Thousands of household wells go dry amid California drought: ‘Without water, you’re nothing’
Priscella Vega
Fourteen years ago, Heriberto Sevilla came across a ranch on the outskirts of Madera set among fields of stalk grass and bright wildflowers. Pepper trees dotted the meadow, and children played in the natural lakes created by heavy rains.
It was the perfect place to raise a big family. So the 51-year-old native of Chilapa, Mexico, bought it and made sure the property included a functioning well.
On spring days, free time was spent lounging in the backyard. Heriberto taught his daughters how to ride horses. They helped him feed the chickens and sheep. Goats kept the area tidy, munching on grass. When fruit in the trees was ripe, he proudly showed his children how to harvest their bounty. And in the winter, his wife Sandra prepared a homemade birria for holiday festivities from their goats.
But then a darkness came over the little Eden the Sevillas had created.
Amid two years of relentless drought, the well’s output slowly tapered off. The family was forced to buy gallons of precious water from the grocery store to take showers, clean dishes and cook. They borrowed water from their neighbor to irrigate their almond and peach trees and feed their goats, sheep, chickens and horses.
Heriberto Sevilla feeds sheep and goats on his ranch in Madera County where he and his family have lived for 14 years. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Heriberto Sevilla and his daughter Arianna, 5, fill a drinking trough for the animals on their ranch with water drawn with permission from a neighbor’s hose. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
“Without water, you’re nothing,” Heriberto said. “Family is the most important thing. Plants are beautiful, and my animals help me relax. But what can we do?”
The Sevillas are just one of thousands households across the San Joaquin Valley whose wells have gone dry amid increasingly hot temperatures and drought. Every year, a new town in this verdant agricultural region seems to be pushed over the brink by water scarcity — like East Porterville, an unincorporated community in Tulare County, in 2014, and, most recently, Teviston, a census-designated place in the same county.
But these issues have plagued rural towns and unincorporated areas here for decades. And in the era of the coronavirus, these inequities have become magnified in an area that already had some of the highest poverty rates in the state.
“Drought is part of our life,” said Susana De Anda, cofounder and executive director of the Community Water Center, a nonprofit environmental justice organization based in the valley. “We need to ensure we invest in drought-resilient infrastructure. … We can’t wait until wells go dry. That’s a disservice.”
Sandra Sevilla washes dishes with water from a tank installed in the backyard of her home in Madera County. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Even those who can afford to pay upfront for new wells must join waiting lists as drilling companies await the back-ordered equipment they need to build and install them. Local officials provide jugs and gallons of water, and local organizations offer aid if resources aren’t already tapped out.
“We’re so inundated,” said Marliez Diaz, water sustainability manager at Self-Help Enterprises, a nonprofit organization that provides emergency services such as water storage tanks and filtration systems across the valley. In 2020, 121 temporary water tanks of 2,500 gallons were installed, 92 new water wells were constructed and 3,033 households received bottled water, according to an annual report.
The drought parched the natural landscape Heriberto once reveled in.
Plants withered, and the spacious backyard is now all dirt. Arianna, their 5-year-old daughter, gets coated with dust when she pretends to cook in her cottage playhouse. A patch of yellowing grass remains, a reminder of better days when Heriberto’s beloved horse grazed near his hammock. He sold his companion months ago to preserve water. He will sell more of his furry friends in the coming weeks.
Sandra Sevilla shows how water from a 2,500-gallon tank, seen in the background, feeds into her home’s plumbing in Madera County. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
“Too many people don’t appreciate water,” Sandra said, “until this happens to you.”
On a recent weekday morning, a thin flow of water trickled from a faucet into a dirty bowl as she washed dishes. Sandra hunched forward to meticulously scrub it with a worn sponge, then poured the soapy water onto another plate.
Every so often, she allowed herself to get a bit more water.
Heriberto lived in the city of Madera when he first arrived in California in 1994. He picked tomatoes, onions and garlic for years until he found his way south in Santa Ana and met Sandra, who became his wife. The two rented a room and survived off of Heriberto’s earnings as a landscaper. But city life wasn’t for them.
This time, he returned with Sandra to an unincorporated area of Madera, where he found the place he’d finally get to call his own.
The first inkling of drought for the Sevillas happened in 2019 when the water pressure from their well dropped. Heriberto thought the pump’s motor might need to be replaced, or that maybe a tube broke. He asked five people familiar with wells for a diagnostic, and they all told him he was running out of water.
“Drought is part of our life. We need to ensure we invest in drought-resilient infrastructure …. We can’t wait until wells go dry. That’s a disservice.”
Susana De Anda, co-founder and executive director of the Community Water Center
Sandra Sevilla removes clothing from the washing machine in her home. She used a hose connected with permission to a neighbor’s water line to fill the washer. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Sandra scaled back on how often she mopped their home’s tile floors. She lugged bags of soiled clothes to stuffy laundromats. If she dried her hands with a paper towel, she smoothed it out and reused it to wipe down the microwave and kitchen counters.
Showers were unpredictable. They’d sometimes have enough water to get wet and soap up, but then have to wait in the tub, covered in bubbles, hoping the water would resume. Most of the time it didn’t.
Her daughters “would get mad,” Sandra said. “The good thing is our neighbor helped us a lot.”
As the situation worsened, Sandra brainstormed a new routine. At dawn, she eked whatever little water drizzled out of the well into 5-gallon plastic buckets. She topped it off with her neighbor’s water. Each family member would shower with their allotted bucket. Whatever was left was used to flush the toilet. Single-use plastic water bottles were reserved for washing hands.
The shift in life harkened back to Sandra’s and Heriberto’s childhoods in Mexico, but it came as an unwelcome shock to their four daughters and son.
Arianna Sevilla, 5, heads to the kitchen table with a fresh quesadilla made by her mother Sandra. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Emilee Sevilla, 21, learned how to scale back her hourlong showers to 15 minutes. She cut down on the products she uses on her hair and face and no longer lets the water run while she prepares to shave her legs, turning on the shower only when she’s actively using it, even now that they’ve received help.
“I’m only 21 and this is what I have to deal with,” she said. “At one point I’m going to have certain struggles when I grow up, and I guess in a way it’s mentally preparing me for the future.”
In October, while her parents were on a trip to Mexico, Emilee stayed behind with her younger brother because of school and work. She was certain there would be no water issues with fewer people in the house.
As she prepared to shower before a work shift, however, only foam oozed out of the shower head. Shutting the well pump off and on didn’t work. She grabbed two water bottles from the refrigerator and washed her face in the bathroom sink.
Over a choppy phone call, she told her parents what happened.
Henry Shillings, a longtime resident who has paid attention to the water discussions in the region, saw Emilee walking in and out of her home. He knew exactly what had happened. His mother had sold her property to Heriberto, and he reckoned that the well had come to the end of its life. He learned their well water flow had dropped to 20 gallons per minute — hardly any pressure compared with his 65 gallons per minute.
Without hesitating, he connected a hose to his well that was long enough to reach the Sevillas’ home. “We’re neighbors,” he said. “That’s what neighbors do. We help each other if we can.”
Two weeks ago, the Sevillas reached a temporary solution with a 2,500-gallon water tank in their backyard.
Heriberto Sevilla stands with his wife Sandra and daughter Arianna next to a 2,500-gallon water tank that was installed by a nonprofit group in the backyard of their home in Madera County after their well failed. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Hours after they received their temporary water tank, Sandra and Heriberto took a moment of rest in their backyard. A cool breeze wafted past them, tickling their tree’s leaves on a sweltering afternoon. They sat in silence and watched Arianna sit inside her cottage playhouse. Duke, their German shepherd, lay at their feet.
The tank meant they’d have one year of guaranteed clean, precious water, a reprieve from buying a new well, which are as expensive as a brand-new Ford Mustang.
Because they understood this gift, their drought routine would not change. Sandra left the two buckets in the tub — Arianna enjoyed her showers that way.
“Thank God we’re going to have this help,” Sandra said as she sipped cold water.
Soon they would start visiting banks in hopes of qualifying for a loan to pay for a new well. But in this fleeting moment, in the face of a drought that is only expected to get worse, life felt normal again.
Lindsey Graham’s Hypocrisies Laid Bare In Scathing ‘Daily Show’ Biography
Ed Mazza
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) once slammed Donals Trump as a “kook” and “unfit for office,” only to change his tune and become of Trump’s staunchest supporters.
Or, as Desi Lydic put it in a new “Dailyshow-ography” segment: “Graham did everything he could to stop the wedding between Donald Trump and America, but if he couldn’t ultimately succeed, then goddammit, he would give up harder than anyone had ever given up before.”
Instead of calling the former president a kook, Graham actively promoted him for the Nobel Peace Prize and declared himself as “all-in” for his onetime nemesis.
“Graham wasn’t off the Trump train,” Lydic said. “He was more like one of those tourist buses that you could get off and then get back on whenever it’s convenient.”
See her full segment on Graham’s “uncontrollable lust for political power,” including a look at his other hypocrisies, below:
Cruz Urias Beltran collapsed because of heat-related illness while working in a cornfield near Grand Island, Neb., in 2018. He is one of at least384 workers who died from environmental heat exposure in the U.S. in the last decade, according to an investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations and NPR. Walker Pickering for NPR
As the temperature in Grand Island, Neb., soared to 91 degrees that July day in 2018, two dozen farmworkers tunneled for nine hours into a thicket of cornstalks, snapping off tassels while they crossed a sunbaked field that spanned 206 acres — the equivalent of 156 football fields.
