Three or four times a week, Melva Garza and her 40-year-old disabled son throw shampoo, soap, towels and fresh clothes in a bag, pack up their car and make their way to a truck stop eight miles away to take a shower.
She keeps the shower tokens — 50 cents each — stacked next to the truck stop faucet, each one worth three more minutes of water.
The Garzas haven’t showered in their own home in over a decade.
For years, Garza hasn’t turned on the taps that spew only fetid, discolored water into her house. She has 5-gallon jugs strewn about for everything from washing her hands to cooking and cleaning her clothes. She uses her two bathtubs as storage.
It’s a reality the family has faced for 11 years since nitrate levels in San Lucas’ 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.
Hundreds of plastic jugs of water arrive on trucks twice each week, delivered down the town’s dirt roads and paid for by the farming business the state blames for the contamination. The state water regulator — which quickly approved a long-term solution for the town, then scrapped the plan a year later — continues to wrangle with the community about a permanent fix, leaving the town’s residents caught in the middle of a slow-motion standoff over who will pay to restore the water supply.
“I have to leave my home to shower. I have to haul water up to my house,” Garza said. “It’s like living in a third-world country.”
In 2013, the state ordered the roughly 300 residents of San Lucas to stop drinking from their faucets, after nitrate levels spiked in the water supply.
The state found a local farm, Mission Ranches, responsible for the contamination citing the farm’s switch from vineyards to vegetables, which use more nitrate-rich fertilizer that then leached into the town’s only well. Nitrate consumption increases the risk of illnesses like “blue baby syndrome” — a potentially fatal condition in which nitrates replace blood oxygen and can cause suffocation — and has been linked to cancer in adults as well.
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.
The State Water Resources Control Board approved the $8 million project in 2015. But the next year, the state backtracked and ordered the water district to stop all pipeline planning.
The plan was deemed too expensive for the small town, exceeding the “approved proportional share of $30,000/connection,” as the state put it in an August 2016 letter. With 324 people in fewer than 100 homes as of the 2020 census, the cost would be about three times that high.
“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.
“The punch in the gut doesn’t go away,” Lopez added. “It lingers.”
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.”
But today more than 920,000 people across California remain at risk of health problems from local water systems that don’t meet quality standards, according to a 2022 state audit. More than two-thirds of those systems are in low-income communities, primarily in the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys.
In interviews with this news organization, officials from the State Water Control Board and the Central Coast Water Board said the best long-term alternative for San Lucas “is still being evaluated.”
Plans to dig a new well in San Lucas, improve filtration systems and introduce new nitrate detection technology are currently underway and will be funded by the agriculture conglomerate that runs Mission Ranches. But the state says it’s up to the community to decide what solution it wants for the long term — and maintains that the company should pay for any permanent fix to eliminate nitrates in the water.
“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.”
Still, the Water Control Board has had no trouble telling San Lucas what won’t work: A pipeline to King City, Cajina said, would be an “unprecedented,” “unorthodox” and “expensive” approach to dealing with nitrate contamination.
What’s played out in San Lucas is similar to what other low-income farming communities in California face, said University of California, Davis professor Thomas Harter, whose research focuses on groundwater contamination in the state.
“If you’re on a community system, that community needs to have an organization that actually deals with water treatment and maintenance,” Harter said. “And for a lot of these rural, smaller unincorporated communities, it’s such a big challenge.”
As the state wrangles with local water officials and ranchers, dozens of families are stuck in the middle.
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.
Her son, Anthony Pio, 14, said he’s “never in my life” drunk out of the tap in San Lucas.
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.
“It’s about time that they did something about the water,” Pio said. “You can’t cook, you can’t clean, you can’t drink, you can’t use it. It feels like we’ve been forgotten, like they don’t care.”
For many in San Lucas, the idea of a water pipeline to King City is a distant memory. That project, which would have cost about $8 million when it was initially approved in 2015, would cost about $12 million today.
At San Lucas Union School, students have for years written their names on personal drinking cups. When a new library was built in town three years ago, it was hooked up to the legacy water system — a sign reads “do not drink” above the bathroom tap.
Yet without water, the town’s future is also at risk.
In 2006, Chispa Housing — a nonprofit based in Salinas — proposed building 33 units of low-income housing, which would have been a boon for the local economy. But the plans fell through because of the contaminated groundwater.
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.
“When we moved here there was pride in everything. This was a real town,” said 82-year-old Mary Carroll, who has lived in San Lucas since 1970. “We look around now and feel like next thing you know we’re going to fade away.”
Sheri Braden, a water district board member, said the state has put too much of the blame for nitrate contamination on Mission Ranches, and John Romans, who runs the company’s local subsidiary.
“People really just want to turn on the faucet and be done,” Braden said. “This community is tied together. What happens to him happens to us too.”
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.
“I already drilled the hole, I can put the well in … but it’s only a Band-Aid,” Romans said in an interview. “King City makes the most sense because they have more wells.”
But Central Coast Water Board deputy director Thea Tyron said the community needs to hold the farm accountable, whatever solution it chooses.
“They’re all a part of the community — the people that caused the water pollution and the people drinking the water,” Tyron said. “It’s a very tight community and it’s hard for them to say, ‘Hey, neighbor, you caused my well to be contaminated, and now you need to pay.’ … But I do have to look at it objectively. That’s the regulatory approach when we deal with things like that. It’s not personal at all.”
Braden insists the best solution is for everyone — the state and the local community — to come together behind a pipeline to King City. She said if the state stopped trying to get the farm to “pay for everything,” the parties could find a solution that honors the state’s commitment to safe drinking water for all.
In the Garza’s bathrooms, Melva heaves a 5-gallon jug into a dispenser propped on the counter inches away from the tap. She’s written prayers, hymns and bible quotes on the jugs to remind herself she must be thankful for what she has. But it’s still hard to watch those jugs empty slowly.
“This is suffering, what I’m going through,” she said. “I have a handicapped son to take care of who doesn’t understand why we can’t just turn the tap on. It makes me feel like I’m not taking good care of him because I can’t get fresh water.
“Even though I don’t have water, I like to stay thankful. Without that, I’d probably be crying every day.”
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