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ByEllenKnickmeyer and Scott Smith The Associated Press FRESNO In a trailer park tucked among irrigated or- chards that help make Cal- ifornia's San Joaquin Val- ley the richest farm region in the world, 16-year-old Giselle Alvarez, one of the few English-speakers in the community of farm- workers, puzzles over the notices posted on front doors: There's a danger in their drinking water. Uranium, the notices warn, tests at a level con- sidered unsafe by federal and state standards. The law requires the park's owner to post the warn- ings. But they are awk- wardly worded and mostly in English, a language few of the park's dozens of Spanish-speaking families can read. "It says you can drink the water — but if you drink the water over a period of time, you can get can- cer," said Alvarez, whose working-class family has no choice but keep drink- ing and cooking with the tainted tap water. "They re- ally don't explain." Uranium, the stuff of nu- clear fuel for power plants and atom bombs, increas- ingly is showing in drink- ing water systems in major farming regions of the U.S. West — a natural though unexpected byproduct of irrigation, drought, and the overpumping of natu- ral underground water re- serves. An Associated Press in- vestigation in California's central farm valleys — along with the U.S. Cen- tral Plains, among the ar- eas most affected — found authorities are doing lit- tle to inform the public at large of the risk. That includes the one out of four families on pri- vate wells in this farm val- ley who, unknowingly, are drinking dangerous amounts of uranium. Gov- ernment authorities say long-term exposure to ura- nium can damage kidneys and raise cancer risks, and scientists say it can have other harmful effects. In this swath of farm- land, roughly 250 miles long and encompassing cities, up to one in 10 pub- lic water systems have raw drinking water with ura- nium levels that exceed safety standards, the U.S. Geological Survey has found. More broadly, nearly 2 million people in Califor- nia's Central Valley and the U.S. Midwest live within a half-mile of groundwater containing uranium over the health limits, Univer- sity of Nebraska research- ers said in a study in Sep- tember. Entities ranging from state agencies to tiny ru- ral schools are scrambling to deal with hundreds of tainted public wells. That includes water wells at the Westport El- ementary School, where 450 children study outside the Central California farm hub of Modesto. At Westport's play- ground, schoolchildren take a break from tether ball to sip from fountains marked with Spanish and English placards: "SAFE TO DRINK." The school is one of about 10 water-well sys- tems in Central Califor- nia that have installed on- site uranium removal facil- ities in recent years. Prices range from $65,000 to mil- lions of dollars. Just off Westport's play- ground, a school main- tenance chief jangles the keys to the school's treat- ment operation, locked in a shed. Inside, a system of tubes, dials and canisters resembling scuba tanks removes up to a pound a year of uranium from the school's well water. The uranium gleaned from local water systems is handled like the nuclear material it is — taken away by workers in masks, gloves and other protective gar- ments, said Ron Dollar, a vice president at Water Remediation Technology, a Colorado-based firm. It is then processed into nu- clear fuel for power plants, Dollar said. Before treatment, West- port's water tests up to four times state and federal lim- its. After treatment, it's safe for the children, teach- ers and staff to drink. Meanwhile, the city of Modesto, with a half-mil- lion residents, recently spent more than $500,000 to start blending water from one contaminated well to dilute the uranium to safe levels. The city has retired a half-dozen other wells with excess levels of uranium. State officials don't track spending on uranium-con- taminated wells. But the state's Water Resources Control Board identified at least $16.7 million the state has spent since 2010 helping public water sys- tems deal with high levels of uranium. In coming years, more public water systems likely will be compelled to in- vest in such costly fixes, said Miranda Fram, a re- searcher with the U.S. Geo- logical Survey in Sacra- mento. Fram and her colleagues believe the amount of ura- nium increased in Central Valley drinking water sup- plies over the last 150 years with the spread of farming. In California, as in the Rockies, mountain snow- melt washes uranium- laden sediment to the flat- lands, where groundwater is used to irrigate crops. Irrigation allows year- round farming, and the irrigated plants naturally create a weak acid that is leeching more and more uranium from sediment. Groundwater pumping pulls the contaminated water down into the earth, where it is tapped by wells that supply drinking water. The USGS calculates that the average level of uranium in public-supply wells of the eastern San Joaquin Valley increased 17 percent from 1990 to the mid-2000s. The number of public-supply wells with unsafe levels of uranium, meantime, climbed from 7 percent to 10 percent over the same period there. "We should not have any doubts as to whether drinking water with ura- nium in it is a problem or not. It is," said Doug Brugge, professor of pub- lic health and community medicine at Tufts Univer- sity School of Medicine in Boston. "The larger the population that's drinking this water, the more peo- ple that are going to be af- fected." In California, changes in water standards since the late 2000s have mandated testing for uranium in pub- lic water systems. For private well-owners and small water systems, however, officials were un- able to point to any pub- lic health campaigns in the most-affected areas, or any help testing or dealing with uranium-contami- nated wells. "When it comes to pri- vate domestic wells, we do what we can to get the word out. It's safe to say that there's always more than can be done," said John Borkovich, head of water quality at the state Water Resources Control Board. The Associated Press commissioned indepen- dent sampling of wells at five