Coronavirus Is Keeping California From Fixing Its Water Systems
California has had fundamental problems providing clean drinking water to its residents for years. And now, the economic impacts of the novel coronavirus may have made the problem even harder to solve.
“More than 300 public drinking water systems in California serve unsafe drinking water, according to public compliance data compiled by the California State Water Resources Control Board,” The New York Times reported in 2019. “It is a slow-motion public health crisis that leaves more than one million Californians exposed to unsafe water each year.”
That same year, the state launched a multimillion-dollar fund to help address the problem. But the economic impact of COVID-19 now appears to be a major hitch in the plan. At a recent meeting where California’s State Water Resources Control Board adopted the first spending plan for the decade-long, $130 million-per-year investment, the chairman suggested that the economic downturn meant that noncompliant water systems would grow more quickly than the funds to fix them.
“The state’s Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, created last year to help communities without the resources to build new water systems or maintain old ones, was meant to be that solution,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “But with the pandemic dragging California’s economy into recession, it’s unclear how much the state will be able to help.”
For the most part, California’s farming communities are those served with unsafe water, which can carry a range of dangerous contaminants. Estimates put the number of consumers at risk at around 1 million, combining the people who depend on these systems as well as those who rely on private wells and unregulated systems.
“The pollution is largely concentrated in agricultural communities in the Central Valley and Salinas Valley, where water is often contaminated by nitrates from pesticides, fertilizer runoff and dairy waste, and arsenic, which scientists believe is released into aquifers by overpumping,” per the Chronicle. “Cancer-causing chemicals have been found in the groundwater in some places.”
Some residents have reported rotten-egg smells from their tap water or point to hair loss as a resulting health effect of consumption. And, adding to their problems, the source-water scarcity in the state makes even this unsafe water difficult for lower-income households to afford.
“The water is too contaminated to safely drink, but residents of this farmworker community in the Central Valley pay $74 a month just to be able to turn on the tap at home,” the Chronicle reported. “Their bills are even higher if they use more than 50 gallons a day, a fraction of daily water consumption for the average California household.”
For these consumers, the spread of coronavirus couldn’t have come at a more precipitous time. Perhaps the state will find a solution that is both financially viable and capable of serving these residents with safe drinking water but, until then, the problems will persist.
To read more about how water systems pay for their services, visit Water Online’s Funding Solutions Center.