LOIS HENRY: Rosedale families struggling as wells run dry
- BY LOIS HENRY, Californian columnist lhenry@bakersfield.com
- Jul 3, 2010
Some families have given up and left their homes.
Others are sticking it out, buying jugs of water by the crate load to wash dishes, shower and keep the toilet working.
“When this first happened, I wanted to leave,” Ana Lopez said in describing what her family’s life has been like since the well in their western Rosedale neighborhood went dry right around Christmas.
They were like everyone else. They turned on the tap and water came out. When it stopped, they had no idea why and no idea what to do.
“I was very…it’s hard to describe what it was like at first. I didn’t know what to do. I got sick and had to go to the ER. I thought I was having a heart attack but it was the stress.”
She and her husband, Paul, have slowly found ways to work around the situation. But Ana said she’s still overwhelmed at times as she tries to give her four young children, ages 11, 9, 6 and 4, as normal a life as possible without running water.
“My husband said we can’t quit, we can’t give up,” she said. “I know it’s like everything else, it’ll take a while, but it will get fixed. It’s just hard because of the kids.”
Theirs isn’t an isolated experience.
More than a dozen wells in Rosedale, mostly around Stockdale Highway and Renfro Road, have dried up or had to be drilled deeper in recent months as the water table has plummeted over the last two years, according to Eric Averett, general manager of Rosedale Rio-Bravo Water Storage District.
Drought and regulatory restrictions on state water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have certainly played a role, he said.
But the real culprits are the Kern Water Bank and Pioneer Project groundwater banks, which have pulled out so much water so fast that they have changed how water moves under the sprawling district west of Bakersfield, he said.
Historically, water has mounded beneath the Kern River channel and spread out, filling the aquifer beneath Rosedale.
But the massive pull from the groundwater banks, which cover thousands of acres along the edges of the river west of Allen Road, has created a trough beneath the river bed so that Rosedale’s groundwater is now being drained away toward those pumps.
Rosedale has filed lawsuits against both groundwater banks over the issue.
There is no evidence, so far, that the banks are causing the problem, said Jim Beck, general manager of the Kern County Water Agency, which owns the Pioneer Project and is a partner in the Kern Water Bank Authority.
He maintains that the banks have brought a net water benefit to the area, raising groundwater levels above what they would have been without the projects.
“We’ve recovered (pumped out) a significant amount. But we have over 2 million acre feet still in storage,” Beck said. “We stand prepared to address any impacts identified with our project operations. As yet, we have no information from Rosedale about specific impacts.”
Averett said Rosedale isn’t accusing the projects of pumping more water out of the aquifer than they’ve put in. Their concern is that since 2007, the projects have moved a vast amount of water out of the aquifer too quickly.
Between 1981 and 2006, 94,000 acre feet were pumped out of Pioneer and a smaller project called Berrenda Mesa. Between 2007 and 2009, 290,000 acre feet were pumped out of those projects, according to Agency figures obtained by Rosedale, Averett said.
In that same time, district demand has remained flat and Rosedale has brought in more recharge water than it has in its history, Averett said.
Rosedale tried for several years to work with the Agency and Kern Water Bank authorities to get them to reduce pumping, but they refused, he said.
Beck disputes the Agency has been unresponsive.
He noted that when Rosedale made them aware that the Agency had drilled a well too close to other existing wells, they quickly moved the site.
“That’s a great example of how we have addressed concerns,” Beck said.
He added that members of the Kern Fan Monitoring Committee, made up of the various groundwater banking entities, had already begun a study to examine the banks’ impacts on neighboring groundwater levels before Rosedale filed its lawsuits.
“Unfortunately, we’ve not made much progress, what with the litigation,” he said.
The study was far too little, far too late, Averett said.
Besides, studying the project’s impacts should have been done as part of the ongoing operation and never was, he said.
Wells are going dry and landowners need solutions now, not two or three years from now when the study might be completed, he added.
There is some hope that Mother Nature will help out this year with higher-than-average runoff in the Kern River and less need for water from the banking projects as the State Water Project has promised to deliver at least 50 percent of its contracted water to districts throughout the state.
The Kern Water Bank actually did stop pumping at the end of May. Pumping isn’t expected to resume until September, according to Kern Water Bank Manager Jonathan Parker.
Pioneer is still pumping but Beck speculated that his members may also need less stored water because of the bump in state water.
Meanwhile, families like the Lopezes are reluctantly learning more than they ever wanted about how water works in Kern County.
“I know we’ve had a drought but I assumed we had plenty of rain this year,” Paul Lopez said. Even so, his house is now surrounded by dead trees and dirt-brown grass. Ana had tried to keep the trees alive with jugs of water but eventually had to give up. “There’s a canal that runs behind our house and for the last two months it’s been gushing water through there. I don’t know if that has anything to do with our well or not.”
He and his neighbors, most of whom have left their houses, all figured the problem was just with their well.
They were told by one company it would cost thousands per household to drill the well deep enough to reach the water table. But there was no guarantee that in a few months, the water wouldn’t drop even farther.
“I had no idea what was going on until after the fact. This is all new to me.”
Vaughn Water Company is another option. But it’s expensive. Just getting a waterline to the street costs about $10,000 per household. Then there’s an additional cost for each house hook into the line.
Even so, that’s the direction the Lopezes are headed, saving a little at a time.
“It’s hard because we’re trying to pay for the house and everything,” he said. “I don’t want to be another statistic walking away from my house.
“You have to fight for what you have. Some fights are harder than others, but you have to keep going.”