low birth weight
Credit: César Rincón/Flicikr
Polluted air is endangering newborns in New Mexico
A new study reveals that air pollution is significantly linked to low birth weight among babies born near industrial areas in New Mexico, posing serious health risks.
In short:
- The University of New Mexico study connects exposure to five industrial pollutants with low birth weight in infants.
- Areas like Albuquerque, Santa Fe and the Permian Basin –the country's most productive oilfield– have some of the worst air quality in the U.S., affecting local newborns' health.
- Minority and low-income communities face disproportionate impacts from pollution, with higher incidences of low birth weight among Black and Latino infants.
Key quote:
“The stakes are incredibly high. Low birth weight not only impacts the health of newborns but can also set children up for health issues that extend well into adulthood.”
— Giovanna Rossi, New Mexico organizer for Moms Clean Air Force.
Why this matters:
Protecting pregnant women and their babies from industrial pollution is vital as low birth weight is linked to severe health issues, from respiratory problems to heart disease, creating a critical public health crisis. Read more: Air pollution linked to millions of birth complications across the globe.
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California’s biggest drought success story came with a high cost.
East Porterville was the hardest-hit community during the drought, when nearly 1,000 people were without water. Efforts to find a long-term fix have been successful but came with a big price tag and some important lessons.
EAST PORTERVILLE, CALIFORNIA – When her well went dry in 2014, Yolanda Serrato had just begun the fight of her life against breast cancer. Her world had already been turned upside down – then it went sideways.
Through chemotherapy and radiation, she often carried buckets of water from a 300-gallon tank outside so she could cook food for her family. She heated water on the stove for sponge baths. She even needed a bucket of water to use the toilet.
“I thought it was the end for me – it was exhausting,” says Serrato, 58, who has lived in an East Porterville house in California’s San Joaquin Valley for 23 years with her husband and three children, two of whom are grown. “You want to know what it’s like to live without water? Turn off your water for a week. That’s the only way you will know.”
Life is still upside down for Serrato, whose cancer has moved into her bones. But her house is now connected to nearby Porterville’s water system, not a dry well. Porterville has a water system that serves 60,000 residents with deeper community wells that survived California’s five-year drought.
More than 300 other homes in East Porterville, which has a population of 7,300, have already received the same long-term fix, some after living two years without functioning indoor plumbing. About 1,000 people – who live on 330 of the 1,800 properties in town – were without water at the height of the drought.
Indoor taps in kitchens, showers, bathrooms, washing machines and toilets just stopped working. Lawns turned brown, roses died, trees withered and dust collected everywhere. People scrambled daily to get water from relatives, friends and neighbors to get kids off to school and themselves off to work – many going to the farm fields in the vast agricultural belt of the valley.
“I shudder when I think of getting up at 3 a.m. to get a bucket of water for my husband when he’s getting ready to go to work,” Serrato says.
East Porterville took by far the hardest hit in the valley during the drought, state officials say. And the valley suffered most in the state from the drought.
Volunteers, nonprofit groups and good neighbors eased the blow here by helping people find temporary water supplies. This rural community at the edge of the Sierra Nevada foothills pulled together. Now East Porterville is the biggest post-drought success story in this 25,000-square-mile valley.
But it came at a price. The State Water Resources Control Board has responded with $35 million to connect East Porterville’s 300-plus dry homes to Porterville’s system. Another 400 homeowners who didn’t lose their wells have opted into the Porterville hookup to prevent future water problems.
At one point during the drought, the state was paying $650,000 a month just for emergency water, temporary holding tanks and deliveries. The total cost of East Porterville’s drought rescue has been estimated at nearly $40 million. Authorities had little choice once they learned the extent of the suffering in East Porterville, state officials say.
“The East Porterville project is massive,” says Dat Tran, the State Water Resources Control Board chief of Drinking Water Technical Assistance. “As far as drought impact, this is the biggest project we’ve done.”
The state favors consolidating smaller, more vulnerable towns with nearby cities, so this may not be the last time California is on the hook for tens of millions of dollars. The valley has hundreds of rural pockets with water supply and contamination problems that have been festering for many years.
“The water and wastewater infrastructure costs that we’ve neglected over the past 30 years or so are not going to be cheap to fund,” says Michelle Wilde Anderson, a professor at Stanford Law School. “The longer we delay the costs of maintenance and new projects, the more we always pay when we finally face our basic needs.”
