New Water Quality Rules for Dairies Compromise Human Health: Groundwater Suit Moosic To Central Valley Residents' Ears

By Traci Sheehan
Executive Director
Planning and Conservation League

While most Californians enjoy access to clean drinking water, over a hundred thousand of our state's residents are not so fortunate.

Take the southern portion of the San Joaquin Valley; here roughly 38,000 people are served groundwater that is too polluted to drink. The leading pollutant in their groundwater is nitrate from manure-laden runoff from the area's dairy operations. In Tulare County, which has the highest concentration of dairies in the state, nitrates exceed legal limits in 40 percent of the private wells sampled and in approximately 20 percent of the small public water systems.

Despite this continuing contamination crisis, in May the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board issued a weak industry-wide permit covering the polluted runoff from all 1,600 dairies in the San Joaquin Valley.

In response, Asociación de Gente Unida por el Água (AGUA) and the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF) filed a historic lawsuit in early February in Sacramento County Superior Court to stop the pollution and invalidate the lax permit. The suit charges that the Regional Board permit did not require sufficient measures to protect groundwater from contamination caused by industrial dairies.

Laurel Firestone, co-director of the Community Water Center and one of the attorneys representing AGUA in this suit, explains their rationale: "People that are affected by this are serious about getting real protection and changing the status quo of allowing current land use to pollute. We hope this suit will be a chance for the court to say that 'better than nothing' is not meeting state law."

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