'It's a toxic blend': where the kids are warned not to swallow the bath water
An invisible line splits the rural road of Avenue 416 in California’s Tulare county, at the point where the nut trees stretch east toward the towering Sierra Nevada mountains in the distance.
On one side of the line, residents have clean water. On the other side, they do not.
On the other side lies East Orosi, an unincorporated community of about 700 where children grow up learning to never open their eyes or mouths while they shower. They know that what comes out of their faucets may harm them, and parents warn they must not swallow when they brush their teeth.
They spend their lives sustaining themselves on bottled water while just one mile down Avenue 416, the same children they go to school with in the community of Orosi can drink from their taps freely and bathe without a second thought.
East Orosi is one of many predominantly Latino communities that suffer from contaminated drinking water that has exceeded federal limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to an extensive investigation by the Guardian. Systems serving Latino communities have twice as many strikes against them for drinking water violations as the national average, according to our analysis of more than 140,000 public water systems in the US and county-level demographic data.
This is an issue that affects 5.25m people across California, according to the Environmental Working Group, in largely small rural communities like East Orosi where there are fewer customers to charge for more advanced water filtration systems.
Maria Orozco, 30, doesn’t remember a time when she felt she could safely drink water from the faucet. When she was five, her mother began noticing residue when she boiled water. Then one day, a neighbor came to see her mother, frightened and desperate: her five-yearold son had developed a rash all over his body. The doctors told them it was just a rash, though the mothers believed it had to be something more.
Now a mother in East Orosi herself, Orozco is constantly concerned about watching over her daughters, sevenyear-old Sheila and nine-year-old Viviana. For Orozco, bath time cannot be the gentle, fun-splashing experience that so many mothers get to share with their children; for her and the other parents of East Orosi, it’s a matter of their children’s health.
“They’re kids, they don’t listen,” Orozco said. “They open their mouths and I tell them to spit it out. They spit it out but sometimes they try to swallow. I tell them they have to stop playing around.”
Orozco tries to put on a brave face for her family, but she is worried. Recently, her daughters’ hair started falling out in the shower, more than usual. Her hair has begun falling out too. “It’s like a knot in your stomach,” she said, of this constant worry over the water and her family’s health. “It’s like a knot in your stomach and someone is putting a lot of pressure on it.”
Symptoms from water contamination are wide-ranging, and it is difficult to prove that a particular chemical or substance might cause a specific illness. In East Orosi, the main concern is nitrate levels that exceed the standard set by the EPA. Since 2015, the town’s water system has exceeded the federal legal limit for nitrates 15 times.
Nitrates make oxygen less available to the body. It’s an issue prevalent in the Central Valley, California’s breadbasket, where big agriculture reigns. Orchards and lush orange groves surround Orosi, where many work in the fields, planting and harvesting the fruit. Dairies line the road to Visalia, the closest city, the whiff of manure sharp at certain junctures.
The majority of residents of the Central Valley rely on groundwater for home use, drilling below ground into aquifers rather than sourcing from reservoirs. Advocates in the region believe that the fertilizer runoff and manure from all the large-scale farming operations and dairies have contaminated the groundwater. More than 90% of nitrates in all drinking water comes from agriculture, said Anne Schechinger, a senior economic analyst with the Environmental Working Group.
The biggest health risk when it comes to drinking nitrate-tainted water is to infants and pregnant women Nitrates can affect hemoglobin, the molecules that help move oxygen in the body, resulting in something called “blue baby syndrome,” when an infant’s skin turns blue. Nitrate contamination has also been linked to thyroid disease which can cause fatigue, weight gain and hair loss.
Too much exposure to nitrates can cause difficult breathing, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, dehydration, dizziness, weakness and convulsions. Newer studies have shown that drinking water with lower nitrate levels than the federal threshold can still increase risks of colorectal cancer in adults.
“The EPA’s limit is really not protecting people enough, is what we believe,” Schechinger said.
Though nitrates are the primary concern in East Orosi, water advocates in the area are also anxious about other contaminants. “The Central Valley produces a variety of food from grapes, almonds, apricots, blueberries and we also create a variety of blended, toxic water,” said Susana de Anda, executive director of the Community Water Center. “Our groundwater is a toxic blend of nitrates, arsenic, 123TCP, chromium. Unfortunately, it’s not just nitrates.”
The East Orosi Community Service District did not return requests for comment.
