“I think it’s from the nitrate,” Chavez says.
According to a 2012 report from UC Davis, in 96 percent of cases where nitrate leaches into groundwater supplies, agricultural operations are at fault.
This is almost certainly how the Chavez family’s well became contaminated.
“It’s shameful,” says Jonathan Nelson, the policy director for the Community Water Center, an organization that has been advocating for people without safe drinking water in the San Joaquin Valley for many years.
Jerry Brown declared he was “committed to working with the Legislature and stakeholders” to bring clean, safe, affordable water to all Californians, and he stated much the same thing in this year’s budget address, delivered in January.
Here, the wells that supplied 750 people ran dry during the drought.
Chavez says he has asked to be connected to the same pipe network.
The fund would be created mostly by a 95-cent-per-month addition to household water bills statewide, with 20 percent – $30 million – proposed to come from a tax imposed on agricultural fertilizers that contain nitrogen.
Tuck says drawing the needed money from the general fund, instead of taxing ratepayers, would be a more appropriate way to create and maintain the drinking water fund.
Nelson, at the Community Water Center, calls the stance taken by the Association of California Water Agencies “the shame of California.” “We have some of the wealthiest water agencies in the state worried about a fee of less than a dollar a month that would help bring clean water to communities of low-income people,” Nelson says.

For years, Californians regarded access to safe drinking water as a Third World problem.
About 1 million Californians can’t safely drink their tap water.
It’s a disgrace that demands immediate state action.
Gov.
Gavin Newsom proposes taxing water across California to create a dedicated fund to solve the problem.
Water experts estimate the need to be about $150 million a year.
But in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta town of Isleton, just 90 miles from San Jose and 40 miles from Walnut Creek, residents’ tap water contains enough arsenic that it is unsafe to drink.
It’s inevitable that if the state continues draining the Delta to send water south it will eventually pose a serious, long-term threat to the quality of Bay Area residents’ drinking water.
For example, Californians last fall wisely rejected Proposition 3, which would have devoted $500 million of an $8.9 billion water bond package to cleaning up the state’s drinking water.
Monning has yet to re-introduce his legislation this year.

by Amanda Fencl, Rich Pauloo, Alvar Escriva-Bou, Hervé Guillon During the 2012-2016 drought, the state received more than 2,500 domestic well failure reports, the majority of which were in the Central Valley (DWR 2018).
Our submission was driven by open data from public agencies and assessed the vulnerability of domestic wells to failure in the Central Valley.
Which domestic wells will be vulnerable in the next drought?
Due to already low groundwater levels, a simulated a 4-year-long-drought starting in January 2018 would result in more than 4,000 domestic well failures in the Central Valley alone, nearly twice as many well failures compared to 2012-2016.
About 1.5 times more well failures were reported by households in disadvantaged and severely disadvantaged communities (DAC + SDAC together) compared to those at or above the Median Household Income (MHI+).
Results from the spatial model of well failure were used to train an ensemble machine learning classifier on 56 climatic and geologic variables to predict present day well failure across the Central Valley and assess the climatic controls on domestic well failures.
We can’t avoid another drought in California.
Our hope is to show local and state decision-makers what is possible with existing data and methodologies to proactively address drinking water issues in California’s rural communities.
Dr. Hervé Guillon is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the UC Davis Water Resources Management Group and Dr. Alvar Escriva-Bou is a Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Arnold, Escriva-Bou, and Lund (2017) San Joaquin Valley Water Supplies – Unavoidable Variability and Uncertainty.

