Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink?

Oconaluftee River, Cherokee, North Carolina
March 2019 by Lisa R. Pruitt

It's an old adage, and it's one that (somewhat) accurately describes a phenomenon as much (or more) associated with rural America than urban places:  lack of clean, accessible, reasonably priced drinking water.

The lack of potable water in many places in rural America is a topic that has been on my mind for  a while.  It's been brought back to the fore by this recent story in the New York Times about the water crisis in California's Central Valley, in this case in East Orosi (population 495) in the Great Central Valley.   Jose del Real reports under the headline, "They Grow the Nation's Food, but They Can't Drink the Water."  Here's an excerpt:

Water is a currency in California, and the low-income farmworkers who pick the Central Valley’s crops know it better than anyone. They labor in the region’s endless orchards, made possible by sophisticated irrigation systems, but at home their faucets spew toxic water tainted by arsenic and fertilizer chemicals. 

* * *

Today, more than 300 public water systems in California serve unsafe drinking water, according to public compliance data compiled by the California State Water Resources Control Board. It is a slow-motion public health crisis that leaves more than one million Californians exposed to unsafe water each year, according to public health officials.

Del Real quotes Susana De Anda, a water-rights organizer:

Clean water flows toward power and money,Homes, schools and clinics are supposed to be the safest places to go. But not in our world.

As for solutions, well, Gov. Gavin Newsom "has proposed a tax of about $140 million on urban water districts and the agriculture industry to pay for redevelopment in districts serving unsafe water."

I'm delighted that my colleague, Camille Pannu who directs the Aoki Water Justice Clinic at UC Davis is quoted in the story:

Flint is everywhere here.  

Pannu also comments on a local conflict between East Orosi and its bigger neighbor, Orosi, population 8,770.

Because Orosi has clean water, they don’t want to take on rate payers from East Orosi who they think are so poor they’ll skip out on their bills. Unfortunately, you have poor people versus poorer people.

I'm so grateful for the work Prof. Pannu does, even more so that our UC Davis law students have the opportunity to do real legal work to redress injustices such as these.

A November, 2018 story by Jack Healy, out of Armenia, Wisconsin (population 707) also compared a rural water crisis to the higher profile one in Flint, Michigan.  The headline for that story was "Rural America's Own Private Flint:  Polluted Water Too Dangerous to Drink."  People in Armenia are among those who no longer drink the water, or even want to shower with it, because it is contaminated with run off from poorly regulated industrial farms.  Healy explains: 

In Wisconsin and other Midwestern states where Republicans run the government, environmental groups say that politicians have cut budgets for environmental enforcement and inspections and weakened pollution rules. In Iowa, for example, the Republican-led Legislature dismissed a package of bills that would have blocked any new large-scale hog operations until the state cleaned up its nitrogen-laden rivers and streams.

The Trump administration is now proposing to weaken federal clean water regulations, too.

He quotes 77-year-old Gordon Gottbehuet of Armenia, whose "nitrate contaminated well sits next to a field injected with manure." 

The regulations favor agriculture. When they keep cutting enforcement and people, there’s nobody to keep track of what’s happening.

But the problem is not limited to the Midwest, as Healy writes: 

Now, fears and frustration over water quality and contamination have become a potent election-year issue, burbling up in races from the fissured bedrock here in Wisconsin to chemical-tainted wells in New Hampshire to dwindling water reserves in Arizona.

I've written about the issue of CAFO contamination of rivers here, in particular a river in my home county in Arkansas.  (That matter is also the subject of many posts here on Legal Ruralism; here is just one).

In any event, these stories of poor water quality in rural America are in sharp contrast to images like the one at the top of this post, a photo of a dramatically clear stream that flows through the Smoky Mountains (North Carolina) town of Cherokee, which I visited in March.  I took the photo because the steam was so strikingly clear, though the photo doesn't quite do justice to that quality.  I'd not seen a stream that clear since I was in Glacier National Park in 2011.