A California city's water supply is expected to run out in two months
COALINGA - The residents of this sun-scorched city feel California's endless drought when the dust lifts off the brown hills and flings grit into their living rooms. They see it when they drive past almond trees being ripped from the ground for lack of water and the new blinking sign at the corner of Elm and Cherry warning: "No watering front yard lawns."
The fire chief noticed it when he tested hydrants in August - a rare occurrence as Coalinga desperately seeks to conserve water - and the first one shot out a foot-long block of compacted dirt. The second one ejected like a can of Axe body spray.
The schools superintendent could only think drought on the first day of school when a 4-year-old fell onto unwatered turf, breaking an arm; or when the chain saws dropped three coastal redwoods outside Henry F. Bishop Elementary that had withered and died. Superintendent Lori Villanueva even lost a portion of her own right lung last year from a drought-aggravated illness, valley fever, that's caused by breathing soil fungus whipped up off the dry ground.
But what lies ahead might be far worse for the 17,000 residents living amid the oil derricks and cattle farms on the western edge of the state's Central Valley. Coalinga has only one source of water - a shrinking allotment from an aqueduct managed by the federal government - and officials are projecting the city will use up that amount before the end of the year.
That looming threat has left city officials racing between meetings in Sacramento and phone calls to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation seeking to increase their water supply. Some residents have begun stockpiling five-gallon water jugs in their homes, while many expect major spikes in their water bills. If Coalinga can't find relief, it would be forced to buy additional water on the open market at exorbitant prices that could swamp the city's budget.
That was the grim scenario facing Mayor Ron Ramsey when he rapped his knuckles on the table and cursed at a City Council meeting in early August. Everyone but Ramsey had just voted to ban watering front yards and to ramp up penalties on overuse - measures they conceded would not save nearly what was needed. But it was more than Ramsey could stomach.
"It's too much. Too fast," Ramsey told the room. On top of that, he said, it wasn't fair.
"Go to the state capitol and they got green grass, don't they?" he said. "They can do it, but why can't we?"
Coalinga, named for its history as a coal mining town, is a small Republican outpost in liberal California. The city had already defied state leadership in 2020, passing a resolution that declared all businesses essential to avoid mandatory pandemic closures. When it was time for the state to distribute covid-19 relief funds to municipalities, Coalinga didn't get any.
The water shortage felt to some like another kind of retaliation.
"How do you not give farmers water when they feed everybody unless you're trying to put them out of business?" asked Scott Netherton, owner of Coalinga's lone movie theater and executive director of its chamber of commerce.
"It feels like we're being singled out, small towns," he said. "It's like they're trying to force them out to where you've got to move into the bigger cities."
Coalinga's brackish groundwater has never been a reliable option. Before a canal was completed in the early 1970s that connected Coalinga to a major aqueduct, the city relied on water delivered by train. After a 1983 earthquake that destroyed some 300 homes in town and spread concerns about water contamination, residents resorted to donations; Anheuser-Busch sent drinking water to Coalinga in beer cans and bottles.
But the drought has made residents question the very survival of their city.
"We've never been this bad where they said we're going to run out of water," Mayor Ramsey said.
- - -
A future with far less access to water
The most severe drought in the American West since the 9th century is now in its 23rd year. All across the region, communities are confronting shortages worse than they have ever known. The biggest reservoirs have fallen to record lows. Whole neighborhoods have lost their water supply as wells have gone dry. States along the dwindling Colorado River are negotiating water cuts that could bring dramatic disruptions to some of the country's most important agricultural belts.
The hotter and drier climate has forced California and other states to reckon with a future in which they will have access to far less water, even as populations continue to grow. In August, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) presented a 19-page plan to deal with the expected loss of 10 percent of the state's water supply by 2040.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: