As summertime looms, McFarland residents may have to choose dirty water — or no water at all
McFARLAND — Twice every month, Maria Jacinto, 49, and her husband make the short trip north to Delano from McFarland.
There they buy water; 5-gallon jugs at $1.50 each to fill. Between the gas and a pack of baby-sized bottles from Costco, the trips run up to $40 a month.
It’s not ideal, but Jacinto’s family has few alternatives. They don’t drink the tap water, or use it to cook.
Instead, she relegates it to house chores: laundering, scrubbing dishware and cleaning the skin of fruit.
Last October, the city of McFarland shut down one of its three public wells days after it was discovered to house higher than allowed levels of nitrate, a chemical typically found in livestock waste, fertilizers and septic tanks.
Jacinto’s family stopped drinking the tap water seven months ago, after discovering a notice from the city posted to their door. It warned residents — especially children and pregnant women — to avoid the tap water, as it could be contaminated with dangerous chemicals.
The city is now running on two active wells, which is bearable in the winter as frequent rains water the lawns and replenish aquifers. But it will be impossible to sustain through the summer, according to city officials.
“We have an emergency here,” McFarland Mayor Saul Ayon said by phone last week.
MCFARLAND’S WATER PLAN
The city’s plan is to double its number of public wells, and to rent a treatment plant capable of filtering nitrates out of its contaminated Browning Road site.
At $7 million apiece, the cost of establishing a new public well dwarfs McFarland’s yearly $5 million general fund, leaving the city at the mercy of state support.
Ayon said the city was supposed to
receive funding by January, through an expedited water grant administered by a division within the State Water Resources Control Board.
Titled the Expedited Drinking Water Grant Program, the program would fast-track projects from a year to within four to six months.
“That’s from application to agreement,” said Joe Karkoski, deputy director and head of the board’s Division of Financial Assistance.
City officials in 2022 submitted a $25 million application. But then the board, also tasked with enforcing state water regulations, halted the application.
“We ran into a couple of issues,” Karkoski said.
State water officials found that the treatment plant McFarland wanted for its Browning Road well was for 1,2,3-trichloropropane, or 1,2,3-TCP, a carcinogen found in industrial solvents and some pesticides. The plant had been out of compliance for the chemical since 2018, when it was first pinged under newly tightened state limits.
This problem isn’t uncommon, said Adam Forbes, an engineer with the board’s division of drinking water. McFarland’s is one of 368 failing water systems statewide, according to the state water board. Nearly 70 of those are in Kern County, and serve more than 130,000 residents.
“There are a lot of water systems that are in that same boat,” Forbes said. “They were given compliance orders back in 2018 and still have not all the way returned to compliance.”
State water board officials say that McFarland is one case of many in a backlog of requests statewide, despite large investments from the state — $130 million pledged annually by Gov. Gavin Newsom until June 2030.
The discovery meant that the state needed to scrap McFarland’s original application, as each chemical contaminant usually requires a separate treatment plant.
The board has since last year toughened its enforcement on the issue, whereby it compels cities and utilities to shut down their wells, treat the water or notify their customers about the contamination.
“Well, just being stewards of state funds, we don’t want to fund another capital project and not have it used,” Karkoski said.
Included at the bottom of the notice received by property owners, an advisory asks people to spread the word to those who “may not have received this notice directly.” It lists examples such as people in apartments, nursing homes, schools and businesses.
Jacinto can’t recall whether there’s been a single city meeting on the subject.
“The community should come together and we’ll talk and solve this,” she said.
Additionally, the notice came in the mail, or posted on doors, issued to property owners across McFarland — more than half of the 15,500 who live here. Many renters, she said, remain totally unaware.
MISMANAGEMENT OR MISFORTUNE?
But what Jacinto sees as mismanagement, Ayon sees as misfortune.
“I inherited a mess,” he said over the phone.
Upon his entrance into office in 2022, Ayon recalled, the city of McFarland hasn’t completed an audit since 2016. Its budget presentation was a copy-and-paste job for years. And several departments suffered from high turnover: three public works directors in the past seven months, for example. Their city manager, Kenny Williams, just retired a couple of weeks ago.
The city currently pays $6,000 monthly for outside consultants to oversee some well operations.
“Up and down the water department, there has been some turnover,” said Curtis Skaggs, an outside water consultant contracted by the city.
McFarland is now working with the State Water Resources Control Board to design an application to fund both short- and longterm plans.
It’s not a simple decision, Karkoski said. Officials will likely seek to build two new wells — one of which will replace Well 6, which is nearly 50 years old. Public wells take years to construct. City engineers also still want funding and operation of a rental treatment plant, wheeled up to the Browning Road site, to filter out the nitrates through the summer and into October.
“The best solution is not just now but for the long-term,” said new City Manager Diego Vermonte. “We have both current and future needs and any decision we make is not in a vacuum, it takes multiple opinions from experts and the state to do what’s best for the city.”
Nitrate is the most costly and difficult to treat, engineers said of their reasoning. Shortly after the well went offline, the city paid $160,000 to run the water through reverse osmosis and replace the pump. But the chemical persisted.