homes in the country- side outside Modesto. The results: Water from two of the five private wells tested over the government max- imums for uranium — in fact, two and three times the maximum. None of the five families had ever heard that ura- nium could be a problem. "It would be nice to be informed, so we can make an informed decision, and those wells can be tested," said Michelle Norleen, one of the five, who was later relieved to learn her own water had tested safe. CENTRAL CALIFORNIA Fearatthetap:Uranium contaminates water in the West JOHNLOCHER—THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Children play in well water from a hose at a trailer park near Fresno. Residents of the trailer park receive notices warning that their well water contains uranium at a level considered unsafe by federal and state standards. JOHN LOCHER — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Water is pumped from a well into an irrigation ditch near Fresno. Officials with the U.S. Geological Survey's Sacramento office and elsewhere believe the amount of uranium increased in Central Valley drinking-water supplies over the last 150years with the spread of farming. By Michael Liedtke The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO Face- book has lifted a ban that blocked material from Tsu.co, a small rival chal- lenging the world's largest social network's financial dependence on free con- tent shared by its 1.5 bil- lion users. The reversal comes a month after The Asso- ciated Press published a story airing concerns that Facebook might be abus- ing its power to thwart competition and stifle the concept advanced by Tsu that people should be paid for the stories and images that they post on social networks. "We won in the court of public opinion," Tsu CEO Sebastian Sobczak said Tuesday. "When you have something new and novel in the market like what we are doing, this kind of validation is extremely important. It feels like we just got a golden stamp of approval." The dispute between one of the Internet's most powerful companies and Tsu began in late Sep- tember when Facebook removed nearly 10 million posts containing links and other references to Tsu (pronounced "soo"). Facebook also blocked at- tempts to post anything else that sent traffic to Tsu.co, both on the pages of its social network or on in its popular Messen- ger and Instagram appli- cations. Tsu's ouster stemmed from its practice of shar- ing ad revenue with its users. The payments are based on how many peo- ple read their posts. Facebook decided Tsu's payments represented a financial incentive for people to share links on its network, something the Menlo Park, Cali- fornia, company says it prohibits because it be- lieves the practice pol- lutes its service with the digital rubbish known as "spam." Sobczak contends Face- book hoped to destroy an upstart trying to popu- larize the idea that peo- ple should get paid for posts that help sell adver- tising. Facebook has built a highly profitable com- pany with a market value of $300 billion, partly be- cause it doesn't pay for the material that keeps people and advertisers coming to its social network. The two sides resolved their differences with a truce that required New York-based Tsu.co to re- move a feature that al- lowed its users to share content directly to Face- book with one click on an app. Now Tsu.co users will have to go through sev- eral extra steps to transfer their posts to Facebook, or just copy and paste a link. T h e c o n c e s s i o n prompted Facebook to restore the Tsu posts that had previously been erased from its social net- work and allow additional material from Tsu, which has nearly 5 million us- ers. Tsu links can also be circulated on Instagram and Facebook's Messen- ger app. Facebook spokes- woman Melanie Ensign described the circum- stances surrounding Tsu's two-month ban as a "mis- communication." Tsu user Claudia Ever- est said she was pleased to recover hundreds of her dog drawings that had been deleted from her Facebook page dur- ing the tiff between the two social networks. She fears the restored links to the sketches that sell for $30 apiece won't attract as much traffic as they might otherwise have be- cause they date back to months ago and are now buried in her Facebook feed. Despite that frustra- tion, Everest is pleased Facebook and Tsu have settled their differences. "I believe that despite all the social networks looking to make money and therefore being in direct competition, there are benefits to everyone if there is a certain amount of sharing between sites," Everest wrote in Tuesday email. SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook li s ban on content from rival social network Tsu The Associated Press LOS ANGELES Melanie Griffith and Antonio Ban- deras' marriage is officially over. A Los Angeles judge fi- nalized the actors' divorce on Friday and the judg- ment was released Tuesday. Griffith filed for divorce in June 2014 after 18 years of marriage. They first worked to- gether on the set of the 1995 romantic comedy "Two Much," and Banderas later directed his wife in the 1999 film "Crazy in Alabama." They have an 18-year-old daughter together. The pair's divorce judg- ment divides the actors' share of profits from nu- merous films, including sev- eral movies in the "Shrek" franchise. It also states that Banderas will pay Griffith up to $55,000 a month in spousal support. As a couple, Banderas, 55, and Griffith, 58, intermin- gled their business and po- litical lives. They hosted a fund- raiser for President Barack Obama in 2011 and also owned a production com- pany together. Even after Griffith's di- vorce filing in June 2014, Banderas spoke of the pair remaining close. "I want — and I think she does, too — to main- tain a relationship be- cause we have spent many years together," Banderas said in an interview ear- lier this year. "I would like to maintain a rela- tionship, and it is happen- ing, I speak with her every other day." 18 YEARS OF MARRIAGE Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas' divorce finalized 4,526fans+28 this week WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2015 REDBLUFFDAILYNEWS.COM | NEWS | 3 B