The California state water board has documented violations with East Orosi’s water dating back to 2003, but residents remember it beginning earlier than that. Orozco believes it’s been at least 25 years. Felipe Gonzalez, 65, who has lived in East Orosi for 30 years, remembers the water was fine when he first moved there. Then the water in the ornate fountain in his front yard began growing algae and mold. When he washed his car, the water would leave a strange residue behind. Eventually, officials with the water district contacted them and told them they could no longer drink from their taps.
Through the years, he and his family learned to make do on bottled water, using what they now pay nearly $70 a month for only showers, watering the plants and dishes. His adult son with developmental disabilities cannot understand that he needs to close his eyes and mouth when he bathes, and has since had a series of eyes issues that they have no way of proving is connected to contaminated water exposure. When his youngest granddaughter visits from Orosi, she cannot understand why she cannot play in the fountain.
“You get tired of the challenges,” Gonzalez said. “I and the others feel like losing hope that this will ever be resolved and they will change the water. So, we can only get used to the idea and learn to live like this.”
Some areas, like East Orosi, are worse affected than others, just given the geography, said Community Water Center solutions manager Ryan Jensen. The closer a community is to the Sierra Nevada mountains, the shallower the aquifer and the water less diluted.
East Orosi has just two wells serving its community, while Orosi has five for its community of 8,770. The cost of getting a water filtration system advanced enough to clean East Orosi’s water – a cost that would be pushed on to the consumers – would be far too much for a community so small that it takes just five minutes to drive around the entire perimeter.
Holding the agriculture industry accountable for its role in polluting the groundwater is a complicated and lofty endeavor. Elizabeth Lopez, 17, who moved to East Orosi a year ago, is fed up with having to keep driving into Orosi or Cutler to refill their five-gallon jugs of water. But like so many others in East Orosi, her mother works in the fields. Her father works at a dairy. The very industry that is impacting their water is also keeping a roof over their heads.
Clean water advocates believe the solution lies in consolidation. In 2015, the Community Water Center helped pass legislation that gave the state water board authority to force one community water system to join with a smaller community’s water system. Orosi would take on East Orosi.
It seemed like the perfect answer. East Orosi and Orosi were already one community, with their children going to the same schools and their residents shopping in the same shops. Advocates have identified a spot for a new well in Orosi to serve the new customers, and all that would be left is the installation of piping down three-quarters of a mile of highway down Avenue 416. In the process, they could even connect a stretch of households that were using contaminated private wells to the new consolidated public water system, Jensen said.
But it appears that Orosi doesn’t want to consolidate, according to local officials and advocates working on the issue. The state water resources control board first ordered a voluntary consolidation with the Orosi Public Utilities District in July 2018. More than two years later, the state board ordered a mandatory consolidation, with the requirement that the two systems merge by the end of 2024.
It’s not a matter of community rivalry, or neighbors hating neighbors. “East Orosi, those residents are our neighbors, they’re our relatives, they’re the students that also attend Orosi high school and Orosi elementary school,” said local lawmaker Eddie Valero, who grew up in Orosi. “They are a part of our community and I would say if you would ask someone in Orosi, ‘Hey, do you want to give people in East Orosi water from our piping system?’ Overwhelmingly, they would say yes.”
But in California – and in the Central Valley, especially – water is more precious than gold. It is the lifeline of the valley, a necessary resource for the $50bn agriculture industry that keeps the region afloat. Water means jobs, it means food on the table, it means the ability to pay next month’s rent. The 2015 drought that choked the state still haunts the Central Valley, with political billboards of “Save California’s Water” dotting its main freeways and political ads about Democrats wasting California’s water blaring on its radio stations.
“It’s a scarcity mentality that causes communities that are doing all right to be hesitant to help out other communities,” Jensen said. “On a larger scale, it’s not a problem unique just to Orosi. The city of the city of Tulare didn’t want to connect with Matheny Tract.
Up and down the Central Valley, there’s these stories of small communities that would like to be connected to a larger community but the larger community is resistant.”
In an email, Mose Diaz, an attorney for Orosi Public Utility District (OPUD), denied that the board of directors was against consolidation. OPUD had been working to negotiate a voluntary consolidation before the state water board “hastily issued a forced consolidation order,” Diaz said.
He did not respond to questions about why a 2017 engineering report prepared for the East Orosi Community Services District stated that OPUD was “opposed to consolidation of EOCSD and OPUD” and had “directed its staff not to furnish information” regarding connections to Orosi well sites.
