East Porterville, an unincorporated part of agricultural Tulare County in California’s Central Valley, won international attention as a case study in suffering when the drought entered its fourth year in 2014. The shallow wells supplying residents went dry as the water table fell — so many that East Porterville has 12 percent of the failed wells in the state.
Two years later, the crisis continues. “Even now, some residents have to use portable showers in a church parking lot and dump a bucket of water into their toilets to flush,” says the Los Angeles Times. “No fewer than nine government agencies and nonprofit organizations have had a hand in helping the community. But residents and even some government officials say progress has been painstakingly slow, if not altogether ineffectual. Last year, for example, state officials sank $1.2 million into a new well that remains untapped because of quarreling among government agencies.”
The well is at the end of a dirt road, where mini-malls “give way to endless alfalfa,” says the newspaper. Tulare County is the second-largest agricultural producing county in the nation.
The new and most ambitious plan to date for saving East Porterville calls for laying pipes to create a municipal water system, with a completion date of late 2017. In the meantime, residents rely on bottled water to drink.