By Daniel Trotta
TEVISTON, Calif., Nov 2 (Reuters) - The San Joaquin Valley
farm town of Teviston has two wells. One went dry and the other
is contaminated.
The one functioning well failed just at the start of summer,
depriving the hot and dusty hamlet of running water for weeks.
With temperatures routinely soaring above 90 degrees Fahrenheit
(32 degrees Celsius), farm workers bathed with buckets after
laboring in the nearby vineyards and almond orchards.
Even as officials restored a modicum of pressure with
trucked-in water, and after the well was repaired, the hardships
have endured. Teviston's 400 to 700 people - figures fluctuate
with the agricultural season - have received bottled drinking
water since the well failed in June.
But for years, probably decades, the water coming from
Teviston taps has been laced with the carcinogen
1,2,3-Trichloropropane, or 1,2,3-TCP, the legacy of pesticides.
The Western U.S. drought, the most severe in 125 years of
record-keeping, is exacting a further toll on communities
throughout the San Joaquin Valley, where people living on the
edge of farmland gather many of the crops but little of the
largesse from California's $50 billion agricultural industry.
For Esperanza Guerrero, 35, a Mexican immigrant and
homemaker whose husband works at a dairy farm, the poor water
quality poses additional dangers for her 16-year-old daughter,
who can drink only purified water because of a gastrointestinal
ailment.
"It's very stressful as a mother to know that if for any
reason she should wash a piece of fruit (with tap water) and eat
it, she's going down," Guerrero said while picking up bottled
water from the community depot.
Teviston, devoid of any retail or commercial business, won a
$3 million settlement in June from pesticide producers Dow
Chemical Company and Shell Oil Company and
distributors that will pay for a water treatment plant.
Dow declined to comment on Teviston, but said there was "no
merit" to allegations in similar lawsuits brought by other local
jurisdictions in the San Joaquin Valley.
"The plaintiffs' claims in these cases are based on a
California water quality standard that went into effect in 2018,
several decades after the product formulations in question were
discontinued. To the extent TCP was present in past product
formulations, it would have been at levels so low as to pose no
environmental risk," the company said in a statement.
Shell declined to comment on active litigation.
The settlement will help Teviston resolve the dilemma of
having to choose between safe or affordable water, said Todd
Robins, an attorney with San Francisco-based Robins Borghei LLP
who has represented other towns like Teviston in similar
lawsuits.
The arid, forbidding land of the San Joaquin Valley has been
transformed into one of the most fertile plains in the world by
farmers, politicians and engineers who changed the course of
mighty rivers and brought water hundreds of miles to a valley so
broad and flat that in most directions the fields meet sky.
The drought has made both surface and ground water scarce.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates canals moving
surface water from Northern California further south, has cut
allotments to farmers this year: first to a mere 5% of normal,
then down to zero.
That increased demand on the aquifers. Growers who operate
their own wells are lowering the water table for neighboring
towns like Teviston that depend on well water.
Outside the valley, many environmentalists criticize
growers. The people of Teviston don't paint them as the enemy.
"We need the farms. Without the farms, we don't have any
work," said Frank Galaviz, a director on the town council who
has emerged as Teviston's leading water advocate.
THE ENEMY BELOW
Historically, the farms have faced another nemesis besides
drought.
Beneath the ground, tiny worms called nematodes infest
roots. For decades, through the 1980s, growers injected their
soil with the since-discontinued pesticides Telone, made by Dow,
and D-D, made by Shell, according to Robins, who has pieced
together the history of 1,2,3-TCP contamination through about 70
lawsuits against both companies.
By the 1990s health officials established that TCP was
carcinogenic and would linger in the water table for a lifetime
unless removed by filtration. California's TCP problem is
concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley, state data show.
Telone and D-D were essentially a byproduct of other
chemical processes that would have been disposed of were it not
found to be an effective pesticide, enabling the companies to
offload the byproduct by selling it to farmers, Robins said.
"It's a dirty secret," Robins said, adding that Dow's
reformulated Telone II became more effective once TCP and other
impurities were removed.
While Teviston awaits a treatment plant, its TCP levels
remain above safe levels. In May, testing showed the TCP level
was nearly three times the maximum acceptable level, and in
March it was more than seven times the limit, according to the
state's Safe Drinking Water Information System. In September,
Teviston showed a negligible amount, an outlier that experts
said could be skewed by the new well or the extreme drought.
Teviston's marginalization dates back nearly a century, when
Black workers arrived to work white-owned cotton farms. While
the farmers had sought the Black workers, the workers were
unwelcome in white towns, and they formed a tent city that
became Teviston. Over the years the workforce became immigrant
Mexican, another politically disadvantaged class, and white
family farms were supplanted by corporations operating ever
larger tracts of factory farms.
Dorris Brooks, an African American woman who lives at the
end of Teviston's water line, said past efforts to improve well
water have only resulted in temporary relief.
"You can see there's actually sludge that comes out of the
tap," Brooks said.
Brooks, who moved to Teviston as an adult 43 years ago,
questioned whether the settlement was just.
"That company got away with for messing up the water and the
people's lives," Brooks said. "There's sick people here."
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta. Editing by Donna Bryson and Diane
Craft)
