Clean Water May Soon Be On Tap for Rural Towns

Each time he turns on his squeaky kitchen faucet, Eleazar Torres watches the murky flow of what federal officials say is probably the nation’s dirtiest drinking water.

At age 48, Torres lives with his ailing mother in a slumping mobile home at the end of a rutted, unpaved road in a tiny community called Poe--a cluster of 39 tumbledown trailers and homes situated amid the expansive Imperial Valley growing fields.

The water he uses to cook, bathe and sometimes brush his teeth comes from a system of narrow irrigation canals that crisscross the fields. While many Poe residents have learned not to drink it, the filthy liquid remains an intimate part of their lives.

“This water’s no good,” Torres says over the crowing of a backyard rooster. “But what can I do? It’s the only water we have.”

From burgs like Poe to isolated outposts with no names, access to reliable supplies of clean drinking water remains a chronic problem throughout rural areas of California and the nation. A 1995 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded that more than a million rural residents nationwide did not have clean drinking water in their homes.

Though they are just a fraction of the state’s 6.9 million rural residents, nearly 100,000 rural Californians use contaminated water that is not filtered at all, federal officials say.

But help is on the way for places like Poe.

Through its Water 2000 Initiative, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent $57 million over four years on dozens of statewide projects aimed at modernizing outdated rural water systems. And a new state Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Fund will soon spend $90 million to upgrade water districts throughout California, some in rural areas.

State Department of Health Services officials have identified 3,300 potential public water projects they want to complete at an estimated cost of $7.5 billion. They range from tiny hookups at farm housing and trailer parks to larger systems.

Many needy communities are outside the reach of municipal water districts, forced to rely on well water treated by antiquated, World War II-era filtering systems. Others tap into irrigation canals, rivaling conditions of Third World nations. Users are almost always people living at or below the poverty line, in isolation that makes connecting them to existing water systems difficult and expensive.

“On the eve of the year 2000, the drinking water systems in many rural places remain straight out of the early 19th century,” said Jeff Hays, a regional director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Across the Central Valley, community wells have been polluted by nitrates and pesticides from agricultural spraying. And in rural farming areas throughout Tuolumne, El Dorado, Kern and Tulare counties, low-income residents draw their water straight from irrigation canals.

But no place has dirtier water than Poe, where a brownish flow spills from the Tamarack Canal into a shallow ditch littered with weeds, old bottles and rats, where dogs often romp.

Pipes send the brackish water directly into the homes of Poe’s 150 residents. Most rarely drink it, but they use it for washing and cooking.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Hays. “This water is as contaminated as you can get, other than raw sewage.”

Federal officials will soon spend $1.2 million to connect Poe to a new water treatment facility in Brawley. Clean drinking water will be a welcome change in a community that has consistently failed to meet state and federal clean-water standards.

Canal Declared Hazard in 1992

In 1992, the federal Environmental Protection Agency declared the canal water near Poe a public health hazard, a carrier of diseases from dysentery to typhoid. Recent EPA testing showed high levels of fecal bacteria and other contaminants, officials say.

Local authorities have pulled everything from abandoned vehicles to decomposing bodies from the canal system, where children swim on hot summer days and from which people still drink.

Asked senior EPA scientist John Merkle: “Would you want to drink that water?”

For the 37-year-old Hays, one of six federal rural development directors in the state, helping to provide rural residents with clean drinking water means scouting a largely desert region the size of a small country.

He is equal parts deal-maker, financier, engineer and salesman. On one proposed project to bring water to an isolated retirement community of 400 dwellings in San Bernardino County, Hays hit a bureaucratic brick wall. Residents had been promised two decades earlier that a water line would be built one day.

But the water never came, forcing elderly residents to make daily trips to county wells. Many relied on private water companies, which finally refused to negotiate the rutted dirt roads leading into the community.

Hays’ supervisors balked initially, saying residents had chosen to live in such isolation. “I had to convince them that they had been promised water that never came,” said Hays, who eventually got his project, a $6-million pipeline that stretches 27 miles from county wells.

But his toughest sells are residents who don’t believe they need government help and bristle at paying $20 a month to repay low-interest federal loans used to build water systems. Hays reasons that the new fees will be far less than what rural residents spend on bottled water each month.

Even in Poe there is defiance.

“This valley was raised on ditch water; I raised four kids on it,” said 70-year-old Lois Wendell, who gets her drinking water from her daughter in Brawley but still uses canal water for washing and cooking. “These clothes were washed in ditch water and they don’t stink,” she said. “That water never hurt anybody. You get thirsty enough, you’ll drink it.”

Some communities, however, welcome Hays with enthusiasm.

In Mesa Verde, a tiny cluster of 360 homes just outside Blythe, residents are plagued by water high in naturally occurring chemicals that have seeped into their main community well. Officials say the water is safe in small amounts.

The often brownish water contains three times the amount of iron allowed by state standards, and is also high in fluoride and dissolved solids.

And that’s the good water. Several times a year during peak season, Mesa Verde’s main well runs low, forcing officials to switch to a secondary well with water containing twice the state limits for uranium, nitrates and fluoride.

Cause of Illness, Death in Infants

Excessive levels of nitrates in drinking water have caused illness and death in infants, and boiling only increases the nitrate concentration, studies show. High levels of uranium in drinking water have also been shown to affect growth and cause kidney damage in animals.

Use of the secondary well is limited to 15 days a year, and it can be tapped only after a 48-hour public notice. “You turn on your faucet and the water comes out all brown and it smells like somebody let off a couple of stink bombs in the house,” said Mike Conley, a guard at the nearby state prison. “I don’t drink that stuff at all. But sometimes my wife makes ice cubes from it and after a couple of sips your Coke starts to taste salty.”

Down the street, Sherry Chavez holds her infant son and describes the water that drips from her tap: It turns both her clothes and her hair the color of rust, leaves her above-ground pool filter a bright orange, and creates white alkaline stains on the ground.

In time, she says, it will turn your teeth yellow. And sometimes after showering in it, Chavez feels dirtier than when she started.

She applauded a $4-million federal project arranged by Hays that will extend a water line from nearby Blythe and build tanks to store it.

Not far away, the tiny community of Ripley also eagerly awaits the federal extension of the Blythe pipeline. Meanwhile, Jean Brown endures water high in iron and chloride, and that fails state standards for sulfate, iron manganese and dissolved solids.

Brown, a longtime Ripley resident, says the iron-tainted water clogs pipes with layers of rusting metal, ruins shower heads and forces her to buy a new dishwasher every year. Many mornings, her water “foams black like mud” when she tries to make coffee.

“I wouldn’t feed that water to my dog,” she said, clutching her pet pooch, Muffy. “Once I cooked a pot of beans all day and they still sounded like rocks hitting the plate. What did we do to deserve this nasty water?”

Frustrated Riverside County health officials say hooking up communities like Ripley and Mesa Verde to clean water has long proven too expensive.

“In our minds the water there is not unhealthful, but it’s a terrible thing to have to live with every day,” said Don Park, a public health engineer with the county Department of Environmental Health. “It’s one of the penances you pay for living out in the country.”

Few people wait for clean water as eagerly as June Regouby. The 71-year-old grandmother, who lives in Poe with her 12 grandchildren, dreams of the day that good water will flow into her home.

“Just think of it,” she says dreamily, “you’ll be able to turn on your faucet, fill a glass of good, cool water and drink it right down.

“That’s gonna be a mighty fine day.”