Diaz also made a point to state that the state water board’s mandatory consolidation order was “based on the erroneous premise that the EOCSD’s groundwater wells exceed the State’s maximum contaminant level” of 10 milligrams per liter. Indeed, for the last four quarters, East Orosi’s water just barely tested within standards: 9.2 and 9.5 milligrams in 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, and then exactly 10 for two more quarters in 2020. Asked if he would recommend that the children Orosi drink this water – or, if he would allow his own children to drink this water – he did not respond.
With nitrates, it’s also important to note that it’s not uncommon for levels to fluctuate because of rainfall or drought, especially in a region with a long history of contamination like East Orosi, Jensen said.
Local advocates are anticipating a legal battle. Diaz said he thought that the state water board exceeded its legal authority in issuing the mandatory order. For the residents of East Orosi, this would only further prolong a process that has already taken too long.
Maria Orozco, the young East Orosi mother, grew up going to meetings with her mother, Maria Elena Orozco, who made the issue of getting clean water to their community her passion in life.
Her mother died in 2018, unable to see her dream fulfilled. Orozco broke down in tears when she talked about her mother, and the thought that someone could fight so hard and still, after all this time, their home would not have clean water.
“Every time we’d go to the water meetings, she would talk right there and tell us our dream was to have clean water, so our kids would have clean water, and our grandkids,” Orozco said. “I want my mom’s dream to come true.”
It’s six in the morning and still dark, 24 March 2020. I wake early and, knowing the children will soon be up, decide to steal half an hour’s solitude in the park. From the dense latticework of trees and shrubs that clothe the wooded slope comes a constant scuttling through dead leaves. The darkness is awake and vigilant; there’s the warning tik-tik of an invisible robin from the bushes, and then the next second it appears on the path. Each individual movement of the bird, each wing-flick and pivot, is brisk and definite yet the overall impression is one of nervousness and indecision. It leaps round once more on the spot, then flits back into the darkness.
From close by comes a blast of song from a wren. Its harsh trill is like coarse twine zipping over a flywheel. The air is cool, not cold, and smells deliciously of earth and moss. There’s a sudden disturbance from the deeper shade, and a blackbird comes careering out with a mad clatter and pauses, alert, on the great arm of a beech tree. It’s evidently agitated. It flicks about the bough, dipping then raising its wings, and tilting its head all the while in response to something I can’t sense. After a few seconds of this twitching the bird seems to experience some sort of inner resolution, and, as the first beam of grey light wakes the colours of the tree, it raises its head and lets out a quiet phrase of song. Spring has arrived.
The day before my early walk in the park, the prime minister ordered a shutdown of public life that would entirely change society as we’d known it. By government decree, normal life was suspended. In the coastal town where I live, compliance was immediate and total. All traffic noise ceased, and you could hear litter scuffing down the empty streets. It felt as if ninetenths of the population had disappeared overnight. The strangeness was amplified tenfold by the difficulty of reconciling this “lockdown” with the sudden coming of the most glorious spring that anyone could remember.
Goldfinch (listen to its song here) Pert, painted, gorgeous. A slim Fabergé sparrow. Buff and white but face dipped in vermilion, and wings lacquered in gold. Thickset ivory beak for cracking seeds. Flocks in buoyant squalls over teasels, but can turn up anywhere. Creaky notes. Song a geyser of bubbling bells or a flypast of wind chimes.
But most of all, we began to notice the birdsong. A little tentative and sputtering at first, by the end of March it filled the air. Broadcast from aerials and hedge tops, a rising choir of chirps, trills and warbles brought life to gardens and echoed off housefronts and shuttered shops with no traffic noise to smother it.
Some bird calls are present all year around, and these are among the easiest to recognise. Everyone knows the crow’s harsh croak, and the oily yelp of gulls. But with the spring came other songs that were harder to place. As lockdown continued into April, it became clear that thousands of people across the British Isles and beyond were becoming enchanted by birdsong. Beautiful and lilting, or monotone and irritating, we recorded the sounds of thrushes, tits and finches on our phones, and asked one another about them or simply shushed family members and called them over to listen.
The pandemic had struck the northern hemisphere at just that moment in the natural calendar when birdsong resumes in full force after the quiet and solitary winter months. Millions of people were not just hearing but actively listening, perhaps for the first time, to the songs of birds – ancient songs, perhaps unchanged from the stone age.
***
I started watching birds when I was seven. My parents encouraged it and soon became enthusiasts in their own right. This was in Birmingham, which you mightn’t think an ideal place for birdwatching, but we lived a halfhour’s walk from a nature reserve, and I’d go down there most weekends or after school, with my father or, increasingly, on my own. By my early teens I could identify most British birds by sight and sound, my knowledge growing as we came across different species on trips to the countryside and coast. It probably peaked around the age of 18, but the interest never disappeared altogether. Then suddenly, last spring, out of work and with a bit of time to look and listen, I felt my curiosity about birds reawaken.