When they emerged at the end of the day to board a bus that would transport them to a nearby motel to sleep, one of the workers, Cruz Urias Beltran, didn’t make it back. Searchers found the 52-year-old farmworker’s body 20 hours later amid the corn husks, “as if he’d simply collapsed,” recalled a funeral home employee. An empty water bottle was stuffed in his jeans pocket. An autopsy report confirmed that Beltran died from heatstroke. It was his third day on the job.
Beltran is one of at least 384 workers who died from environmental heat exposure in the U.S. in the last decade, according to an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations, the investigative reporting unit of Columbia Journalism School. The count includes people toiling in essential yet often invisible jobs in 37 states across the country: farm laborers in California, construction and trash-collection workers in Texas and tree trimmers in North Carolina and Virginia. An analysis of federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the three-year average of worker heat deaths has doubled since the early 1990s.
A family photo of Cruz Urias Beltran taken during the 1990s. Paty Espinoza
CJI and NPR reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including workplace inspection reports, death investigation files, depositions, court records and police reports, and interviewed victims’ families, former and current officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, workers, employers, workers’ advocates, lawyers and experts.
CJI and NPR also analyzed two federal data sets on worker heat deaths: one from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the other from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both are divisions within the U.S. Labor Department.
Among the findings:
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), whose primary responsibility is to protect workers from hazards, has failed to adopt a national heat standard to safeguard workers against rapidly rising temperatures, resulting in an enforcement system rife with problems.
For at least a dozen companies, it wasn’t the first time their workers succumbed to heat. One worker collapsed and died after repeatedly complaining about the heat; another died after hauling 20 tons of trash for nearly 10 hours. In some instances, employees died after not having ample water and scheduled shade breaks. Many died within their first week on the job.
OSHA officials often decide not to penalize companies for worker deaths. When they do, they routinely negotiate with business owners and reduce violations and fines.
In some cases, OSHA doesn’t follow up after a worker’s death from heat exposure to ensure that the company is complying with the measures the agency imposed to prevent future fatalities.
Workers of color have borne the brunt: Since 2010, Hispanics have accounted for a third of all heat fatalities, yet they represent a fraction — 17% — of the U.S. workforce. Health and safety experts attribute this unequal toll to Hispanics’ overrepresentation in industries vulnerable to dangerous heat, such as construction and agriculture.
OSHA’s record-keeping on heat fatalities is so poor that there’s no way to know exactly how many workers have died from heat.
Current and former OSHA officials acknowledge that the known death tally is a vast undercount. The agency mostly relies on companies to report worker fatalities after they occur, but not all do so.
CJI and NPR reporters analyzed worker heat deaths recorded by OSHA between 2010 and 2020 and compared each incident day’s high temperature with historical averages over 40 years. Most of the deaths happened on days that were unusually hot for that date. More than two-thirds occurred on days when the temperature reached at least 90 degrees.
Yet no worker should die from heat, said Ronda McCarthy, an occupational health specialist who directs medical services at the health care provider Concentra, in Waco, Texas. McCarthy spent seven years educating her home state’s municipal workers about heat, which reduced cases of worker heat exhaustion and similar conditions there.
“Heat illness should be considered a preventable illness,” she said.
No federal heat standard
OSHA has known about the dangers of heat — and how to prevent deaths — for decades. In 1972, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studied the effects of heat stress on workers in the U.S. and recommended criteria for an OSHA heat standard. Under the proposal, employers would have had to give employees one break every hour and offer ready access to water. New workers would have received extra breaks so they could acclimate to strenuous activity in the heat.
NIOSH has refined these safety measures — first in 1986 and, again, in 2016 — but OSHA has notacted on them because of other regulatory priorities. This year, for the first time, OSHA is officially considering a heat standard by putting it on its regulatory agenda. James Frederick, OSHA’s acting director, said it’s a “priority” for the Biden administration.
“Occupational exposure to heat remains a very important topic,” Frederick said in an interview with CJI and NPR. “We’re focused on improving our efforts to protect workers moving forward.”
James Frederick, OSHA’s acting director, says heat safety is a “priority” for the Biden administration. Ian Morton/NPR
Absent a heat standard, OSHA must rely on a 50-year-old regulation guaranteeing workers a “hazard-free workplace.” OSHA does require companies to provide adequate water but not other heat-safety measures.
OSHA’s own research shows relying on this general rule hasn’t worked. A 2016 study by agency scientists found that some employers whose workers got sick or died from heat hadn’t met basic water provisions. Most companies never offered rest breaks. Only one out of 84 total employers had a plan for building up its workers’ tolerance for laboring in heat.
In 2011, four labor and public interest organizations, including Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, petitioned OSHA to issue a heat standard. They asked the agency for an emergency temporary standard because a new rule, the petition stated, “could potentially take many years before it’s finalized and implemented.”
David Michaels, then the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, who oversaw OSHA, denied the petition, arguing in a January 2012 letter to petitioners that workers weren’t dying from heat at a rate that would justify a legal standard. Recognizing extreme heat’s threat, he said most workers can “recover fairly quickly when the appropriate measures are taken.”
Instead, Michaels launched a voluntary awareness campaign distributing posters and flyers that instructed employees on how to protect themselves. OSHA incorporated these precautions into a free bilingual phone app featuring government-issued heat alerts and advisories. The agency continued this campaign through 2013. Its principle message remains on OSHA’s website today.
David Michaels (right), then the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, who oversaw OSHA, attends a committee hearing in 2010. Astrid Riecken/Getty Images
Michaels touted the campaign as a success at the time. The numbers are less clear. The number of workers who succumbed to heat topped 61 cases during the campaign’s inaugural year, in 2011 — an all-time high. Another 65 workers would die from heat exposure in the ensuing two years, closer to the annual average for the decade, while the campaign remained an agency priority.
Six years after his petition denial letter, and after leaving OSHA’s top post, Michaels changed his approach. In 2018, he joined Public Citizen and 131 additional groups in a second petition asking the agency to enact a heat standard. This time, petitioners cited NIOSH’s updated guidelines and warned that “this warming trend will not only continue but accelerate.”
In a recent interview, Michaels, now a public health professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said the agencywide consensus was that climate change would worsen the problem. But the rule-making process at OSHA is “so difficult” and the industry opposition so formidable that adopting a heat standard “became a bridge too far,” he said. He has come to believe a standard is essential.
“We know that heat kills,” Michaels said. “And if we don’t have requirements, heat will kill more workers.”
Search and rescue
A standard that included water, rest, shade and acclimatization could have saved Beltran, an experienced farmworker who traveled more than 1,300 miles from San Luis, Ariz., to the heart of America’s Corn Belt to pull tassels off corn plants for Rivera Agri Inc.
The day he went missing in the fields on the outskirts of Grand Island, the temperature — with humidity — felt like 100 degrees. Joseph Rivera, the company’s owner, placed an emergency call to authorities shortly after 5 p.m. Beltran was in the field but didn’t come out with the other workers, he told the 911 operator.
Cruz Urias Beltran went missing in the cornfields near Grand Island, Neb., on a day when the temperature — with humidity — felt like 100 degrees.
Walker Pickering for NPR
The call set off an elaborate search-and-rescue mission in the central Nebraska city of 51,000. One volunteer flew a Piper Cub airplane low and slow, on the lookout for the orange safety hat atop Beltran’s salt-and-pepper hair. Another manned a helicopter circling the sea of stalks until the chopper ran low on fuel. At sunset, a Nebraska State Patrol plane with thermal-imaging equipment scanned for a sign of Beltran’s body temperature, but since the plants and soil also were emanating heat, he went undetected.
The following morning, as the temperature hovered in the 90s, the Red Cross opened a temporary cooling station with air conditioning for the 100 volunteers who joined the search. Shortly after noon, someone spotted Beltran’s body, facedown in the husks.
Two months after Beltran’s body was shipped to his family’s home in Mexico’s Sonora state, an OSHA inspector visited Rivera Agri as part of the agency’s investigation into the death. OSHA inspection records show the company didn’t deploy the kind of preventive measures that a heat standard would have required. Rivera Agri did not ensure that employees took enough rest breaks in shade, drank sufficient amounts of water and adapted to their grueling work, the records show.
Beltran hugs his son, Jesus Adrian Urias Machado. Beltran was an experienced farmworker and traveled from Arizona to work in Nebraska.
Paty Espinoza
“These actions were left to the employees to manage themselves,” the inspector wrote in a nine-page citation.
OSHA found that the “moderate lifting and bending” and “pushing and pulling” that Beltran had performed in the heat had contributed to his death. It cited Rivera Agri for a violation and proposed fines totaling $11,641. The agency also ordered the company to train employees on the symptoms of heat illness, among other safety measures. Rivera Agri agreed to OSHA’s conditions, and the fines were reduced to $9,500, records show.
Angela Rivera, who runs the farm labor contracting business with her father, Joseph, said the company has worked to fulfill the agreement. Today, it contracts with a farmworker-rights group to educate employees on how to respond to heat emergencies. Near the cornfield, it sets up extra water stations and has canopies for emergency shade.
“We’ve been in this business for a long time,” said Angela Rivera, who calls Beltran’s death “an unfortunate thing.”
“Every year we try to step it up,” she said.
Joseph Rivera said supervisors now monitor the heat on their cellphones and pull detasselers from the cornfields whenever it gets too hot — part of a heat-stress plan the Riveras created after Beltran’s death. They hand out brochures explaining the new policy to every farmworker on their bus.
