The subject had been covered in a 14 November 2014 report by San Francisco Bay Area television station KNTV: Social media interest in wastewater irrigation spiked in February 2016, but the issue was neither new nor specific to tangerines. 'We found oil and these nasty solvents,' which can cause 'kidney damage, liver damage and cancer,' Smith said. In order to find out the health impacts of using recycled oil water on crops, Deol joined water scientist Scott Smith as he covertly tested the water for toxic chemicals at the Cawelo wastewater treatment plant.

And they're salting up their soil by using this water, which means ultimately they'll have to stop growing everything.' Is there a tiny amount of toxicity now in the fruit? Nobody is testing that yet. The irrigation water is toxic, even at very tiny amounts. 'Where did that water come from? It's the irrigation water. 'You grow an orange - it's 90 percent water when it gets to the consumer,' Frantz continued. It's being used to grow food for people - citrus crops, grapes, pistachios,' Tom Frantz told Deol in the episode. 'There are farmers so desperate for water in one particular irrigation district called Cawelo, they're taking some wastewater to irrigate crops from Chevron. It shows how farmers are using treated oil wastewater to irrigate their crops, despite the fact that nobody has tested the wastewater to see if it's safe. The second episode, which aired last week, highlighted another aspect of the drought.

The post quoted a retired almond farmer named Tom Frantz saying that the irrigation water being used in that area was toxic (and previously untested):

That post suggested that farmers in a specific irrigation district were 'so desperate for water' that they used oil wastewater produced by Chevron to grow food crops (including tangerines). Many Facebook users linked to a 10 February 2016 post on the blog EcoWatch which recapped the second episode of a web documentary series titled Spotlight California. In early February 2016, social media users began sharing posts warning that specific brands of produce were grown in wastewater that was a byproduct of fracking activity (i.e., the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release fossil fuels) and therefore posed a risk to human health if consumed. Crops in Kern County are irrigated with 'toxic wastewater' that has been proved to contain harmful pollutants from fracking activities.

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