be a little cleaner this summer, if only on paper.
The nation’s dirtiest air monitoring station over the past decade – Arvin in Kern County – has been moved to an apparently cleaner location two miles away.
The move could statistically make the Valley’s air cleaner without actually reducing pollution or making the air any healthier to breathe.