Drying Up: Inside the Californian Communities Without Enough Water

Jocelyn Tabancay Duffy X Briana Flin X November 15, 2022

In California, commercial farms are drying up the wells in vulnerable communities that have long relied on underground water.

California’s Central Valley grows a large portion of America’s food – and that requires a huge amount of water. But the region is experiencing a drought and drying up the surface water that farms rely on. So farms are now pumping water from underground. There’s a problem, though: it’s drying up the wells in vulnerable communities that have long relied on underground water.

This video was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

Jocelyn Tabancay Duffy

Jocelyn Tabancay Duffy is an environmental journalist and video producer based in Oakland, CA. Her work has been featured on NBC, The Guardian, The Intercept, KALW, and PBS. As someone who grew up in a cabin on a dirt road where wildfires were an annual catastrophe, she knows that climate change impacts the most vulnerable first.

Briana Flin

Video Editor/Producer

Briana Flin is a video editor and producer for Nexus Media News, where she covers environmental justice and climate change. Her work has appeared in outlets like The Atlantic, WIRED, Newsy, KQED, and Twin Cities PBS. Prior to joining the Nexus Media team, she was at WIRED, producing videos on everything from kinetic sculptures to praying mantises sporting 3D glasses. She’s a proud alumnus of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a Californian born-and-raised. After work, you can find her attempting to train her rambunctious rescue dog, baking treats, or rewatching Mad Men for the umpteenth time.


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Drying Up: Inside the Californian Communities Without Enough Water

In California, commercial farms are drying up the wells in vulnerable communities that have long relied on underground water.

Jocelyn Tabancay Duffy

Briana Flin

Video Editor/Producer

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