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So in 1995, state officials agreed to a deal or, as it has been suggested, a staggering giveaway. The farmers had to relinquish 14 billion gallons of “paper water” — junior water rights that exist only de jure, since there simply isn’t enough rainfall most years to fulfill them. In exchange, they got ownership of the Kern Water Bank, a naturally occurring underground reservoir that lies beneath 32 square miles of Kern County, which sits toward the southern end of the Central Valley. The bank held up to 488 billion gallons of water, and because it sat beneath a floodplain it could be easily recharged in wet years with rainfall and surplus water piped in from the Delta. The Resnicks, who’d given up the most paper water rights, came to hold a majority vote on the bank’s board and the majority of its water. So like other farmers, the Resnicks have turned to the state’s dwindling reserve of groundwater, sinking wells hundreds of feet deep on their land.
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By the time she was 24, she’d launched her own advertising agency, Lynda Limited, given birth to three children, and gotten divorced. California and Florida ranked highest for carbon dioxide emissions from lawn equipment, while Florida and Texas topped the list of PM2.5 pollution. While one might expect the sheer amount of lawn care in California, the most populous U.S. state, to rank it higher on PM2.5 pollution, it only comes in 29th. Lower two-stroke engine use accounts for the gap between the state’s carbon and particulate emissions, according to Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst at Frontier Group and contributor to the report.
In wildfire-prone areas, homeowners are learning they're uninsurable - Grist
In wildfire-prone areas, homeowners are learning they're uninsurable.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Grist House Review – A Wide Array of Beer Styles in Millvale
It was determined by city leaders who made zoning and land use decisions throughout the last century that purposefully changed the very nature of Logan and its surroundings. For years, however, the ramifications of those decisions were buried in the dust, leaving residents exposed to soil lead particles that are perpetually resuspended in the air the residents breathe. For years, Logan’s residents have celebrated their history as a barrio, but many never imagined that their past could also come back to haunt them.
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The Western States Petroleum Association, or WSPA, an oil industry group, is one of the largest lobbying forces in California by expenditure. 467, and Democratic senators who voted against both bills received thousands of dollars in contributions from the industry. But some Los Angeles County residents tend to live closer to wells than others. This story was produced in collaboration with Capital & Main, a nonprofit media publication focused on inequality, and was made possible with funding from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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But as long as the toxic dust remains in the earth, and as long as the Santa Ana winds whip through the streets of Logan, Andrade Rodriguez realizes that the only way to return to the cherished barrio of her youth is by letting her imagination carry her to a place that once was. Ultimately, if the transformation of Logan can improve the health of residents, Logan will have won, said Andrade, who has watched generations of Logan residents get cancers and battle heart disease and other health issues. His mother Chepa, who died of a heart attack while undergoing dialysis, was one of them. Romero, who is struggling with health issues, realizes his activist days are nearing their end.
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The testing was conducted on bare soil throughout residential yards with a focus on areas where children would be likely to play. Grist also tested soil along the perimeter of yards near fences, as well as the areas near the outer walls of a housing structure. The mixed-use nature of the Logan neighborhood has burdened residents with exposure to pollution, health problems, and a bevy of annoyances.
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The stark contrast in exposure to wells between majority white enclaves and those where people of color live is replicated across the state. She remembers being scared of the noise that was made by the strange device that her mom would use at night — a nebulizer, to treat her asthma. And there were periodic warnings to stay inside because of explosions at nearby refineries. The Josephine Andrade oral history interview is provided courtesy of the Lawrence De Graaf Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton. The soil testing was made possible thanks to the generosity of Thermo Fisher Scientific, which provided an XRF analyzer on loan to conduct soil testing for this investigation. Tijerina, who has short gray hair and a cautious smile, grew up in a village near Monterrey, Mexico, before her family moved to South Texas in 1954.
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They are smaller — coming in two- and four-stroke versions, which reference the differences in the engines’ combustion cycles — and are generally less efficient, with two-stroke engines being particularly problematic because they run a mix of lubricating oil and gasoline. Lawn-care equipment — leaf-blowers, lawnmowers, and the like — doesn’t top most people’s lists of climate priorities. But a new report documents how, in aggregate, lawn care is a major source of U.S. air pollution. HACLA insists that it has ensured a thorough cleanup by constantly testing the soil during construction, though it declined to share test results with Grist.
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After Maui wildfires, returning home means confronting toxic risks - Grist
After Maui wildfires, returning home means confronting toxic risks.
Posted: Tue, 22 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
But it’s also an apt analogy for a barrio that has weathered many storms — political battles that the Andrade family and generations of Logan residents have fought in order to defend their homes against the industrialization that surrounded and eventually infiltrated their neighborhood. Despite those efforts, the development of the barrio would leave a toxic legacy that still plagues them to this day. According to CalGEM data, of the 240,000 oil and gas wells in California, 98,737 are active or idle but not cleaned up, meaning that they can still emit toxic chemicals. Across the state, about 392 public schools — 4 percent of all public schools in the state — are located within 2,500 feet of a well.
In response to the scandal, the California legislature passed a law changing the agency’s name to CalGEM and updated its mandate to more explicitly include the protection of public health. In November 2019, Newsom initiated the start of updated public health and safety rules for the agency, a draft of which was promised by December 31, 2020. The rulemaking, which many hope will include oil and gas setbacks, has still not been released. Oil shaped Los Angeles — and millions there still live with the continuing legacy of that oil boom. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in September to phase out the 1,600 oil and gas wells and ban the drilling of new wells in unincorporated parts of the county.
You’re more likely to encounter one while scrolling through $300-a-night Airbnb listings than browsing Zillow. In the meantime, Hernandez and the other activists at Communities for a Better Environment are continuing to organize and demand that California residents be spared the health effects of living alongside oil operations. They’ve taken every opportunity to push CalGEM for 2,500-foot setbacks at the agency’s community meetings. As such, “the exploration for oil and extraction of oil got baked into the fabric of Los Angeles,” Sarah Elkind, professor of history at San Diego State University, told Grist. A century ago, Los Angeles was “small, industrial, and isolated,” but oil development soon became the backbone of its economy. By the 1930s, Los Angeles had grown from a small city of 50,000 to a metropolis of 1.2 million that produced a quarter of the world’s oil.
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