“No man ever steps in the same river twice.”
— Heraclitus
From the 1940s into the 1980s, the Central Valley bought soil fumigants from Shell and Dow to kill nematodes in citrus ground. The products carried a stowaway: 1,2,3-trichloropropane — TCP — a manufacturing leftover that internal memos revealed in court records showed had no agricultural use at all, a fact the companies withheld from the farmers applying it [1]. It sank. Decades later, California declared TCP a potent carcinogen and set a drinking-water limit in 2017 [2], and it has since been detected in hundreds of wells [3] — many of them under the towns where Rodney grew up, and where his family still fills glasses from the tap.
Then came the lawsuits, and here’s the part worth saying plainly: the recoveries went to water systems, not people. Fresno settled its TCP claims for $233 million; Bakersfield, with roughly as many contaminated wells, took $81 million [1]. That money builds treatment plants — which matters, genuinely — but the state’s own water board has said these lump-sum settlements often aren’t enough to finish the job [1]. Meanwhile, reporting on the litigation found private law firms collecting up to forty percent of some settlements [1]. Residents got cleaner water, eventually, and the bill for whatever the settlements didn’t cover.
So what’s the honest use of this history? First: if you’re served by a small water system, a school, or a mutual water company that hasn’t tested or hasn’t acted, deadlines on these claims have been tightening for years [4] — worth asking about now, not later. Second: if your water comes from a private well, test it. A lab report doesn’t depend on anyone’s memory. TCP doesn’t occur naturally; if it’s in your well, someone put it in the ground [3]. Third, and most important: TCP is the rehearsal, not the show. The next contaminants — the forever chemicals now turning up in water systems across California — are at the beginning of their legal story, not the end. The people who acted early were made whole first, and the people who waited are still waiting.
As for the fees — the policy is printed on this website, and it slides downward the faster a case resolves. The Valley has paid enough people forty percent.
[2] California State Water Resources Control Board, 1,2,3-TCP MCL (adopted July 2017) — waterboards.ca.gov
[3] Robins Borghei LLP, TCP Litigation background — rbwaterlaw.com/tcp-litigation/
[4] SJV Water, “Expiration dates looming for TCP lawsuits” (Nov. 4, 2020) — sjvwater.org