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A person holding a “Justicia para East Orosi” sign. Credit: Sandra Tsang
East Orosi hasn’t had safe drinking water in over 20 years. The water is full of nitrates, runoff from industrial agriculture, which is harmful to human health. The community has taken action to find a solution, from lobbying at the state capital to working with neighboring towns.
And they may finally have one. New California laws, passed in the last five years, have opened up funding to build water infrastructure in small towns like East Orosi. But even as laws and funding develop, implementation has been challenging.
We visit East Orosi and talk to Berta Diaz Ochoa about what it’s like living without clean drinking water and the solutions on the horizon. This is part one of a two part series.
Featuring: Episode Credits: Voice Overs
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Transcript:
Making Contact Button.
Salima Hamirani: I’m Salima Hamirani, And this is Making Contact.
Susana De Anda: So welcome to tonight’s event. Welcome to everyone. I want to let you know that we are on very special land. In this community we have fighters, warriors fighting to have clean water. (I want to let you know that we are on very special land)
Salima Hamirani: You’re listening to the voice of Susana De Anda, she’s the co-founder and executive director of an organization called Community Water Center.
Susana De Anda: But more than anything we have a community of love, compassion and unity. Tonight we are here to celebrate that.
Salima Hamirani: Community Water Center is based in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Which is also known as the central valley. And today they’re celebrating the day of the dead. Specifically in the town of East Orosi. I was part of a group invited by the Community Water Center to witness today’s event. Because they wanted more people to know about what’s going on with the water in the town of East Orosi.
Susana De Anda: They want to give you some words of inspiration and also they want to remember their ancestors, that maybe aren’t with us anymore, but are here in spirit.
Salima Hamirani: On the day of the dead, you honor your ancestors who for one night are able to walk through the curtain of the afterlife, to visit the people that they once loved. So from the stage, Susana call out the names of the the people they’ve lost over the years
Susana De Anda: Teresa Dianda. Presente. Jesus Quevedo. Presente. Maria Elena Orozco. Presente. (fade out as bed)
Salima Hamirani: But, what’s unusual about this particular day of the dead event is they’re specifically honoring the activists that the town of East Orosi has lost during its long struggle for clean drinking water.
Susana De Anda: Jesus Quevedo. Presente. Teresa Dianda. Presente.
Salima Hamirani: For about 20 years now, this town and some of the towns around it have been living with water highly contaminated with nitrates. Over that time, many of the activists who once fought to get clean water, have passed away.
Cristobal Chavez: and the saddest thing about the situation is that many families are getting sick and dying. My wife died last year from cancer. its not hereditary. It’s for some reason. its because we’ve been drinking contaminated water for 11 years.
Salima Hamirani: That’s Cristobal Chavez, he’s a member of the community water center.
Cristobal Chavez: So now we know we can’t use that water to drink or cook. And that’s the sad situation. I lost my wife. And she’s there on the altar table.
Salima Hamirani: And his wife – like many of the names spoken out loud that day – was also an organizer. One of their focuses was legislation to change East Orosi’s situation.
Cristobal Chavez: Nora was also one of those people who went to the marches in Sacramento so that Gavin Newsom could sign SB200. And, we’re still in the fight, supporting Community Water Center.
Salima Hamirani: She didn’t live to see the end of the fight.
We’re taking a look at East Orosi’s long struggle for clean water. It’s just one of hundreds of failing water systems across California -most of them in the central valley, and in poor farm worker communities. Just like this one.
Susana De Anda: Clean Water is a human right and it should never be a privilege. Do you agree? Clean Water is a what? A human right, not a privilege. Clean Water is what? A human right, not a privilege.
Salima Hamirani: And by looking at East Orosi’s water struggle, we can start to understand the roadblocks California has to face if it wants to provide clean, safe drinking water to all of its residents. Because this isn’t just a policy story. California can’t just pass the right laws. It also has to ensure a way to implement them in the poorest of places, where residents are already struggling with infrastructure and access, and local governance is underfunded. the right laws might be sliding into place for East Orosi. But by themselves, they’re still not enough.
