A little sunny 25 ° C, it’s a beautiful holiday day in Bakersfield. Still, the streets ring hollow in the small residential area of Southgate. My kids don’t play outside, otherwise it’s an asthma attack for sure
, explains Camilla. For the three children of this 27-year-old mother, on vacation afternoons, it’s in the living room, windows closed. A far from isolated case. Children in Kern County, where Bakersfield and its 385,000 residents are located, are three times more likely to develop asthma than the average Californian.
“After fifteen minutes, we all find ourselves coughing”
Intensive agriculture, animal husbandry, oil extraction, pollution from automobile traffic from Los Angeles… Nothing is spared the residents of the San Joaquin Valley. As large as Switzerland, the region, which stretches from Sacramento in the north to Los Angeles in the south, has the unenviable record of the most polluted air in the world. United States, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Also read. REPORTAGE. In California, giant farms face pollution
And Kern County is the most polluted in the whole valley
, says Kevin Hamilton, from the heights of Bakersfield Scenic Park. As a radiant panorama, the Kern river oil field is spread out in front of the small sunglasses of the president of the Coalition against asthma of California. With some 10,000 wells, the fifth largest oil field in the country gives the landscape a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-like air. Below, for no less than 45 km2, traversed by dirt roads, fences on both sides, the derricks, these funny metal heads, beat time tirelessly to extract black gold.
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Kevin Hamilton, chairman of the California Asthma Coalition, on a hill in Bakersfield, in front of the huge Kern County oil field. © Elie Courboulay
In 2020, to produce three-quarters of California’s crude oil, or 300,000 barrels per day, Kern County paid the price: 103 days when air pollution exceeded allowable limits. Before, I often went to play football with my children, but it is no longer possible with all this ambient dust, laments Camilla. After fifteen minutes, we all find ourselves coughing.
Of the fifty or so members of his family who live in the county, they are at least twenty have asthma
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More than 75,000 of the 900,000 inhabitants of Kern County suffer from asthma, of varying severity, according to the American Pulmonology Association, a reference organization for cardio-respiratory diseases. Sometimes the sick are not taken seriously, either in the emergency room or by some doctors in the county.
, explains Kevin Hamilton.
Joseph, 4 years old, the youngest of Camilla’s sons, experienced these repeated trips to the emergency room. We must have been there at least seven times, before they agreed to treat him, let go of mom. When it finally happened, they just gave him a single dose of corticosteroids and sent us home.
This will pass, assured the doctors who, faced with the inflation of cases, hospitalize only the most alarming. The problem for Joseph is that it didn’t happen.
“It’s the fault of the Trump administration”
Faced with the county’s lack of investment which limits places in hospitals, Camilla preferred to fend for herself. Joseph is now followed by a children’s hospital in Los Angeles, two hours away, when there is no traffic …
she specifies. Under treatment, the kid is better. But football is in the living room now, with a sofa for the goal.
The county’s air quality had improved by the turn of the 2000s. The situation has deteriorated again in recent years. It’s the administration’s fault Trump which had emptied of its substance the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) »
, retorts Kevin, muttering the name of the former president, climate skeptic and frenzied petropartisan. Industrial controls have indeed been less regular.
But above all, there is the growing impact of climate change on the region in recent years. The San Joaquin Valley is wedged between mountains on one side and desert on the other, so pollution stagnates. Only the rains and cold winds from the north-west allow the stale air to be renewed. However, the hotter it is, the less air is renewed. This year, the region is experiencing its worst drought since 1977 …
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. © Ouest-France
In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced plans to limit the production of shale oil, by hydraulic fracturing, from 2024. It also aims to stop all types of oil extraction by 2045. Not won. The powerful Californian oil industry has already called this project harmful and illegal
and will oppose it by any means possible
, with weighty arguments: the activity weighs 150 billion dollars and generates more than 20 billion dollars in taxes per year.
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