In lockdown, on solitary walks, I started paying attention. The trees are renewed, and improbably beautiful. At the bottom of the road a copper beech shelters our local mob of vigilante jackdaws. They’re not bothered by me but tilt their shoehorn heads and make a soft cacophony of caws and sneezes when a raven passes high above.
Over the past 100 years or so, researchers have started to investigate what these sounds actually mean to the birds. Some calls are quite obviously intended to warn of predators, while others relate to rituals of courtship and display. And some may be neither: Charles Darwin suggested that birds are moved by emotions and may sing from “mere happiness”.
Jackdaw (listen to its song here) A small crow. Sooty black with silver cape and a smoky opal iris. Socialises in small flocks. Infinitely curious. A municipal inspector of kerbs, with a wide-legged gait, as though its bootlaces had come undone. An arsenal of caws: harsh and affronted to intimate and genial. A delightful, companionable bird.
Recognising the calls and songs of even a few species of birds can enrich one’s understanding of the world by revealing an almost forgotten aspect of the grammar of reality. The calls and responses range across various bandwidths, and some speak to the soul more readily than others. Even in bright June sunshine a robin’s sombre phrase can bring on a reflective mood, and who has not sometimes felt cheered by the daft laughter of park ducks? Some bird calls seem to have the power to shortcircuit time and take you straight back to childhood.
Above all the other birdsongs of March, the blackbird’s rises unmistakable – strident and clear. In the sombre spring of last year, when the usual noise of people and cars was absent, the song, transmitted from aerials, trellises and lamp-posts, felt loud and life-affirming, compelling in its variety and the emotion it seems to contain.
While each bird species possesses its own distinctive calls and songs, in the blackbird the variety of sounds is quite astonishing. From close listening I was able to categorise blackbird songs (as opposed to simpler, more standard calls) into four or five basic types – but then the more I listened, the more I became aware of such internal variation in these songs as to almost make a nonsense of trying to fix them in this way. Indeed, it gradually dawned on me that at least some of the birds I regularly heard from the house, in the park and at the garlic wood nearby had their own individual quirks of speech, just as people do.
Blackbird (listen to its song here) Dark of feather and mien. Breeding males black with marigold bill and eye-ring. Females leaf-litter brown with lemony bill and an undercoat of speckles on the belly. Emits tetchy clucks, hysterical rattles and a sinister ventriloquial whistle. Spring song is glorious – rollicking and woozy. Spot them on aerials at dusk.
I often lingered in the wood at twilight, listening to the birds as, one by one, they ceased to call. The wood pigeons were the first to break off, followed by the nuthatches, the woodpeckers and the dunnocks. By seven o’clock the only songs left were the hesitant phrases of the robin, the sharp, rapid spool of the wren, and three or four blackbirds still going strong. It was only after another hour that the last songbird fell silent. Later, back home, I put my head out of the skylight to listen to the cock blackbird on our terrace exchange songs with two others in the nearby park. The most distant of the park birds is a real virtuoso, and he seems to enjoy the contrast between mellifluous, fruity passages and clownish, off-key notes. I call the children to listen, and for a few moments we’re all quiet, our heads protruding from the roof above the quiet streets, attentive to the song that pours out of three minuscule throats.
Transcribing the calls of birds is a hopeless task. I noticed that they don’t seem to use consonants. Vowels seem better equipped to approximate some bird sounds, but here, too, we can only convey a vague similarity. We shouldn’t be surprised: birds have neither lips, nor teeth, nor vocal cords, and though they do have a larynx it is not for them the “voice box” that it is for us. Instead, birds have an organ called a syrinx, named after the nymph of Greek mythology who was transformed into reeds from which the first panpipes were made.
All the species that we call songbirds have their syrinx between the windpipe and the tubes – or bronchi – that lead to the lungs, and are able to produce sound with air drawn from either the left or right lung, or both at once. It’s the ability to switch at great speed between different bronchi that allows for the astonishing sophistication of birdsong. Different notes, pitches and tones can be emitted from each bronchus. Some birds, such as the song thrush, can even overlay a set of notes produced from one side of the syrinx on to a different, lowerpitched set emitted by the other side. It is as though you or I sang melody and harmony at once, drawing from a nearly limitless number of notes, at a rate of up to 40 notes per second. There’s a robin at the end of our street, a streetlamp crooner who only really gets going at dusk. When I first began listening to him I could only distinguish three or four phrases that seemed to be repeated, often in the same sequence, over and over again. Two weeks later, I’d lost count of the subtle variations that leaven his song.
