THERMAL, Calif. — Community activists in Southern California’s Coachella Valley have been toiling for years along the eastern rim of this crescent-shaped breadbasket to spread the word about the abandoned waste dumps, shoddy migrant housing and overburdened recycling facilities that are a fact of life in this poor, farmworker community.
Their work paid off last month, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators cracked down on a soil-recycling plant that was blamed by air-quality officials for a putrid stench that sickened dozens of children and teachers at a nearby school.
Now, the groups are taking advantage of that national spotlight — including a visit from Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat — to press for similar action at other toxic sites that dot the remote valley, from an abandoned and illegal dump to a mountain of human sewage that locals dubbed Mt. San Diego because it was trucked in from San Diego County.
On Friday, activists took state lawmakers and state and federal regulatory officials on an “environmental justice” bus tour with stops at a laundry list of sites that represent potential environmental hazards. State Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski and state environmental regulators toured five sites, including an abandoned dump, the soil-recycling facility blamed for noxious fumes, and trailer parks where migrant workers live with arsenic-tainted water and spotty electricity.
It’s the second such tour the group has organized this year since forming an environmental task force that includes officials from all levels of government, with the goal of improving living conditions in the sun-baked Coachella Valley. Friday’s tour preceded a state legislative committee hearing on environmental safety and toxins that was to be held at the local high school here.
The federal crackdown on soil recycler Western Environmental Inc., which sits on tribal land, was the first major success after a coalition of civil rights and migrant-advocacy groups began using an evolving strategy, said Megan Beaman, an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance Inc. The group used to try to make its point by filing lawsuits against major polluters or negligent landlords, but recently realized that’s not enough, she said.
“We need a lot more people at the table and a lot more resources,” she said. “We are looking at this as an opportunity to create a model of enforcement … that will carry on to other places in our community and around the state.”
The valley roughly 130 miles southeast of Los Angeles is well-known for the glitzier cities such as Palm Springs and Palm Desert that sit on its western edge, but dusty towns to the east like Mecca, Thermal and Indio skirt the northern tip of the Salton Sea and seem a world away from the fairways and swimming pools of their neighbors. Farmworkers, many of them migrants, toil in the agricultural fields that define this heavily irrigated region and come home to dangerously crowded trailer parks with limited septic systems and jerry-rigged electrical systems.
Recycling plants, dumps and other businesses unwelcome in more metropolitan areas set up shop years ago in the eastern valley and continue to present health hazards.
In March, the newly formed environmental task force ramped up an online site where residents can log in and document environmental hazards in their community, including unexplained fumes and pollution, said Miss Beaman, whose group is one of the main organizations working in the valley.
Both the so-called “toxic tours” and the online site are ideas borrowed from the nearby Imperial Valley, where poor and mostly migrant residents deal with similar issues, she said. The online log of residents’ complaints has been used there to identify safety issues previously unknown to regulators, organizers say, and they hope it will have the same effect in the Coachella Valley.
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