In East Porterville, California, there are more than 500 wells that have dried up (Bliss 2015). This marks the beginning of California’s worst recorded drought. The county of Tulare within East Porterville is home to 1675 wells total (Bliss 2015). Tulare is one of the eight counties that make up the San Joaquin Valley, the richest agricultural region in the world. Of the 1750 households in East Porterville, at least 35% of residents live in poverty (Bliss 2015). Tulare county has been working with nonprofit organizations to refill storage tanks for low income families who have ran out of well water (Brussels 2014). Throughout the drought, records show accounts of residents who spoke of showering in a stream of dirt and having to haul a bucketful of water to flush the toilet. Although the tanks that the county has been working to refill seem to bring justice to its citizens, there is indeed a discrepancy. Although residents of Tulare County are listed as residents of “Porterville,” they live on unincorporated county land, right next to municipal limits (Bliss 2015). The land is just beyond the reach of Porterville’s formal water district, which continued to serve its customers with clean, running water throughout the entire drought period. Further investigation explains how the issue of who must bare the financial burden of avoiding contaminated water and attaining clean water, is one of environmental justice.
Residents of Tulare County, and its neighboring counties have relied on wells that pump water from the ground, which are the same sources that surrounding farmers use to keep crops lush. Since the beginning of the drought, farmers have began to drill their wells deeper, lessening the ground supply of water (Bliss 2015). There was scarcity of rain and Tulare’s water table is shallow, so wells began to come up empty. Using this sequence of events, media coverage has blamed farmers for the scarcity of water faced by residents. A recent report recorded 525 poor, densely populated, unincorporated communities throughout San Joaquin Valley. 65% of the population in these places are people of color while 64% of this population is low income (Bliss 2015). Many of these communities were settled by Black and Latino farmers who were attracted to such inexpensive land with low taxes and little government oversight. Little to none of the regulations that were in place within the city were enforced in these outskirt communities. As Michelle Anderson, a Stanford University public law scholar reported, “Neglect by white officials, often compounded by community need to keep housing costs low, resulted in a lack of rudimentary infrastructure, including paved streets, sewers, utilities, and water (Bliss 2015).”
What began as subtle discrimination turned to explicit neglect as Tulare County’s 1971 plan shifted investment away from 15 of the unincorporated communities, on the grounds that an investment would be a waste because they would eventually depopulate. The callous plan stated that, “Public commitments to communities with little or no authentic future should be carefully examined before final action is initiated. These non-viable communities would, as a consequence of withholding major public facilities such as sewer and water systems, enter a process of long term, natural decline as residents depart for improved opportunities in nearby communities (Bliss 2015).” Among many, a flaw in this plan was that such low income farmers could not afford to move anywhere, let alone the wealthy communities nearby. As such, today, 13 of those 15 communities with “no authentic future” are still existent (Bland 2016). These communities have been surviving on the subpar infrastructure that prompted the disinvestment.
Many unincorporated communities in the San Joaquin Valley have had fertilizers, pesticides, and livestock waste leaking into their groundwater for decades. Furthermore, San Joaquin Valley has the highest water contamination rate in the state. The Community Equity Initiative of California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) reported 220 disadvantaged unincorporated communities (DUCs) that lack the basic infrastructure necessary for a community to sustain itself (Pannu 2012). These services include safe drinking water. The greater disadvantage that these communities face is that they rely on county governments to take initiative and manage the services, while wealthier communities have elected city governments working on the tasks alongside the county governments (Pannu 2012). A vast majority of these DUCs are comprised of working people of color who chose their residence based on its proximity to rural job opportunities. Research showed that there was a positive, although somewhat weak, correlation between poverty and poor drinking water. The research went a step further to show that there is a strong negative correlation between the percentage of caucasians and low quality drinking water in an area (Pannu 2012).
The environmental justice issues surrounding safe water in the San Joaquin valley were not motivated by direct discrimination against a particular race or races, but rather the neglect of outskirt communities. The county government named 15 counties, comprised mostly of Latino and Black residents, non viable (Bland 2016). The gap in justice, came forth when the county decided to remove investment from these communities rather than working to improve the conditions. The county wrongly assumed that the communities would fall apart due to the disinvestment, when in reality they continued to survive in barely hospitable conditions. Even if the government didn’t know that the communities would survive, they still agreed to allow residents to live in terrible living conditions for the period of time until the community “dispersed.” The contention stemmed from whether the government’s foresight of the eventual doom of these communities was discriminatory and neglectful (the view of most community members) or for the long term good of the greater San Joaquin Valley area. Although some of such claims have been resolved, the controversy surrounding other cases of unequal access to clean water continue. Not specific to San Joaquin Valley, the success rate of Environmental Justice cases in the US is 18% higher than the success rate worldwide (Brussels 2014).
Analysts used various methods to determine that the issue of San Joaquin Valley was indeed an Environmental Justice issue. One of those methods included Mohai’s unit-hazard coincidence approach (Mohai 2009, p. 410). This approach was demonstrated when the government chose two specific geographic locations, such as within Tulare County, and the outskirts of the county (East Porterville), and measured the damage from the environmental hazard of water safety. They then collected demographic data from both locations and compared and inferred based on the overlaps of hazard and residence of minorities.
As access to water declined, the unincorporated communities essentially went into survival mode. Since the majority of residents were farmers, there was a sense of pride associated with the land and the lifestyle that they had built for themselves, making the departure to other already established communities less appealing (Bliss 2015). Besides the emotional qualm with moving, property values were so low that relocation was extremely difficult for residents. Also, the factors that originally attracted people to outskirt communities, low cost land and minimal government oversight, still stood strong. To tackle the issue of water access, the communities became quite self reliant, using private wells or community water systems that source from a couple larger common wells (Bliss 2015).
Such self reliance was anything but easy. The New York Times’s Patricia Leight Brown spoke of individuals with an annual income of $14,000 who fill five gallon jugs of water each day in addition to their standard water bills (Greenfield 2012). The financial burden was placed on the low income citizens instead of the government as they spend an average of $50 per month paying for an extra water source (Greenfield 2012). The residents are paying for filter water supplements or bottle water as well as contaminated tap water, according to a 2011 study by the Pacific Institute (Greenfield 2012). Then there are those who would not afford to relinquish about 10% of their household incomes and were forced to drink from the nitrate contaminated wells. After years of citizens attempting to fix the water issue themselves, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Human Right to Water bill, which promised “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes (Greenfield 2012).” But there was still a discrepancy and where exactly the influx of money to fix these problems would come from. The federal government contributed $1.3 million to a town in San Joaquin Valley to build a water treatment plant, but this sum of money wasn’t in place and the plant remains unused. Brown then pivoted to sink filter attachments that would account for the nitrate and arsenic contamination, but quickly realized that it would take a total of $150 million to completely solve the water issues (Greenfield 2012). As prices continued to rise and the government attempted to fund the projects, the situation in the Valley worsened as the nitrate contamination continued to spread, according to The State Water Resources Control Board (Greenfield 2012).
The theme of unequal access to safe water spreads beyond East Porterville. The pattern of poor, unincorporated, predominantly non-white communities being victimized by authoritative powers has been and continues to be a popular theme within the realm of environmental justice. Heavily populated regions have been dealing with a lack of appropriate water infrastructure and contamination for decades but the disparities within the period of the drought in San Joaquin Valley were the most blatant and visible. The Valley remains one of several areas in the United States in which tap water in not safe to drink. The burden fell from the government, whose job it is to bare such a difficult situation, to the citizens of the San Joaquin Valley. As thousands of minority individuals struggle to avoid contamination, justice has not been served.