Thomas Esqueda, associate vice president of water and susainability at Fresno State and executive director of the California Water Institute discusses groundwater contamination and overpumping at the Arsenic Symposium at Fresno State on Oct. 11.
(Courtesy of Jordan College of Ag Sciences and Technology) The California Water Institute at Fresno State hosted the Arsenic Symposium, a community event focused on analyzing arsenic levels in groundwater.
Thomas Esqueda, Fresno State’s associate vice president of water and sustainability and the executive director of the California Water Institute, said the need for discussions about water infrastructure and safety is especially relevant in the San Joaquin Valley.
“Because we live in this environment where we are pretty much a rural area, the San Joaquin Valley, closely linked to ag, can’t grow food without water.
With the anticipated growth of the Valley’s population, Esqueda said it is vital to begin planning and implementing infrastructure that will supply safe, dependable water for the Valley.
“There’s no lack of water issues in the Valley.” Fresno State utilizes both public water supply wells as well as its own irrigation wells on the campus.
Esqueda said the two issues to focus on regarding water are the quality and the quantity of water in the Valley.
While the Arsenic Symposium addressed quality of water issues, a future event planned for January will discuss solutions concerning the Valley’s quantity of water.
The symposium took place one day after the fourth annual “Imagine a Day Without Water” events, for which Fresno State’s California Water Institute partnered with the city of Fresno, elected officials, water utilities and community leaders to raise awareness of the need for investing in the nation’s water infrastructure.
“People have to have food, and people have to have water.”

Pumping an aquifer to the last drop squeezes out more than water.
(Image credit: Shutterstock) The group found that satellite-derived measurements of ground sinking could predict arsenic concentrations in groundwater.
“Groundwater must have been largely turned over,” said study co-author Scott Fendorf, a professor of Earth system science and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
They found that when land in the San Joaquin Valley’s Tulare basin sinks faster than 3 inches per year, the risk of finding hazardous arsenic levels in groundwater as much as triples.
When pumping draws too much water from the sand and gravel areas, the aquifer compresses and land sinks.
“Sands and gravels that were being propped apart by water pressure are now starting to squeeze down on that sponge,” Fendorf explained.
The researchers said overpumping in other aquifers could produce the same contamination issues seen in the San Joaquin Valley if they have three attributes: alternating layers of clay and sand; a source of arsenic; and relatively low oxygen content, which is common in aquifers located beneath thick clays.
While well data is important to validate and calibrate satellite data, she explained, on-the-ground monitoring can never match the breadth and speed of remote sensing.
“You’re never sampling a well frequently enough to catch that arsenic the moment it’s in the well,” said Knight.
As in the San Joaquin Valley, areas of the Mekong Delta where land was sinking more showed higher arsenic concentrations.

“I think it’s from the nitrate,” Chavez says.
According to a 2012 report from UC Davis, in 96 percent of cases where nitrate leaches into groundwater supplies, agricultural operations are at fault.
This is almost certainly how the Chavez family’s well became contaminated.
“It’s shameful,” says Jonathan Nelson, the policy director for the Community Water Center, an organization that has been advocating for people without safe drinking water in the San Joaquin Valley for many years.
Jerry Brown declared he was “committed to working with the Legislature and stakeholders” to bring clean, safe, affordable water to all Californians, and he stated much the same thing in this year’s budget address, delivered in January.
Here, the wells that supplied 750 people ran dry during the drought.
Chavez says he has asked to be connected to the same pipe network.
Another report from UC Davis released in March found that most of the people without safe drinking water live near public water systems.
The fund would be created mostly by a 95-cent-per-month addition to household water bills statewide, with 20 percent – $30 million – proposed to come from a tax imposed on agricultural fertilizers that contain nitrogen.
Monning, however, says the general fund, since it gets reallocated every year, is nowhere near reliable enough.

More than 300 California communities lack access to clean drinking water.
Last fall, a bill with a proposed solution passed the state senate but has since remained in limbo, receiving both broad support and opposition—even in the San Joaquin Valley.
They voiced their support of Senate Bill 623, which would establish a fund to help communities like theirs obtain safe drinking water.
But at the same Assembly subcommittee hearing where Garcia and Solorio supported the bill, many groups spoke out against it.
The reason: The fund would come from a statewide tax on water bills, as well as fees on some growers.
One group opposed is the city of Fresno.
“We do agree that there is a need for safe drinking water, but we oppose the water tax,” she said.
The Association of California Water Agencies, the League of California Cities, and a variety of municipal water districts also voiced their concerns about the bill.
“If you are in the Central Valley, it seems to me that we have an extra special obligation to make sure that we’re joining hands together to ensure that all of our fellow Californians that live, reside, work in the Valley can have access to safe drinking water,” Nelson said.
A state representative confirmed as much at last week’s hearing.

