As California’s wells dry up, residents rely on bottled water to survive
Bryce Johnston of Big River Drilling works on drilling a new water well in August. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
In drought-parched Central Valley, thousands rely on trucked and bottled water as they wait for new wells
FRESNO, Calif. — Wes Harmon’s ringtone sounds like a steam whistle, and it goes off in the cab of his Ford Super Duty at such regularity and volume it practically shudders the rooster-in-a-hula-skirt affixed to his dash.
Braaaaah!
“What’s up, Matt?” Harmon answers on a typically busy Monday morning.
“You want to drill a well in Ivanhoe?” his old colleague asks.
Harmon does not want to drill a well in Ivanhoe, which he calls a “rock pile,” because his two rigs are already tied up in more forgiving ground elsewhere in California’s Central Valley, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A whiteboard in his office is crammed with future jobs, and people won’t stop calling — a veteran with a bad heart whose faucet ran dry; a widow in a panic who can’t hold back tears.
Wells are running dry in California at a record pace. Amid a hotter, drier climate and the third consecutive year of severe drought, the state has already tallied a record 1,351 dry wells this year — nearly 40 percent over last year’s rate and the most since the state created its voluntary reporting system in 2014. The bulk of these outages slice through the center of the state, in the parched lowlands of the San Joaquin Valley, where residents compete with deep agricultural wells for the rapidly dwindling supply of groundwater.
A worker drives a tractor in a dusty field. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Amid rows of almond and orange trees, entire communities are relying on deliveries of bottled water to survive. More than 2,400 homes in the region keep their taps running with emergency plastic water tanks installed in their yards by the nonprofit group Self-Help Enterprises. It sends around a fleet of trucks to fill the tanks, which hold 2,500 to 3,000 gallons, at least every two weeks. More than half of the tanks are new this year.
Tami McVay, Self-Help’s director of emergency services, expected this year’s spike in dry wells. But the sheer scope of the shortages this summer has been unsettling for her.
She has watched as groundwater in some places has fallen in one year by hundreds of feet. Last year, her organization made emergency bottled water deliveries after outages from dry or malfunctioning wells threatened the water supply in two communities. This year, that has happened in 20 communities.
“Mentally, I don’t think we were prepared to really kind of absorb how fast it was happening,” she said. “Overnight our phones just started ringing.”
‘She’s going dry. I’m dry’
The first sign of a failing well tends to be a softening of the water pressure. Brown patches in the lawn where sprinklers no longer reach. Garden hoses that pulse and fizz with aeration. Showers that slow to a trickle.
Margarita Serrano watches her granddaughter, Ariela, play in a pool filled with just enough water for her to cool off on a day that reached over 100 degrees. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Groundwater is both the main source of water for many communities and a buffer that California relies on during drought. Normally, these underground reserves account for about 40 percent of the state’s water supply; in dry years, that grows to 60 percent. Of the 3,700 wells on the state’s live groundwater website that track levels over the past decade, nearly half of them are much below normal or at an all-time low.
“What we’re facing is pretty unprecedented,” said Steven Springhorn, an engineering geologist with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Office of California’s Department of Water Resources. “It’s very dry out there.”
[A California city’s water supply is expected to run out in two months]
Sharon Ramirez knew this, and she tried to conserve. She let her grass yellow and the vegetable garden die. Tomatoes, potatoes, butternut squash — all gone. In her bathroom, she only flushed solids, despite the embarrassment. She watched with agony as the trees she nurtured for years — the Chinese elm, the pistachio, the mulberry — appeared to weaken under the unrelenting sun.
The motor for the pump in her 348-foot well usually ran for 20 minutes to refill her tank. It began to take hours.
Ramirez could only do so much. She had moved to Madera Ranchos, a rural community north of Fresno, to make room for her two horses, Coco and Fergus. It was her retirement dream after 25 years as an administrative assistant at Fresno State University. But horses need water.
Sharon Ramirez embraces her horse, Coco. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
On a Thursday in August when she finally went dry, she broke down and cried.
“I’ve been dribbling since the first of the month. I knew it was going to happen,” Ramirez said. “You live on a well. You know it’s going to happen.”
These emergencies are familiar to anyone who lives in this area, and Ramirez’s neighbors immediately jumped in to help. While she awaits her new 600-foot well — low bid of $54,318, and a waiting list of nine months — she was able to run a 120-foot hose from the house next door to keep her faucets flowing. Across the street, Kimberly Davis, who runs a petting zoo out of her backyard, didn’t have enough pressure to shower while the sprinkler is on, but was allowing another neighbor to share her own well as long as her water held out.
“She’s going dry. I’m dry. Two houses down, they’re dry,” Ramirez said. “It’s what we do out here. We survive with each other.”
Kimberly Davis runs Kim’s Birthday Party Petting Zoo. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The city of Madera is one of this year’s hot spots for dry wells. It’s where Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited in August, standing in a field left fallow for lack of water, warning that the worsening drought crisis is an “existential threat to our communities and our livelihoods,” and announcing more funding for resilience projects in the years ahead.
Those who live here point in many directions to explain their predicament. Up and down the roads of these dusty suburbs, billboards call out for politicians to build “#moreDAMstorage” and for California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to “stop dumping our farm water in the ocean.” Neighbors stand in their barren yards and worry that the local rock quarry, or the high school with its green sports fields, or the subdivisions still sprouting new houses by the thousands, or the irrigated groves and orchards all around them, are sucking all the water out from underneath their wells.
“Everyone’s relying on groundwater. So all of us have a straw. And some of us have deeper straws than others,” said Susana De Anda, executive director of the Community Water Center, which advocates for access to clean water in California. “The reality is the drought only exasperates the current conditions that we have already, it worsens the stress. For many, people are losing water.”