2021.6.17
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Guillermina Andrade (left) and Vicente Tapia filled barrels from a water depot outside the East Porterville, California, fire station. When this photo was taken, in April 2015, the well at their nearby home had been dry for 18 months and they visited the depot twice a week for water. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

As a Hot, Dry Summer Begins in California, More Water Wells Are Failing

In this blistering year in California drinking water wells are going dry in increasing numbers, rekindling memories of the historic drought of 2012 to 2016, when more than 2,600 wells across the state stopped producing water. So many wells went dry in 2014 in the town of East Porterville that Tulare County supplied portable public showers.

California is not yet to that level of emergency. A state database for household water supply issues received 38 dry well reports in the first 12 days of June, the most for any month since October 2016. But because the trend lines do not look promising, government agencies and nonprofit groups are preparing for a difficult summer in which thousands of wells could fail.

HotSpots H2O: Farmer-Herder Violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt Persists, a Consequence of Drought and Climate Change

Nigeria’s central states, a region referred to as the Middle Belt and nicknamed the country’s “food basket,” have been overwhelmed with violence for the better part of a decade.

The conflict is a consequence of extreme heat and worsening drought, byproducts of climate change, which bruises Africa’s Sahel region and nearby countries more deeply than almost anywhere else in the world. Temperatures here are rising 1.5 times faster than the global average. The land has become too arid to absorb water, so when seasonal rains do occur, they trigger abounding flash floods and landslides. Traditional open-well water reserves and irrigation systems are a struggle to maintain amid inconsistent precipitation.

This all is a burden, to say the least, for residents of the Sahel and Nigeria, where over two-thirds of the population depends on agriculture or livestock for their livelihoods.

What’s Up With Water – June 14, 2021

For the news you need to start the week, tune into “What’s Up With Water” fresh on Monday’s on iTunes, Spotify, i Heart Radio, and SoundCloud.

Featured coverage from this week’s episode of What’s Up With Water looks at:

In science news, an international research team published findings from its investigation of a destructive landslide that happened in northern India last winter.
In Canada, a community with longstanding water problems may soon be getting a clean drink.
In the United States, a binational program for monitoring airborne pollution found traces of PFAS chemicals in rain samples taken form sites around the Great Lakes.

This week Circle of Blue reports on a toxic threat to the world's coastlines.

From Circle of Blue's Archives:

Benjamin Luengas and his great-granddaughter Selena stand next to the water tank the family received last October, thanks to a grant from a local bank. Photo © Brett Walton / Circle of Blue

After Dry Wells, Relief for Some California Families

When Circle of Blue reporter Brett Walton visited Monson in July 2014 to report on the county’s water crisis, one resident described the community as a “lost world,” a place bamboozled by bureaucracy, hindered by poverty, and lacking the political power to shift the gears of state assistance.

When he went back to Tulare County a year later, some of those residents found help, but far more have not. Thousands await the day when “collect water” is removed from the to-do list.

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