Too Many People = Too Many Fires

Is California finally reaching the breaking point?

"Illegal immigration over the last 30 years, the exodus of millions of middle-class Californians, and huge wealth concentrated in the L.A. basin and Silicon Valley have turned the state into a medieval manor of knights and peasants, with ever fewer in between."

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON 

(Mercury News)  -  Corporate profits at California-based transnational corporations such as Apple, Facebook and Google are hitting record highs.

California housing prices from La Jolla to Berkeley along the Pacific Coast can top $1,000 a square foot.

It seems as if all of China is willing to pay premium prices to get their children degreed at Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA or USC.

Yet California — after raising its top income tax rate to 13.3 percent and receiving record revenues — is still facing a budget deficit of more than $1 billion. There is a much more foreboding state crisis of unfunded liabilities and pension obligations of nearly $1 trillion.

Soon, new gas tax hikes, on top of green mandates, might make California gas the most expensive in the nation, despite the state’s huge reserves of untapped oil.

Where does the money go, given that the state’s schools and infrastructure rank among America’s worst in national surveys?

New tax to fund road repair in California will add 12-cents to the
price of each gallon of gas. (Dan Coyro -- Santa Cruz Sentinel)

Illegal immigration over the last 30 years, the exodus of millions of middle-class Californians, and huge wealth concentrated in the L.A. basin and Silicon Valley have turned the state into a medieval manor of knights and peasants, with ever fewer in between.

The strapped middle class continues to flee bad schools, high taxes, rampant crime and poor state services. About one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients reside in California. Approximately one-fifth of the state lives below the poverty line. More than a quarter of Californians were not born in the United States.

Many of the state’s wealthiest residents support high taxes, no-growth green policies and subsidies for the poor. They do so because they reside in apartheid neighborhoods and have the material and political wherewithal to become exempt from the consequences of their own utopian bromides.

Blue California has no two-party politics anymore. Its campuses, from Berkeley to Claremont, have proven among the most hostile to free speech in the nation.

A few things keep California going. Its natural bounty, beauty and weather draw in people eager to play California roulette. The state is naturally rich in minerals, oil and natural gas, timber and farmland. The world pays dearly for whatever techies based in California’s universities can dream up.

That said, the status quo is failing.

The skeletons of half-built bridges and overpasses for a $100 billion high-speed-rail dinosaur remind residents of the ongoing boondoggle. Meantime, outdated roads and highways — mostly unchanged from the 1960s — make driving for 40 million both slow and dangerous. Each mile of track for high-speed rail represents millions of dollars that were not spent on repairing and expanding stretches of the state’s decrepit freeways — and hundreds of lives needlessly lost each year.

The future of state transportation is not updated versions of 19th-century ideas of railways and locomotives, but instead will include electric-powered and automatically piloted cars — all impossible without good roads.

Less than 40 percent of California residents identify themselves as conservative. But red-county California represents some 75 percent of California’s geographical area. It’s as if large, rural Mississippi and tiny urban Massachusetts were one combined state — all ruled by liberal Boston.

Now, a third of the state thinks it can pull off a “Calexit” and leave the United States.

Calexit proponents assume California can leave the union without an authorizing amendment to the Constitution, ratified by three-fourths of all the states. And they fail to see that should California ever secede, it would immediately split in two. The coastal strip would go the way of secessionist Virginia. The other three-quarters of the state’s geography would remain loyal to the union and become a new version of loyalist West Virginia.

Buying a home on the California coast is nearly impossible. The state budget can only be balanced through constant tax hikes. Finding a good, safe public school is difficult. Building a single new dam during the California drought to capture record runoff water in subsequent wet years proved politically impossible.

No matter. Many Californians consider those existential problems to be a premodern drag, while they dream of postmodern trains, the legalization of pot-growing — and seceding from the United States of America.

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What Quality of Life?
The Golden State Dream has turned to rust.
.
California residents literally spend years of their lives on slow moving freeways to travel to their vastly overpriced homes. Californian's are packed in shoulder to shoulder. Their expensive homes make them "house poor" with all extra money taken by the bank for the privilege of living this lifestyle.

Lawnmowers under attack by Democrats

Democrats attack lawnmowers,

not overpopulation

Clueless California Democrats ignore the real

cause of pollution - too many people.

(NPR)  -  Those gas-powered leaf blowers, hedge trimmers and mowers you hear in your neighborhood aren't just annoying — they make a lot of pollution, too.

