SECTION NEWS
www.ca-nv-awwa.org 11
based Environmental Justice Coalition for Water (EJCW) to
develop solutions for six small Salinas Valley communities
grappling with nitrate contamination. Most of the residents in the
six project areas are migrant workers who live in communities
ranging from as little as five to as many as 50 homes, with multiple
families living in some of the houses. All the communities are too
small and poor to afford the services of engineers to help them
address the problem of nitrate contamination.
The Project Team
I assembled the project team based on technical competence
and interest in participating in a volunteer project for a small eco-nomically
disadvantaged community. It included Erin McCau-ley,
a volunteer, and Sarah Plummer and myself from Corona En-vironmental
Consulting. Erin has a long history of philanthropic
involvement. Shortly after graduating from Rice University in
Texas with a degree in engineering, she served our country as a
Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic for two years.
After that, she went to work for Cal Water where we worked
together for many years implementing solutions to nitrate con-tamination.
Erin and I work well together, and I knew that she
would want to help a community in her own backyard. She was
a natural fit as the project engineer for our team.
Sarah, too, is interested in giving back. While she was at
Princeton, completing her undergraduate degree, Sarah was
the EWB South New Jersey state representative to the regional
steering committee. That is a long way of saying that she was in
charge of pestering volunteer groups for missing paperwork. Af-ter
she finished her undergraduate degree in chemical engineer-ing
from Princeton, she taught undergraduate students for two
years in Singapore. She came out west to attend the University
of California Davis.
One of the requirements of the CEC process is to have an
independent review panel. The CA-NV AWWA panel was com-posed
of three additional volunteers I selected based on technical
competence and a soft spot for small systems with big problems:
Cindy Bertsch (Water Works Engineers), Craig Thompson (West
Yost Associates) and Dr. Jeannie Darby (University of California
Davis). In addition to the many volunteer positions that Craig
has held with the Section over the years, he was also a Peace
Corps volunteer in Nepal. Jeannie literally wrote the book on
nitrate treatment.
The Walnut Avenue Community
Our team was assigned to what EJCW had designated as
the Walnut Avenue community. Data from water quality reports
indicated that the nitrate levels in the water used by this com-munity
have exceeded the MCL since 1988 and had in fact in-creased
since then. EJCW has been providing bottled water to
the residents since becoming aware of the situation. In May 2016,
our team completed a tour of the system’s well, which provides
unchlorinated water for 20 to 30 residents, many of them chil-dren,
and the system’s water storage tank. On the day of the site
tour, the team, along with representatives from EJCW, met with
