‘A ticking time bomb’: Why California can’t provide safe drinking water to all its residents

‘A ticking time bomb’: Why California can’t provide safe drinking water to all its residents

Posted on September 27, 2023

Joseph Heide, community development manager at the nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, said that projects to address water quality problems can take five to 10 years to finish, and that officials need to expedite them to three.

“We need to make sure small, disadvantaged communities have the resources and the funding to fix their water within that three-year time period, because this has real impacts,” said Heide, who helps under-resourced communities access clean drinking water in the San Joaquin Valley — the fertile southern region of the Central Valley.