Not the first death
Beltran was not Rivera Agri’s first heat-related fatality. In July 1997, a 39-year-old detasseler died of heatstroke under similar circumstances. Like Beltran, it was his third day on the job, and the temperature had spiked to 95 degrees. When he collapsed, the crew found him within two hours. But his core body temperature was 108 degrees — hot enough for the brain, liver and kidneys to shut down.
OSHA investigated his death but didn’t impose penalties because then-OSHA Area Director Ben Bare determined there was no applicable standard. The lack of a standard leaves individual OSHA officials to decide whether a general violation applies to each death, creating a pattern of uneven enforcement in worker heat-death cases, records show.
CJI and NPR’s analysis of worker heat deaths shows that, like Rivera Agri, 11 other companies have lost more than one employee. In five of the cases, OSHA investigated the first fatality and issued citations, only for another employee to die from heat. One of those cited was Texas-based Hellas Construction, which builds publicly and privately funded stadiums and other sports infrastructure projects across the country.
In July 2018, the week before Beltran died in a Nebraska cornfield, Karl Simmons signed on as a laborer for Hellas. At 30, with long braided hair and a shoulder tattoo bearing his mother’s name, Simmons arrived at the sprawling Gateway Park in Fort Worth, Texas, ready to install turf.
On his second day on the job, Simmons, who had served in the U.S. Navy, took a lunch break and fielded a call from his wife, Precious. “It’s just hot,” he complained, according to a deposition she gave in a lawsuit filed by the family against Hellas. The five-person crew had already drunk all the water. Simmons returned to preparing the mixture to attach to the turf, shoveling gravel and adhesive chemicals into a mixer.
That afternoon — as the temperature topped 96 degrees — Simmons told his supervisor he felt hot, according to OSHA records. He complained about the heat two more times that day. Each time, he said he felt sick. At one point, he sought shade under a tree while his supervisor drove to a store to get water.
A passerby eventually spotted Simmons sprawled on the ground, facedown, and alerted the crew. His brother-in-law, Michael Spriggins, who worked alongside Simmons as a Hellas laborer, sprinted to his aid. He found Simmons gasping for breath, bleeding from his nose and mouth.
Karl Simmons was installing turf at Gateway Park in Fort Worth, Texas, when he felt ill. Later, he was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Heatstroke, the autopsy report confirmed. JerSean Golatt for NPR
“It was a sight I ain’t going to never forget,” Spriggins said in an interview with CJI and NPR.
He called 911 and then placed a cool towel under Simmons’ neck at the dispatcher’s instructions. Simmons opened his eyes.
“It looked like he’s gonna pull through this,” Spriggins recalled.
Two hours later, Simmons was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Heatstroke, the autopsy report confirmed. He was one of at least 53 workers who have been fatally stricken by heat in Texas since 2010, CJI and NPR’s analysis shows.
The next day, Jason Davidson, Hellas’s chief safety officer, emailed more than 340 company employees, addressing the perils of laboring in extreme heat. It was at least the fourth written warning he sent in the summer of 2018, when 11 additional Hellas employees were diagnosed with heat-related illnesses requiring medical attention.
Dean Wingo, who oversaw the OSHA regional office that includes Texas from 2007 to 2012, said Hellas’ hospitalization numbers suggest a worrying pattern. Serious heat-related illness involves everything from a heat rash to uncontrolled bleeding, according to medical experts. In its most severe form, heatstroke can cause multisystem organ failure that has lasting adverse effects. Wingo said he believes Hellas’ record on workplace heat safety shows “poor” company management.
Dean Wingo, who formerly oversaw the OSHA regional office that includes Texas, says he believes Hellas Construction’s record on workplace heat safety shows “poor” company management. Michael Cirlos III for NPR
Hellas officials declined a dozen interview requests for this story and didn’t respond to a list of 20 written questions from CJI and NPR. In its response to a wrongful-death lawsuit filed in July 2019 by Simmons’ wife, the company denied that its conduct “rose to a level of gross neglect” or that it failed to provide a safe workplace.
But in December 2018, OSHA found that Hellas hadn’t provided Simmons a workplace “free from recognized hazards” and cited the company for two violations, including failing to record Simmons’ death in OSHA logs, records show. OSHA proposed a fine of $14,782 against Hellas for Simmons’ death. The company earned more than $150 million in revenue that year.
As part of a settlement, Hellas agreed to implement “a more robust/detailed training program … to prevent heat exhaustion and heat stress injuries.” OSHA lowered the fine by nearly $2,000, to $12,934. That’s higher than the national average fine of $7,314 for employers in such cases, according to a CJI and NPR analysis.
Hellas executives did not carry out the safety measures, records show. And OSHA never showed up at a work site to see whether the company was following the terms of the settlement agreement.
OSHA’s regional office in Dallas, which investigated Simmons’ death, declined to discuss the case.
OSHA data shows the agency reduced heat-related sanctions nationally by 31%, on average, after settlements. It cut the penalties in more than half of the 246 heat-death cases in which OSHA had proposed them.
Wingo said the only way OSHA can ensure that companies like Hellas keep their promises is to conduct follow-up inspections in person.
“I don’t think it’s excusable,” he said. “When you’ve had a fatality, you go back.”
On July 19, 2019, a year after Simmons’ death, a second Hellas worker succumbed to heat — this time in Hondo, Texas, 42 miles west of San Antonio. At 6 a.m. that day, forecasters were promising a scorcher. The temperature would soar to 99 degrees, 3 degrees hotter than the 40-year average, the CJI and NPR data analysis shows.
Pedro Martinez Sr., 49, had been employed by Hellas for more than a year when he arrived for work at McDowell Middle School with his 22-year-old namesake. The father had gotten the son a summer job. At the time, Pedro Jr., also known as “Bruno,” was between semesters at a college in his home state of Zacatecas, Mexico.
On the third day, the pair did cement work on the school’s athletic field. They pulled out vertical rebar stakes using a device called a JackJaw, pumping a handle to wrench the stakes from the ground. As in the Simmons case, an OSHA inspection would later confirm that the area had little shade. Records show that the younger Martinez toiled for 10 hours before taking a lunch break at 4 p.m.
Nearly two hours later, he was working beside his father when he became overheated and ran off, hit a fence and collapsed. The father rushed his son to a local hospital’s emergency room, where nurses placed ice packs around his body. But his core temperature was already 108 degrees, according to a police report. The official cause of death was heatstroke.
The former construction site where Pedro Martinez Jr. died of heatstroke now serves as a recreational facility adjacent to a middle school in Hondo, Texas. Michael Cirlos III for NPR
In December 2019, OSHA cited Hellas for a willful violation, the most serious category. The citation would have placed Hellas on a public list of “severe violators,” reserved for repeat offenders. The agency proposed a penalty of $132,598 — the maximum amount OSHA could levy at the time.
One month later, Hellas challenged the citation, arguing it should be dismissed because OSHA didn’t prove “the necessary elements of its claims.” The Labor Department settled with Hellas in April 2020, cutting the fine in half and reclassifying the willful violation as five “serious” ones. This kept Hellas off the severe violators list. A revised settlement agreement required the company to create a heat-illness prevention plan, among other things. It’s unclear whether Hellas followed through.
By May of last year, Hellas had paid the fine, and OSHA resolved the case. The agency’s regional office in San Antonio, which investigated Martinez’s death, declined two requests to discuss the case.
A state standard falls short
Besides Texas, the states of California, Florida and Arkansas have each recorded at least 14 worker heat deaths since 2010, according to CJI and NPR’s analysis. Unlike most states, however, California has its own heat standard. Passed in 2005, the standard was later named after a 17-year-old pregnant farmworker, Maria Jimenez, who died from heat exposure while pruning grapes. The standard was the first to uphold the pillars of heat safety: water, rest, shade and acclimatization.
In 2015, after the United Farm Workers sued California’s state version of OSHA, the agency tightened its standard. Cal/OSHA lowered the heat safety limit from 85 to 80 degrees and required companies to prepare for extreme heat threats on days hotter than 95 degrees. It also allocated more money and staff to enforcement.
Today, California’s rule is widely viewed as the gold standard. The Labor Department should emulate it, said John Newquist, who served as assistant administrator in OSHA Region 5 in the Upper Midwest from 2005 to 2012.
“It’s easy with California already adopting this thing for years,” he said. “If you follow these guidelines, that works.”
But OSHA data on worker heat deaths suggests the state’s standard can fall short. The rule has led to a rise in heat-related enforcement actions by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal/OSHA, every year but 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic affected such activities across the board. In 2019, for instance, the agency conducted more than 4,000 heat inspections and cited workplaces in nearly half of them. Still, the CJI and NPR analysis shows that California’s yearly tally of worker heat deaths has remained steady over the past decade.
Some critics say the agency has yet to curb worker heat illnesses and deaths because of lax and uneven enforcement.
Garrett Brown, a Cal/OSHA inspector from 1994 to 2014, has investigated dozens of heat deaths and worked as a special advisor for a former Cal/OSHA secretary and as a part-time inspector until this year. He believes the agency can’t “do what it needs to do” to protect the state’s workers because of its chronic understaffing. Brown has documented staffing levels for years, charting the data on his blog, Inside Cal/OSHA. The figures reveal a tiny workforce — about 190 inspectors for 1 million employers responsible for 18 million workers. That’s one inspector for roughly every 5,200 companies.
Brown said mismanagement and the state’s inability to fill inspector positions have exacerbated the problem. As of July 31, at least 25% of nearly 250 Cal/OSHA inspector positions remained vacant. And that can make for dire consequences on the ground.
A firefighter’s death
In California, where fires have been raging, the victims of heat-related deaths are sometimes firefighters.
