By: Linda Densmore

Linda Densmore — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 14:36:30 +0000

22 years ago I moved to the central vally pregnant with my fist daughter. I really didn’t know much about the central valley other than it was hot and that as a nurse at Stanford we got a lot of people with cancer coming in to get treatments and diagnosed. We moved into a small house right outside Visalia and our neighbor said to make sure we brought in our outdoor plants and furniture in September because the cotton fields (a few blocks away) are sprayed with defoliant then. I thought that was kind of odd that we should get exposed to that and that the neighbors just accept it. Since I was pregnant I told my husband we had to get out of there before September so we moved to Porterville out in the country right in the middle of an orange grove. As we were moving in the owners who lived across the street said that the water was contaminated so they would pay for bottled water. We had the water tested because we were also bathing in it and the water testers told us that when testing the safety of city water they only test for the chemicals used most by the farmers (it’s too expensive to test for all potential chemicals).They found out which chemicals to test for by asking the farmers which one’s they used the most! Needless to say within the year we moved away from there too and have raised our kids eating as much organic food as we could find where we ended up (and with your information tried to decrease use of chemicals used on the lawns at our kids schools).

Comments on: Debate Grows Over New Water Rules In California

By: Linda Densmore