Stay tuned, all that and more coming up.
Susana De Anda: Quevedo! Presente! Teresa Dianda! Presente! Mariale Neurosco! Presente! Mariale Neurosco! Presente! Mariale Neurosco! Presente
FADE OUT MUSIC
FADE IN SOUNDS OF BERTA’S HOUSE
Berta Diaz: Ok, here, this water here, well it looks very clear, as you can see, but this water is full of nitrates
Salima Hamirani: Our story today starts with Berta Diaz, who’s lived in East Orosi with her family for 24 years. She’s a farmworker, like many in this small town in tulare county.
Berta Diaz: the majority of the people in this community of East Orosi are low income, Also a lot of elders live here, almost 90 percent are farmworkers.
Salima Hamirani: East Orosi is smack in the middle of dozens of sprawling orchards, packed onto dry hard dirt which doesn’t even seem like its capable of bearing fruit.“In this area, clean water is earmarked for sustaining the crops – not the people.”
Berta Diaz: I work in agriculture, in the citrus industry. My work is with mandarins, oranges, lemons, and mineolas, all the citrus.
Salima Hamirani: Berta’s daughter too who also works in the fields with her mother
Berta Diaz: she loves to be with me every day.
Berta’s daughter: yes, helping with people, telling them “dont leave the fruit on the ground, on the trees, don’t leave your tools behind”.
Salima Hamirani: And on one of my trips out to East Orosi Berta had agreed to walk me around her house and her yard to show me what it’s like living with water that’s so polluted it could kill you, but so transparent it looks like glass.
Berta Diaz: we found out in 2000, since 2000, but they say its been a while since the water wasn’t drinkable. But for me, if its been a while since the water has been polluted, I think it’s irresponsible, that they never told us until women who were pregnant here started to have miscarriages
Salima Hamirani: Berta does use the water from the tap for some things
Berta Diaz: With this contaminated water we bathe, with this contaminated water we wash our dishes, with do all the household chores with this contaminated water.
Berta’s Daughter: Our teeth,
Berta Diaz: We brush our teeth with contaminated water because we don’t have another solution
Salima Hamirani: But they definitely can’t drink it. For drinking water, they depend on jugs delivered through a program funded by the California State Water Resources Control Board. We’ll hear from them a little later in the show about how they’re funding water access.
So for example, if Berta wants to make a cup of coffee –
Berta Diaz: we have to take get the water bottles. These are the bottles that they deliver to us. These are five gallon bottles, they leave us only 5 bottles of 5 gallons
Salima Hamirani: Each household receives five gallons of water every other week
Berta Diaz: Now we have left, … i have them outside
Salima Hamirani: You could have two people in your house or five, but you still receive the same ration every week.
Berta Diaz: Right now, I have two bottles left. they’re going to bring me water… the water they’re deliver it on the 11th of november
Salima Hamirani: I spoke with Berta on November 3rd. And maybe five days doesn’t seem like a long time when she has two gallons left. But, as an experiment, if you’re listening at home – fill up a five gallon container one day and slowly use it for all of your drinking needs. I tried it after this trip to visit Berta and it lasted me half a day. And I’m one person. Not an entire family.
Berta remember, also works in the fields, so she needs much more water than I would on a normal work day.
Berta Diaz: And when it’s hot, for only one person we need six to eight bottles of water per day
Janaki Anagha: The stories that I hear from local residents about the realities of living off of bottled water is just the trade offs that they have to make every day between, using that water to rinse their produce, or should they use it to drink with, or should, you know, it’s sort of like a daily rationing practice
Salima Hamirani: That’s Janaki Anagha. She’s a lawyer with Community Water Center. She’s been helping the residents of East Orosi fight for clean water. The central valley has a lot of pollutants in the water, but the main problem with the water in East Orosi is that nitrate Berta Diaz was talking about
Janaki Anagha: And that’s a result of local agriculture, like dairies and synthetic fertilizer that runs off of the local orchards, concentrating in drinking water sources.
