Calif has major risk of forest fires. Hope Danny D and everyone out there is OK.
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With Dry Taps and Toilets, California Drought Turns Desperate
OCT. 2, 2014
PORTERVILLE, Calif. ? After a nine-hour day working at a citrus packing plant, there is nothing Angelica Gallegos wants more than a hot shower.
But she has not had running water for more than five months ? nor is there any tap water in her near future ? because of a punishing and relentless drought in California.
residents cannot flush a toilet, fill a drinking glass, wash dishes or clothes, or even rinse their hands without reaching for a bottle or bucket.
?Everything has changed,? said Yolanda Serrato, 54, who has spent most of her life here. Ms. Serrato warned her three children that they should cut down on long showers, but they rebuffed her. ?They kept saying, ?No, no, Mama, you?re just too negative,?
Then the sink started to sputter. The sole neighbor with a working well allows them to hook up to his water at night, saving them from having to use buckets to flush toilets in the middle of the night. On a recent morning, there was still a bit of the neighbor?s well water left, trickling out the kitchen faucet, taking over 10 minutes to fill two three-quart pots.
Because the land is unincorporated, it is not part of a municipal water system, and connecting to one would be prohibitively expensive.
The Gallegos family?s drinking water comes only from bottles, mostly received through donations but some times bought at the gas station. For bathing, doing dishes and flushing toilets, the family relies on buckets filled with water from a tank set in the front lawn, which Mr. Gallegos replenishes every other day at the county fire station. Often, the water runs out before he returns home from his job as a mechanic, forcing Ms. Gallegos to wait for hours before she can clean.
The family has spent hundreds of dollars to wash their clothes at the laundromat and on paper goods to avoid washing dishes. Ms. Gallegos recently told her 10-year-old daughter that there was no money left to pay for her after-school cheer leading club.
The local high school now allows students to arrive early and shower there. Parents often keep their children home from school if they have not bathed, worried that they could lose custody if the authorities deem the students too dirty, a rumor that county officials have tried to dismiss.
Mothers who normally take pride in their cooking now rely on canned and fast food, because washing vegetables uses too much water.
For months, families called county and state officials asking what they should do when their water ran out, only to be told that there was no public agency that could help them.
State officials say that at least 700 households have no access to running water. Tulare County, just south of Fresno, recently began aggressively tracking homes without running water, delivering bottles to hundreds of homes and offering applications for biweekly water deliveries. In August, the county placed a 5,000-gallon tank of water in front of a fire station on Lake Success Road, and plans to add a second soon. A sign in English and Spanish declares, ?Do not use for drinking,? but officials suspect that many do.
?We will give people water as long as we have it, but the truth is, we don?t really know how long that will be.?