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I think I'd be walking across the street.

All Tapped Out In A Tiny California Town

Around the tiny rural community of Fairmead, Calif., about an hour north of Fresno on Highway 99, hundreds of one-story houses on small ranches stretch out for miles.

The ground is mostly brown, parched by California's recent drought. But beneath the surface, this mostly African-American community in the San Joaquin Valley has been going dry for years.

Fairmead used to be known for corn and cotton, but today the aging community is surrounded by large almond and pistachio orchards. Family homes in Fairmead with shallow private wells feet can't compete with agricultural wells sucking water out of the aquifer at 1,000 feet or deeper.

Jean Wilson moved to Fairmead 20 years ago to escape big-city life. It wasn't until last year that her private well started shooting out sand.

"I was the first one that actually went out of water," Wilson says. "I think about a year this month."

Wilson got so fed up with the lack of government help that she wrote to Gov. Jerry Brown.

"It's almost inhumane," she says she told him. "The biggest issue was, where can we go get water? You're telling me I can't have water. What are you saying?"

When no aid came, Wilson created a flyer offering to deliver water to her neighbors.

Annie Cooper and her husband found one of those flyers at a laundromat. Last June, their private well dried up when an almond farmer began drilling a well across the street from their country home.

Annie and Lawyer Cooper, moved to Fairmead from Arkansas in the 1940s, have lived without running water in their home for almost a year.

Cooper says she was fixing dinner one day that month when she called her husband to show him the trickle from the tap.

"I said, 'There's hardly any coming out,' " she says. "The next hour so, that water was gone. We've been without it ever since."

The Cooper family moved to Fairmead from Arkansas in the 1940s, like many other African Americans. They hoped to farm small plots instead of settling in cities like Los Angeles and Oakland.

Thelma Williams moved to Fairmead in the 1990s from Southern California to retire on 40 acres of land. But life in Fairmead hasn't been easy: Williams has been without running water for seven years.

She can't afford to dig a new well, so she showers at her parents' home nearby and fills up eight five-gallon jugs to bring home.

For a while, the Madera County Farm Bureau provided drinking water to residents with dry wells, but that program has stopped. Now Madera County is working on a state-funded project to supply water to homeowners with dry wells. In time, qualified residents will receive a large tank for potable water that a truck service will fill every few weeks.

The county plans to deliver bottled water as soon as state funding arrives, and plans to have the first tanks installed sometime in late May.

But Wilson says the process is taking much to long.

"Why do we have to go through so much of this?" she says. "Let all of them get their water cut off, everybody's water cut off for one month and have one station for everybody to go get water, and see what happens."

http://www.npr.org/2.....ornia-town

thank goodness we are going to Vegas this summer, I didn't think about what happens if hoover dam stops running

Lake Mead’s low levels could trigger federal shortage by 2017

Lake Mead is expected to shrink low enough by January 2017 to trigger a first-ever federal shortage declaration on the Colorado River, according to a bleak new projection from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

In its monthly forecast issued this week, the bureau predicts the reservoir east of Las Vegas could start 2017 as much as 15 feet below the shortage line of 1,075 feet above sea level.

Only a month ago, forecasters expected the Colorado River to narrowly avoid a shortage in both 2016 and 2017.

If accurate, the new prediction would force Nevada to reduce its Colorado River water use by 4 percent while Arizona and Mexico take larger cuts.

Southern Nevada Water Authority officials insist such a curtailment won’t impact the community because valley residents have already reduced water consumption by more than enough to absorb it.

Potentially more alarming is the even deeper dip Lake Mead is expected to take next year, when it could fall low enough to reduce power generation at Hoover Dam and shut down one of the intake pipes that supplies the Las Vegas Valley with 90 percent of its water.

Already in record-low territory, the lake surface is now expected to drop another 4 feet by the end of June, to 1,073 feet above sea level. After that, forecasters expect the water to gradually rise again, to elevation 1,077 by January 2016, before plunging roughly 22 feet in six months to a new all-time low of 1,055.

Should the lake hit 1,050, the Southern Nevada Water Authority will lose the use of one of its two existing intake pipes, though that will be less of a concern after September, when a new $817 million intake should start drawing water from the deepest part of the lake.

On paper, Hoover Dam is also supposed to stop generating electricity. However, that minimum generation level is expected to be revised downward, to 950 feet above sea level, because of ongoing power turbine improvements.

Four of Hoover’s 17 turbines have been retrofitted to run more smoothly as the reservoir continues to drop, and two more are to be upgraded in the coming year, said Bureau of Reclamation spokesman Doug Hendrix.

Since the lake has never been so low, Hendrix said, more study is needed to see whether the remaining, unimproved turbines can operate safely below the 1,050 mark.

“The new wide-head turbines will,” he said, but it remains to be seen how the older turbines might handle the strain. “You never want to operate your turbines when they’re in distress.”

A reduction in output from the dam could increase costs for power customers by driving up the price of available hydropower and forcing utilities to buy needed electricity on the spot market. That’s what worries Jayne Harkins, executive director for the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, the agency responsible for managing the water and power resources the state gets from the river.

more http://www.reviewjou.....rtage-2017

it begins?

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.

http://www.washingto.....story.html