Confidence in Tap Water Runs Dry : Contamination: Some families near Oxnard can’t afford many luxuries, but they are paying the price to avoid nitrates seeping into their wells.

For Alberto and Flora Garcia and their five sons, it’s hard enough to make ends meet on the $4.50 an hour Alberto makes picking strawberries between January and June and the $424 monthly unemployment check he gets the rest of the year.

Like most of their 15,000 neighbors in El Rio and Nyeland Acres--two small, working-class, mostly Latino communities just north of Oxnard--the Garcias can’t afford many luxuries. But they pay for and drink bottled water.

“You want the best for your children,” Alberto Garcia said in Spanish at his residence Friday, while Flora stood nearby stirring a pot of frijoles soaked in bottled water. “The tap water’s no good.”

El Rio and Nyeland Acres residents have been drinking bottled water for months--and in some cases up to two years--because county health officials have warned them that the wells serving the area are becoming increasingly contaminated with nitrates from septic tanks and fertilizers used on agricultural fields.

Nitrates pose a risk for babies, who don’t have stomach acids to break down the minerals. Unaltered, nitrates affect the blood’s ability to transport oxygen.

The nitrate contamination has caused county officials to close wells in seven of the 20 small water companies in the area. The rest are contaminated but not enough to violate state standards, health officials have said.

County Supervisor Susan K. Lacey is lobbying state officials for a $400,000 grant to pay for new safe water supplies for the area and save residents the estimated $2,000 per household it would cost them to solve the problem.

Alberto Garcia said he doesn’t know anything about nitrates or what the politicians are doing to help him. All he knows is that for months the water had been “tasting funny and had a rusty color,” and that three weeks ago a government official testing water nearby told him “the water could be no good.”

And he knows that raising $2,000 for better water is out of the question. “I hope the government can help us,” he said. “I hope it spends its money on something people really need, which is water.” For now, the Garcias will continue spending $3.50 every three days for their five-gallon bottle, plus $20 to $40 for their tap water.

Robert Butterfield, 66, and his wife, Julia, 68, live across Balboa Street from the Garcias. Social Security is their only income and they have to cut corners.

So every week, they drive 15 minutes to Ventura, where they can buy drinking water for 30 to 40 cents a gallon. “It’s still expensive, if you count the gas money,” said Julia Butterfield, as she pulled some weeds from her front lawn.

“But we don’t drink that much water anyway,” added Robert, who was dragging a large plastic trash container onto the yard. Smiling from ear to ear, he said, “We prefer beer.”

Plumber Alfredo Salazar, 44, who lives in the neighborhood, knows that there’s something wrong with the local water. “The copper pipes get rotten, and there’s holes in them. It happens all over, but much more around here,” he said.

Salazar has found an alternative to bottled water. For $13 a month, he rents a reverse osmosis water filter system he saw advertised on television. About four of every 10 families he visits in the area have done the same thing, he said. Salazar keeps his water filter under the kitchen sink and has hooked the filtered water to a faucet he drilled into his refrigerator.

“The water comes out ice-cold and it tastes good,” he said. “For cooking, we use the other faucet connected to the sink.”

But not everybody in El Rio is complaining--or suffering--from the water situation.

At Chhino’s Market & Liquor on Vineyard Avenue, manager Maria Lopez, 29, is thrilled because bottles of Evian, Arrowhead and Crystal Geyser water are selling like hot cakes.

“We had to alter the refrigerator to make room for the 1 1/2-liter bottles,” she said.

And the store’s shelves also had to be changed three weeks ago, she said. “We used to keep the bottles right there,” she said, pointing to a single shelf, “but they would disappear before noon.”

Now, water bottles of all shapes and sizes occupy the entire right side of a row.

Outside the store, teen-agers form lines to fill five-gallon bottles from the water machine. “The machine carries 100 gallons, and it’s usually empty by the end of the day,” Lopez said.

Lopez might be the only El Rio resident happy about the water problems.

“I like it because we sell the water for 30% more than what we pay for it,” she cheerfully remarked, while tending shop behind the cash register.