Lindsay is a citrus- and olive-growing town in Tulare County. The lush orchards that embrace the surrounding landscape thrive on water from California’s canal system and the San Joaquin Valley’s groundwater. But some of the residents here, including Irma Medellin and her family, cannot drink the tap water.
“The first thing that we face is why we have to pay a lot of money for our water because we pay for tap water, but then that water, they say, is not good.” It didn’t seem right to Medellin that every month her family pays $60 for unhealthy tap water and another $60 for bottled water.
Veronica Mendoza lives in Orosi. She said that her son suffers from rashes after taking a shower. “Every day after I dry [him] with a towel, he gets rashes like red spots. And my neighbors, they have yellow and black teeth. The doctor said it’s the water.”
Other reported problems include kidney and gallbladder ailments and miscarriages.
Cristobal Chavez, his wife, two kids and their six foster children live on their 15-acre farm just west of Porterville. They can’t drink the water from their own well.
Sitting in the shade of a massive mulberry tree, Chavez explains a recent report on their well water: nitrates four times higher than what is considered safe, coliform bacteria counts much greater than the safety threshold. He confirms that his family must buy water for household use. “Yes we cannot drink it at all, or wash dishes or cook.”
Some of the hardest working families in the Central Valley pay some of the state’s highest water rates for toxic water. For many, it takes 10% of household income just to have safe drinking water. Chavez spends $200 a month to buy bottled water. That is commonplace for thousands of Valley residents, especially those with private wells or on small community water systems.
Mainly, this is because cleansing the water, or drilling a new well, is expensive and usually not a viable option. Moreover, many Valley schools cannot provide clean drinking water. Until a few years ago, neither the state’s bureaucrats nor local officials did anything about it. Chavez says they never warned him or his family about the poor water quality.
Elsewhere in the Valley, drinking water exceeds maximum contaminant levels of uranium and arsenic. The pollution is a result of agricultural chemicals that have percolated into the groundwater and from naturally occurring minerals in the subsoil.
Surrounded by orchards and vineyards, Seville has 75 homes and 350 residents who are mainly farmworkers with an average salary of $16,000 a year. Like many other rural areas, people should not drink the water, and the village is too small to do anything about it.
Seville was served by a deteriorated pipeline running through an open ditch. The leaky pipeline was sucking algae, sand and bacteria into Seville’s water system. It was so bad that the county had to take receivership of a primitive, broken water system.
Rebecca Quintana, who grew up and raised a family in Seville, was angered by the conditions, “I have always told everybody that in the town of Seville, it’s like we’re living in a third world country. This shouldn’t exist here in the state of California.”
Quintana decided to do something about it. She connected with the Visalia-based Community Water Center (CWC).
The CWC has been a powerhouse in the world of water advocacy and organizing since its founding in 2006 by organizer Susana De Anda and attorney Laurel Firestone. They specialize in a full range of activities including building political power in communities, developing safe water projects to help individual families and villages, and advocating in the Capitol and statewide for policies that supply safe and affordable water.
The group filled a great void in caring about the quality of life for so many Valley residents who, indeed, actually were living as if in a third-world country.
That is what brought Catarina de Albuquerque to Seville in 2011. She was convinced by the CWC that conditions in the Valley, especially in Tulare County, warranted a UN mission. In September 2010, the United Nations officially declared the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, with the United States signing on. The Portuguese human rights attorney was appointed the UN Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water in 2008. She has investigated living conditions in Egypt, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Slovenia and Japan.
In Seville, de Albuquerque explained the human right to water. “It means that water and sanitation have to be available. They have to be accessible, and they have to obviously be of quality. They have to be safe for everyone to drink.
“When we talk about affordability, it means you don’t have to be forced to make choices between the right to water and the right to food, or the right to water and the right to housing.”
Reflecting on what she saw in the Valley, de Albuquerque says that “there is no single country I have visited, rich or poor, where there are no problems. In richer countries what I see is an even more profound presence of discrimination. I think it’s a lack of political will. So, it’s the constant patterns of discrimination and exclusion that I unfortunately see all over the place.”
Later that year, she presented the Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation to the UN Human Rights Council that documented her findings. She observed that Tulare County is one of the top agricultural-producing counties in California. It has a majority Latino population. And that it is the poorest county in the state. Her investigation underscored what local residents and community researchers had already discovered.
“Tulare County has many public water systems with nitrate levels over the maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 45 parts per million. Approximately 20% of Tulare County’s small public water systems are unable to meet the nitrate MCL on a regular basis.