In California, they're about to pass cars as the worst air polluters, spewing out formaldehyde, benzene and particulate matter. According to Michael Benjamin at the California Air Resources Board, in just three years' time, the biggest single ozone polluter in the state is going to be all this gardening equipment.

"We expect that ozone-contributing pollutants from small off-road engines will exceed those same emissions from cars around the 2020 time frame," Benjamin says.

"Unless ARB adopts more stringent controls, emissions from this category are going to really become much more significant relative to cars," he says.

California — which currently goes by federal standards for its emissions regulations of small off-road gas engines — is considering requiring tougher emissions standards for small gas engines and to offer major incentives for landscaping businesses to change over to electric.

David Clegern of the California Air Resources Board says he is unaware of any other states pursuing programs other than exchanges for residential lawn and garden equipment or of other states lobbying the federal Environmental Protection Agency to adopt more stringent standards.

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The San Fernando Valley in 1900
.
Insane Politicians
Politicians take a non-polluted, pristine California and pave every possible inch of it over with endless housing tracts, malls and freeways. Tens of millions of new people are added and it is not stopping to this day.
kk
So instead of ending the mindless population growth and its resulting pollution the idiot political hacks attack lawnmowers as the problem.
.
And the Population Bomb keeps ticking.

Zero population growth is the answer, but I suspect we are 50 years too late.

California again has nation's highest rate of real poverty

The Golden State Has a Bit of Rust

• Pardon me, but if we exported say 2 million people the housing crisis would not exist, the insane rents and home prices would fall and freeways would unclog. But I am just a "crazy" Blogger. What do I know.

(Sacramento Bee)  -  Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislators have been crowing about what they did for California’s poorest residents the last few years. 

They raised the state’s minimum wage, improved overtime pay for farm and domestic workers, enacted an earned-income tax credit, expanded health and welfare benefits, and provided extra money for the educations of poor students.

However, their failure to confront the heaviest burden on poor families – California’s soaring housing costs – will extend California’s embarrassment of having the nation’s highest rate of real poverty.

A new supplemental poverty measure by the Census Bureau, covering the 2013-15 period, found that nearly 8 million Californians, 20.6 percent of the state’s residents, are living in poverty.

While that’s lower than what it was during the previous three-year period, 23.4 percent, the gap between California and other states, which range from 19 percent to 9.7 percent, has widened.

A house covered in wrapping paper with a cardboard chimney 
is seen at the Silicon Valley homeless encampment 
known as "The Jungle".  Read More . . . .

California’s “official” poverty rate, 15 percent, is only slightly higher than the national rate of 14.5 percent, but its 20.6 percent supplemental rate is 5.5 percentage points higher than the national rate, 15.1 percent.

The official poverty rate is based on a half-century-old formula that takes into account only a narrow range of incomes and living costs. The supplemental rate covers a much wider array of income sources and living costs, including housing, and is widely considered to be much more accurate.

Deeper dives into the data leave little doubt that California’s high costs of living, particularly for housing, are a huge factor in its having such a high proportion of impoverished residents.

A few years ago, the Public Policy Institute of California devised the California Poverty Measure, which is similar to the Census Bureau’s supplemental index, and came up with a 21.8 percent poverty rate.

The PPIC study also revealed that the state’s highest level of poverty, 26.1 percent, was to be found in Los Angeles County, home to a huge immigrant population working at low-skill, low-wage jobs but confronting very high housing costs in relation to their modest incomes.

While housing costs in the Bay Area are even higher, its technology-centered economy also generates much higher incomes so its overall poverty rate under the PPIC formula is well under the state average.

Supply shortages lie at the core of California’s high housing costs and thus, of its very high incidence of poverty. Although the state’s current population growth is quite modest, less than 1 percent a year, that’s still about 300,000 new Californians every year who need at least 100,000 more housing units.

Our net housing gain has been about two-thirds of the need in recent years, which means the demand/supply gap is continuing to widen and drive housing prices, especially urban rentals, steeply upward.

Brown proposed a modest plan to cut through red tape for some new housing, particularly low-income, but didn’t make it a high priority, and he and legislators allowed opposition from narrow interests to block it.

