‘Brown Water for Brown People’: Making Sense of California’s Drinking Water Crisis - The New York Times

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LOS ANGELES — It all started with a gut check earlier this year, on the side of Highway 8, which runs right through California’s agricultural Imperial Valley. When journalists write about rural America, I thought to myself, we tend to focus on white, blue-collar voters, on truck-stop diners or on farm owners. Rarely are farmworkers — mostly Latino, Spanish speaking, and often undocumented — at the center of our storytelling.

What might we be missing?

With this in mind, I began to research the lives of farmworkers in California today. It is unfortunately no surprise that the vulnerabilities are vast: high rates of sexual assault endured by campesinas, widespread poverty and dangerous pesticide exposure, to name the most intractable. But something very elemental kept coming up as well, often casually: the struggle many farmworkers face getting enough clean water to drink, cook and bathe at home.

Certainly that couldn’t be right, I thought, not in the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country on earth, and not in 2019. Were there really any such communities without potable water today? If so, why?

As I spoke with industry experts, advocates and workers, I began to realize the massive scale of the problem among small farmworker communities in the San Joaquin Valley. “Flint is everywhere here,” an attorney who works on water rights issues told me. “It’s brown water for brown people.”

While the issue of potable water access had received some attention during the drought that lasted from 2012 to 2017, that spectacle often elided the deep underlying problems that remained when the drought ended.

I often try to find hard numbers to augment the human stories I like to tell. They give an article heft — and they can point out the difference between a singular injustice and something more structural. After some digging through state reports, I found a gold mine of public data to guide my reporting: spreadsheets with thousands of rows of compliance information. There, I learned that more than 300 water systems in California did not meet public safety standards in 2019. Many more fall in and out of compliance each year.

The spreadsheet was overwhelming, but I knew each of the communities listed had a story to tell. So I started visiting them. In East Orosi, I spent days going door to door asking community members for their testimonies. Most did not speak English, and they were relieved that I could speak Spanish fluently. (It’s not always obvious: I’m very guero — fair-skinned.)

The story is complicated, with issues of “economies of scale” at its core. Rural areas struggle with unreliable drinking water precisely because of their isolation.

But I also began to see, in the data and local news reports, that urban water districts sometimes fell through the cracks as well. I knew immediately I would need to do more work on the topic, even after that first piece was published.

I set my sights on the Sativa Los Angeles County Water District, which serves an unincorporated urban community along the border of Compton. Last year it was the subject of outrage, protest and excellent local media attention when the system began pumping brown water into hundreds of households.

I wanted to understand how a water system, under the supervision of locally elected board members, could go so far off-the-rails without the government’s intervening, and I wanted to know if that said something about the system at large.

In the course of that reporting, I realized significant regulatory gaps were keeping the state in the dark about what water districts were up to. Sources at the state water agency then told me that up to 1,000 systems across California may be at risk of significant failures, but there is no way of knowing until they actually fail. Economies of scale might be a problem, but a flawed and outdated regulatory framework was clearly also implicated.

All the while, I kept turning this idea of rural isolation in my mind. Why would people settle in towns they knew had no water? The answer is probably simple: It’s where people can afford to live.

But as I was reporting in the valley, locals would sometimes mention towns — like Lanare and Teviston — that used to be primarily African-American settlements. That reminded me of something I had noticed in my time writing about the rural-urban divide after the 2016 election: Many rural communities across Appalachia and the South have “white” and “black” parts of town, the direct result of segregation. That’s true in cities, we know, but I was perhaps naïvely surprised to find this divide in communities of just several hundred people as well.

I knew nothing about that history in California, so I reached out to local historians and reread the writings of people like Mark Arax about black farmworkers in the region. The disturbing history of segregation and racism in the Central Valley was, I realized, echoing through the pipes. Ongoing “selective annexation” keeps such settlements, sometimes just a mile or two away from larger cities, unconnected to robust water and sewer systems.

A story like this one exists at a weird intersection that state and national reporters often run into: It is shocking — literally unbelievable — to out-of-towners, and yet a well-known fact of life at the local level. I can’t help but wonder how many more such stories are out there, and how many aren’t being covered because small-town newsrooms are losing staff and funding.

Meanwhile, I keep thinking back to an insight a community organizer shared with me in May: “Clean water flows toward power and money.”

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‘Brown Water for Brown People’: Making Sense of California’s Drinking Water Crisis - The New York Times
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