When clean water isn’t always assured

Hello and welcome to The Associated Press Climate Watch newsletter. I’m Peter Prengaman, global climate and environment news director. Today I’m going to write about millions of people in the United States who cannot always count on clean drinking water.   

In America, most people don’t think twice about turning on their taps and drinking the water. The Safe Drinking Water Act, passed more than 50 years ago, aims to ensure that harmful pollutants don’t get into the water that gets into our homes, and by extension into our bodies. 

But there are still millions who can’t always count on clean and safe water. Many of them live in mobile home parks.  

How and why this happens was the focus of a recent @AP series that underscored significant inequalities. 

For Michael Phillis, a lead reporter on the series who has covered water policy for years, the reporting began with the knowledge that small water utilities often have more trouble than those serving large cities.  

Phillis and colleagues Travis Loller, Mary Katherine Wildeman and Brittany Peterson expected to find more problems with mobile homes, but nothing like this: In the past five years, nearly 70% of mobile home parks running their own water systems violated safe drinking water rules. 

“This is a group of people – a massive group of millions of people – that the law doesn’t help the same way it helps most of us,” said Phillis. 

How does that happen? 

Many mobile home parks exist in a gray area. They get water from a city or town, which ensures it’s clean when it enters the park. But the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t generally track water once it’s on private property. If the pipes within the park that serve individual homes are bad, the water may be dirty when it arrives at the faucet. 

The difference between residential and mobile homes is underscored in this visual by graphics artist Peter Hamlin.  

“That can leave residents in a bureaucratic nightmare when the water turns brown or stops flowing. The nearby utility can’t help, nor can state regulators,” said Phillis. “There’s nowhere really for them to go. They may have to hold out hope the park owner fixes the issue – eventually.” 

Even when park owners are willing to address the problems, such rehabs can take years. And then there are owners who refuse to repair pipes or are so absent that they have no idea of day-to-day problems that residents face.  

The team’s reporting found this was a big problem in Michigan, where many mobile home parks have been bought by private equity firms. One option that regulators have is to shut down parks in bad shape, but that creates another problem: where do those people go? For many, mobile homes are one of the last affordable housing options.  

Even when a problematic water system gets fixed, there is a lingering legacy: fear. People are distrustful and often won’t drink the water. Instead, they use much of their income to buy bottled water, a solution bad for their pocketbooks and the environment.  

To explore this side of the story, colleagues Jae Hong and Dorany Pineda got to know several families at mobile home parks in Southern California.  

One resident they interviewed, Virgilio Galarza Rodriguez, encapsulated the problem. An inspection in 2021 found high levels of arsenic in the water in their mobile. Now they have filters and regular water tests. 

“They tell us it’s safe to drink, but we don’t really trust it,” Galarza said. 

Agustin Toledo, resident of a mobile home, pushes a cart with water to his truck on Oct. 30, 2024, in Coachella, California. (AP Photo/Jae Hong). 

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✅Climate Solutions 

The Trump administration has moved to slow — and even arguably stop — a transition to green energies like solar and wind by eliminating tax incentives and instead bolstering greenhouse gas-emitting fuels like gasoline and coal. But much of the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction. 

That has U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres hopeful about the future, despite a lot of bad news around climate change, such as intensifying extreme weather events. 

What’s more, wind and solar and have reached a tipping point of penetration and cost reductions, according to a U.N. report released last week.  

“Obviously, the (Trump) administration in itself is an obstacle, but there are others. The government in the U.S. doesn’t control everything,” Guterres told colleague Seth Borenstein in an exclusive interview.  

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