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Contaminated: Dirty Water In California's San Joaquin Valley

Kerry Klein, Ezra David Romero
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Valley Public Radio
At the Community Water Center in Visalia bottles of contaminated water are on display from communities across the region.

In 2012, California made history when it became the first U.S. state to declare that clean drinking water is a human right. But five years later, nearly 300 communities still shouldn’t drink their water, according to new state data—and more than half of the 400,000 impacted residents live in the San Joaquin Valley.

In this series, our reporters visit these communities, speak with residents, and explore the challenges to obtaining safe, clean drinking water.

If you have a personal account or story about contaminated water in your area of California email us at eromero@kvpr.org or kklein@kvpr.org.

To find out if the water in your community is contaminated, click through the map below. 

This post is an abbreviated version of the Contaminated page. You can find the full series here.

Ezra David Romero is an award-winning radio reporter and producer. His stories have run on Morning Edition, Morning Edition Saturday, Morning Edition Sunday, All Things Considered, Here & Now, The Salt, Latino USA, KQED, KALW, Harvest Public Radio, etc.
Kerry Klein is an award-winning reporter whose coverage of public health, air pollution, drinking water access and wildfires in the San Joaquin Valley has been featured on NPR, KQED, Science Friday and Kaiser Health News. Her work has earned numerous regional Edward R. Murrow and Golden Mike Awards and has been recognized by the Association of Health Care Journalists and Society of Environmental Journalists. Her podcast Escape From Mammoth Pool was named a podcast “listeners couldn’t get enough of in 2021” by the radio aggregator NPR One.