That water is delivered from a patchwork of community water systems that often don’t meet state or federal standards for drinking water or from private wells that are not tested.
Most people without safe water, or about 99,000 residents, live near a public water system with clean water.
Practical solutions Ways safe drinking water can be achieved, according to the report, include: * Develop and strengthen consolidation and service extension mandates and incentives for cities, counties and community water systems; * Create larger, more stable, and more equitably distributed and coordinated sources of funding for drinking water systems; * Improve public access to data and planning tools; enhance existing data systems and coordinate water monitoring efforts.
Students in the UCD School of Law Aoki Water Justice Clinic have been meeting with these communities to secure funding to build that infrastructure.
Law students are also working with community organizations seeking policy changes to increase access to safe drinking water for low-income Californians.
The study’s purpose is to inform state policy and local planning in order to improve access to safe drinking water for these communities.
People of color made up a majority of those without safe water, the Center for Regional Change study found.
For example, while Hispanics make up just under half, or 49 percent, of the total population of the San Joaquin Valley, they represent more than two-thirds of residents in these unincorporated communities and 57 percent of all residents served by out-of-compliance water systems.
— UC Davis News School of Law Water Justice Clinic The Aoki Water Justice Clinic combines transactional law, policy advocacy, and strategic research to ensure low-income California communities receive clean, safe and affordable drinking water.
* Students are leading or supporting research collaborations, including partnerships with the UCD Center for Regional Change, UC Cooperative Extension, and UC Berkeley School of Law’s Wheeler Water Institute.

This is according to a new UC Davis study, which suggests that permanent solutions aren’t that far away.
But 66 percent of these people live within one mile of a system that could supply them clean water.
A majority of those without safe drinking water in these small rural places are people of color — Hispanics make up 57 percent of all the people that get water from out-of-compliance water systems in the eight counties represented.
The authors hope the research alerts state decision-makers to take action by funding ways to connect communities to existing infrastructure and incentivizes water agencies to help.
For many of these communities, this would mean a pipeline extension or annexation.
“It’s really difficult to ask that population to bear the burden of fixing what is really a state created and statewide problem,” Pannu said.
“Because they’re small and remote they also don’t have a lot of political power when it comes to trying to sway the county for example.” Around 100 residents are bringing samples of dirty water from their towns to the state Capitol on Wednesday to show lawmakers at a hearing.
Last year, a group of legislators introduced Senate Bill 623, which would set up a fund for safe and affordable drinking water.
The bill is still active in the Assembly, but water justice leaders are approaching the topic in a new way this year: They want permanent funds allocated out of the state budget for connecting communities with water contamination issues to clean water sources.
“Within the next decade and with adequate funding, we could solve a problem that has plagued low-income, rural communities for over 50 years,” Pannu said.

(Photo by Andrea Jaramillo Valencia/News21) Phoenix residents Dora Godinez, 54, and her daughter Diana Garcia, 26, refill their five-gallon water jug every week because they don’t trust their tap water.
Often, reusable water bottles that aren’t properly cleaned can affect the quality of the water.
(Photo by Andrea Jaramillo Valencia/News21) PHOENIX — Dolores Escobar takes a 30-minute bus ride every Sunday from her house to the closest water-vending machine and carries eight empty gallon jugs with her to refill them.
The Phoenix resident said she didn’t like the taste of the tap water at her home, which she said has as a “metallic taste.” Numerous studies have found that Latinos’ consumption of tap water is significantly lower than non-Latinos’ consumption in places with predominant or growing Latino populations such as Northern California, Denver, Salt Lake City and Milwaukee.
These studies indicate that many Latinos believe their water is unsafe, don’t like the taste or the odor, or repeat the cultural patterns from their home countries, where tap water isn’t safe to drink.
Beamer’s research indicated that 73 percent of the people surveyed said they would drink the tap water if they knew it was safe – even if they didn’t like the taste.
Beamer’s team also did water-quality tests during their home visits in Nogales and found no significant difference between the tap water and the bottled or vended water Latino residents drank, except in cases where they found water stored in reusable containers that weren’t properly cleaned.
Latinos also spend more money on bottled water.
Beamer said that not drinking tap water increases Latinos’ risk of developing diabetes because they tend to consume sugary drinks instead of water.
This report is part of the “Troubled Water” project produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, a national investigative reporting project by top college journalism students and recent graduates from across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.