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,