The small Monterey County farming community of San Lucas must live daily with the inconvenience, danger and fear of contaminated water — and is one of many across the Salinas and Central valleys wh…
“I don’t use tap water because it is non-potable and causes a rush on our skin,” Melva Garza said as she shows the setting of 5-gallons of potable water jugs near her bathroom in San Lucas, Calif., on Thursday, April 14, 2023. Garza and her disabled son go to the truck stop showers in King City two or three times a week, where she pays to take showers, she said. The farm town of about 200 residents hasn’t had clean drinking water for over a decade.
It’s a reality the family has faced for 11 years since nitrate levels in San Lucas’s only freshwater well spiked to dangerous levels. Her family is one of the dozens in the small Monterey County farming community that must live daily with the inconvenience, danger and fear of contaminated water — and she is one of the hundreds of thousands of people across the Salinas and Central Valleys who face water insecurity in a state that is the world’s fourth-largest economy.
Rene Valdez, Jr., of Pure Water Bottling Company, loads 5-gallon water bottles onto residents' trucks at the San Lucas Water District office in San Lucas, Calif., on Thursday, April 14, 2023. Officials at the town’s water district — headquartered in a three-room house on the city’s main street — decided a pipeline to King City, eight miles away, was the best long-term solution to the city’s nitrate issue, while also addressing other contaminants that made tap water smell bad and turn yellow, brown or even black.
“Right in the moment when you’re on the path of progress, and everyone is saying you’re doing a great job, we’ve got the grant dollars, we’ve moved the needle, the rug was just pulled out from under us,” Monterey County Supervisor Chris Lopez, who represents San Lucas, said in an interview.Just a year before the San Lucas water crisis began, then-Governor Jerry Brown pledged to end water insecurity in the state, signing legislation making access to drinking water a “human right.
“The state can’t dictate the means of compliance nor can we go in and operate a water system,” said Drinking Water Division Chief Stefan Cajina in an interview. “For us to go in with our staff and help them on the water system solutions would in effect be dictating the means of compliance, and that’s overstepping our role.”
For Guadalupe Pio’s family, the weekly drinking water deliveries aren’t enough. Pio, who has grown not to trust San Lucas’ water system at all, bathes her nieces and nephews in jug water to prevent them from getting itchy, flaky, red skin from the tap. She gives the jug water to her pets too, and sometimes her plants.Pio has to choose wisely when she does her laundry. She said she “can’t bear to think” of how many clothes she’s thrown away after they came out stained and smelly from the washer.
Long gone are the restaurant, store, barber and train station that once connected San Lucas’ residents to each other and the rest of the world, leaving only empty lots and the memories of long-time locals. John Romans, farmer for Mission Ranches, walks towards the water well that provides non-potable water to San Lucas, Calif., on Thursday, April 14, 2023. Susan Madson, general manager of the San Lucas Water District, receives water bill payment from longtime resident Leon Infante at the office in San Lucas, Calif., on Thursday, April 14, 2023.
In conjunction with a 2013 order to provide water for the town, the state ordered Mission Ranches to consider a new groundwater well and deal with the legal issues surrounding its construction. But the farm warned in a 2015 letter to the state that the well could not be a long-term solution, as it too would likely spike in nitrate and other contaminants, given the long history of farming in the area.
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