More than 1 million Californians are affected by unsafe or
unreliable sources of water for cooking, drinking and bathing.
They can lose access to water supplies when their wells run dry,
especially during drought when groundwater is relied on more
heavily and the water table drops. Employment disruptions caused
by the COVID-19 pandemic can impair their ability to pay water
bills on time. Communities of color are most often burdened by
these challenges.
Below you’ll find the latest news articles raising
awareness on efforts to seek water equity written by the staff at
the Water Education Foundation and other organizations that were
posted in our Aquafornia news aggregate.
With private investors poised to profit from water scarcity in
the west, US senator Elizabeth Warren and representative Ro
Khanna are pursuing a bill to prohibit the trading of water as
a commodity. The lawmakers will introduce the bill on Thursday
afternoon, the Guardian has learned. “Water is not a commodity
for the rich and powerful to profit off of,” said Warren, the
progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. … Water-futures
trading allows investors – including hedge funds, farmers and
municipalities – to trade water and water rights as a
commodity, similar to oil or gold. The practice is currently
limited to California, where the world’s first water futures
market was launched. So far, the market hasn’t taken off,
dampened by the reality that the physical trade of water in the
state has been limited. After a couple of wet years in
California, the price of water futures has also plummeted.
The Wonderful Company, California-based maker of the popular
pomegranate juice POM, is the state’s second-largest user of
paraquat – a toxic herbicide banned in over 60 countries – a
new Environmental Working Group investigation finds.
Studies have found a strong connection between paraquat
exposure and an elevated risk of Parkinson’s disease. The
chemical has also been linked with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and
childhood leukemia. … Wonderful’s brands include POM
pomegranate juice, Landmark Vineyards wine and Fiji Water,
among many others. In 2021 alone, Wonderful sprayed more
than 56,000 pounds of paraquat on California fields where it
grows pistachios, almonds and pomegranates, according to state
and county records analyzed by EWG. … The herbicide can
remain in soil for years.
Pretty much every time I write about the amount of Colorado
River water that is consumed to irrigate alfalfa and hay,
readers respond with a comment or question about how much of
the alfalfa — and therefore Colorado River water — is shipped
overseas. … It is true that Western farms export alfalfa
to foreign countries. … But there’s a big caveat here: Many
farms in Arizona — and most if not all of the Saudi Arabia
owned ones — irrigate with groundwater, not with water diverted
from the Colorado River.
Kings County growers will face millions of dollars in fees and
a mandate to report groundwater pumping after California
officials voted unanimously today to put local agencies on
probation for failing to protect the region’s underground water
supply. The unprecedented decision is a first step that could
eventually lead to the state wresting control of a groundwater
basin in a severely depleted part of the San Joaquin
Valley. Before issuing the probation order, the State
Water Resources Control Board had repeatedly warned five
groundwater agencies in Kings County that their management plan
for the Tulare Lake basin is seriously deficient, failing to
rein in the dried-up wells, contaminated water and sinking
earth worsened by overpumping.
One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being
staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves.Tucked into
the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a
community of about 200 people. … Nearly a decade ago,
Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by
global investors, bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land
here in Cibola. In a first-of-its-kind deal, the company
recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of
Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14m gross profit. More
than 2,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River that was
once used to irrigate farmland is now flowing, through a canal
system, to the taps of homes more than 200 miles away.
For the first time in California history, state officials are
poised to crack down on overpumping of groundwater in the
agricultural heartland. The State Water Resources Control
Board on Tuesday will weigh whether to put Kings County
groundwater agencies on probation for failing to rein in
growers’ overdrafting of the underground water supply.
Probation — which would levy state fees that could total
millions of dollars — is the first step that could allow
California regulators to eventually take over management of the
region’s groundwater.
President Biden has approved California’s request for a major
disaster declaration to support recovery efforts from a string
of February storms that drenched much of the state with
historic rainfall and mountain snow and resulted in numerous
deaths, officials announced Sunday. Nine California counties —
Butte, Glenn, Los Angeles, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa
Barbara, Santa Cruz, Sutter and Ventura — will receive federal
aid as a result of the declaration, which also includes funding
for statewide hazard mitigation efforts, officials said. “
Workers hurriedly tried to shore up a rural Utah dam after a
60-foot crack sent water pouring into a creek and endangering
the 1,800 residents of a downstream town. State and local
leaders don’t think the Panguitch Lake Dam is in imminent
danger of breaking open but have told residents to be prepared
to evacuate if conditions worsen.
Today, Congresswoman Norma Torres and Congressman David Valadao
– members of the House Appropriations Committee – announced the
introduction of the bipartisan Removing Nitrate and Arsenic in
Drinking Water Act. This bill would amend the Safe Drinking
Water Act to provide grants for nitrate and arsenic reduction,
by providing $15 million for FY25 and every fiscal year
thereafter. The bill also directs the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) to take into consideration the needs of
economically disadvantaged populations impacted by drinking
water contamination. The California State Water Resources
Control Board found the Inland Empire to have the highest
levels of contamination of nitrate throughout the state
including 82 sources in San Bernardino, 67 sources in Riverside
County, and 123 sources in Los Angeles County.
