Environmental Science: Water Wars

Pacifica, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

            Hearing the words ‘shadow program’ one might think of secret governments or mutated super men, but in California and twenty-three other states, the term applies to a water usage program that’s much scarier. Back in the 1980s the EPA started “an underground disposal program that allows toxic substances to be disposed of in nearly 700,000 waste wells across the country” (Lustgarten, 2016). These ‘aquifer exemptions’ are nearly impossible to track down. Even the EPA when pressed for more information, “admitted that…incomplete location coordinates for a majority of the exemptions… was all the information the agency had” (Lustgarten, 2016). Losing a few hundred thousand wells might be terrifying in itself, but what’s in those wells should really alarm you. According to Lustgarten,

[U]nder concessions won by the oil industry and inserted into federal law, oilfield production waste — including chemicals known to cause cancer and fracking materials — are not legally considered ‘hazardous,’ a term with a specific definition in federal environmental law. According to the California Department of Conservation, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, “drilling mud filtrate, naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM), slurrified crude-oil, saturated soils and tank bottoms” are all allowed to be injected into aquifers as “non-hazardous” material.

These wells appear all over California, from Bakersfield to Paso Robles and cover hundreds of miles. The Kern Water Bank, “one of the state’s largest underground water storage facilities [and] relied on by California farmers” (Lustgarten, 2016) is situated above at least one of the new proposed exemption sites. Opponents of the exemption program want tougher, more thorough laws and regulations focusing not only on the exemption location itself, but a broader more holistic view as to how it fits in to the larger environmental scene.

References

Lustgarten, A. (2016, September 5). The Golden State’s water crisis: California and EPA poised to expand pollution of potential drinking water reserves. Retrieved from Salon: http://www.salon.com/2016/09/05/the-golden-states_partner/