THERMAL, Calif. (AP) — Agustin and Ricarda Toledo loaded eight empty 5-gallon jugs onto their truck and drove to a water store some 14 miles from their Southern California home, just as they’ve done almost weekly for years.
The couple, originally from Mexico, planned to make dozens of chicken tamales for their five children and 13 grandchildren that weekend, and the limited flow of clean, safe water from their home filter wouldn’t suffice.
“We can’t consume the water; we can’t use it” to drink or cook, said Ricarda, a retired farmworker whose family lives in and co-owns a mobile home park, speaking in Spanish. “We’d like to have potable water.”
In the agriculturally rich Eastern Coachella Valley, water is a source of worry. What flows from many people’s taps contains health-damaging arsenic, and in areas where the issue has been resolved, distrust about the tap water lingers. Many rely on water donations or drive miles to fill water jugs and buy packs of bottles. Residents here are mostly low-income Latino and Indigenous farmworkers whose only affordable housing options are mobile home parks served by small, outdated systems more likely to violate drinking water rules.
Luz Gallegos, executive director of Training Occupational Development Educating Communities, or TODEC, an immigrant and farmworker justice group, said people live in places with contaminated water because they have no other choice.
“Our community right now is not thinking of prevention. Our community is thinking of survival,” Gallegos said.
More than a decade after California legislatively recognized that all residents have the right to clean water, more than 878,000 people were connected to failing water systems, many of which can increase their risk of cancer or other serious health issues, according to 2024 state data, the last year available.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been working with a local nonprofit to restore safe drinking water to some Eastern Coachella residents. Last year, the agency announced that more than 900 people could safely drink and cook with tap water again.
Distrust of tap water is widespread
Many still fear the tap — an issue not unique to the area. Flint, Michigan’s water crisis that began in 2014 eroded public trust of government and tap water. Even after high levels of lead were reduced to well below a state threshold, many residents still won’t drink or cook with it. It’s a distrust most common among non-white populations, research shows.
A recent study on drinking water behaviors and perceptions in Evanston, Illinois, a suburban city north of Chicago, found, in part, that people who drank mostly bottled water were more likely to be Black, Indigenous or other people of color. Compared with white respondents, they were more than three times more likely to distrust tap water.
The finding that minority groups in Evanston were more likely to distrust tap water was “remarkably consistent” with research elsewhere, said Sera Young, a study co-author and co-director at the Center for Water Research at Northwestern University.
“It’s a global phenomenon,” Young said.
Respondents’ main concern was contamination. A lack of trust in government and negative experiences with water were among other reasons.
“People who thought that they had been harmed by their water in the past were more likely to think they would be harmed by the water in future,” Young said.
That’s true for Martha. For 18 years, she and her husband lived in the Eastern Coachella Valley’s Oasis Mobile Home Park, where the EPA found high levels of naturally occurring arsenic in the tap water in 2019. Martha, who is in the country illegally and spoke under the condition that only her middle name be used, said the water sometimes smelled like rotten eggs. An itchy rash would sometimes break out over her body when she showered, and her hair would fall off in clumps. She thinks the water was to blame.
Martha and her family now live in a new place and have been told the tap water is safe to consume.
“We don’t trust it,” Martha said.
They buy water at stores or pick up bottled water at one of TODEC’s offices, where plastic-wrapped packs cram a closet. The group provides free water to many of the area’s residents and organizes know-your-rights workshops in farm fields, among other things.
Perceptions can cause cascading effects
Anisha Patel, a pediatrics professor at Stanford University who has studied drinking water access and tap water perceptions for years, said immigrants from countries with unsafe tap water can also bring those perceptions here and low-income families are more likely to distrust the tap because they may live in older homes.
These perceptions can have significant negative impacts. People are more likely to consume sugary drinks, eat out and spend limited money on bottled water — upward of 10% of their household income, said Patel. Microplastics found in containers like bottled water, researchers are learning, may be harmful. Then there’s the environmental impacts — single-use bottled beverages create enormous waste.
Convincing people to drink from the tap is not easy, but experts have some recommendations based on their research findings. That includes government funding to improve plumbing in people’s homes and investing in community-trusted groups to implement water testing programs and educational campaigns, said Silvia R. González, co-director of research at the UCLA Latino Politics and Policy Institute who lead a study in 2023 exploring drinking water distrust in Latino communities.
“It’s been something that we’ve been trying to understand for the past 10, 15 years now, and I don’t think we’re closer to solving the issue, but we definitely see similarities across different communities,” especially among immigrant, Spanish-speaking and other non-English-speaking groups, González said.
Back in the California desert, water jugs and stacked packs of bottled water are a common sight inside and outside homes.
The kitchen in Virgilio Galarza Rodriguez’s mobile home is cramped by bottled water — boxes and shrink-wrapped packs piled four high, a drinking water dispenser topped by a 5-gallon (19-liter) jug with a spare nearby and more loose bottles scattered around.
The Galarzas, raising three boys, drank and cooked with tap water 16 years before a 2021 inspection by the EPA revealed arsenic at levels more than six times the federal limit. Despite now having filters and regular water tests, the family still worries.
“They tell us it’s safe to drink, but we don’t really trust it,” Galarza said, speaking in Spanish.
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