THE BEST-CASE SCENARIO ISN’T THE BEST
But even a best-case scenario doesn’t fix every problem. Residents of McFarland will have to decide once the Browning Road well reopens, even with the nitrate filter, whether they drink the contaminated water.
“For now it’s OK, but as the temperature heats up and demand starts to rise, they’re going to need additional water,” said Jeff Densmore, the section 4 manager for the state’s division of drinking water, which oversees some parts of the Central Valley. “And McFarland is looking at this Browning Road well as their answer to that water shortage supply.”
Long-term exposure to even small amounts of 1,2,3TCP in drinking water can lead to serious health issues, including various cancers. Short-term exposure can irritate the skin, eyes and throat, and may affect memory, concentration and muscle coordination.
“If you drink that water you could be at risk,” said Adam Forbes, a state district engineer.
But if water officials don’t reopen the well, the city of McFarland will likely face a water shortage this summer.
“I’m hoping it doesn’t have to come to that,” Ayon said. “That’s why we’re desperately moving towards a plan.”
There’s no guarantee a plant will work. A 2022 study by UC Berkeley found that despite the addition of a $6 million treatment plant, the water supply of the Kern Valley State Prison and three nearby Central Valley communities — Allensworth, McFarland and Delano — exceeded arsenic limits for months or even years at a time.
They concluded more than 15,000 cases of cancer could occur across the region within 70 years because of unsafe drinking water.
And there’s no guarantee, Skaggs said, that the two new wells will prove unsullied by contaminants. Drill too shallow and you run into some chemicals; drill too deep and you run into others. It’s a mounting public health crisis and familiar scene in the Central Valley, where finding a guaranteed site for clean water is incredibly difficult.
One of the city’s two active wells, the Garzoli well, has since 2018 been treated for arsenic. Their Taylor water well was decommissioned in 2016, after a buildup of carbon monoxide punctured a hole through its steel casing.
“It put a hole through steel,” Skaggs said.
For the Browning Road well, the sweet spot was between 600 and 800 feet in the ground. When it was built in 2012, its output proved great, arguably the best in the city.
WHAT IS CAUSING THE CONTAMINANTS?
Outside its site on Friday, engineers couldn’t say for sure from where exactly the chemicals derived. Poking over the concrete walls on three sides, endless rows of almond groves abut the property.
“Historically, we know there’s a nitrate problem in the shallow aquifer here,” Skaggs said. “That is attributed to either ag or dairy, because there’s a couple dairies here.”
In its explanation behind the data, the state water board said the failed systems in Kern are spurred by poverty, overpumping of aquifers and cancer-causing chemicals that continually foul the water supply. Some 99% of public water systems in Kern are approaching contaminant limits, while 83% have already surpassed it — many times for years.
The congregation of buildings that make the city’s center — family-owned markets, Pentecostal churches and beauty salons — stand like a weed patch amid endless fields of almonds, walnuts and grapes.
Approximately 191 million pounds of pesticides were used in 2021, according to findings compiled last year by the California Environmental Protection Agency, and 95 million acres were treated. The majority of that usage of pesticides per square mile occurred in the Central Valley. More than 260 pounds of pesticides is used per square mile in McFarland, according to the state’s office of environmental health.
Like most of the small towns dotting the valley from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the north to the Grapevine in the south, McFarland’s economy turns on farming. Yet little of farm bounty passes through the local economy, as much of it is grown for export. Although pesticide residues fade on most produce by market day, the chemicals linger in the valley for years, officials say.
Despite far more stringent regulations, and an 81% drop in statewide pesticide use since 2012, experts, officials and community activists today tie the contaminants to long term use of agricultural fertilizers and fumigants.
But it’s nearly impossible to prove, as chemicals migrate once they penetrate the valley’s sandy floor.
“We don’t know if it was some byproduct of the dairy operation or something to do with the oil pumping somewhere in the area,” Skaggs said. “It could be a number of things.”
FROM THE CAFETERIA COUNTER
But far from any debate in Sacramento, in both miles and in mind, Jacinto watches from the cafeteria counter where she works at Horizon Elementary, a K-5 school with more than 700 students at the edge of McFarland’s southwest.
According to Ayon, if either of the two remaining wells were to go down now, McFarland would enter a water crisis.
But Jacinto doesn’t place too much faith in the mayor, or the city, to keep its residents’ interests at heart. She said that if this happened elsewhere, like Bakersfield, there would be an uproar.
She doesn’t know what everyone in the community thinks, but if they live here, in McFarland, they should be worried. But to her, the lack of transparency has only worsened the problem.
“They don’t take the community into account,” she said.
At church, she overhears others saying to simply boil the water, which actually strengthens the contaminant by cooking out excess water. “They didn’t know that when they boil the water, the nitrates don’t go away,” Jacinto said. “They didn’t know.”
And from the lunch counter, Jacinto watches kids, one by one, gleefully walk up to the water fountain and drink. She acknowledges, with gratitude in her eyes, that she doesn’t know anyone personally affected.
“Right now, I don’t know of anyone (impacted),” she said. “But eventually, in the future, yes.”