Salima Hamirani: Nitrate helps boost the amount of nitrogen available to plants, which helps them create protein. Since there’s a limited amount a plant can naturally absorb, normally there’s a limit to how fast they can grow and even where they can grow. Artificial fertilizers accelerate plant growth by flooding them with nitrogen in water soluble form: nitrates. and it can force plants to grow in soil that’s not really suited for them. Its also not good for humans to consume.
Janaki Anagha: It is an invisible and scentless compound that, in certain quantities, can result in inhibiting oxygen moving through your body. So, , In very small children and infants, this can be fatal. In adults, and particularly among pregnant women and people who are immunocompromised. it’s incredibly detrimental And it also is connected to a higher risk of cancer
Salima Hamirani: There weren’t any medical studies on East Orosi that I could find. And it’s difficult to pinpoint water as the cause of many of the diseases present in the central valley. The area has been plagued by environmental racism for decades so its hard to know if its the refineries, or heavy industry or the smog or the fertilizers. But a 2021 study found that low-income communities with high levels of nitrate in their water had twice the incidence of thyroid cancer.
And it’s not just nitrate that small towns in the central valley have to worry about. Depending on their location there are a slew of chemicals they’ll have to contend with.
There’s problems with Arsenic. which occurs naturally, but also leeches into the groundwater as runoff from industrial and agricultural sources. Hexavalent Chromium, also industrial runoff, which is highly carcinogenic. And 1,2,3-TCP, a chemical used in pest control that is now banned, but lingers in the groundwater in agricultural towns. It’s also carcinogenic and damages the liver.
A 2019 study by the Environmental Working group discovered that drinking tap water in California could contribute to 15, 500 cases of cancer in the state. And most of that unsafe water is concentrated in the central valley.
It’s a catch-22 for many of its residents. Many people work in the very industries that are slowly killing them. Like Berta and her neighbors.
Berta Diaz: There are people of all ages dying because of the chemicals that they’re releasing. And we don’t have any other solution other than to go to work in the fields every day.
Salima Hamirani: When I asked her if she thought the big farms should pay to clean up their water she said:
Berta Diaz: they should, but I know they’re not going to. Why? Because that’s how they make money. To then, we’re only farmworkers. In reality as a farmworker here, we feel as if the only thing that’s important is that we harvest the crops
Salima Hamirani: She feels like they don’t have much of a choice. They’re poor, they’re immigrants. They’re replaceable.
Berta Diaz Maybe when we’re sick, even then we won’t be important to them because they say, more workers will come
Salima Hamirani: And it’s not just the drinking water Berta is struggling with
Berta Diaz: We’ve had a lot of problems with the sanitation.
Here in this area is the septic tank. We have to open it from here up to this part
Salima Hamirani: In big cities, we don’t think much about the water that comes out of our taps or the water we flush down the toilet. They’re somehow related, but we don’t know how, or who’s in charge. For Berta living in this small town the sanitation system and drinking water ARE linked. and she’s had a lot of problems with sludge gurgling up through the sewage pipes and into her house and yard.
Berta Diaz: In the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the toilet and it stinks
Salima Hamirani: Part of the problem is that the people who are supposed to service the sanitation in this area often just don’t do it.
Janaki Anagha: We hear dozens of residents come and tell us they’ve never had their septic tank pumped. Even despite calling and trying to get through that they have had to do it themselves and pay There have also been several instances where the infrastructure has failed due to poor operation, maintenance and sewage has backed up into people’s homes into, their bathtubs and their sinks and, into their backyards.
Salima Hamirani: Berta is tired of living without water and having sewage back up into her house. She wishes more people understood how they’re forced to live.
Berta Diaz: I believe that this should be viral because, its a very critical situation, what we’re living with here in this community and like I said, its a beautiful community, very peaceful, but even though its peaceful, we can also see the seriousness of the situation with our water. We also deserve to have a better, dignified life, like all human beings.
Salima Hamirani: There’s a common issue across the Central Valley that Berta pointed out to me. The city next to East Orosi is called Orosi and it does have clean water. Berta, told me she could point to the boundary between the two towns right from her house
Berta Diaz: para allá? Pa? El pueblo. Ok, Orosi es una milla una milla de Orosi a East Orosi.
