Dozens of environmental activists gathered in Wasco to protest issues affecting the health of San Joaquin Valley residents.
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More than 1 million people in California live in places where tap water isn’t reliably safe to drink, and a large number of those are in small, mostly Latino towns such as Seville in the San Joaquin Valley.
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The beige notice appeared on Becky Quintana’s doorstep one recent morning here in Seville, a century-old settlement nestled amid fruit and almond groves in the Central Valley.
“Boil your water,” it warned in bold, capital letters. Alarming as that was, the blue “unsafe water alert” that came the next day was more worrisome: Don’t drink, cook or even wash dishes with the water — and don’t boil it, because that just concentrates the nitrates.
The beige notice appeared on Becky Quintana’s doorstep one recent morning here in Seville, a century-old settlement nestled amid fruit and almond groves in the Central Valley.
“Boil your water,” it warned in bold, capital letters. Alarming as that was, the blue “unsafe water alert” that came the next day was more worrisome: Don’t drink, cook or even wash dishes with the water — and don’t boil it, because that just concentrates the nitrates.
But, a day later, more pastel-colored circulars arrived. One canceled the do-not-boil alert. Another repeated the boil-it-first alert. A third said water pressure was so low that residents should use it only for the essentials.
Western Hungary still is digging out from under 24.7 million cubic feet of caustic red sludge–a toxic tide unleashed when a containment pond at an old aluminum factory gave way. The breach killed nine, injured 150, forced home evacuations and ruined property over a 15.6 square mile area.
Hardly had the mud subsided, though, when an environmental group fingered another 150 industrial sites in the Danube region, each a potential disaster in the making. Here in the U.S., what industrial dangers lie in wait? Experts suggested this list of the most unsavory possibilities to ABC News:
Manure Lagoons
“Manure lagoon” may sound like the title of a Captain-and-Tennille hit single; but the phrase in fact describes impoundments of animal waste in liquid form on cattle, hog, dairy or chicken farms. These can contain millions or even tens of millions of gallons of excrement. Dams designed to contain the waste have on occasion failed.
Outside the Fresno County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, concerned voters with “Communities for a New California” rallied against what they’re calling an injustice.
“There’s going to be a real impact on the communities we care about the most,” Alegria De La Cruz, with Communities for a New California, said.
Inside the supervisors meeting, Fresno County Clerk Victor Salazar tried to make the board understand the need to eliminate hundreds of polling places in the county, in order to save nearly $200,000.
“We’ve exhausted everything that we can. We reduced our staffing. In the last five budget cycles, we’ve lost a third of our staff. We’re at our wits end,” Salazar told the board.
Opponents argue the selection of which sites to eliminate has a direct impact on certain areas of town.
“We understand that is going to have a disproportionate impact on people of color, on people with disabilities who may have relied in the past on polling sites closer to their homes to get there or people who have limited transportation,” De La Cruz said.
Water is a huge issue in the Central Valley. You don’t have to go to India or Africa to find families drinking unsafe water. It is right here in California, 100 miles from my home.
Our water education came from the folks fromCommunity Water Center* that we met in Seville, about 45 minutes from Visalia. The town (calling it a town is generous) is a few streets of homes, a nice new K – 8 school and not much else.
The water coming out of the faucets in so many of the homes of the communities we visited throughout the Central Valley is unsafe and dangerous to drink. There is a very high level of nitrates in the water in addition to bacteria and other contaminants. We were shown several bottles of water that came from Seville and some of the surrounding communities. Some were murky and had sediment that had settled to the bottom. Some were clear and looked perfectly drinkable. Looks are deceptive. It turns out the clear water is more dangerous than the murky, brownish water because of the nitrates that had seeped into the town’s well from pesticides and fertilizers. Nitrates are colorless, odorless and can be lethal, especially for babies and young children.
Ante un salón lleno de agricultores, activistas y otros miembros comunitarios, la Dirección Regional de Control de Calidad del Agua del Valle Central de California, expuso su propuesta de un programa para regular el agua de los 7 millones de acres de tierra de riego en el Valle Central.
El nutrido grupo que se hizo presente escuchó durante varias horas la ponencia por parte de los miembros del personal de la Dirección de Control de Calidad del Agua, la cual se basó en tres temas principales: explicación del programa de irrigación de tierras agrícolas a largo plazo; estudio del impacto ecológico y costos estimados.
The San Joaquin Valley is the center of California’s growing drinking water crisis. Five of its eight counties – Fresno, Madera, Merced, Kern, Kings, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Tulare – have some of the highest rates of water contamination per person in the state.1 Contaminated drinking water causes many adverse human health effects, including gastrointestinal illnesses, nervous or reproductive system impacts, and chronic diseases such as cancer.
This is the first of a series of reports that examine the prevalence of common drinking water contaminants in the San Joaquin Valley and the rates of related health indicators as outlined in public health literature. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, health indicators can “…provide information about a population’s health status with respect to [environmental] factors that can influence health.” Our intention is to draw connections between contaminants in drinking water and the high rates of many diseases prevalent in the San Joaquin Valley.
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Josefina Miranda showed up to work in a field still wet from pesticides. She was four months pregnant. By the time she finished work, her clothes were soaked through with chemicals. She miscarried the next day.
A 2002 application of soil fumigant metam-sodium sickened over 260 residents in Arvin, California. Initial reports by country officials indicated that only one person was affected, but door-to-door community surveys found that residents had suffered a variety of symptoms including eye irritation, nausea, vomiting, and breathing difï¬culties. Metam-sodium is an acutely toxic chemical linked to cancer and reproductive disorders.
These are just two of the many incidents of pesticide exposure endured by workers and residents in the Central Valley.