So much for helping the poor.

ead more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/dan-walters/article101657302.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/dan-walters/article101657302.html#storylink=cpy

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An encampment of tents under an overpass in Fresno.
(New York Times)

SoCal's mountain lions could become extinct

A Mass of Concrete and Asphalt 

from Ventura to Mexico

(Christian Science Monitor)  -  Some of Southern California's beloved mountain lions could soon be extinct unless something is done to diversify the population, scientists say.

The population of mountain lions living in the Santa Monica Mountains now faces a 99.7 percent chance of extinction, due to loss of genetic diversity.

According to the National Park Service, which has placed GPS tracking collars on more than 30 mountain lions in order to study their behavior, the mountain lions of the Santa Monica Mountains have relatively low genetic diversity compared to other mountain lions in the rest of the state, largely due to being fenced in by roads. The researchers found that the small population size has led to infighting, inbreeding, and health problems.

"Many of these phenomena, including very low genetic diversity and close inbreeding, have only been previously seen in Florida panthers, an endangered and completely isolated population of mountain lions," Seth Riley of the National Park Service, who has worked on similar mountain lion studies, said in a press release. "In our case, the fact that lions in the Santa Monica Mountains are completely surrounded by roads and development likely lead[s] to behaviors that would be rare or nonexistent if normal population and social processes could occur."

Paving over every square inch
In a natural desert, plus with a drought, we see moron politicians keep
building water guzzling businesses and homes as far as the eye can
see. The quality of life becomes more like an ant hill.

In his own research, Dr. Riley observed unusual behavior in the cats in the Santa Monica Mountains, including inbreeding between fathers and daughters, and members of the species killing each other, even siblings, offspring, and mates.

In order to assist the movement of lions so that they may intermingle with other populations and increase genetic diversity, a collaborative of wildlife agencies including the National Wildlife Foundation have started the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing project. If completed, the project will result in an animal crossing bridge across Highway 101, one of the major state highways that cut the animals' natural habitat in half. The project is slated to cost $50 million, but will help many species, not just mountain lions, cross the highway safely.

Wildlife corridors such as this one have become a popular solution to helping animals live a natural life – hunting, roaming, and mating – despite urban sprawl. They also cut down on animal-related car accidents, since animals are not longer forced to cross large highways as frequently in search of food.

Statewide, the mountain lion population has actually improved since the 1960s, when a bounty program to kill lions considered a threat to livestock rearing came to an end. According to the California Department of Fish and Game Services, the population has rebounded since 1970: from 2,000 then, to between 4,000 and 6,000 today.

Still, in southern California particularly, the mountain lion faces many threats due to human encroachment. The ability to expand its habitat is vital to the population's survival.

"The long-term survival of a mountain lion population here depends on their ability to move between regions to maintain genetic diversity and overall population health," the National Park Service said in a statement.

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What quality of life?
How about zero population growth?  Let's address the people already here.
Importing more and more people does not improve our quality of life.
Plus each new resident sucks down more water.

Environmental group wants to bring the grizzly bear back to California

Cornelius B. Johnson and the Sunland grizzly in 1916

(BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY)

In 1916, Cornelius Birket Johnson, a Los Angeles fruit farmer, killed the

last known grizzly bear in Southern California and the second-to last

confirmed grizzly bear in the entire state of California. (More)

Bring The Grizzly Back To California

• As a Conservative John Muir Conservationist I firmly believe that Man is the real beast that is dangerous. We pave over and destroy all that is beautiful in nature.
• If it was not for the environmental movement we would see Walmart and auto malls in Yosemite Valley, and ALWAYS man would claim it is in the name of "progress".

(San Francisco Chronicle)  -  The only place the grizzly bear lives in California today is at the San Francisco Zoo, but an Arizona-based advocacy group wants to change that.

The Center for Biological Diversity would like to see the iconic animal depicted on the California flag return to the wilds of the Golden State where they haven't been seen in nearly 100 years.

The environmental group filed a people's petition late last year calling on the California Fish and Game Commission to conduct a feasibility study looking at reintroducing grizzlies — a much larger and more dangerous relative of the black bear —  in California's Sierra Nevada.

The center's wildlife biologists have identified 8,000 square miles that they believe is prime grizzly habitat. They believe the animals could thrive and bring balance to nature in the remote areas of Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks and the national forest land in between, as well as in a separate pocket in the Trinity Alps Wilderness. (See map in gallery above.)