In April 2015, just two months before California’s standard was tightened, Raymond Araujo, one of 4,000 inmates who then served as firefighters for the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — known as Cal Fire — was on a 2-mile hike in Banning, Calif., about 30 miles from Palm Springs. Winding through steep, often shadeless hills, the trail was part of the department’s required cardiovascular training. On that day, the temperature climbed to 81 degrees, 10 degrees hotter than the 40-year average.
A fire station warning sign in Fallbrook, Calif. A Cal/OSHA inspection report named heat as a contributing factor in Raymond Araujo’s death while he was training as a firefighter for Cal Fire. But his death was ultimately deemed an accident. Ariana Drehsler for NPR
As the 12-member group neared the end of the exercise, Araujo stumbled and fell to his knees. His supervisor told his colleagues to help Araujo stand up and remove his fire gear so he could finish the hike. He walked another 30 feet and eventually collapsed.
The fire captain called for medical assistance, and a helicopter transported Araujo back to a nearby base camp, where he was pronounced dead, the records show.
While the Cal/OSHA inspection report named heat as a contributing factor in Araujo’s death, the cause was “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” according to the autopsy report. As a result, Cal/OSHA deemed his death an accident.
Brown, the former Cal/OSHA inspector, reviewed the agency’s report and said it was impossible for him to know why officials declined to investigate. He said the incident resembled many cases he had investigated — where workers suffered heart attacks because of the heat. Were he leading the charge, Brown said, he would have wanted to talk to eyewitnesses because the incident had all the hallmarks of a heat illness violation.
“One way to invalidate a fatality report is to decide that it’s natural causes,” he said, explaining that Cal/OSHA managers can look for ways to lessen understaffed inspectors’ workloads.
Cal/OSHA declined CJI and NPR’s requests to interview key officials for this story. But an agency spokesman defended Cal/OSHA’s handling of Araujo’s death, noting that the agency followed the Cal/OSHA medical unit’s assessment in determining a cause of death.
Asked about the effectiveness of the heat standard, the agency said it regularly looks to enhance enforcement activities.
“We continue to evaluate the effectiveness of our programs and consult with various subject matter experts to determine what changes, if any, are necessary to improve health and safety,” spokesman Frank Polizzi said in an email.
“It pays not to comply”
Just before 8 a.m. on July 28, 2019, Cal Fire firefighter Yaroslav “Yaro” Katkov set out with a fellow employee and a fire captain on a hike similar to the one that Araujo had made. The 28-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, who lived in Murrieta, Calif., a bedroom community near San Diego, had served as a reserve firefighter before being hired by Cal Fire in a seasonal role a year earlier.
Cal Fire firefighter Yaroslav “Yaro” Katkov was on a routine training exercise when he stumbled and felt exhausted shortly before he collapsed. Ashley Vallario
On a standard training exercise, Katkov was asked to complete a 1.45-mile loop at Cal Fire’s rural Station 16 in Fallbrook, a remote mountainous area halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. As they traversed the loop, the captain and the co-worker noticed Katkov lagging behind the required 30-minute deadline to finish the hike. The two stopped on several occasions to allow Katkov to catch up, delaying their end time by 10 minutes. The temperature would climb to 88 degrees that day — 5 degrees hotter than the 40-year average.
The captain, Joe Ekblad, recognized that Katkov hadn’t given his body enough of a rest yet but ordered the firefighters to repeat the exercise, according to the Cal/OSHA records. On the way up the steepest incline of the loop, Katkov stumbled and told his supervisor he felt exhausted — two telltale signs of heat stress. He collapsed on the hilltop, was airlifted to a hospital nearly two hours later and died of heat illness the next day.
“He loved the idea of being like a wildland firefighter,” said Ashley Vallario, Katkov’s fiancée. “It made him happy.”
This time, Cal/OSHA investigated Katkov’s death, interviewing eyewitnesses. The inspector detailed extensive failures by the captain, which led to his demotion. The agency found that Cal Fire had failed to stop the hike and seek emergency medical treatment even after Katkov had exhibited heat-related symptoms. Regulators levied a fine of $80,000 — almost five times the average Cal/OSHA fine of $17,000 in these cases.
Neither Cal Fire nor Ekblad responded to requests for comment.
Yaro Katkov was assigned to Cal Fire/San Diego County Fire’s De Luz Station 16 in Fallbrook. He died of heat illness after a training exercise in the area.
Ariana Drehsler for NPR
Such a large penalty shows what a fully enforceable heat standard can do, some experts say. But Cal/OSHA records suggest the regulators’ stick has not come soon enough. Since 2012, at least four other firefighters have died during Cal Fire training hikes. All the firefighters but Katkov were inmates. No other case yielded sanctions.
Cal Fire’s training processes, meanwhile, continue to put firefighters at risk. In 2020, almost a year after Katkov’s death, another department firefighter was sickened by heat during a hike. That firefighter was rushed to the hospital and survived.
Ellen Widess, head of Cal/OSHA from 2011 to 2013, said she sees an unsettling pattern: Employers can brush off the cost of an agency fine. In many cases, she said, penalties have no effect.
“We’ve seen that the costs of [non]compliance are so cheap,” Widess said. “It pays not to comply.”
“It’s going to be like this every year”
In the three years since Public Citizen renewed its petition for an OSHA heat standard, political pressure for such action has grown. In March, Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., authored legislation that would require OSHA to create a national heat standard based on NIOSH criteria and mandate employer training “to prevent and respond” to heat illnesses. The bill, co-sponsored by at least 57 House Democrats, is pending in committee. It marks the second attempt by federal lawmakers to establish a rule since 2019.
OSHA, meanwhile, said it will take the first step toward issuing a rule this fall. In October, the agency plans to publish a request for information from employers, occupational health specialists, climate scientists and workers on the viability of a standard. Frederick, OSHA’s acting director, said the input could help the agency develop a regulation that applies to any industry in the United States.
“Heat hazards exist in many, many industries,” he said. “We know that we have work to do with almost every industry to understand … what the effect of heat hazards in their workplace is and how best they are putting in practices and controls to mitigate those hazards.”
Already, former OSHA officials are anticipating industry pushback, particularly from construction groups.
The cornfield where Cruz Urias Beltran’s body was found near Grand Island, Neb. Walker Pickering for NPR
“Every time OSHA proposes a standard, [the] industry accuses OSHA of killing jobs and destroying whatever industry is going to be regulated,” said Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant labor secretary who helped shepherd two chemical-exposure standards through protracted rule-making processes. “That would probably follow with a heat standard.”
Some states have decided not to wait. In June, as an unprecedented heat wave blanketed the Pacific Northwest, Sebastian Francisco Perez moved irrigation pipes at a nursery in Willamette Valley, Oregon. Perez was found dead at the end of his shift. Preliminary information suggests the incident was heat related, but Oregon Occupational Safety and Health (Oregon OSHA) has yet to make a determination, according to Aaron Corvin, a spokesman for Oregon OSHA. Ten days later, the state enacted an emergency heat standard.
Back in Grand Island, Neb., where the average high temperature has increased 2 degrees since the 1990s, the intensifying heat is not lost on Joseph Rivera. As a younger man in the fields, he remembers there were hot and humid days. But now the heat is so extreme, he said, “you get these hot days that just come up over you.”
“With climate change, you hit 112 in Nebraska the other day,” Rivera said, explaining why he’s amenable to a federal heat standard. “It’s going to be like this every year.”
Christina Stella, a reporter with Nebraska Public Media; Jacob Margolis, a reporter with KPCC in Los Angeles; Allison Mollenkamp, an intern on NPR’s investigative team; and The Texas Newsroom contributed to this story. Julia Shipley, Brian Edwards and David Nickerson reported this story as fellows for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. Cascade Tuholske, a climate impact scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, contributed to the data analysis. Public Health Watch, an independent investigative nonprofit, helped edit this story.
This story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Stung by climate change: drought-weakened bee colonies shrink U.S. honey crop, threaten almonds
Karl Plume
GACKLE, North Dakota (Reuters) – There was barely a buzz in the air as John Miller pried the lid off of a crate, one of several “bee boxes” stacked in eight neat piles beside a cattle grazing pasture outside Gackle, North Dakota.
“Nothing,” Miller said as he lifted a plastic hive frame from the box, squirming with only a few dozen bees. “Normally this would be dripping, full of honey. But not this year.”
A scorching drought is slashing honey production in North Dakota, the top producing state of the sweet syrup, and a shortage of bees needed to pollinate fruits and flowers puts West Coast cash crops like almonds, plums and apples at risk, according to more than a dozen interviews with farmers, bee experts, economists and farm industry groups.
Miller and other Midwestern apiarists haul their drought-weakened insects by truck to California almond farms in the winter to pollinate orchards in the top global producer of the nuts increasingly in demand for milk substitutes. Then they move on to other fruits.
The drought’s impact therefore will be felt far beyond North Dakota, where withered alfalfa fields and parched pastures usually teeming with sweet clover and gumweed are providing bees little nectar this summer.
The dearth of strong bee colonies and the resulting higher costs to lease them for pollination services will add to the challenges of West Coast growers already dealing with drought and, in California, soaring water costs. It could also add to soaring costs consumers are facing at grocery stores.
Scientists have linked weather extremes from severe heat to floods and droughts to climate change. Such weather events are rippling through the food chain, raising food costs and heaping economic pain on small-scale farmer — and devastating bee colonies.
The 2.7 million managed honey bee colonies in the United States, one in five of them in North Dakota, are crucial to pollinating scores of crops, including cherries and peaches as well as almonds and apples. Income from pollination services totaled $254 million in 2020, according to U.S. government data.