Salima Hamirani: A mile of difference. Yet Orosi has water. East Orosi doesn’t. They’re both small towns with farm workers. Both are surrounded by agriculture. So why does one town have clean water and the next town over doesn’t? To understand we need to learn a little bit more about California geology, and how poverty plays into who gets water and who doesn’t. So stay tuned, there’s a lot more coming up.
Break –
Amy Gastelum: We’re just jumping in to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want to hear more, visit us online at radioproject.org. And leave us a comment! And now back to the show.
Fade out Music.
Salima Hamirani: Welcome back to Making Contact, if you’re just joining us we’re talking about water access in East Orosi, a small town in the central valley of California. And in the first half we visited Berta Diaz’s house to see what it’s like trying to live without clean drinking water and having sewage backup through the pipes and into your house and yard. To start us off in the second half, I wanted to know why some towns in California are so polluted while others aren’t. And for that I visited a non profit called Self help Enterprises at their offices in Visalia.
Jessi Snyder: So, how was the drive? It was a long drive.
Salima Hamirani: I learned about Self Help Enterprises because they’re actually in charge of delivering those 5 gallon jugs of water to people like Berta in East Orosi. But, that’s not the only thing they do. Here’s Jessi Snyder, the director of community development at Self Help Enterprises
Jessi Snyder: We were founded in 1965. We serve the San Joaquin Valley, which is nine counties. and the foothills and surrounding areas in those counties.
Salima Hamirani: By the way that includes Tulare County, which includes towns suffering from polluted water like Cutler, Earlimart, Seville, Sultana, and East Orosi. but they didn’t start out working on water.
Jessi Snyder: We do a lot of affordable housing, we started off building houses and quickly realized that infrastructure is a really critical part of a healthy community. So we started working in the 70s to help secure that.
Salima Hamirani: Self help uses money from the State of California to help small communities build out water infrastructure. By guiding them through project management and complex grant procedures. Things like pipes, treatment and wells,
And when it comes to clean water, the most critical piece of infrastructure is a productive well. But it’s almost impossible to know if that’s what you have until after you break ground, says Jessi.
Jessi Snyder: Hydrology. Aquifers are not neat, tidy layer cakes. They are messy. There’s all these different things going on that we literally cannot see, right?
Salima Hamirani: A lot of communities in coastal california get their water from reservoirs and snow melt. those are easy to track at a glance. Because they’re above ground. but the central valley mostly relies on aquifers: water held in rocks deep underground
Jessi Snyder: We don’t have ground penetrating vision, so we don’t know exactly where plumes of contamination are, and we don’t know where they might go over time. So every time we drill a well, I mean, I have to say, it’s a little bit of a crapshoot. You really don’t know what you’re going to get until you get it.
Salima Hamirani: East Orosi isn’t unique in this way. There are about 400 failing water systems in California. Almost all in poor rural communities. And as climate change increases drought, and agriculture continues to pull from the ancient aquifers underneath the state, and continues to pollute, those systems become more vulnerable
Jessi Snyder: And when you are a small disadvantaged community that’s maybe, what, two, three acres in size? Those two, three acres are what you’ve got to work with.
Salima Hamirani: In a bigger, richer town, if you dig a well and it’s polluted you can try digging another one miles and miles away. Hoping to find a clean gush of water. Then you can ship that clean water in, mix it with the polluted water and lower the overall concentration of something like nitrate. But if you’re a small, poor unincorporated town..
Jessi Snyder: You’re not going to be able to drill a well 20 miles away and pipe that water in. You’re stuck with what you’ve got under your feet.
Salima Hamirani: East Orosi for example has two wells, and they’re both contaminated. In the summer, they’re almost dry and the concentration of chemicals reaches incredibly dangerous levels. And technically, even if they cant dig a new well far far away, they could try to dig a deeper one, to access potentially cleaner water lower into the aquifer. But that’s also not an option.
Salima Hamirani: I’m guessing drilling a well is pretty expensive.
