When the wells run dry | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

how long would you live like this before you said screw it and moved?

TULARE, Calif. – Looking for water to flush his toilet, Tino Lozano pointed a garden hose at some buckets in the bare dirt of his yard. It's his daily ritual now in a community built by refugees from Oklahoma's Dust Bowl. But only a trickle came out; then a drip, then nothing more.

"There it goes," said Lozano, a 40-year-old disabled vet, masking his desperation with a smile. "That's how we do it in Okieville now."

Millions of Californians are being inconvenienced in this fourth year of drought, urged to flush toilets less often, take shorter showers and let lawns turn brown. But it's dramatically worse in places like Okieville, where wells have gone dry for many of the 100 modest homes that share cracked streets without sidewalks or streetlights in California's Central Valley.

Farming in Tulare County brought in $8.1 billion in 2014, more than any other county in the nation, according to its agricultural commissioner. Yet 1,252 of its household wells today are dry, more than all other California counties combined.

Lozano, a 40-year-old disabled vet and family man, has worked with his neighbors to rig lines from house to house, sharing water from a well deep enough to hit the emptying aquifer below. County trucks, funded with state drought relief money, fill 2,500-gallon tanks in many yards. Residents also get containers of drinking water, stacking them in bedrooms and living rooms.

These "Third-World-type conditions" are hidden from plain sight, says Andrew Lockman, of Tulare County's Office of Emergency Services. "It's not an earthquake or flood where you can drive down the street and see the devastation."

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