In the West, water has never been just about infrastructure—it’s about priorities, tradeoffs, and how a region plans for an increasingly uncertain future.
Efforts like the San Fernando Valley cleanup are about more than addressing legacy contamination—they’re about maintaining access to safe, reliable drinking water for millions of people.
The situation is far from over, but the shift in oversight signals a more centralized—and potentially more coordinated—approach to managing the fallout.
Jim Beath’s latest “A Driller’s Life” follows a Miami deep-well job, a jump to underground mining in Nevada, and the hard lessons that came with chasing bigger holes.