More than 1 million Californians don’t have reliable access to clean water

[n2doc]

ARVIN, California – Californians who grumble about not being able to water their lawns everyday during the fourth year of a historic drought should swing by this small town in southern Kern County.

Drought or no drought, residents of this rural community can’t drink water from the tap and can’t even use it for cooking because high levels of arsenic — known to cause cancer — become even more concentrated when water is boiled.

“They worry about little things,” said Salvador Partida, president of the Committee for a Better Arvin, of the rest of the state. “We’re worried about not being able to drink the water.”

Last week Gov. Jerry Brown ordered the State Water Resources Control Board to enact mandatory cuts in water use by 25 percent. But more than 1 million California residents who live in mostly rural areas have unreliable access to safe drinking water, according to the Community Water Center, a non-profit group that advocates affordable and clean water for all Californians. For them, the ongoing drought that is ravaging the state's water supply is merely a sideshow.

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http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/6/more-than-1-million-californians-lack-clean-water.html

[NYC_SKP]

1. Arvin, a city built on oil fields and then artificial agriculture. It probably should dissolve.

It's called "the Garden in the Sun" but it's situated in a semi-arid area.

Nearly 50% of residents are out of work and in 2007 it had the highest levels of smog of any community in the US.

Go to Kern county and on most days you can smell petroleum in the air.

Most of what agriculture exists there was dependent upon massive water projects that robbed other areas of the state of water with dire environmental impacts.

It's a zero sum game, there's only so much water and we simply have too many people living in the wrong parts of the state to do it in a sustainable fashion.

We're robbing our children of their future which, without our arrogant wasteful ways could be a healthy and happy one.

[Journeyman]

4. Speaking of dissolving: I golfed once in Arvin, out at the now-closed Sycamore Canyon GG . . .

I sliced my third hole drive into a large, somewhat muddy area. When I got to the mud, I saw it wasn't too mucky and a ball was sitting only a dozen feet or so into it. I stepped gingerly out to it, reached down and picked it up, to check the marker on the bottom side to see if it was my ball. The ball was half dissolved! Clean. Right at the level where it sat in mud.

I dropped the ball and jumped back out of the mud. I then saw, there were balls everywhere in that toxic muck. We used a ball retriever to turn some of them over and, sure enough, each ball was cleanly eaten away, right at the mud level.

I found out later there used to be a large fertilizer plant in Arvin. It leached a toxic stew into the groundwater for years, before it was closed in the early '80s or so. But it left behind a Superfund disaster, a toxic plume that may never get cleaned up.

I don't know what ate those balls. And it didn't surprise me to read, years after that trip, that the Arvin golf course had closed. It was a strange place for a golf course.


And you're right about the impact of irresponsible water use in the State. I do a lot of work for the water industry and see first-hand much of the damage. What few realize, however, is even when we have water in abundance,* what we're doing here and on farmland across the West will eventually catch us all in a disaster of our own making. For the biggest issue we face is the salt left behind from massive irrigation projects. It portends our potential doom same as it has for every desert civilization save one, and Egypt was spared thanks to the periodic floodings it used to receive before the Anwar Dam was built. Time will tell what fate awaits the lower Nile Valley.



*We will never have enough water. Because of the myriad demands placed on our system -- agriculture growing products we have no business producing in this State, a population that has far outgrown the meager water we receive here -- because of all this, we entered a period of permanent drought some 45 years ago. We're only now beginning to see the implications of it all.

[NYC_SKP]

5. Hear, Hear! And what a strange story of the dissoved golf balls!

Thanks for this:

"*We will never have enough water. Because of the myriad demands placed on our system -- agriculture growing products we have no business producing in this State, a population that has far outgrown the meager water we receive here -- because of all this, we entered a period of permanent drought some 45 years ago. We're only now beginning to see the implications of it all."

[Cleita]

2. That's in Kevin McCarthy's district.

Good luck in getting the darling of the Congressional Republicans to give a fuck. The Democratic Party needs to back a Democratic candidate to challenge him and for chrissakes give them the funds to run a viable campaign against him. Usually he runs unopposed and sometimes a grass roots candidate will try but they can't fight the money machine behind him. The establishment Dems just shrug their shoulders and close heir checkbooks claiming the seat is unwinnable by a Democrat.

On edit it seems Arvin is in David Valadaos-R district adjacent to McCarthy's district. However the same is true for his district. Democrats have to start backing candidates in Kern County to stop the pollution that is occurring not only from oil but industrial agriculture.

[tularetom]

3. I think that was the first place my dad lived when he came to California back in the 30's

He used to shudder when he described it. Apparently the water situation isn't much better there than it was 80 years ago but at least that was before the aquifer was poisoned by years of poisons being dumped on the ground and percolating down to the water table.