TULARE, Calif.—Looking for water to flush his toilet, Tino Lozano pointed a garden hose at some buckets on the bare dirt of his yard. It’s his daily ritual now, in a community built by refugees from Oklahoma’s epic Dust Bowl drought. But only a trickle came out; then a drip, then nothing more.
“There it goes. That was all,” said Lozano, masking his desperation with a smile. “That’s how we do it in Okieville now.”
Living with a dried-up well has turned one of life’s simplest tasks into a major chore for Lozano, a 40-year-old disabled Army veteran and family man.
Millions of Californians are being inconvenienced in this fourth year of drought, urged to flush toilets less often, take shorter showers and let lawns turn brown. But it’s dramatically worse in places like Okieville, where wells have gone dry for many of the 100 modest homes that share narrow, cracked streets without sidewalks or streetlights in a dry corner of California’s Central Valley.
Farming in Tulare County brought in $8.1 billion in 2014, more than any other county in the nation, according to its agricultural commissioner. Yet 1,252 of its household wells today are dry — more than all other California counties combined.
It’s particularly alarming in Lozano’s neighborhood, where at least 15 domestic wells used by 23 homes have dried up.
Some neighbors rig lines from house to house to share water from the remaining wells deep enough to hit the emptying aquifer below. Others benefit from state drought relief that pays for trucked-in water to fill 2,500-gallon tanks in their yards, and boxes of drinking water that get stacked in bedrooms and living rooms.
