When you think, “California water crisis”, most people imagine that the issue is simple — there just isn’t enough water. Lawns go brown. The agriculture industry struggles. Reservoir water levels decline. 

But there is a more subtle and insidious problem: many people are experiencing adverse health effects from poor drinking water quality, which is being exacerbated by the water shortages. 

That’s because the problem isn’t that there’s not enough water. It’s that we aren’t acquiring good water in the right way.

Consider what happened to the water supply in Compton, Los Angeles. Compton is an underserved city that is mostly low income and non-white. In 2018, residents found brown water flowing from their bath pipes. People began protesting over “unexplained stomach pains and skin so itchy it had scarred from the scratching”. How does a crisis of water shortage lead to a crisis of water quality? 

In these underfunded communities, water is supplied by small local providers who lack resources to perform routine inspections, necessary infrastructure updates, and water treatment operations. When a water shortage comes along, they send inadequately treated, haphazardly imported groundwater to their customers because they lack funding to purchase cleaner, higher-quality surface water, or to properly treat and transport the lower quality groundwater. 

While the larger providers that serve the wealthier neighborhoods of Los Angeles can afford to pay more during water shortages, these smaller companies that serve marginalized communities start piping second-class water into LA’s neediest homes.

This is exactly what happened in Compton. The outdated pipes used to transport water from far-away groundwater sources were leaching manganese, a contaminant county officials consider a “secondary violation” because though it is aesthetically unpleasing, it is not “outright dangerous”. According to them, the water in Compton was safe to drink all along– but others disagree. Research from the World Health Organization indicates that exposure to manganese in drinking water has been linked to harmful neurological effects. Regardless, the incident has brought to light that water shortages disproportionately affect small-scale water systems, because they can’t afford to treat or test the groundwater they are buying or the update the pipes that are used for transport. 

Pumping more water through deteriorating pipes isn’t going to make the bathwater in Compton any cleaner. What will improve the water quality is investing in updating and maintaining the water systems, especially in underserved urban and rural communities. 

The benefits of doing so would extend far beyond just public health. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, the Pacific Institute, and the National Resource Defense Council have found that the “invest and upgrade” strategy could kill two birds with one stone. It would solve water quality problems like those in Compton and help out the more obvious victims of water shortages, such as agricultural communities and endangered wetland wildlife populations. Not only will the water be safer, fewer leaks mean there will be more of it– an increase of as much as 14 million acre-feet per year. According to the researchers, the trick is asking the natural water supply to work smarter, not harder, in three different ways:

1. Update existing infrastructure to safer and more eco-friendly technologies, to mitigate public health concerns and conserve as much water as we can. Increase municipal adoption of water reuse and water recycling, as well as rainfall and stormwater runoff capture. This could save between 1.8 and 2.4 million acre-feet per year while reducing water pollution and saving energy in the process.
2. Subsidizing the adoption of modern irrigation technologies and practices within the agriculture industry. This could save 5.6 to 6.6 million acre-feet annually without sacrificing revenue or crop production.  
3. Increasing public education on simple home measures like fixing leaks, installing efficient appliances, and replacing water-guzzling lawns with native landscapes. This could save between 2.9 and 5.2 million acre-feet each year. 

We’ve reached the limit on the amount of safe water that current infrastructure can supply, as the crisis in Compton and elsewhere make clear. But current research suggests that we aren’t stuck at a dead end. If we improve our efforts and refine our approach, there is enough water to go around.