Starling (listen to its song here) Glossy black at distance; close-up a galaxy of spangles, every colour of the petroleum rainbow. Juveniles ashbrown. Quarrelsome, chatty, gregarious – very seldom seen alone. Walks on lawns, playing fields, car parks. Flies with rapid beats of stiff wings. Very vocal: gobbling chatters, pop-gun detonations and saucy whistles. A lover of innuendo.
Should we think of birds’ sounds as language? Nobody who has watched birds for any time at all could reasonably doubt that they’re communicating with one another. Recently, while I was wondering about this, a large seagull landed on next door’s shed and began making the nervous, rapid ak-ak-ak that meant it had spotted the cat glowering on the opposite wall. No doubt the sound reflected the bird’s own anxiety, but it was also understood by all the other gulls around.
More than that, the basic message of alarm was certainly recognised by other species, too. Sometimes a buzzard drifts over the street, and when it’s spotted the local gulls start up a summoning honk to call for reinforcements, quite horrible to the ear. A starling or jackdaw caught by a predator or trapped by a human being will make distress calls that seem to have the same function.
These examples might be termed calls rather than songs proper. But there’s more than might be imagined to even the shortest and simplest-seeming calls. Among many different species of songbirds, for example, the alarm calls for an overflying hawk are almost identical: a thin, compressed whistle, delivered with the bill barely open, thought to be designed to alert as many birds as possible without causing excessive risk to the sentinel. The hawk can’t get a fix on the source of the sound.
This alarm call, then, has a social effect without necessarily having a social intention, but other bird calls can only be understood in the context of their social lives. Birdwatchers and scientists usually label these contact calls. In a corner of our nearest park there’s a stand of pines where it’s often possible to see goldcrests – birds that love conifers more than any other kind of tree. The high-pitched piping of these tiny creatures is disproportionately loud in relation to their size.
I stand still one afternoon to watch them fizzing about one fissured trunk, tilting their heads to squint for spiders’ eggs in the darkness between needles. But the longer I watch, the more I come to doubt that I could see them move at all. It’s always like this with these birds: they’re so quick that they’re simply there one second, and somewhere else the next. Goldcrests are scarcely larger than a ping-pong ball and weigh perhaps only twice as much. They came nearer, and for a minute or two they were all around, haloing me with their thin, silver calls that seem almost as much of light as of sound. And how else could such tiny animals avoid losing one another in this vastness, but with voices that flash out into the dark?
Wren (listen to its song here)Tiny, brown and mouselike, with cocked tail. Bustles low down, too fast for the eye. A tuft of tumbleweed on the trellis. A perpetual motion meatball. Flight direct, whizzing, weightless, like a shuttlecock on a tiny motor. Sings repeatedly from cover, very loud, and tart, ending on a rapid trill.
As spring turns into summer and the fine weather persists, the park begins to fill with people once more, although most are still at pains to avoid each other. Squinting out on to the park lake, I see to my delight that the tufted ducks have given birth to 12 dark brown pom-poms: two per chick. In a few weeks they’ll have become more streamlined, but at the moment head and body seem to have only an accidental relationship. This makes for entertaining viewing – in their excited
haste to dabble and snap at gnats, the top-heavy ducklings frequently overbalance and end up face-down in the water, before their madly scrambling legs and natural buoyancy set them right again. While her chicks are getting to know the water, the duck watches over them with the greatest vigilance. Her head and neck are in constant motion as she peers alternately at the sky and the shore.
Right at the end of July it’s reported that the sudden decline in human activity during the pandemic has been registered by seismologists as a wave of silence passing over the Earth, its course exactly following that of the virus. From China to Iran to Italy, vibrations from traffic, industry and construction work faded or, for a time, halted altogether; the crust of the planet ceased to judder with the noise that had been dinning, seemingly unstoppably, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
Finally, the Earth could hear itself think, and the voice of its thought was birdsong. A year on, we’re still too close to it to tell which stories and emotions will survive from that strangest of times. But it also seemed possible, even in the grimmest days, that the spring of 2020 might be remembered differently – as the time when we first heard the birds and, hearing them, began to recover an appreciation of something universal we had somehow mislaid.
Extracted fromBirdsongina Timeof SilencebySteven Lovatt, published byParticular Books(£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply