Dias makes $7.50 an hour picking fruit, and pays $60 a month for her tap water and up to $75 a month to fill jugs with water from a vending machine. That’s nearly five times more than the average San Franciscan, who earns about $45,000 a year and pays just $28 a month for some of the nation’s best tap water, drawn from Sierra Nevada snowmelt.

“If you looked at people’s water rates, you’d think we were rich,” said Susana De Anda, co-founder of the Visalia-based nonprofit Community Water Center. “The reality is that we’re making sacrifices just to have safe drinking water in the home.”

Sierra snowmelt reaches the Central Valley through the Friant-Kern Canal and California Aqueduct. But only farmers and cities that pay for water rights can use it. And East Orosi, like most unincorporated towns, must rely on ground water instead.

Becky Quintana lives just a few miles from the Friant-Kern Canal in Seville. Her parents, both migrant workers, met in the fields and settled here in 1946. Quintana uses her tap water only to flush the toilet, shower and wash clothes. But showering makes her skin itch. “My whole back, and especially my mom’s back, is so scarred from all the scratching.”

To help defray the costs of buying water, Quintana hopes to get state grant money to install a community-owned vending machine. She knows it would be just a short-term solution.

“People in San Francisco get their water straight from the mountains. Well, we have the snow mountain water here too,” she said. “We can see it. We can almost touch it. But we have no right to it.”

Codified Neglect
In 1971, Tulare County released a report on community sewer and water systems as part of its development plan. The report recommended concentrating resources in areas with existing systems where improvement might spur economic growth.

The plan identified 15 “non-viable” communities, including East Orosi and nearby Seville, “with little or no authentic future.” As mechanized harvesting technology made farm workers’ jobs scarce, the report said, these communities would “enter a process of long-term, natural decline as residents depart for improved opportunities in nearby communities.”

The towns declined as predicted. But enough farm jobs remained that residents, for the most part, didn’t leave. And the water quality didn’t improve.

In East Orosi and Seville, more than 94 percent of the population is Latino. Based on the latest U.S. Census, conservative estimates place more than half of East Orosi residents, and one in four of Seville’s, below the poverty line.

Nitrate contamination adds to the burden of people living in low-income communities, who typically have more severe health problems and less access to health care, said Asa Bradman, associate director of UC Berkeley’s Children’s Center for Environmental Health Research. “This is the kind of exposure that can exacerbate their risk for health problems.”

De Anda works with disadvantaged communities throughout Tulare County to help them get clean water, which she sees as a basic human right.

On Route 63 north of Visalia, the musty, acrid stench of manure wafts through the car window. Cows gather near 25-foot-high mounds of manure, not far from a rectangular pool of liquid waste. “That Olympic-size lagoon has no proper liner, so you know it’s trickling down to the ground water,” De Anda said. “Then they use that to irrigate the corn they feed to the cow. It’s a dirty kitchen.”

In 2007, after engineering studies found that even dairy ponds built to state standards were leaking, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board adopted stricter regulations. But lagoons occupy just a fraction of dairy lands. Nitrogen pollution comes primarily from manure applied to crops grown to feed cattle.

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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