Many beekeepers produce honey during summer in the northern Midwest and Plains, where bees forage on pastures and rangelands, harvesting what honey the bees do not consume or stow away to nourish their young.
North and South Dakota, Montana and Minnesota accounted for 46% of all U.S. honey production last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Apiarists truck the bee hives to milder climates like California during the fall and winter, generating crucial income by leasing colonies to fruit and nut farms to pollinate crops.
Poor summer weather on the prairies has left colonies weakened, with fewer bees. A smaller amount of nectar also forces beekeepers to help feed their colonies with less nutritious sugar solution or corn syrup, an added expense for producers already hurt by a smaller honey harvest.
“What happens in North Dakota in August has a direct impact on what happens in California in February,” Miller said. “Weak colonies that lack sufficient stores of honey going into winter will not be in good shape for the upcoming almond bloom.”
Miller expects less than 30 pounds of harvestable honey per colony from his roughly 16,000 hives this summer, down from around 50 pounds in recent years and the least in his 52 years of records, as North Dakota suffers its worst drought since 1988, according to climatologists.
Beekeeper Dwight Gunter also expects less than half of his normal honey harvest this summer. Honey prices have increased about 15% to 20% so far this year as supplies tighten. Gunter’s farm near Towner, North Dakota, is in the driest part of the state, with his entire county under “exceptional” drought.
“Last fall, it was dry as a bone and we never got any rain in this area. No winter snow either,” he said. “The pollen flow this year has been considerably less.”
The drought is expected to weaken bee colonies across the region, said Joan Gunter, Dwight’s wife and the president of the American Beekeeping Federation.
“This is really going to affect bee health. We’re used to having good nutrition for the bees and they’re probably not going to get that this year,” she said.
Iowa-based cooperative Sioux Honey, which produces 20% to 25% of U.S. honey under the Sue Bee brand, estimates the drought could drag domestic production down 25% to as much as 40% this year. Some 75% of the cooperative’s honey comes from Montana, the Dakotas and Minnesota.
President and Chief Executive Mark Mammen worries that the drought will be a “double-edged sword” for his more than 200 producers as honey revenue drops and as weaker colonies may earn less from pollination services.
“Without pollination revenue, it would be very tough for beekeepers to survive these days.”
HIGHER POLLINATION COSTS
California’s drought-hit almond growers, who account for around 80% of global production, may be in for a shock come September or October as they negotiate pollination contracts for the upcoming season, said agricultural economist Brittney Goodrich, at the University of California at Davis.
Almond growers required about 2.5 million colonies last year to pollinate acres that have more than doubled in the last 15 years as demand for almond milk and health foods has grown. That represented around 88% of all managed U.S. hives, Goodrich said, adding that supplies of strong hives will remain tight this year.
“This certainly has the potential to impact almond yields,” she said.
Pollination services are among the largest input costs for almond farms, and those costs are set to rise at least 5% to 10% for the upcoming season, said Denise Qualls, pollination broker and founder of brokerage The Pollination Connection.
“I’m definitely concerned about there being enough bees for pollination,” Qualls said. “If growers want good, quality hives, they’re going to have to pay for them.”
Almond farmer Ben King has already seen his pollination cost rise from $210 per hive to $230 as demand for strong colonies has outpaced supply and beekeepers pass along their higher costs.
The drought, meanwhile, is tightening bee supplies further. King’s beekeeper will only guarantee him 675 hives for the upcoming season, down from the 700 he normally would rent for his groves near Arbuckle, California.
“Overall, you’re going to have less pollination because you’re going to have less hive strength,” he said. “Everybody is scrambling this year because of drought.”
(Reporting by Karl Plume in Gackle, North Dakota; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Nick Zieminski)
Mega-clouds of traveling smoke are harming people’s health thousands of miles away from wildfires
Morgan McFall-Johnsen
A resident watches from his porch as the Cameron Peak Fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado’s history, burns outside Estes Park, Colorado, October 16, 2020. Jim Urquart/Reuters
Wildfire smoke is traveling thousands of miles, polluting air on distant coasts and even in the North Pole.
World-traveling clouds of wildfire smoke may be annual events now.
For the second year in a row, enormous wildfires are creating clouds of smoke big enough to generate their own weather, blanket entire continents, and turn faraway skies orange or grey.
Smoke is billowing from blazes in the western US, Canada, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Algeria, and Siberia – so much, in fact, that astronauts on the space station can see it. The wildfires in California and Oregon have darkened skies and led to air-quality warnings in New York City and Boston, as they did last summer. The Siberian fires, meanwhile, have sent clouds of smoke and ash to the North Pole, nearly 2,000 miles away, then down to Canada and Greenland.
The Dixie fire’s thick smoke plume, as seen from the International Space Station on August 4, 2021. NASA/JSC
Each time a big fire burns, its smoke can rise high in the atmosphere, where winds can catch it and carry it for thousands of miles until it hits a weather system that pushes it back towards the ground. That’s when it poses a health risk. Many people see wildfires as a local problem – a danger to people in Greece or California, say, but not for them personally. That’s incorrect, according to environmental epidemiologist Jesse Berman.
“Every one of these wildfire events is an opportunity for that smoke to travel long distances and affect not only the people nearby, but also those very far away,” Berman told Insider. “People who live in areas that have relatively good air quality are going to be all of a sudden subjected to levels of pollution that are many times higher than what’s normally seen, and at levels that are very harmful to health.”
These mega-clouds of world-traveling smoke may become a regular, annual occurrence, according to Berman – “if not multiple times every single year,” he said.
Climate change is expected to lead to more frequent, larger, more intense wildfires in the coming decades. A new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that “fire weather” will probably increase through 2050 in North America, Central America, parts of South America, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, north Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. That means more days where conditions are warm, dry, and windy enough to trigger and sustain wildfires.
Wildfire smoke shrouds the Statue of Liberty, as seen from Brooklyn, New York, July 21, 2021. Brendan McDermid/Reuters
The amount of fuel available to burn in those places – dry vegetation – is also likely to increase as rising temperatures cause the air to absorb more moisture and bring about more droughts.
“When these events cover hundreds or thousands of miles, everybody is at risk,” Berman said. “It doesn’t matter where you’re living. You can be affected by these events the same as anyone else.”
Particles in wildfire smoke can strain your lungs, heart, and immune system
Smoke from the Bootleg Fire rises behind the town of Bonanza, Oregon, July 15, 2021. Bootleg Fire Incident Command via AP
Wherever it goes, wildfire smoke fills the air with microscopic particles from the material that has burned and the resulting chemical reactions.
Known as PM2.5, these particles measure no more than 2.5 micrometers across (that’s about 30 times smaller than a human hair), allowing them to penetrate deep into your lungs and enter your bloodstream. When you inhale these particles – as millions of people have in the last year – they can damage the lining of your lungs and cause inflammation.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that smoke can “make you more prone to lung infections” including COVID-19, since any breach in the lungs’ lining offers more opportunities for a virus to infiltrate.
Satellite imagery shows smoke spreading over the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in eastern Russia on August 8, 2021. NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens
Indeed, a recent study linked about 19,000 cases of COVID-19 on the West Coast to wildfire smoke last summer. The paper, published last week, found a correlation between high levels of PM2.5 pollution and spikes in coronavirus cases in counties across California, Oregon, and Washington.
Experts suspected as much. Previous research had already shown that wildfire smoke leaves people more vulnerable to disease. In the short term, smoke can irritate the eyes and lungs and cause wheezing, coughs, or difficulty breathing, even in healthy people. Longer-term studies have connected PM2.5 pollution to an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, heart failure, and premature death. PM2.5 particles can also impair the immune system, possibly by disabling immune cells in the lungs.
Wildfire smoke can have the most severe effects on people who are already highly vulnerable to COVID-19: the elderly, children (many of whom are unvaccinated against the coronavirus), and people with asthma or chronic lung disease.
It rained for the first time at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet
Denise Chow
Rain fell for several hours at the highest point on the Greenland ice sheet last week — the first rainfall event in recorded history at a location that rarely creeps above freezing temperatures.
Scientists confirmed Wednesday that rain was observed Saturday at Summit Station, a research facility that sits atop the Greenland ice sheet and is operated year-round by the National Science Foundation. It was the first report of rain at the normally frigid summit, and it marks only the third time in less than a decade that above-freezing temperatures were recorded at the Arctic research station, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The rare rainfall caused significant melting at the summit and along the ice sheet’s southeastern coast over the weekend and occurred just weeks after the region experienced a separate extensive melting event in late July. The recent warm spell adds to concerns that climate change is rapidly melting ice in the Arctic, which accelerates sea-level rise around the world.
Above-freezing temperatures were recorded at Summit Station, which sits at an elevation of 10,551 feet above sea level, beginning Saturday at 5 a.m. local time. The National Snow and Ice Data Center estimated that over the course of three days 7 billion tons of rain fell over the ice sheet.
“Warm conditions and the late-season timing of the three-day melt event coupled with the rainfall led to both high melting and high runoff volumes to the ocean,” National Snow and Ice Data Center researchers said in a statement.
The rain and warmer-than-usual temperatures were caused by a region of low air pressure that settled over Baffin Island and a ridge of high pressure over southeast Greenland that pushed warm air and moisture up from the south.
The melting peaked Saturday, affecting 337,000 square miles of ice, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. By Monday, the area of melted ice had returned to “moderate levels,” the researchers said.
