-
The City of Bakersfield Water Resources Department has cut off flows to city-owned recreation and water recharge facilities to hold on to what little surface water it’s receiving from the dwindling Kern River for drinking water.
-
Since Gov. Newsom's emergency drought order on March 28, Kern County hasn’t issued a single agricultural well permit. Frustration in the ag community is at a boiling point.
-
Taft was described in 1912 as “perhaps the liveliest town in the state,” a frontier community of the sort that movie fans once expected Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable to brawl in. Of course, it’s changed tremendously since its early frontier years, but one thing remains the same: it’s still an oil town through and through and the people who live here want it to stay that way. In this episode, we meet some of oil’s biggest supporters. And a high school culinary teacher helps students understand each other through local recipes: Native American, Samoan, Oaxacan.
-
The Latinx families lost young mothers due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
-
KVPR will add a reporter based in Kern County through Report For America
-
The rural city of Taft is perched directly on top of the state’s most productive oilfield.
-
A petition opposes a plan to convert the facility.
-
The environmental group American Rivers lists “excessive water withdrawals” as the main threat to the lower Kern, which is dry in all but the biggest water years as it cuts through the heart of Bakersfield.
-
The cancer-causing chemical 1,2,3-TCP has been found in several large groundwater banking operations in Kern. A recent feasibility study says cleanup could cost up to $465 million.
-
The report was commissioned after legislators and the public learned the water that surfaces during oil and gas production had been provided to some Kern County growers for years.