(CNN) — Gary Briggs’ family has been without water from their private well for more than a decade, following a multi-year drought and over-pumping by agriculture and industry.
Now the eight-acre farm in West Goshen, California, that Briggs passed on to his son, Ryan, in the 1970s, is parched and fallow. His son and his granddaughter bring water from the fountains to drink and shower. They go into town to do laundry, says Briggs.
In recent years, the family has gone from relying on water from cisterns provided by government programs, which they say tastes terrible, to hauling containers of water to the homes of neighbors who are willing to share what is left. .
Briggs, 72, still remembers when the family property had a thriving orchard. As a teenager, he planted pecan and orange trees, while his father grew alfalfa and raised cattle and sheep.
“Now, it’s all dirt,” Briggs, a lifelong California resident, told CNN. “Central California is dying. We’re becoming a wasteland. A hot, dry wasteland.”
“And God forbid, I don’t know how long this drought is going to last,” he added. “Believe it or not, climate change is here, and California is an example of it.”
As cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco struggle to reduce their use of water — the vast majority of which comes from the state’s reservoirs — rural Californians who depend on groundwater are already exhausted. They live with the daily worry of not having enough water to bathe or drink.
Gary Briggs and Ruth Martinez, neighbors suffering from water shortages in rural California.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has begged urban residents and businesses to cut their water use by 15%, but March water use was up 19% in cities compared to March 2020, the year it began. the current drought. Faced with the depletion of water in the state, unprecedented water cuts for city dwellers have gone into effect this week: In parts of Southern California, residents have been asked to cut consumption by 35% to avoid a total irrigation ban later in the summer.
The scorching heat of summer is also approaching. Water evaporates from the ground on hot days, exacerbating drought, one of the main reasons an unprecedented groundwater shortage is appearing. Not only has it not rained enough to fill the reservoirs, but the air is absorbing the water left on the ground.
Pollution from industry aggravates the water situation
Ruth Martinez, who lives in the small unincorporated town of Ducor in Tulare County, has been an advocate for clean water for decades. In this town of regarding 600 mostly Latino residents, the drinking water had been contaminated with nitrates, which are usually caused by fertilizers used in agriculture.
Following several complaints from residents, Ducor received a state grant in 2015 that allowed the community to drill a deeper well—regarding 2,000 feet—to access clean water. But it only worked for three years before Martinez says a new well was installed in front of his residential well, threatening his own water supply once once more.
“We didn’t even know until we saw the excavation equipment, and when we saw that it had been drilled, and everything that was at the well site,” Martinez told CNN. “The drought has made it even worse, because we don’t have the pressure [de agua] that we had before. We’ve had problems with the quality of the water and we’ve had to buy bottled water at the store and things like that.”
The Ducor community well is supposed to help facilitate access to clean water.
A new commercial well has been drilled in open ground at Ducor.
Martinez, a member of the Ducor water board, says he has been getting concerns from his neighbors who want to know what the government is going to do. He tells CNN that area residents blame agriculture and industry for exacerbating the crisis by pumping more groundwater, despite a dwindling supply.
Briggs, whose family farm is in Tulare County, also points to nearby dairy farms that he says have been drilling deeper wells and pumping more water out of the ground, leaving less water for residential use.
Groundwater beneath rural communities in central California had not recovered from the previous drought when it was hit once more by the current one. And drought conditions in California have resurfaced rapidly this spring. Not only has it not rained enough this winter to stop the drought, but winter snowfall has been well below average, so it has barely melted and run off into rivers, reservoirs and groundwater.
The San Joaquin Valley, where Tulare County is located, is already in the most severe category of the US Drought Monitor.
Kelsey Hinton, director of communications for the Community Water Center, a group that advocates for affordable access to clean water, said the issue is complex and can date back to decades-old planning policies.
“The first thing that’s important to understand is that these communities have been historically disinvested from the beginning,” Hinton told CNN. “They weren’t even included in county master planning, nor were they considered viable communities that were going to continue to grow over time. But these are people’s homes, they are their neighbors, they have decades of life and community, and they want to be growing.” and they want to have the necessary infrastructure for it”.
Water has long been considered a property right in California, meaning property owners can pump as much water as they want. This has become a problem in a changing climate. During droughts, water was pumped out of the basin faster than it might be replenished.
The state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, passed in 2014, was intended to address over-pumping—particularly from agriculture—and rebalance depleted aquifers. However, well drilling permits have proliferated “with little oversight,” Hinton said.
In March, Newsom issued an executive order strictly prohibiting local agencies from granting well drilling permits for agriculture and industry, consistent with the 2014 bill, unless they conduct a comprehensive review of how drilling would affect to surrounding homes. But Hinton says the order includes temporary measures that will only last until the drought ends. Water advocates are betting on passing a bill in the state legislature that permanently strengthens oversight of the permitting process.
Martinez, who worked alongside Cesar Chavez and the farmworker movement, is one of the leading voices in the effort to get that bill passed quickly as climate change accelerates the impacts of the drought.
“We have to meet with legislators and the different affected communities and find out, educate ourselves on what we can do to prevent certain things from happening,” he said. “All the problems that have to do with water frustrate me. What keeps me going is that I have only seen little improvement.”
Briggs said that seeing how drastically different the Central Valley is today, compared to when he was a boy planting trees on his family’s farm, there is no doubt that the climate crisis is taking its toll.
“We’re in this part of the state that’s slowly dying, because nobody takes us seriously,” Briggs said. “I tell my grandchildren that as soon as you get out, leave this area and go somewhere where there is water, because this place is dying.”