Farmers Reel at Kesterson Decision : ‘They’ve Just Wiped Us Out,’ One Says of U.S. Irrigation Curb

All weekend long, the farmers of this town in the San Joaquin Valley collected in small knots around City Hall. They would stare for a while, talk for a while, then stare some more. In all, the farmers were trying to digest the news that their town, and the farm region stretching on all sides around it, had just been declared null and void by the federal government.

On Friday the federal Bureau of Reclamation, in an announcement that came as a surprise to everyone, told the farmers that it would soon cease delivery of irrigation water to 42,000 acres of rich farmland surrounding Mendota. At a hearing of a House subcommittee in nearby Los Banos, bureau officials said the action was necessary because agricultural drain water from the farmlands, contaminated with selenium, is poisoning wildlife at Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge about 50 miles away.

For Mendota, a town that bills itself as the world’s capital of cantaloupes, the news was so bad that many, at first, refused to believe it. One member of the stand-and-stare crowd at City Hall said Mendota was about to become the world capital of tumbleweed. He laughed, but he laughed alone.

“I still don’t believe it,” said Bruno Marchini, who owns 160 acres in the affected area. “I keep telling myself the people who made that decision don’t understand what they’ve done. They’ve just wiped us out, and if we go down, the whole town will go with us.”

In the council chambers in City Hall, intense discussions were raging over the town’s proper response. Some councilmen were pushing lawsuits; others wanted an outpouring of citizen demonstrations. A sheet of addresses for President Reagan, Gov. George Deukmejian and U.S. Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel had been hurriedly photocopied and passed through the ranks of farmers. At the top of the sheet were the instructions: “Send telegrams now.”

Whether these techniques prove successful or not, the problems facing the farmers here are very grave. The farmland around Mendota contains high concentrations of selenium and heavy metals that render irrigation water toxic even as it passes through the soil and makes the crops flourish.

If the soils drained naturally, the repercussions might not be serious; the toxic wastes simply would filter deep into the earth. But throughout most of the western San Joaquin Valley, a layer of impermeable clay lies underneath the topsoil. As more and more irrigation water is applied, the underground water level begins to rise toward the surface as certainly as a tub fills with bathwater.

In the late 1970s, the Bureau of Reclamation installed on the farms around Mendota a drainage system that, the agency believed, would solve the western valley’s problem. Collector pipes were buried underground to carry the waste water to a drainage sluice named the San Luis Canal.

Initially, the canal was designed to extend to San Francisco Bay before dumping its contaminated load. But financial and political problems prevented that, and the canal never got farther than Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, a few miles outside of Los Banos. Since 1978 the marshes of Kesterson have been the sole repository for the San Luis waters.

The results for Kesterson have been disastrous. Government biologists have found extremely high levels of birth deformities and deaths among waterfowl and have concluded that the cause is the selenium contained in the agricultural water. Now, even refuge officials are required to wear protective clothing when they work in the area.

Late Saturday afternoon, Marchini and three other local farmers visited some of the fields that have been designated for cut-off by the bureau. At the corner of each 160-acre plot, a concrete culvert gurgled with the sound of waste water being carried away to the San Luis Canal.

“It’s a neat system,” said Stan Silveira, patting the culvert. “When we put the drains in the ground we thought, hey, this is the whole answer. Only problem was no one knew about the selenium.” Until the announcement on Friday, all the farmers had planned to plant their fields with cotton this week. Preparations for the planting have already cost them about $150 per acre. But without the water, no cotton will grow, so the farmers say they will not plant unless a miracle occurs in the next few days.

“Right now this land is worthless,” said Silveira.

‘Then I’ll Sue’

If there is no crop this year, the result for him probably will be bankruptcy, said Peter Deltesta, who owns 640 acres inside the cut-off zone. “If the worst happens, I’ll go to Chapter 11 and salvage what I can. Then I’ll sue the hell out of the government.”

When the bureau announced the cut-off last week, regional director David G. Houston said his agency would pursue alternatives for the storage and disposal of the waste water. Those schemes involve injecting the wastes into deep wells or constructing local ponds to serve as temporary collection basins.

But the farmers put little stock in those proposals. All of them, they noted, are complex, costly and controversial in themselves.

“No one is going to come up with another system this year,” said Silveira. “You either use the drain or you don’t farm.”

For some farmers in the affected area, there is an alternative. Those farms--estimated at fewer than half of the total--have working wells that can supply water for the coming season even if irrigation water is cut off.

That alternative is not without cost. When the bureau shuts off the water, it also plans to plug the drainage system, so any water used on the farms will once again cause the water table to begin rising toward the surface.

District Plans Suit

For the rest, the only immediate hope appears to lie with legal action being planned by Westlands Water District, the sprawling farming district that represents the farmers affected by the bureau’s decision. Westlands officials say they will file suit seeking to block the cut-off early this week.

For Westlands and the San Joaquin Valley, the issue is much larger than the 42,000 acres affected by the bureau’s decision. Eventually, Westlands officials say, about 1 million acres of the San Joaquin Valley will require the kind of underground drainage that was installed around Mendota. No one knows if selenium contamination will result from drainage of those acres.

And no one knows who will pay for the pending disaster in this farming region. Westlands officials say the cut-off zone produces about $40 million to $45 million a year in crops, including cotton, tomatoes and melons. If dependent businesses such as farm equipment dealers and pest-control operators were included, the economic loss would be much higher.

The bureau has estimated that a planned clean-up of the Kesterson refuge will cost $500 million, but that figure does not include compensation to farmers or others for their losses. Late last week bureau officials said the government was still studying the issue of its liability to the farmers.

“If things stand the way they are right now, it’s over for all of us,” Silveira said. “A few guys would keep trying to grow, but then the water would build up and slowly kill the crops. You’d see bigger and bigger patches of brown in the fields until nothing was left. Just like a cancer growing.”