California lawmakers want to establish the state’s position on
environmental health, taking a first step Monday in their
proactive approach to ensure processes for the state’s
environmental management remains secure, regardless of any
federal changes. … The Los Angeles Democrat is
propositioning a constitutional amendment that would enshrine
into law the Californian’s right to clean air, water and the
environment. Assembly Constitutional Amendment 16,
authored by Bryan, passed Monday out of the Assembly Natural
Resources Committee and into his chamber’s Appropriations
Committee. It must pass both houses by at least two-thirds and
then secure a majority vote at the polls.
The Commerce Department announced Monday it pledged up to
$6.6 billion to Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC,
which will add a third chip manufacturing facility in Arizona
to the two in the works. The grant will go down in Washington
as one of the crown jewels of the Biden administration’s
initiative to bring the supply chain for ubiquitous—and
strategically vital—computer chips back to the United
States. But in Phoenix, where the factories are going to
be built, TSMC faces a lingering question: where’s the water
going to come from in one of the driest cities in the
country?
New California legislation seeks to permanently ban paraquat, a
powerful and widely used weedkiller that has been linked to
Parkinson’s disease and other serious health issues. Assembly
Bill 1963, introduced recently by Assemblymember Laura Friedman
(D-Glendale), would sunset the use of paraquat beginning in
January 2026. The herbicide, which is described by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency as highly toxic, is regularly
sprayed on almonds, grapes, cotton and other crops in the
state. … California is the nation’s top user of paraquat
…
Nearly half of US prisons draw water from sources likely
contaminated with toxic PFAS “forever chemicals”, new research
finds. At least around 1m people incarcerated in the US,
including 13,000 juveniles, are estimated to be housed in the
prisons, and they are especially vulnerable to the dangerous
chemicals because there is little they can do to protect
themselves, said Nicholas Shapiro, a study co-author at the
University of California in Los Angeles.
Water bubbles up in streets, pooling in neighborhoods for weeks
or months. Homes burn to the ground if firefighters can’t draw
enough water from hydrants. Utility crews struggle to fix
broken pipes while water flows through shut-off valves that
don’t work. … Across the U.S., trillions of gallons of
drinking water are lost every year, especially from decrepit
systems in communities struggling with significant population
loss and industrial decline that leave behind poorer residents,
vacant neighborhoods and too-large water systems that are
difficult to maintain.
The climate-driven shrinking of the
Colorado River is expanding the influence of Native American
tribes over how the river’s flows are divided among cities, farms
and reservations across the Southwest.
The tribes are seeing the value of their largely unused river
water entitlements rise as the Colorado dwindles, and they are
gaining seats they’ve never had at the water bargaining table as
government agencies try to redress a legacy of exclusion.
… A state audit from the California Water Resources Control
Board released last year found that over 920,000 residents
faced an increased risk of illness–including cancer, liver and
kidney problems–due to consuming unsafe drinking water. A
majority of these unsafe water systems are in the Central
Valley. The matter has prompted community leaders to mobilize
residents around water quality as politicians confront
imperfect solutions for the region’s supply. Advocates point
out that impacted areas, including those in Tulare County, tend
to be majority Latino with low median incomes. … This
year’s extreme weather has only worsened the valley’s problems.
The storms that hit California at the start of this year caused
stormwater tainted with farm industry fertilizer, manure and
nitrates to flow into valley aquifers.
When the Colorado River Compact was
signed 100 years ago, the negotiators for seven Western states
bet that the river they were dividing would have ample water to
meet everyone’s needs – even those not seated around the table.
A century later, it’s clear the water they bet on is not there.
More than two decades of drought, lake evaporation and overuse of
water have nearly drained the river’s two anchor reservoirs, Lake
Powell on the Arizona-Utah border and Lake Mead near Las Vegas.
Climate change is rendering the basin drier, shrinking spring
runoff that’s vital for river flows, farms, tribes and cities
across the basin – and essential for refilling reservoirs.
The states that endorsed the Colorado River Compact in 1922 – and
the tribes and nation of Mexico that were excluded from the table
– are now straining to find, and perhaps more importantly accept,
solutions on a river that may offer just half of the water that
the Compact assumed would be available. And not only are
solutions not coming easily, the relationships essential for
compromise are getting more frayed.
A pilot program in the Salinas Valley run remotely out of Los Angeles is offering a test case for how California could provide clean drinking water for isolated rural communities plagued by contaminated groundwater that lack the financial means or expertise to connect to a larger water system.
Martha Guzman recalls those awful
days working on water and other issues as a deputy legislative
secretary for then-Gov. Jerry Brown. California was mired in a
recession and the state’s finances were deep in the red. Parks
were cut, schools were cut, programs were cut to try to balance a
troubled state budget in what she remembers as “that terrible
time.”
She now finds herself in a strikingly different position: As
administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s
Region 9, she has a mandate to address water challenges across
California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii and $1 billion to help pay
for it. It is the kind of funding, she said, that is usually
spread out over a decade. Guzman called it the “absolutely
greatest opportunity.”
State work to improve wildlife habitat and tamp down dust at California’s ailing Salton Sea is finally moving forward. Now the sea may be on the verge of getting the vital ingredient needed to supercharge those restoration efforts – money.
The shrinking desert lake has long been a trouble spot beset by rising salinity and unhealthy, lung-irritating dust blowing from its increasingly exposed bed. It shadows discussions of how to address the Colorado River’s two-decade-long drought because of its connection to the system. The lake is a festering health hazard to nearby residents, many of them impoverished, who struggle with elevated asthma risk as dust rises from the sea’s receding shoreline.