Man The Butcher

Novelty chair made from a California grizzly carcass

BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY

See More:

Great grizzly bear hunt in Santa Paula

This summer, the group is launching an ad campaign to encourage more Californians to sign the petition and raise awareness among state politicians. As of early July, 12,000 people have signed and the group is hoping to reach 50,000.

The center went down a similar road in 2014, when it filed a legal petition in 2014 calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to study the possibility of grizzly reintroduction in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. The request was rejected, and Biological Diversity Conservation Advocate Jeff Miller thinks likely due to "political will."

"I don't think there was any good legal or biological reason for it," Miller said. "All it was asking for was for them to study whether it was feasible. I think they were wanting to avoid controversy. Grizzlies are dangerous and the thought of them being around can scare people."

Part of the push for bringing the grizzly bear back to California is related to a proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove bears in the Yellowstone Region from its list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Some 50,000 grizzlies once inhabited the lower 48, but in 1975, those numbers dwindled to 1,000 and in the Yellowstone area 136 bears remained. Today, roughly 1,500 to 1,800 grizzlies are in the lower 48, and 700 to 800 in the Yellowstone region, and many of the agency's biologists think these numbers mark a successful recovery and indicate it's time to lift the ban on hunting and trapping them.

Man killed every bear until you could only find a carcass in a museum. 

But Miller feels it's too early to de-list the grizzly and says the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission is already fast-tracking approval of the state's first trophy hunt of grizzlies in 40 years.

"We're concerned once they lose Endangered Species protection, the populations is going to start plummeting," Miller says. "We think this is the time to protect those existing bears and get bears back to their usual haunts."

And one of those haunts was once California. Before the Gold Rush and hunting eventually led the species to become extinct in the Golden State in the early 1900s, the bear populations were especially dense along the state's coastal regions and river valleys, areas where the combination of rich, fertile land and abundant wildlife provided food and habitat for grizzlies.

But now people have flooded these areas, and some experts don't think there's enough space in the state to accommodate these mega-fauna. The bears are notoriously dangerous, and while they rarely kill humans, these incidents are tragic, and some think encounters with humans in highly populated California would be inevitable.

"Not only are we approaching 40 million people in this state, grizzly bears traditionally would roam oak woodlands and even beaches and eat whale carcasses," says Jordan Traverso, a spokesperson for the California Fish and Game Commission. "Reintroducing them would suggest bringing them into places where people are now, not typical black bear habitat. The idea has been a nonstarter for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife."

With that said, Traverso says if a petition is delivered to the Commission it will undergo the formal review process.

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El Niño a bust, the drought goes on

And the Politicians are Clueless

• The political hacks keep authorizing the building more and more water using homes and businesses during a drought.
• California's population keeps increasing. The quality of life keeps decreasing.

(Capital Public Radio)  -  The U.S. Drought Monitor says warmer weather has increased concerns of early snow melt in California and the overall trend is for the multiyear drought to continue or even worsen.

"Out west, progressively warmer weather heightened concerns of early snow melt, with early-week rain and mountain snow falling short of weekly normals and doing little to ease long-term drought," according to the weekly report released Feb. 25.

"Despite some welcomed rain and mountain snow at the beginning of the weekly drought assessment period, a return to dry, warmer weather by week’s end renewed concerns of a sub-par Water Year even with the ongoing strong El Niño," the update noted.

The overall trend was toward maintaining or increasing the multiyear drought in California and other parts of the western U.S.

The Drought Monitor intensity levels are Abnormally Dry, Moderate, Severe, Extreme and Exceptional drought.

California remains 99.5 percent abnormally dry, 94 percent moderate, 81 percent severe, 61 percent extreme and 38 percent in exceptional drought.

"In the core drought areas of California and western Nevada, welcomed early-week rain and mountain snow gave way to warm, dry weather," the report says. "Despite locally impressive precipitation totals during the 7-day period (ending Feb. 23 at 4 a.m., PST), wetter-than-normal conditions for the week were confined to the northern-most counties in California as well as portions of the Sierra Nevada."

But precipitation over the past two weeks "has fallen well short of normal over most of the state."

"Nevertheless, a boost to northern California’s SWE (snow water equivalent) and reservoir storage led to a small reduction of Extreme Drought (D3). However, the recent overall trend toward warmer, drier weather - despite the ongoing strong El Niño - has raised concerns over increasing short-term drought impacts in addition to the region’s ongoing long-term ("L" Impact) drought.

