Special Report: Pollution, Poverty, People of Color
Communities across the US face environmental injustices

Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the Special Report

EAST OROSI, Calif. – Jessica Sanchez sits on the edge of her seat in her mother’s kitchen, hands resting on her bulging belly. Eight months pregnant, she’s excited about the imminent birth of her son. But she’s scared too.

A few feet away, her mother, Bertha Dias, scrubs potatoes with water she bought from a vending machine. She won’t use the tap water because it’s contaminated with nitrates.

Every day, Dias, 43, heads to the fields to pick lemons or oranges, lugging a ladder so she can reach the treetops. She often skips lunch to save money for the $17.50 she needs each week to fill jugs with vending-machine water.

Four years ago, the family learned that it had nitrates in its drinking water, which Sanchez drank as a little girl. She started speaking out about her town’s toxic water when she discovered that nitrates can cause “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal blood disorder that cuts off an infant’s oxygen supply.

“Now it really hits me,” she said, “because now it’s my baby.”

Sanchez, 18, who graduated from high school last year, lives in East Orosi, a square parcel carved out of 160 acres of land in Tulare County surrounded by orchards in the shadow of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. Fewer than 500 people, nearly all Latino, live in this long-neglected town with no sidewalks, street lights, parks or playgrounds. More than half live below the poverty level.

The struggle to find clean drinking water has become a way of life for the residents of East Orosi. But they’re not alone. Like a growing number of California's poor people, they’re paying for water that’s not fit to drink.

One in 10 Californians in two major agricultural regions pays high rates for well water that’s laced with nitrates, pesticides and other pollutants. Most are low-income Latinos; many speak only Spanish.

Public health researcher Carolina Balazs suspected that nitrate-tainted water was an environmental justice problem, so she examined the contamination along with income and ethnicity in small public water systems in eight counties of the San Joaquin Valley.

She found that nearly 5,200 people had drinking water that exceeded federal nitrate standards, and half were Latino. Another 449,000, more than 40 percent Latino, had medium levels that ranged from just under the limit to half the maximum allowed.

“It was in the small systems with highly Latino populations where the nitrate levels were the highest,” said Balazs, lead author of research at the University of California, Berkeley that was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives last September.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers the water systems in East Orosi, nearby Seville and seven other Tulare County towns “serious violators” of federal safe drinking water standards. In the past three years, these systems exceeded safety levels for coliform bacteria, nitrates, or arsenic at least nine times. East Orosi and Seville violated nitrate standards 12 times.

Nitrates are byproducts of nitrogen in synthetic fertilizers, animal manure, septic tanks and wastewater treatment plants. Farmers douse crops with nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant growth, to boost yields.

9 Comments

1. 1. vapur 03:03 PM 6/12/12

   A couple issues here:
   
   1) The government's own research states that Cannabidiol was able to repair damaged brain cells in foetuses whose oxygen supply was cut off. Basically, "blue baby syndrome" can be treated by using Cannabis tincture.
   
   2) Tap water contains fluoride, as well as other toxic metals introduced to water when a municipality uses cheaper industrial-grade silicofluoride instead of pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride. Remember, they're only putting fluoride in water to "help" the poor (by medicating everyone).
   
   
   Sources:
   1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18679164
   2) http://www.fluoride-history.de/chemicals.htm

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2. 2. mggordon 07:50 PM 6/12/12

   "Pollution, Poverty and People of Color: Don't Drink the Water"
   
   Well, he's right about it -- drinking water is fatal; everyone who has ever drunk water is either already dead or going to die.
   
   NOT drinking water brings about the same outcome rather more quickly.
   
   So I think I'll drink some water. Right now!
   
   "environmental justice problem"
   
   Say what? There's that phrase again! Probably has meaning only in California.
   
   Anyway, I use a distiller -- I don't know and don't really care what is in my tap water.

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3. 3. mggordon 07:59 PM 6/12/12

   Five pages of hand wringing but no solutions suggested. Science is supposed to be able to solve problems, not merely describe them which is a thing anyone can do.
   
   However, we're talking about California, which is not only out of money, but increasingly in debt. So the usual socialist solutions are not likely going to work and capitalism makes no pretense of even trying to solve social problems; that's not the purpose of its existence.
   