“The independent expert received testimony from various rural communities in Tulare County. These communities suffer from drinking water contaminated by nitrates, arsenic, banned pesticides and disinfectant by-products. Seville, a small, low-income community, is illustrative of the broader problems plaguing Tulare County.”
That report and the follow-up work by clean water advocates sparked a package of state legislation in 2012 that became the Human Right to Water law. California became the first state in the nation to recognize that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking and sanitary purposes. The human right to water extends to all Californians, including disadvantaged individuals and groups and communities in rural and urban areas.”
Subsequently, in 2016, the State Water Resources Control Board adopted a resolution to make the human right to water a top priority and core value. The water board pledged “to preserve, enhance and restore the quality of California’s water resources and drinking water for the protection of the environment, public health and all beneficial uses, and to ensure proper water resource allocation and efficient use, for the benefit of present and future generations.”
The Water Board promised to work with relevant stakeholders to develop new systems or enhance existing systems and to identify communities that do not have safe, clean, affordable and accessible water for household use.
Human rights laws passed in 2012 and State Water Board resolutions did not have an immediate impact on the ground. The drinking water crisis had not abated. While some funding was provided to improve water systems in some communities, the effort was falling far short of what was required. By 2018, more than 300 public and private water systems in the state were still out of compliance with safe drinking water standards, affecting one million residents statewide.
Then in 2019, as one his first acts in office, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 200 sponsored by then State Senator Bill Monning to establish the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund to help communities and individuals have access to clean groundwater. It allocated some $130 million annually for a range of projects to improve infrastructure. Newsom followed up by appropriating $10 million for emergency drinking water projects and $10 million to help bring local water districts into compliance with drinking water standards.
At the 10th anniversary of the Human Right to Water (HRTW) law, the California Water Impact Network offered their evaluation of the measure’s impact and reach, suggesting a deficiency of political will to fulfill the all-inclusive goals of the HRTW law.
“Much of the commentary around the 10-year anniversary of the HRTW law can be summarized as ‘progress has been made, but more work remains.’ While this is both true and unobjectionable on its face, it avoids the politically uncomfortable question of why more work remains.
“Why, in 2023, is it too difficult to immediately and permanently provide safe drinking water to 2.5% of the state’s population? Why is it too difficult to ensure that domestic wells don’t go dry every time precipitation levels are low? Why is it too difficult to provide financial assistance to people struggling to pay their water bills when the state helps with every other basic necessity? Why is it beyond the state’s capacity to provide adequate water and sanitation to people living on the street?”
As the state’s most recent drought years stretched on, concerns over water quality issues in the San Joaquin Valley merged with the existential threat of simply having running water in the home at all. A century of pumping water from the once abundant aquifers had drawn them down to a condition of severe overdraft in order to build the agricultural and commercial life of the Valley that exists today.
Groundwater depletion was especially serious during three drought episodes over the past two decades. The first was 2006 to 2010, the second from 2011 to 2017 and the most recent from 2019 to 2022. The overpumping did not stop during the dry years as large estates of nut trees and other thirsty permanent crops have continued to expand.
Meanwhile, more than a thousand wells dry up each year in the state with the Valley being especially hard hit. The small unincorporated community of West Goshen is an example. Part of the town is hooked up to the water system of nearby Visalia, but about 60 homes rely on private wells. Some of those residences had their wells go dry in those recent droughts.
That is when the CWC stepped in to help. Working with an engineering firm, they worked to identify options to connect with other safe, reliable sources for water. The CWC holds monthly meetings with residents to share information and gather feedback. Other groups like Self Help Enterprises supply funding for small-scale water systems.
The Kaweah subbasin extends from the Sierra Foothills to the center of the Valley; it contains the cities of Visalia and Tulare and a lot of farmland. It is part of the Tulare Lake aquifer. Like most aquifers in the southern San Joaquin Valley, groundwater is currently being pumped out faster than it is recharged.
Stakeholders here formed a groundwater sustainability agency and came up with a plan as required by California’s sustainable groundwater law passed in 2014, but the State Water Board’s professional staff found deficiencies in the proposal and held a workshop to explain why the state could intervene.
In the 2022 water year, agriculture used 91% of the water with urban consumption at 7% according to the staff report. The plan that the Kaweah Sub-Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency came up with in 2022 failed to protect domestic wells and disadvantaged communities. Some 40% of domestic wells, more than 1,500 wells, could dry up under that plan, and 53 public supply wells would also go dry.
There are other groundwater basins under state scrutiny for plans that staff researchers are finding inadequate. Coming up with equitable groundwater plans will be a major challenge for state regulators and all the stakeholders—farmers, disadvantaged small towns and families—dependent on well water and support groups. State laws and common fairness require that commitment. Water is, after all, a public resource.
