Mother Jones magazine: Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water [View all]

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Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water
Thanks to the drought, many people in East Porterville can't cook, shower, or flush the toilet at home.

—By Julia Lurie | Mon Sep. 7, 2015 6:00 AM EDT


Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you'll instantly know something about the people who live in the house adjacent to it.

If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it's brown, or if the yard contains plastic tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.

Residents of these homes rely on deliveries of bottled water, or perhaps a hose connected to a working well of a friendly neighbor. They take "showers" from a bucket, use paper plates to avoid washing dishes, eat sandwiches instead of spaghetti so there's no need to boil water, and collect water used for cooking and showers to pour in the toilet or on the trees outside.

East Porterville is in Tulare County, a region in the middle of California's agriculture-heavy Central Valley that's been especially hard hit by the state's historic drought. More than 7,000 people in the the county lack running water; three quarters of them live in East Porterville. The community doesn't have a public water system; instead, residents rely on private wells. But after years of drought, the nearby Tule River has diminished to a trickle and the underground water table has sunk as more and more farmers rely on groundwater. Last week, I spent a few days interviewing residents in the town, also known as "ground zero" of the drought. .....................(more)

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/drought-no-running-water-east-porterville