   In the end, people make choices and experience the consequences. Illegal immigrants, for instance, face terrible consequences to remain in Mexico or merely bad consequences in the San Juaquin valley of California. If that was your choice, what would I do? I'd take "bad" over "terrible" and I might not complain too much about "bad" unless I thought I could persuade you to give me what you have -- then *I* would have good and *you* would have bad.

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4. 4. mggordon 08:05 PM 6/12/12

   I should point out the obvious -- socialism presumes that *everyone* can have good water, no matter how many people are using it and how few people are working to make it happen.
   
   Let me assure readers that such a thing cannot be; it is actually possible to divvy up the water uniformly, but such a thing will never happen simply because it's stupid and anti-Darwinian. Human ingenuity, intelligence, and industry evolved *because* it gave advantage over those almost-humans that did not evolve. It may well be that 12,000 years ago Neanderthals were leftwing socialists and equalized among themselves, thereby making every last one of them uncompetitive with Cromagnon.
   
   Suppose California promised every citizen 50 gallons of pure water, as good as distilled, every day, for free. What would happen? You'd have quite an inmigration from Arizona and a stampede, bigger than already is, from Mexico. Sooner or later that house of cards must collapse.
   
   That's why the writer complains for 5 pages without a solution. He hasn't got one.
   
   But I *do*: SOLAR STILLS. More in my next message so it stands out a bit.

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5. 5. mggordon 08:10 PM 6/12/12

   SOLAR STILLS. The idea is simple and even Boy Scouts make them. Many possible designs exist. California's central valleys are desert and get plenty of sunshine. Groundwater is somewhat abundant but as has been reported, is also loaded with fertilizer and some other things.
   
   Example:
   
   http://sdoople.info/12818-how-does-a-solar-still-work.html

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6. 6. mggordon 08:16 PM 6/12/12

   Oops, good idea, bad source!
   
   http://sdoople.info/12818-how-does-a-solar-still-work.html
   
   "As the water is boiled, the PH level drops dramatically, causing flat-tasting water. With a solar still, the water is purified naturally, allowing the PH levels to stay balanced."
   
   Water is pH7, by definition, neutral. It makes no difference how you purify the water. Pure distilled water always tastes exactly the same, which is to say no taste at all, because it is H20 and absolutely nothing else.
   
   Valley water tends to be alkaline and tastes terrible at least to me.
   
   Mountain water tends to be slightly acidic, well oxygenated and tastes great. But that acid leaches out the limestone, a carbonate rock, and that buffers it and turns it basic (alkaline) by the time it reaches the valley floor.
   
   "Balanced" has no meaning in pH. It's a stupid thing to say that immediately reveals an unscientific approach.
   

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7. 7. SasaMarinic 03:09 AM 6/13/12

   The water is a bigger issue than the energy and global warming. We need to address this matter urgently.

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8. 8. anumakonda 01:46 PM 6/14/12

   Impure water is the cause for many diseases.
   
   Waterborne diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms that most commonly are transmitted in contaminated fresh water. Infection commonly results during bathing, washing, drinking, in the preparation of food, or the consumption of food thus infected. Various forms of waterborne diarrheal disease probably are the most prominent examples, and affect mainly children in developing countries; according to the World Health Organization, such disease account for an estimated 4.1% of the total DALY global burden of disease, and cause about 1.8 million human deaths annually. The World Health Organization estimates that 88% of that burden is attributable to unsafe water supply, sanitation and hygiene.
   Microorganisms causing diseases that characteristically are waterborne, prominently include protozoa and bacteria, many of which are intestinal parasites, or invade the tissues or circulatory system through walls of the digestive tract. Various other waterborne diseases are caused by viruses. Yet other important classes of water-borne diseases are caused by metazoan parasites. Typical examples include certain Nematoda, that is to say "roundworms". As an example of water-borne Nematode infections, one important waterborne nematodal disease is Dracunculiasis. It is acquired by swallowing water in which certain copepoda occur that act as vectors for the Nematoda. Anyone swallowing a copepod that happens to be infected with Nematode larvae in the genus Dracunculus, becomes liable to infection. The larvae cause guinea worm disease.
   Water is the Elixer of life – Leonardo Da Vinci.
   Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
   E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
   

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9. 9. mggordon 12:53 AM 6/15/12

   Eventually the global average death rate will match the average birth rate. It cannot be avoided.

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