"To illustrate, a pronounced pocket of short-term dryness extends from the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains southeast of Los Angeles northwestward to Santa Barbara, where rainfall has averaged a meager 33 to 50 percent of normal during the current Water Year (since October 1)."

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California Faces Lost Decades in Solving Drought

Shasta Dam

A Government of Morons

• Endless money is spent on welfare and to pander to illegal aliens. But it is too hard for Democrats or Republicans to add a few feet to the tops of dams.

SHASTA LAKE, Calif.— (Wall Street Journal)  -  One of the seemingly easiest ways to expand California’s water supply would be to raise the height of the 602-foot Shasta Dam by 18.5 feet, adding the equivalent of another reservoir to the drought-stricken state.

The federal Bureau of Reclamation has been studying the idea to some degree since 1980. But regulatory delays and pushback from critics—including a Native-American tribe that has performed war dances at the dam—prevented it from happening.

Raising the dam, which is a fairly common procedure though not on this magnitude, would cost about $1.3 billion. Getting the project funded through Congress and other sources, however, would be a challenge.

The hurdles in expanding the Shasta Dam underscore a broader problem in the nation’s most populous state as it grapples with a devastating four-year drought: state and federal officials haven’t significantly upgraded California’s water infrastructure in decades.

Building water projects amid divisions among residents in Northern California, where most of the water can be found, and Southern California, where most residents live, is a challenge. There are about 1,400 dams under state and federal control in California and roughly 1,300 reservoirs, officials said.

Since the last major state or federal dam was completed in 1979, California’s population has grown to 39 million people from 23 million.

“We’ve added millions of people and yet we’re operating on a 1960s infrastructure for the entire state,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million residents.

The heyday of large-scale projects to move water to farms and urban areas in California ended during the tenure of Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in the 1960s, and little has taken place since his son, current Gov. Jerry Brown, first led the state in the 1970s and early 1980s.

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California builds homes in the desert during a drought

A Government of Fools

• In only five years California has added 1.8 million new water using people to the state. Now the fools in government are going to encourage even more population growth in hot desert areas where there is no water.
• But what the Hell.   Let's keep pouring millions and millions of new people on to the freeway and surface street system until we are packed in shoulder to shoulder like an ant colony.

(San Jose Mercury News)  -  For the first time since ordering water cuts across California, state officials propose easing the reductions for communities with rapid housing and business growth or sizzling hot climates.

In the Bay Area, water agencies most likely to benefit are in fast-growth areas like Silicon Valley, or in hot inland areas like Concord, Brentwood, Dublin and Pleasanton, state water officials said. The biggest beneficiaries statewide likely would be areas with the hottest climates like Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Palm Springs.

While the proposal was made amid a series of storms that has begun to replenish reservoirs, state officials said the proposed change in the emergency rules was not a response to the rain and snow, but to persistent complaints from some communities that the reduction targets are unfair to them.

"We're talking about modest adjustments in response to concerns about equity," said Max Gomberg, the state Water Resources Control Board's climate and conservation manager.

"We are responding cautiously because the drought is not over," he said.

Under the proposal released by the state board, water suppliers could get a maximum reduction of up to 4 percentage points in their state-assigned water cuts, which vary from 4 to 36 percent. The state's 25 percent conservation target would drop to 22 percent under this proposal.

Hot climate water agencies say it is unfair that their required cutbacks fail to provide some allowance for the extra water used on landscaping in their area. Water agencies can be fined for falling short of the targets.

One environmentalist called it a "bad idea" to change rules during a drought emergency.

"It sends the wrong message to move back from the conservation target," said Sara Aminzadeh, executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance. "We have done such a good job of communicating what we need to do for conservation, and to add this new element is confusing."

Aminzadeh said the state board should make no change until April, when officials know how much snow and rain will have fallen for the season. "Why change now?" she asked.

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Riverlakes Golf Course in Bakersfield
Developers select names that have nothing to do with reality. Simply, there is no river and there are no lakes except man made ones.  California keeps adding millions of new water sucking houses for people and new businesses with no real thought about overpopulation or where the water will come from in a desert. 

California adds nearly 350,000 people

And every damn one of them 

is on the freeway

• What quality of life?  How about zero population growth?  Let's address the people already here. Importing more and more people does not improve our quality of life. Plus each new resident sucks down more water and clogs the freeways and streets.