Jessi Snyder: Absolutely it is. So a new public drinking water well, I mean, is easily. North of a million dollars these days
Salima Hamirani: This is a reason small rural poor communities really suffer so much more from a lack of clean drinking water. They just don’t have the tax base to create new infrastructure. They can’t ship cleaner water in. They can’t dig deeper in search of it. And its not just water. East Orosi is having sewage problems, as we mentioned. It also doesn’t have sidewalks. The street lamps do not function sometimes. It just doesn’t have the money.
Jessi Snyder: So, you know, if you drill and you find nitrate, well, you might just be stuck with that until another hundred years goes by and you can save up enough money for a new well. Or you access public funding to drill it.
Music –
Salima Hamirani: That’s why the situation in East Orosi is changing. Because now, there is public funding available. In 2012, California declared water access a human right. It was the first state in the nation to do so. And it’s actually setting aside funds to fix its failing water systems in small poor towns, where water access is the most dire.
And there are a few new laws but the primary one is called SAFER, or SB 200 which stands for Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience. It was an important victory for many of the East Orosi organizers who often went to Sacramento to lobby for it. Safer sets aside $130 million per year through 2030 just for water.
One of the things that was really unique about SAFER. It does pay for infrastructure, so pipes in the ground, wells, uh, treatment plants,
A study in 2018 pointed out that 80% of towns that don’t have water are less than a mile away from other communities that do. That’s the case with Orosi and East Orosi
Andrew Altevogt: Well, so one of the primary tools we have, and this is one of the tools that we’re using in the case of Easter Rosie, is what we call consolidation. Which means joining two water systems together,
Salima Hamirani: That’s Andrew Altevogt, assistant deputy director of the State Water Resources Control Board. which is the government entity helping fund water delivery to East Orosi. The board has facilitated over 100 consolidations across california – Consolidating water systems can mean many things – combining billing, or administration for example
Andrew Altevogt: and in this case, what we would call physical consolidation, where you’re actually connecting pipes together.
Salima Hamirani: The state plans to pay for or reimburse all the expenses involved in laying new pipes, digging new wells, connecting all of the infrastructure between the two towns. It just has to get the town of Orosi to agree.
Salima Hamirani: The state can also allow bigger administrative systems to take over smaller ones – to help with things like billing and bureaucracy while the consolidation takes place. That’s also been ordered for East Orosi,
Andrew Altevogt: So we’re paying Tulare County to help to run the East Arosie system and to bring them into the consolidation with Arosie.
Salima Hamirani: All of this means that East Orosi is finally, after twenty long years, on the verge of being able to turn on their taps, and drink the water flowing out of it without fear of getting cancer.
The next time I went back to East Orosi, for the second Day of Day of the event, the community was celebrating its new found victory.
(Sound from Second Day of the Dead event fades in)
Salima Hamirani:We’re back in East Orosi, early on a November night. a young boy places marigolds on the base of an altar the community builds near the front of the gathering. Its a chilly night, but a respite from the overbearing heat I experienced during my summer visits to the town.
Maricella Alatorre: This year, we kept it a little bit more low key. We thought we could just do, you know, more information, still do a remembrance. And just share bread and chocolate, hot chocolate with the residents
(fade in sound from day of the dead) .
Maricella Alatorre: Janaki Anagha from the community water center updates the residents on their recent win
Janaki Anagha: Many of you know that we are here close to the city of Orosi, or the district of Orosi and at the end of 2026, we’re going to connect the pipes from here, in East Orosi, to Orosi
Salima Hamirani: But, this is not the end of the story for East Orosi. In the next episode – why is East Orosi’s water solution taking so long, even with the proposed consolidation and available state funds? Because both Orosi and East Orosi are unincorporated towns, and their water is overseen by boards, or what’s called a utility district. They’re supposed to advocate for their communities – fight for their clean water, make sure septic tanks get cleaned. But in a very counterintuitive way, democratic local governance – via utility districts – has actually been a huge barrier to California implementing water equity. I’m Salima Hamirani and this is Making Contact.
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