For now, the East Porterville fix has been moving quickly, with the installation of main lines, new wells and home hookups. The goal is to bring nearly half the town’s 1,800 homes onto the system serving Porterville.
“I’ve been in government a long time, but I’ve never seen a project of this scale put together so quickly,” says Eric Coyne, Tulare County deputy administrator of economic development.
At the same time, the drought left an indelible mark on the people, more than 70 percent of whom are Hispanic. It created a horrendous ordeal, says Tomas Garcia, who has lived in East Porterville since the mid-1990s. Garcia’s well went dry in 2014.
“We never knew our well was something to worry about,” says Garcia, 54, who eventually volunteered with nonprofit groups to help his fellow residents. “In the beginning, it was very hard. You had to find water and get it to your house. I worked such long days. I have diabetes. Now, I’m hooked up to the city of Porterville, but I still save water all the time. All the time.”
He says his monthly water bill is about $54, and he does not object to paying it, especially after he looked at the cost of replacing his old well.
A well-drilling contractor estimated the cost of a 200ft well would have been $55,000, Garcia says. Garcia’s wife, Juanita, works in the fields. He works for a tire shop in Porterville. They can get by as they raise their two children, but they couldn’t afford a new well.
Residents here are poorer than 91 percent of other Californians, according to the latest CalEnviroScreen data from the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
CalEnviroScreen, which details stress in communities, shows East Porterville’s population is among the 5 percent of California residents who live with the most environmental, social and economic burdens. Factors include air pollution, poor water quality, low birth weight, issues of access to healthcare and language barriers.
The town’s drinking water source has always been shallow, private wells, some of which were dug down only 20ft by hand a century ago. The wells are not monitored by the state for contamination. In California, private well owners must hire their own contractors to test wells.
East Porterville’s geographic location is the main reason the wells are shallow. At the edge of the foothills just downhill of Success Lake, the soil below the surface is shallow because the granite base of the mountain range slopes upward. There isn’t as much room for underground water as locations farther west in the valley.
“The underground aquifer is more reliable where the sediments are deeper – as they are around Porterville,” says engineer Richard Schafer, watermaster for the Tule River Water Association, which manages water operations on nearby Success Lake. “For shallow areas, like East Porterville, there isn’t as much water, and it is recharged by the Tule. Remember, 2014 and 2015 were the driest seasons in 130 years on the Tule.”
Even though last winter was wet, there are still water supply problems in East Porterville, says Jessi Snyder of Visalia-based Self-Help Enterprises, which has worked with low-income families to build sustainable communities since 1965. The nonprofit has been a valuable resource for residents, helping them connect with the Porterville system or find financing if they need a new well.
“We’re still getting reports of new dry wells,” she says. “That’s why it’s important to have long-term solutions.”
There are a small number of properties still dry – a precise tally is difficult to estimate, officials say – but most places that lost water during the drought are now connected to Porterville’s system.
Ryan Jensen of the Community Water Center, which kept people informed and helped organize involvement in the hookup project with Porterville, says the entire process of fixing water problems here is focused on solutions.
“It’s a model that I’m hoping to see more and more,” he says. “We will have between 700 and 800 houses connected to the Porterville water system maybe by the end of the year. That’s impressive.”
Out in the community, stacks of bottled water still clutter some porches. Sometimes the garbage bins are filled with paper plates because people don’t want to waste water washing ceramic plates. It still looks like a community on the mend.
Fred Beltran, 62, a nearby Terra Bella resident who once lived in East Porterville, volunteered to work on water drives in East Porterville – getting donated water and delivering it. He had been in early retirement for a few years before the drought, but now he works for Self-Help Enterprises.
“Those water drives helped us understand what people needed,” Beltran says. “People didn’t have water to flush their toilets and take showers. We got them water tanks and connected them to the house plumbing and the hot-water heater. This was a devastating time but we pulled together.”
Yolanda Serrato, who continues to battle cancer, says she didn’t think of leaving East Porterville. She says she couldn’t have sold her house anyway after the well went dry. But she loves the quiet country life here. She says she’s staying.
Plus, the drought taught her children a few lessons about survival. The younger folks often worried how long anyone could live without running water in the house.
“I told them, ‘Yes, you can do it,’” she says. “We didn’t have indoor plumbing when I lived in Sonora, Mexico. You got a bucket of water to bathe and a cup of water to brush your teeth. But I understand why they’re afraid. You never know how precious water is until it’s gone.”
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Living on Earth: Beyond The headlines.