Greenland’s sprawling 656,000-square-mile ice sheet expands and contracts as part of natural yearly variations, but global warming is causing glacial ice to melt at a rapid pace. Some climate models suggest that without aggressive climate interventions, the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in the summers by 2050.
The consequences of that would be catastrophic. If Greenland’s ice sheet were to completely melt, scientists have said global sea levels could rise more than 20 feet, affecting coastal communities around the world and submerging low-lying cities such as Shanghai, Amsterdam and New York.
Last week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a blistering report on the state of climate change, saying climate change is intensifying, occurring at an accelerated pace and is already affecting every region of the planet. The assessment also found that some changes that are already playing out, such as warming oceans and rising sea levels, are “irreversible for centuries to millennia.”
Biden EPA Bans Chemical Pesticide Linked to Psychological Health Disorders in Children
By Glynn Wilson August 19, 2021
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Millions of children just in the United States have been diagnosed with some form of attention deficit disorder and/or hyperactivity disorder by psychiatrists and psychologists, and are often treated with pharmaceutical medication or behavioral therapy.
But what if these problems are not genetic or cultural psychological issues, but caused by chemicals children are exposed too in industrial society?
Farmers have been spraying chlorpyrifos on food crops such as strawberries, apples, citrus fruits, broccoli and corn since 1965. But studies now show this pesticide is inked to neurological damage in children, including reduced IQ, loss of working memory, and attention deficit disorders.
While the Trump administration fought to keep it in use, the Biden administration just announced it would be banned in food from now on after a court ruling forced the Environmental Protection Agency to provide proof of the chemical’s safety or regulate it out of existence.
This week the EPA issued a final ruling saying chlorpyrifos can no longer be used on the food that makes its way onto American dinner plates, a regulatory action intended to protect children and farmworkers, according to a press release from the agency.
In a statement announcing the decision, EPA Administrator Michael Regan called it “an overdue step to protect public health from the potentially dangerous consequences of this pesticide.”
“After the delays and denials of the prior administration, EPA will follow the science and put health and safety first,” Regan said.
Health, environment and labor organizations have been waging a campaign to revoke the use of chlorpyrifos for years. The EPA was considering a ban under the Obama administration, but under Trump, the agency concluded there wasn’t enough evidence showing the harmful effects of the chemicals on humans and kept it on the market.
That decision set off a series of legal challenges. Back in April, a federal appeals court ruled the decision was up to the EPA to produce indisputable proof that the pesticide is safe for children. If the agency failed to comply by Aug. 20, the judge said, then the food growers would be barred from using it.
In addition to use on farms, chlorpyrifos is one of several common household chemicals employed to try keeping ants, roaches, termites and mosquitos out of homes.
“It took far too long, but children will no longer be eating food tainted with a pesticide that causes intellectual learning disabilities,” said Patti Goldman, an attorney for Earthjustice, which represents health, environment and labor organizations behind the lawsuit. “Chlorpyrifos will finally be out of our fruits and vegetables.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council similarly cheered the EPA’s move, but cautions that the pesticide can still be used on other things, including cattle ear tags. The group wants a ban on other organophosphate pesticides, which are in the same chemical family as chlorpyrifos.
The new rule will take effect in six months.
In studies cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children exposed to high chlorpyrifos are significantly more likely to experience Psychomotor Development Index and Mental Development Index delays, attention problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder problems, and pervasive developmental disorder problems.
The estimated number of children diagnosed with ADHD, according to a national 2016 parent survey, is 6.1 million, or 9.4 percent of all children in the U.S. This number includes 388,000 children between the ages of 2–5 years, another 2.4 million between the ages of 6 and 11, and 3.3 million from 12–17. Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls (12.9% compared to 5.6%).
Many children with ADHD are also often diagnosed with other mental, emotional, or behavioral disorders.
About 5 in 10 children with ADHD had a behavior or conduct problem, according to surveys. About 3 in 10 children with ADHD suffered from anxiety. These same children often suffer as well from depression, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette syndrome.
About 3 out of 4 children in the U.S. diagnosed with ADHD receive some form of treatment, 62 percent taking ADHD medication. Another 47 percent receive behavioral treatment
This has a major impact on the health care field. In studies from 2008–2011, children between the ages of 2 and 5 covered by Medicaid were twice as likely to receive clinical care for ADHD compared with similar-aged children covered by commercial employer-sponsored insurance. About 3 in 4 of these who had clinical care for ADHD recorded they received ADHD medication in their healthcare claims from 2008–2014. Fewer than half received any form of psychological services.
According to breaking news coverage of EPA’s announcement by The New York Times, chlorpyrifos is one of the most widely used pesticides commonly applied to corn, soybeans, apples, broccoli, asparagus and other produce.
The EPA decision follows an order in April by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that directed the agency to halt the agricultural use of the chemical unless it could demonstrate its safety. Labor and environmental advocacy groups estimate that the decision will eliminate more than 90 percent of chlorpyrifos use in the country.
In an unusual move, the new chlorpyrifos policy will not be put in place via the standard regulatory process, under which the EPA first publishes a draft rule, then takes public comment before publishing a final rule. Rather, in compliance with the court order, which noted that the science linking chlorpyrifos to brain damage is over a decade old, the rule will be published in final form, without a draft or public comment period.
“The announcement is the latest in a series of moves by the Biden administration to re-create, strengthen or reinstate more than 100 environmental regulations,” gutted by the Trump administration, according to the Times.
The pesticide has been linked in studies to lower birth weights, reduced IQs and other developmental problems in children. Studies traced some of those health effects to prenatal exposure to the pesticide.
“Pesticides like chlorpyrifos haunt farm workers, especially parents and pregnant women,” said Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for United Farm Workers of America, one of the groups on the petition. “They don’t hug their kids until they change clothes, they wash their laundry separately. When they miscarry, or when their children have birth defects or learning disabilities, they wonder if their work exposures harmed their children.”
Several states — including California, Hawaii, New York and Maryland — have banned or restricted the use of chlorpyrifos, and the attorneys general of those states, as well as those of Washington, Vermont and Massachusetts, joined the petition.
The Obama administration began the process of revoking all uses of the pesticide in 2015 but, in 2020, the Trump administration ignored the recommendations of EPA scientists and kept chlorpyrifos on the market.
“It is very unusual,” Michal Freedhoff, the EPA assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, said of the court’s directive. “It speaks to the impatience and the frustration that the courts and environmental groups and farmworkers have with the agency.”
“The court basically said, ‘Enough is enough,’” Ms. Freedhoff said. “Either tell us that it’s safe, and show your work, and if you can’t, then revoke all tolerances.”
The decision is expected to lead to criticism by the chemical industry and farm lobby, which worked closely with the Trump administration ahead of its decision to keep chlorpyrifos in use.
“The availability of pesticides, like chlorpyrifos, is relied upon by farmers to control a variety of insect pests and by public health officials who work to control deadly and debilitating pests like mosquitoes,” said Chris Novak, the chief executive of CropLife America, an agricultural chemical company, at the time of Trump’s decision.
Pesticide products that include chlorpyrifos include the brands Hatchet, manufactured by Dow AgroSciences; Eraser, manufactured by Integrated Agribusiness Professionals; and Govern, manufactured by Tenkoz.
Chlorpyrifos will still be permitted for nonfood uses such as treating golf courses, turf, utility poles and fence posts as well as in cockroach bait and ant treatments.
In a withering attack on the Trump EPA, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Ninth Circuit wrote on behalf of the court that, rather than ban the pesticide or impose restrictions, the agency “sought to evade, through one delaying tactic after another, its plain statutory duties.”
According to additional coverage in The Washington Post, the regulation to curtail use of the potent insect-killing chemical on food overturns a 2017 decision by then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to keep the pesticide on the market despite a recommendation by the agency’s scientists to restrict it, given its potential risks.
“For a half-century, chlorpyrifos has proved effective in keeping all sorts of pests off soybeans, almond trees, cauliflower and other crops. Farmers often deploy it when no other pesticide can do the job,” the newspaper reports. “But for the past decade, environmental, labor and public-health groups have clamored for phasing out the pesticide, which can lead to headaches or blurred vision when inhaled or ingested. Some studies of families in apartment buildings found that exposure during pregnancy led to memory loss and other cognitive issues in children.”
Claudia Angulo, a farmworker who came from Mexico to work the citrus and broccoli fields in California’s San Joaquin Valley, was pregnant when she was exposed to chlorpyrifos. She blames the pesticide for her son Isaac’s developmental delays, after the chemical showed up in tests on his hair.
“It’s affecting a lot of families. We’re all being affected, either with allergies or some with disabilities,” said Angulo, who is now part of a class-action lawsuit. “As a mother, I’m still struggling and won’t stop until this pesticide is not harming kids.”
“Results: Highly exposed children (chlorpyrifos levels of >6.17 pg/g plasma) scored, on average, 6.5 points lower on the Bayley Psychomotor Development Index and 3.3 points lower on the Bayley Mental Development Index at 3 years of age compared with those with lower levels of exposure. Children exposed to higher, compared with lower, chlorpyrifos levels were also significantly more likely to experience Psychomotor Development Index and Mental Development Index delays, attention problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder problems, and pervasive developmental disorder problems at 3 years of age.”
In addition to being banned in California, Hawaii, New York, Maryland, and Oregon, Canada and the European Union are already phasing out the insecticide on farms.
But federal regulators previously struck deals with chemical manufacturing companies to limit the use of chlorpyrifos for killing termites and several pests in homes, treating golf courses, and for growing cotton. The EPA will make a decision on whether to continue to allow for those and other nonfood uses by the end of next year.
