Most of the fish that Marco Valdez catches at the mouth of the Sweetwater River in the South Bay he throws back. He says that in his community, talk of water contamination circulates on the regular – and ever more often.
“You hear this in the news all the time, Pa’,” Valdez told an inewsource reporter as he reeled in his line.
According to attorney and water policy expert Felicia Marcus, who is also the William C. Landreth Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, regional officials hope to purify this groundwater and are also actively pursuing collaborations with local water districts in order to obtain clean drinking water for its residents.
South Orange County, though, is not affected by this dilemma as at least 90% of its water is imported.
Garrett Rue grew up fly fishing in central Colorado, often surrounded by mountains stained amber and maroon, and hiking along streams that seemed to borrow those colors. Sometimes he would cast for native trout and come back with nothing—because there was nothing to catch. Then he started hearing stories about people in nearby mountain communities who couldn’t drink their own water. He began to wonder: “These streams have problems supporting ecosystems, and they’re not usable for drinking. What’s going on here?”
More than 58,000 fires scorched the United States last year, and 2021 is on track to be even drier. What many people don’t realize is that these wildfires can do lasting damage beyond the reach of the flames – they can contaminate entire drinking water systems with carcinogens that last for months after the blaze. That water flows to homes, contaminating the plumbing, too.
Ageing infrastructure, legacy pollution and emerging contaminants across the US are driving a growing urgency to do something about America’s water crisis.
Nearly half a century after a Gold Rush-era quicksilver mining operation shut down in northern California, mercury continues to flow into a nearby creek, and federal officials blame the mine’s state landmark status for cleanup delays.
House lawmakers presented an extensive amendment to the annual defense spending bill targeting harmful chemicals that have contaminated hundreds of military bases.
Residents in Earlimart, California, lost water service when a 50-year-old well on Mary Ann Avenue failed in late May.
When it came back on, the main source of drinking water for more than 8,000 residents became a well contaminated with a chemical from banned pesticides. And most residents didn’t know.
The military now has at least 651 sites that have been contaminated with cancer-linked “forever chemicals,” a more than 50 percent jump from its last tally.
The information was released Friday in a report from the Department of Defense (DOD), part of a task force designed to help the military remove a class of chemicals known as PFAS from the water supply near numerous military bases.
The billion-dollar companies that made and used chemicals now popping up in water supplies around the country are switching to newer alternatives, but they haven’t escaped liabilities for historic environmental contamination.
The chemicals, known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, have become ubiquitous in everyday consumer goods as well as in specialized industrial applications. For some of the companies, including 3M Co. and the Chemours Co., liabilities from their PFAS operations have negatively affected the value of their stock.