Peter Dykstra returns to Living on Earth this week to discuss what’s beyond the headlines with host Steve Curwood. They consider EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s decision on a pesticide and the latest legal efforts to try to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the history segment, Peter shares an environmental message from a Republican president in 1907.
Beyond The Headlines
Air Date: Week of April 14, 2017
stream/download this segment as an MP3 file
In 1907, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt addressed the school children of the United States in an advance apology for the destruction of nature his generation was undertaking. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Peter Dykstra returns to Living on Earth this week to discuss what’s beyond the headlines with host Steve Curwood. They consider EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s decision on a pesticide and the latest legal efforts to try to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the history segment, Peter shares an environmental message from a Republican president in 1907.
Transcript
CURWOOD: Let’s join Peter Dykstra, of Environmental Health News -- That’s ehn dot org and DailyClimate dot org -- now to catch up on the world beyond the headlines. Peter’s been off for a while but is back now on the line from Atlanta, Georgia – how are you Peter, how are you doing?
DYKSTRA: I’m getting better, Steve, I’m on the mend.
CURWOOD: Well hang in there, what do you have for us this week?
DYKSTRA: Well, you’ve just been talking about Scott Pruitt and he’s unsurprisingly showing the same contempt for environmental regulation in his new role as EPA boss as he did during six years as Oklahoma Attorney General. One 25 year EPA employee, Mike Cox, fired off a scorching resignation letter citing “indefensible budget cuts,” among other things.
CURWOOD: Yeah but it’s not just budget cuts that are prompting anger, lawsuits, and protests involving Mr. Pruitt.
DYKSTRA: Oh, absolutely not. One of the most conspicuous flashpoints is that Administrator Pruitt ignored his own agency’s scientific advice in lifting an Obama-era ban on chlorpyrifos, also known as Dursban. It’s one of the most widely used agricultural pesticides, used on everything from citrus, wheat, corn, apples, strawberries. It’s also widely used on golf courses. Chlorpyrifos is considered a neurotoxin and believed to cause low IQ and low birth weight in newborns. EPA has placed it off-limits for residential use since the year 2000.
Although construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline began during Obama’s Presidency – this photo is from July of 2016 -- and has been allowed to continue under President Trump, two Democratic senators have sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers arguing that building began without the proper permission. (Photo: Lars Plougmann, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)
CURWOOD: So, this is at least controversial, at worst really nasty stuff. So, you see this as a sign of how Mr. Pruitt’s EPA will address other issues?
DYKSTRA: Yeah, almost definitely. One has to assume that it is. It’s consistent with what Pruitt has said and done throughout his career.
CURWOOD: Okay, what do you have next for us?
DYKSTRA: In what may be one of the final legal efforts to stop the Dakota Access pipeline, two U.S. Senators, Democrats Maria Cantwell of Washington State and Tom Carper of Delaware, sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers contending that Energy Transfer Partners and its contractors may have jumped the gun, building their pipeline under Lake Oahe, before they had permission to do so.
CURWOOD: And of course, that lake is the drinking water source for the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes.
DYKSTRA: And of course that threat, as well as the disruption of sacred tribal sites are among the main reasons for months of protests and occasionally violent responses. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has issued an Executive Order granting an easement. The Dakota Access pipeline does not have to obey certain environmental regs or impact assessments.
CURWOOD: And finally, hey, Peter, take a look back at environmental history for us now. What do you have for us this week?
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is facing a slew of lawsuits and protests against his agency, and also losing some staff members who have resigned. (Photo: Gage Skidmore, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)
DYKSTRA: Well, I’ve got yet another reminder that not all Americans started thinking about the environment in recent years, because 110 years ago this week, in what he called his “Message to the School Children of the United States,” President Theodore Roosevelt – That’s Republican President Theodore Roosevelt – said this:
"We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.”
CURWOOD: Boy, it’s a shame we don’t have recordings of statements like that from 1907, huh?
DYKSTRA: Oh, so you’re saying you don’t like the way I read it?
CURWOOD: No, no, no, I’m just saying it would be great to have the wisdom of Teddy Roosevelt on tape.
DYKSTRA: Yeah, in many ways he was a century or more ahead of his time.
CURWOOD: Well, Peter, we’re glad you’re back and hope you’re headed for a full recovery soon.
DYKSTRA: All right, Steve, thanks a lot and we’ll talk to you soon.
CURWOOD: Peter Dykstra is with Environmental Health News. That’s EHN.org and DailyClimate.org. And there’s more on these stories at our website LOE.org.
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