According to the agency, the U.S. has a safe and abundant food supply, and children and others should continue to eat a variety of foods, as recommended by the federal government and nutritional experts. Washing and scrubbing fresh fruits and vegetables will help remove traces of bacteria, chemicals and dirt from the surface. Very small amounts of pesticides that may remain in or on fruits, vegetables, grains, and other foods decrease considerably as crops are harvested, transported, exposed to light, washed, prepared and cooked.
In obituary for a vaccinated man, daughters share anger — and a plea
Claire McNeill, Tampa Bay Times
Danielle Allen sifted through the files on her dad’s computer. She’d already gone through his eyeglasses, his printed-out jokes, his binder of Garfield clippings. She’d held the T-shirts he’d worn since they were kids. Her sister Nicole Allen-Gentile had packed up his scooter, which he’d used to visit a nature preserve during the long pandemic days. They knew he didn’t want a service. But in the packet titled “Stuff to Do Upon the Death of Clark Allen,” it became clear that an obituary mattered very much.
He left a draft. It began, Clark R. Allen of Delray Beach, Florida, passed away on ____ __, _____ at the age of __.
He’d moved last summer into assisted living, so his daughters changed the city to Lantana. They filled in July 22, 2021, and the age of 84.
The rest of their dad’s draft obituary outlined the proper nouns of his life: the jobs and boards and schools. What about the guy who kept a spreadsheet of every family pet’s birthday? They needed to say something, too, about the way he died. What they had witnessed in Florida.
Nicole emailed Danielle a furious start.
Clark died of Covid. <insert info about being vaccinated but an unvaxed person killing him>
At the Carlisle
Clark Allen had taken the virus seriously. Nicole mailed him gloves and masks. He stayed close to home and paged through the New York Times and the Palm Beach Post. His damaged lungs from decades with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease had heightened COVID-19′s threat.
His expansive oceanside life as a Florida retiree — where the warmth let him umpire youth baseball year-round — shriveled into the confines of his apartment.
Clark began sitting around, cooking less. He let go of his careful bookkeeping. The plan had always been to move him up north, into assisted living near Nicole — eventually. But now, with his blessing, his family found a place along the familiar coast.
On the walls at the Carlisle Palm Beach, apartment 432, he hung framed photos of his seven kids and their weddings and travels. On the fridge, he tacked newspaper clippings, like highlights from Danielle’s ice hockey games. When the place wasn’t locked down, he found a bridge group and scooted across the street for Butterfingers to stock the freezer.
He wore a mask, he told his two youngest daughters, except in the dining room. He knew he was vulnerable, and he desperately wanted to see his grandkids again. In Oregon, 33-year-old Danielle, a massage therapist, scrolled the news and worried. In Connecticut, Nicole, now 38, and a public librarian, did the same — until Clark got the Pfizer vaccine this winter. Then worry coexisted with a huge dose of relief.
He emailed and called near-weekly as he always had, reluctant to talk about himself per usual, instead wanting family updates, happy to hear of his children’s vaccinations. If he ever went quiet, they knew his bad lungs were acting up.
In early July, he confessed to Danielle that he was having a hard week. And on July 8, Nicole got a call. Clark was in the hospital.
Sports and squirrels
Clark was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1937, the son of Carroll and Edna Allen.
Danielle and Nicole left in the reference to his high school, where he had captained track and field. They kept his editorship of the Springfield College paper and yearbook, and the mention of the school radio station.
They kept the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders course and the EMT training and the stint covering sports for the Washington Post. As for his work, they trimmed until they wrote of “his life-long career in advertising and marketing for consumer packaged goods.”
He had been proud of his life. He’d provided. But Danielle and Nicole wanted to weave in a few things that had brought their dad joy.
Where he mentioned his “second career” as referee, his daughters wrote, Clark loved all things sports.
Where he mentioned his work clerking for Palm Beach County elections, they remembered his unfailing reminders of their civic duties. They wrote, Clark firmly believed in everyone’s right to vote and in the democratic process.
They thought of the way he had sent them photos of every creature to grace his porch. The lizards, he named Iggy, squirrels he called Homer or Gus, depending on their color.
Nicole wrote, It cannot go unmentioned how much Clark enjoyed animals.
Fighting for his life
At JFK Medical Center, Clark struggled for breath. A nurse told Danielle that Clark had tested positive for COVID-19 — their first breakthrough patient, the nurse said.
Nicole quickly called the Carlisle but didn’t hear back, so she emailed. “He is vaccinated, but I know the current data says you can still get and possibly transmit the disease. Please let me know if I should be alerting anyone else at the facility,” she wrote.
A staffer replied: “It could be a result of the vaccine itself. I hope he’s ok and I will let our wellness director and executive director know.”
Stunned, Nicole replied with a link to CDC evidence. “Vaccines cannot cause a positive test,” she wrote. “The facility should consider that the virus may be circulating among its staff and residents.”
The Carlisle employee said she was taking the situation “very seriously.”
A spokeswoman for the Carlisle’s ownership group, Senior Living, did not respond to questions from the Tampa Bay Times, like the vaccination rate of its staff. A statement instead mentioned the group’s “enhanced efforts” to fight the virus. “The health of and communication to our residents and team members are our greatest priority,” the spokeswoman said in an email.
At first, it seemed, even doctors were surprised that Clark had tested positive. JFK staff wondered if his pulmonary disease was to blame. Because Clark was vaccinated, a nurse said, he should recover. A few days later, the hospital released him.
“I really wish the hospital would keep him a bit longer,” Nicole wrote to her siblings.
Within 12 hours, Clark was back in the emergency room and fitted with a BiPap mask that pumped oxygen into his lungs. Nicole and Danielle booked flights, though their dad said he worried about Florida’s caseload.
At an Airbnb, Danielle and Nicole called the hospital. They couldn’t advocate for their dad in person, but they left voicemails for his doctor. Once, for something to do, they brought cookies for the nurses. A front desk worker, confused about where to send the treats, told them that the hospital had just expanded from one COVID unit to two.
Clark texted sometimes.
Haven’t seen M.D. since shortly after return.
On Remdesivir, just finished CT scan. I’m exhausted but breathing easier.
Trump’s sending gallon of Clorox.
Hungry. Can’t have food. Nothing since Monday morning pancake.
Eventually, his texts grew sparse.
One day, they caught their dad on FaceTime while they were going through his things at the Carlisle. He had the BiPap mask on. He waved. His daughters began to cry, and he cried, too. They told him they loved him. They watched him grow agitated, until a nurse ended the call.
Should they go there?
How much of his political life to include, they weren’t sure. In New Jersey, he had led the state’s Young Republicans, which he’d noted in his draft. He’d sat on national party boards. He mailed Danielle — decidedly not a Republican — repurposed GOP Christmas cards that thanked him for donations to President Bush.
In recent years, he’d begun to feel betrayed. President Trump did not speak to his values. And in conversations with his daughters, he lamented his party’s pandemic response. “Our great Governor, Trump’s buddy, just stammers when asked questions,” Clark wrote in an email as Florida prepared to roll out vaccines. “He has no clue.”
His daughters debated writing about his change of heart. In his files, Danielle found plenty of strongly worded emails to Republican politicians, as well as the occasional vacuum company, that suggested he was not shy about his views. He had even switched to No Party Affiliation.
But they didn’t want to further politicize the vaccine.
They let it go unsaid.
In the end
As the Florida days stretched out, Nicole and Danielle called siblings and called nurses.
They stopped talking about long-term care.
At the Carlisle, where they tended to his apartment, two residents came up to Danielle. Both knew Clark, but neither knew he’d tested positive for the virus nearly a week earlier.
Among staff and residents, masks appeared rare.
Danielle and Nicole had eaten up all of the headlines, like this from the AARP: Only 2 in 5 Florida Nursing Home Workers Vaccinated Against COVID-19.
They’d read emails from their dad about where he lived, describing his quest for pandemic-related information only to find absent nurses, scarce memos and a blank TV channel. A typical subject line: It would be funny if it were not so sad.
They’d heard the announcement that vaccinated people could also spread the disease, but they don’t believe that’s what happened in this case.
Was it a dining room server? A nurse?
The vaccine had given Clark a chance, but because of his health, it hadn’t caused a strong enough immune response, hospital nurses told them. And his lungs were too weak for a ventilator.
The ICU doctor said to think about hospice. The nurses told them of bad nights, of Clark ripping off IVs and his breathing machine. More than one nurse was near tears. The pulmonologist said it was time. Nurses said it was time. But then Nicole heard that Clark had sat up and drank ginger ale. She had to make the decision without being able to hold his hand.
Clark suffered, delirious, another night, while his daughters were caught in the mix of paperwork and permissions. Finally, on July 20, hospice took him in.
Nicole stood separated from him by a window. As he slept, she video called her siblings one by one, so they could say goodbye.
Choosing the right words
The obituary was something to do. The death certificate was slow to arrive from Florida, anyway, and while the family was making cremation plans, the funeral home director came down with the virus. Nicole emailed Danielle an early draft. Do not read if you are having a hard time, she wrote.
To Danielle, the first attempt read as too angry. She was angry. She’d just had to drop off her father’s glasses in a Walmart donation bin. She’d been crying in her car between massage clients, who couldn’t stop talking about the virus. And all of the stories emphasizing that vaccinated people rarely die of COVID-19 — which she knew was true — felt painful, like they erased her dad.
She knew he hadn’t had to die like this.
In early August, she received another draft from Nicole. Clark’s family urges everyone to get vaccinated to protect those who are still vulnerable.
