Responding to the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board's roll out of its "Human Right to Water" program, Heal the Ocean attended its hearing in Santa Barbara at the end of January and offered assistance to implementing the program.

Specifically we offered to pay for staff support in the following three areas:

Map drinking water impacts - particularly the development of regionwide GIS maps to identify areas where public and domestic drinking water wells are impacted by common pollutants (e.g. nitrate);

Upload groundwater data to Geotracker;

Well data management for Santa Barbara County drinking water wells.

Such assistance is not new to HTO. In 2013, when all of the City of Santa Barbara paper reports on contaminated groundwater were transferred to the Regional Board from the Hazmat/Site Mitigation Unit operating with Santa Barbara County Fire Department, we provided a Cal Poly intern to work in Regional Board's San Luis Obispo office to scan the reports into the State Water Board's Geotracker program. That intern, Sarah Treadwell is now a full-time environmental engineer with the Regional Board.

Many thanks to our own Corey Radis for her excellent presentation to the Board!