Remember Kettleman City? That town midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, where nearly half the residents live below the poverty line and an unusually high numbersuffer from asthma, cancer, and birth defects? Last month, I wrote that for 23 years Kettleman’s residents have blamed their local landfill, which contains chemicals known to cause cancer and reproductive complications, for their health problems. Those health problems include miscarriages and 11 infant birth defect cases in three years. Well, Kettleman just got some good news.
News
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Travel the world & experience the challenges of living without water. Kids can help.
For more than a decade, residents in rural Tulare County’s Tooleville and Tonyville have had drinking water that is anything but. The groundwater being pumped to Tooleville residents has a high level of nitrates. Nitrates are known to cause ‘blue baby’ syndrome. If absorbed by a growing fetus, nitrates can be converted to nitrite, a natural inhibitor to the flow of oxygen in the blood stream. The chemical reaction causes shortness of breath and blueness of the skin. Life-long exposure for adults can cause spleen hemorrhaging.
Every three months, the water association must send out a bilingual flyer warning residents that children six months and younger can die within several weeks of ingesting the water and should not even be used to make juice or formula. Boiling the water doesn’t help either; it only intensifies the concentration of nitrates after some of the water is evaporated. In 2007, nitrates in Tooleville’s water measured at 48 parts per million (PPM), higher than the state’s maximum contaminant level of 45 ppm.
Reporting from Kettleman City, Calif.— On a rainy afternoon in a cramped trailer, the five homemakers listened as state officials with clipboards asked personal questions: Did they or their husbands smoke, drink or take illicit drugs? Had they been exposed to pesticides or other toxic substances in the United States or Mexico? Do their families have histories of birth defects?
Each had miscarried a fetus or given birth to a child with severe birth defects within the last three years. Each suspected it had something to do with a nearby toxic waste facility.
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Minding the Climate Gap: What’s at Stake if California’s Climate Law isn’t Done Right and Right Away
The California Global Warming Act (AB 32) – a cutting edge policy that no one expected to pass
so quickly and with so much bipartisan support – proposes to cut green house gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The successful implementation of such a standard would mean reducing carbon emissions from major polluters around the state – cement refineries, power plants, and oil refineries top among them. It’s a clear victory for all Californians, it would seem – but the underlying picture may be a bit more complicated.As we have shown in a recent report entitled The Climate Gap (Morello-Frosch, et al. 2009), climate change is not affecting all people equally: communities of color and low-income communities suffer the greatest negative health and economic consequences. Among the many disparate impacts, these communities are more vulnerable to heat incidents, more exposed to air pollution, and may be more affected by the economic dislocations of ongoing climate change.
While reducing greenhouse gas emissions will benefit all Californians, a carbon reduction system that
does not take co-pollutants into account could likely result in significantly varying benefits for different populations. Those who are most likely to suffer the negative consequences of a short-sighted carbon trading system are the communities of color and the low-income communities already facing the greatest impacts of climate change – widening instead of narrowing the climate gap.
One of the perks of living in the Bay Area is the wide variety of fresh, local produce we enjoy year-round. Much of that comes thanks to our proximity to the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions the world has ever seen.
Unfortunately, this luxury comes at a price, although we aren’t the ones paying it.
California’s Central Valley produces $13 billion worth of food products annually, according to the American Farmland Trust. But this bounty has brought water pollution, which disproportionally affects the poor people who grow and harvest our food.
Set on the valley floor against a backdrop of the Sierra Nevada, the town of Seville has been home to farm workers for four generations. About 500 people live here, and most of the adults work in the fields. It’s February, time for the orange harvest. Before work begins, men and women gather on a dirt road between orchards. They’re chatting, snacking and playing an impromptu game of soccer.
After being pressured by activists, state health officials are now acknowledging that more birth defect cases have come to light for Kettleman City, reporting at least three cases from 2009 and one case this year.
New information brings the total tally of babies born with deformities to mothers living in the impoverished farmworkers’ community since September 2007 to 10 — double the number previously acknowledged by the state and known to the county.
The fact that the information didn’t come voluntarily is angering activists as well as county officials and deepened their distrust toward the state agency whose reluctance to probe the concern last year led to the governor’s order in January.
Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,
On behalf of the people of Kettleman City, we first want to express our appreciation for your recent order instructing state agencies to conduct a thorough, on the ground investigation of the birth defects and environmental pollution in this suffering community.
Unfortunately, the State Department of Public Health seems to have ignored your direction to conduct a thorough investigation and instead issued written documents, verbal statements and “findings” that demonstrated bias and downplayed the severity of the health situation before they stepped foot in the town or talked to the families involved in the birth defects and infant deaths.
Each year, nearly one billion pounds of pesticides are sprayed into fields and orchards around the country. As the families who live nearby can tell you, those pesticides don’t always stay in the fields and orchards.
State and federal officials are scrambling to determine what caused the deaths of three children in this Central California farming town, which shares a ZIP code with the largest hazardous waste treatment site west of the Mississippi.
Over a 15-month period in 2007 and 2008, six children of mothers from Kettleman City were born with serious birth defects, including cleft palates, deformities and brain damage. Half of those infants subsequently died.