Water Shortage at Trailer Park Angers Tenants

There’s trouble in Paradise.

Some of the more than 100 residents of the Paradise Ranch Trailer Park north of Castaic blame the landlord and owner of the park, 70-year-old Ken Smith, for interruptions in service that left their homes without water for hours at a time during most of June.

And even though the water came back on a week ago, almost no one in Paradise Ranch is smiling. The bad feelings were evident Saturday when residents and the wheelchair-bound owner exchanged accusations during a meeting at the park’s clubhouse before state, county and local officials.

The residents, many of whom are elderly, said the water shortages are a major inconvenience.

“When you get up at 2 in the morning to go to work and you’ve got to shower, what are you going to do?” asked Joe Martinez, a dairy truck driver. “You’re going to use bottled water to shower.”

Officials said Saturday that they had not determined what caused the shortages. Smith blamed vandals who he said lurked around the trailer park’s seven wells, shutting them off when no one was watching. But some residents said the vandals were a poor excuse for bad maintenance of the wells’ pumps.

“Why? Why would they do that, cut off their own water?” resident Randall Forster asked. “We’ve heard that excuse before.”

Gary Schultz, a sanitary engineer with the state Department of Health Services, said officials were studying the situation but had not determined the cause of the shortages. “We’re hearing a lot of allegations and we’re just trying to get the facts straight,” he said.

Smith had his own theories. Besides vandals, the landlord said he believed that some of the water was lost by residents who let their hoses run overnight. He said the 84 trailers in the park are using almost all of the 31,000 gallons pumped each day from the wells. “That’s 400 gallons per day per space,” he said. “That’s a lot of water.”

After about two hours, the meeting deteriorated into a shouting match. “You’re a liar!” Forster yelled when Smith accused him of wasting water.

“I didn’t come here to be badgered,” Smith answered. He said later that the water controversy was “hurting my marriage. I’ve seen my wife cry and I think some of you people don’t think we’re human beings.”

A few residents rallied to the landlord’s defense. “People ought to give Mr. Smith a little more credit around here because he’s trying real hard to solve the problem,” said Kris Goddard, owner of a jockey school at an adjacent equestrian center.

Goddard also complained about “busybodies” who she said took pictures of her as she washed horses and watered the grass.

Officials attending the meeting included Jo Anne Darcy, a field deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, and Bonnie Thomas of the county Department of Health Services. Thomas said she came to the park to investigate a spill of raw sewage at a recreational vehicle park adjacent to the trailer park. The spill was not related to the water outages, she said.

Capt. Roy Burleson of the volunteer Castaic Fire Department attended the meeting because a nearby water tank reserved for firefighting was nearly empty. Ordinarily, the tank would be filled by the trailer park’s wells.

But he said that in case of an emergency, the fire department would simply pump water from another source: the trailer park’s 40,000-gallon swimming pool.