By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue Many of the more than one million Californians who live in mobile home parks drink water that is more polluted and more likely to be cut off than residents who get water from other municipal utilities, according to the most detailed research to date on water access in California trailer parks.
Water service and quality in mobile home parks is “terribly neglected,” according to Greg Pierce, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author of the study, which was published on October 4 in the journal Environmental Justice.
By analyzing state drinking water data from 2010 to 2014, Pierce and Silvia Gonzalez, a coauthor, showed that mobile home parks had more frequent water quality violations: one-third exceeded at least one drinking water health standard in those years compared to one-quarter of other water systems.
Using federal housing data, the researchers found that residents of mobile home parks were four times more likely to have water cut off than those served by other systems.
That study, led by Pierce and published in 2015, found that mobile home park residents were nearly three times more likely to have water service cut off than residents served by other municipal systems.
For this study, Pierce and Gonzalez evaluated mobile home park water service on quality, reliability, and affordability, which are the three tent poles of the right-to-water law.
Publicly regulated systems in California serve 15 or more connections.
There are a number of policy prescriptions available to remedy poor service and water quality in mobile home parks, Pierce said.
The State Water Board has made progress on this point.
He also writes the Federal Water Tap, Circle of Blue’s weekly digest of U.S. government water news.