(Fox News)  -  New figures show that California added nearly 350,000 people over a one-year period, bringing its total population to a smidge under 39.1 million.

The Department of Finance released the numbers Wednesday. The growth covers the period July 1, 2014, to July 1, 2015.

California, the nation's most populous state, added 346,000 people, with most of the growth caused by what's called a "natural increase." There were 507,000 births and 245,000 deaths.

The rest comes from migration into and out of the state, resulting in 84,000 new people. California added about 145,000 people from other countries and lost 61,000 to other states.

"We're getting just below 1 percent of growth a year. It shows the state's recovery since the recession is ongoing," said John Malson, the state's chief demographer.

California has gained more than 1.8 million people since the 2010 U.S. Census, department officials said.

Much of the growth has been in urban coastal counties, although inland counties have posted growth in recent years as people move away from urban centers for more affordable housing.

Of the state's 58 counties, five accounted for more than half of California's population growth. They are the Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Riverside, and the Northern California county of Santa Clara.

Smaller counties in remote areas continue to lose people or post smaller gains, department officials said.

Lassen County, for example, in northeastern California lost the most number of people: 815. Los Angeles County gained the most with nearly 69,000 added, bringing its total population to nearly 10.2 million.

San Diego is the state's second most populous county, followed by Orange, with more than 3 million people each.

Fifteen counties posted a population growth of more than 1 percent, including San Joaquin and Fresno in Central California.

The Northern California Bay Area counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Contra Costa also grew by more than 1 percent each.

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Uranium contaminates water in Central California

Too Many People

• As a Conservative John Muir Conservationist I see overpopulation destroying the Golden State's natural beauty, health and quality of life. But the politicians from both parties keep paving over the state.

FRESNO --  (Associated Press) -- In a trailer park tucked among irrigated orchards that help make California's San Joaquin Valley the richest farm region in the world, 16-year-old Giselle Alvarez, one of the few English-speakers in the community of farmworkers, puzzles over the notices posted on front doors: There's a danger in their drinking water.

Uranium, the notices warn, tests at a level considered unsafe by federal and state standards. The law requires the park's owners to post the warnings. But they are awkwardly worded and in English, a language few of the park's dozens of Spanish-speaking families can read.

"It says you can drink the water -- but if you drink the water over a period of time, you can get cancer," said Alvarez, whose working-class family has no choice but keep drinking and cooking with the tainted tap water daily, as they have since Alvarez was just learning to walk. "They really don't explain."

Uranium, the stuff of nuclear fuel for power plants and atom bombs, increasingly is showing in drinking water systems in major farming regions of the U.S. West -- a naturally occurring but unexpected byproduct of irrigation, of drought, and of the overpumping of natural underground water reserves.

In this Sept. 14, 2015 photo, Dora Martinez cooks food at her home in a trailer park near
Fresno, Calif. Residents of the trailer park receive notices warning that their well water
contains uranium at a level considered unsafe by federal and state standards.
(AP Photo/John Locher) (John Locher/AP)

An Associated Press investigation in California's central farm valleys -- along with the U.S. Central Plains, among the areas most affected -- found authorities are doing little to inform the public at large of the growing risk.

That includes the one out of four families on private wells in this farm valley who, unknowingly, are drinking dangerous amounts of uranium, researchers determined this year and last. Government authorities say long-term exposure to uranium can damage kidneys and raise cancer risks, and scientists say it can have other harmful effects.

In this swath of farmland, roughly 250 miles long and encompassing major cities, up to one in 10 public water systems have raw drinking water with uranium levels that exceed federal and state safety standards, the U.S. Geological Survey has found.

More broadly, nearly 2 million people in California's Central Valley and in the U.S. Midwest live within a half-mile of groundwater containing uranium over the safety standards, University of Nebraska researchers said in a study published in September.

Everything from state agencies to tiny rural schools are scrambling to deal with hundreds of tainted public wells -- more regulated than private wells under safe-drinking-water laws.

That includes water wells at the Westport Elementary School, where 450 children from rural families study outside the Central California farm hub of Modesto.

At Westport's playground, schoolchildren take a break from tether ball to sip from fountains marked with Spanish and English placards: "SAFE TO DRINK."

Meanwhile, the city of Modesto, with a half-million residents, recently spent more than $500,000 to start blending water from one contaminated well to dilute the uranium to safe levels. The city has retired a half-dozen other wells with excess levels of uranium.

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