Allensworth Rising: A Fight for Water

In California’s southern Central Valley, Allensworth is a close-knit community founded in 1908 by a former slave and Civil War veteran. Since the 1960s, when arsenic was discovered in the town’s groundwater, residents describe receiving little help or attention from their government or anyone else. Chronic exposure to arsenic can lead to cardiovascular circulation problems, amputations, various forms of cancer, and neurological damage. “Sometimes it feels like we’re all alone,” one resident told a pair of recent UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students in a short documentary that appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times.

So Allensworth leadership got in touch with Development Engineering Professor Ashok Gadgil, a pioneer of clean-water innovation. Gadgil and his team installed equipment in Allensworth to remove arsenic from the groundwater. With the help of his lab, including an MDevEng student, the clean-water system operates with minimal personnel to produce water at affordable prices. “There is a deep satisfaction in saying we made the world slightly better,” Gadgil says.