General Discussion

Panich52

(5,829 posts) Fri Apr 10, 2015, 12:04 AM Apr 2015

It's not just the drought -- More than 1M Californians don’t have reliable access to clean water

Al Jazeera

Californians who grumble about not being able to water their lawns every day during the fourth year of a historic drought should swing by Arvin, a small town in Southern California’s 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 its high levels of arsenic — known to cause cancer — become concentrated when water is boiled.

http://alj.am/1akQUrp

Read more: Agua4All campaign brings clean water to communities
http://aljazeera.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=38ffd892c93e55497901185c8&id=af453b0de1&e=a4f8e71df5

1 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

It's not just the drought -- More than 1M Californians don’t have reliable access to clean water (Original Post) Panich52 Apr 2015 OP

I had to use a water service back east Warpy Apr 2015 #1

Warpy

(111,354 posts)

1. I had to use a water service back east

Reply to Panich52 (Original post)

Fri Apr 10, 2015, 01:10 AM

Apr 2015

when the military polluted the town wells.

It's why I never bought in to the bottled water craze. Having had to have 5 gallon carboys of water delivered every week soured me on the whole idea. The water here has some arsenic in it, but my part of town (the worst part) has the lowest levels. I just filter the tap water to get the chlorine that makes my tea weird out of it and it's fine. I feel great about being able to drink tap water without filtration if I have to.

People in Arvin will have to do what I did. At least they can shower in their water. The town told us not to for a couple of weeks while they drilled new wells and flushed the system so the levels of TCE and other contaminants were down to acceptable levels. Needing to hump 5 gallon bottles of water around is a pain in the ass, but people in cities all over the planet do the same thing.

Arvin's just the canary in a very large coal mine. California is going to have to get serious about where their potable water is going to come from. The fat years of heavy snowpack might be over for a long time.

Reply to this discussion