Small towns in California grow desperate for water
MENDOCINO, Calif. — As a measure of the nation’s creaking infrastructure and the severity of the drought gripping this state, there is the $5 shower.
That’s how much Ian Roth, the owner of the Seagull Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in this tourist town three hours north of San Francisco, spends on water every time a guest washes for five minutes under the shower nozzle.
Water is so scarce in Mendocino, an Instagramready collection of pastel Victorian homes on the edge of the Pacific, that restaurants have closed their restrooms to guests, pointing them instead to portable toilets on the sidewalk.
And the fire department has asked sheriff’s deputies to keep an eye on the hydrants in response to a report of water theft.
“We’ve grown up in this first-world country thinking that water is a given,” said Julian Lopez, the owner of Café Beaujolais, a restaurant packed with out-oftown diners in what is the height of the tourist season. “There’s that fear in the back of all our minds there is going to be a time when we don’t have water at all. And only the people with money would be able to afford the right to it.”
Mendocino’s water shortage is an extreme example of what some farflung towns in California are experiencing as the state slips deeper into its second year of drought. Scores of century-old, hand-dug wells in the town have run dry, forcing residents, inns and restaurants to fill storage tanks with water trucked from faraway towns at the cost of anywhere from 20 to 45 cents a gallon. Utilities in California, by contrast, typically charge their customers less than a penny per gallon of tap water.
The drought is revealing for California that perhaps even more than rainfall, it is money and infrastructure that dictate who has sufficient water during the state’s increasingly frequent dry spells. The drought, and the effects of climate change more generally, have drawn a line under the weaknesses of smaller communities with fewer resources.
Some 600 miles to the south of Mendocino, in a much more arid part of the state, the Lake Perris reservoir, a large artificial lake that provides drinking water to San Bernardino and Riverside counties, is nearly full.
Lake Skinner, Lake Matthews and Diamond Valley Lake, in the dry hills southeast of Los Angeles, are all around 80 percent full. These robust reservoirs, part of the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, illustrate that the haves and have-nots of water in California today are determined by financial muscle and by decades of planning.
Southern California’s cities have built up huge reserves through a century of building aqueducts and reservoirs and storing water in underground aquifers during wetter years.
Across Northern California, reservoirs are at critical levels. For the first time since it came online more than five decades ago, a power generating station at the Oroville Dam stopped producing electricity this month because the reservoir, currently at just 24 percent of capacity, had dipped too low. The massive Shasta Lake reservoir at the top of the agricultural Sacramento Valley is now at 30 percent of capacity. In Santa Rosa, an hour north of San Francisco, the city has put in place a mandatory 20 percent reduction in water use and sends inspectors through neighborhoods to check for excessive water use. Restaurants have been ordered to serve their customers water only on request.
In Mendocino, the immediate concern is being able to find enough water to last until the winter’s rains.
Ryan Rhoades, the manager of the town’s aquifer, spends his days in desperate bouts of brainstorming: The town could string 50 miles of fire hoses through the redwood forests to the city of Ukiah for an emergency supply of water. Blackhawk firefighting helicopters could drop water into the reservoir at Fort Bragg, 16 miles up the coast.
The paradox for Mendocino, which is flanked by vast redwood forests, is that on many days the town is shrouded in moisture. The fog can get so thick that residents towel off their dogs after morning walks. Silicon Valley companies have approached Rhoades about installing machines that convert the fog into drinking water.
The urgent concern is the possibility that in the coming weeks, towns and cities in the county will stop selling water to Mendocino altogether, a step that Fort Bragg took in July because of concerns about its own water shortage.
“That’s what keeps me up at night,” said Roth, the Seagull Inn owner. “If we dry up, our business is done for. We can’t tell guests to clean themselves with hand wipes.”