Nicole proposed asking people to consider a donation to one of their dad’s favorite nonprofits, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Danielle emailed back an addition to thank the nurses, like the one who had played Patsy Cline in his hospital room.
Her dad had believed in the common good. She and Nicole had heard him tell stories of the sacrifices his family had made during the Great Depression and World War II. He’d wanted to donate his body to science, but COVID victims are not accepted. Instead, his children will split his ashes into seven.
Danielle rewrote the intro.
He was infected by someone who chose not to get vaccinated and his death was preventable.
It had pained him to see people acting without concern for their neighbors. Danielle and Nicole had agreed: If one person got vaccinated after reading his obituary, they knew he would be proud.
Danielle wrote, It is the wish of his family that everyone get vaccinated in order to prevent further death, sickness and heartbreak.
She took out heartbreak, then put it back in.
• • •
To read Clark Allen’s obituary in full, visit the Palm Beach Post.
Arizona ‘bracing for impact’ of Trump-driven election report
Zach Montellaro
The controversial Arizona 2020 election review is almost over, but top officials in the state’s largest county and secretary of state’s office aren’t waiting for the conclusions, launching a pair of preemptive strikes against a report that could land as soon as next week.
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, released a prebuttal laying out all of her office’s criticisms of the so-called election “audit.” She detailed the pre- and post-election testing election equipment underwent in Maricopa County and called the state Senate-led effort “secretive and disorganized” that routinely discarded best practices of an actual audit.
“All credible audits are characterized by controls, access, and transparency that allow for the processes and procedures to be replicated, if necessary,” Hobbs’ office wrote. “As this report has described, the review conducted by the Senate’s contractors has consistently lacked all three of these factors.”
And Stephen Richer, the Republican county recorder in Maricopa County, on Thursday issued a lengthy report of his own, in the form of an open letter to state Republicans, challenging the credentials of the reviewers and defending his own Republican bona fides.
“I will keep fighting for conservatism, and there are many things I would do for the Republican candidate for President, but I won’t lie about the election, and I will not unjustifiably turn my back on the employees of the Board of Supervisors, Recorder’s Office, and Elections Department — my colleagues and friends,” he wrote.
Since late April, contractors hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate have been reviewing all the ballots cast in Maricopa County, which President Joe Biden won en route to flipping the state, along with examining election equipment.
The process was initially supposed to take 60 days, but has stretched on well past that. Julie Fischer, a “deputy Senate liaison” for the effort, told POLITICO that the contractors’ report — the firm leading the effort is called Cyber Ninjas — is expected to be submitted to the state Senate on Monday, and a hearing will be scheduled after that.
Election officials in the state have opposed it nearly every step of the way, including Richer, Hobbs and the GOP-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
“The only thing that has been consistent about this endeavor has been missed deadlines and having to walk back statements,” Richer said at a Thursday press briefing organized by the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with election administrators. “Please look into it before taking whatever the Cyber Ninjas produce as gospel.”
The state Senate calls the Cyber Ninjas’ work an “audit,” a label almost universally rejected by election officials and experts because the Arizona effort has poorly defined processes and an embrace of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
From the jump, the review in Arizona has been plagued by disorganization and in-fighting. Cyber Ninjas’ owner is a supporter of former President Donald Trump and has promoted conspiracy theories about the election. Officials have said they were checking for bamboo fibers in ballots, a nod to a fringe theory that ballots were smuggled in from Asia. It has been funded by a nonprofit run by a correspondent for the far-right One America News Network and a former tech CEO who has poured millions into promoting Trump’s lies about the election.
Hobbs, who is also running for governor next year, was critical of the Cyber Ninjas-led effort in an interview earlier this week.
“This isn’t a real audit,” Hobbs said, noting that the schedule for the Arizona review has constantly shifted. “We’re sort of just bracing for impact” for the Cyber Ninjas’ conclusions.
In her prebuttal, her office wrote that “any ‘outcomes’ or ‘conclusions’ that are reported” from the state Senate’s process must be disregarded, and called on the state’s political leaders to “proclaim that the 2020 General Election was fair and accurate.”
Other election experts have previously torn into the Arizona review as unprofessionally run, including a report from former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, and Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“The Cyber Ninjas review suffers from a variety of maladies: uncompetitive contracting, a lack of impartiality and partisan balance, a faulty ballot review process, inconsistency in procedures, an unacceptably high level of error built into the process, and insufficient security,” Grayson and Burden wrote in their June report. “Because it lacks the essential elements of a bona fide post-election analysis, the review currently underway in Maricopa County will not produce findings that should be trusted.”
The Republican-controlled county board has also been engaged in a protracted battle with the state Senate. The board — and Dominion Voting Systems, the election vendor for the county — has refused to comply with recent subpoenas from the legislature, effectively daring the state Senate to find the board in contempt, with some Republicans in the closely-divided chamber saying they don’t support the Cyber Ninjas-led review.
The county board said this week it wants the state Senate to pay $2.8 million to replace voting machines the Senate subpoenaed. The county leased new machines after Hobbs said the old machines would be decertified because of chain of custody issues.
It also comes amid significant national pushback against the post-election audit movement. At a meeting of the nation’s secretaries of state last weekend, election officials overwhelmingly approved a set of guidelines for post-election audits.
Many of the guidelines read as implicit rebukes of the Arizona process, including definitive timelines and only allowing “a federally or a state accredited test lab to perform any audit of voting machine hardware or software.” The Justice Department also issued guidance late last month saying some post-election audits could run afoul of federal law.
Trump and his supporters have eagerly been awaiting the conclusion of the review in Arizona, and will likely use whatever the findings are to advance his baseless claims the election was stolen from him. During a July speech in the state, Trump said the process in the state would ultimately reveal that “we won by a lot,” and “this is only the beginning of the irregularities the Arizona audit is uncovering.” (There’s no legal process to transfer the state’s 11 electoral votes to his tally.)
Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican elections lawyer who has spoken out about the efforts to undermine faith in American democracy following the 2020 election, said he hoped the Cyber Ninjas report would land without making much noise and could quell the movement. “Once they can’t be backed up, then that will be an object lesson to other states, not to go down that perilous path of basically losing your credibility,” he said at the briefing.
And Richer concurred: “The Cyber Ninjas have been out there in common parlance now for about four months, and we haven’t seen this in other states,” the county elections official responded, praising the work of Arizona journalists and election officials in the states. “If we can pat ourselves on the back a little bit here.”
At least one of those efforts outside of Arizona appears to be withering. Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, an ally of Trump who is considering a gubernatorial run next year, sought to launch his own investigation.
But on Thursday, Mastriano sounded discouraged about the effort on a since-deleted Facebook livestream, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported. “We’re not in a very good spot right now,” he said. “I put my name out there to get it done, and I’ve been stopped for the time being.”
Even so, some election security experts said this is likely not the end of questionable reviews of the 2020 election.
“I’m a little less sanguine about that, as I see ongoing efforts” across the country, said the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s David Becker. “I think we’re going to need to be continually vigilant.”
California’s Caldor Fire has grown 20 times bigger: ‘It’s devastation’
Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
California’s Caldor Fire was more than 20 times bigger on Thursday than it was on Tuesday and has forced over 10,000 people to flee their homes, according to fire officials.
On Wednesday, dozens of fire engines and crews were called in from other fires to fight the Caldor fire, which exploded through heavy timber in steep terrain since erupting over the weekend southwest of Lake Tahoe in El Dorado County.
The fire, the cause of which is unknown, was 0% contained as of Thursday, Cal Fire said. It’s now at over 65,000 acres in size.
Increased humidity on Wednesday night into Thursday morning helped slow the fire’s progress, but fire officials expect fire behavior to increase Thursday afternoon when the inversion layer lifts, sparking new spot fires to the north and northeast of the fire area. A red flag warning is scheduled to continue through 11 a.m. Thursday.
More than 6,900 structures are threatened by the fire.
The number of those evacuated in El Dorado County jumped to 16,380 Wednesday, up from about 6,850 the day prior, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services told CNN.
The fire has blackened nearly 220 square miles and on Tuesday ravaged Grizzly Flats, California, a small community of about 1,200 people.
Dozens of homes burned there. Grizzly Flats resident Chris Sheean said the dream home he bought six weeks ago went up in smoke. “It’s devastation. You know, there’s really no way to explain the feeling, the loss,” Sheean said. “Everything that we owned, everything that we’ve built is gone.”
A home burns on Jeters Road as the Dixie fire jumps Highway 395 south of Janesville, Calif., on Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. Critical fire weather throughout the region threatens to spread multiple wildfires burning in Northern California.
Cal Fire reported Wednesday that the blaze had “experienced unprecedented fire behavior and growth due to extremely dry fuels pushed by southwest winds.”
Fire agencies battling the blaze say that the extent of the damage is not yet entirely known as unsafe conditions continue to prevent structure assessment teams from entering the area.
At least 16,000 other homes remain threatened by California wildfires, which are among some 104 burning throughout mostly Western states, officials from the National Interagency Fire Center said Thursday.
California’s wildfires are on pace to exceed the amount of land burned last year – the most in modern history.
The massive Dixie Fire – the nation’s largest at more than 1,000 square miles, which is about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island – also continued to burn Thursday.
The fire has destroyed 1,217 structures, including 649 homes, according to Cal Fire.
The Dixie Fire is the first to have burned from east to west across the spine of California, where the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains meet.
No deaths have been reported despite the speed and damage of the blazes in California.
Contributing: The Associated Press; The Record, Stockton, Calif.; The Reno Gazette-Journal
