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"I Don't Drink My Water" Say Boonville Residents. What Is Being Done?

 
Boonville is a photogenic one-street town home to just over a thousand people.  It's got a hardware store, a couple grocery stores and a laundromat plus half a dozen places for tourists to get an espresso on their way to the coast. But beneath the surface is a very different story.  Many of the people who live in town don’t have safe drinking water.
Valerie Hanelt is chair of the Boonville Community Services District." We’d heard there were problems with water,  so we did some tests for nitrates and Ecoli. It was a blind test, so no one knew where the results came from."
The results were not good. Twenty-two out of twenty-four water samples were bad, some of them were really bad. "When I took them to the people in Sacramento they looked at me, and looked at the results, and looked back at me and said, 'this is third world.' These are indicators of other stuff in our water. If  you have Ecoli and nitrates you also have pharmaceuticals, cancer treatements, estrogen, oven cleaner, and its all going through your community and into the creeks and into the river. "
 
For more information about the Boonville water and sewer project visit www.avcsd.org