Drought-hit California town’s water supply is set to run out in just TWO MONTHS

A drought-stricken small town in Central California says it is set to run out of water in a matter of months as the state continues to grapple with a 20-year megadrought – the likes of which have not been seen in the region since the 9th century.

The crisis facing the people of Coalinga – a tiny farm town located in the mountains between Fresno and Bakersfield – is so dire, officials say the city may need $2.5million to buy enough water to last the year, at a premium from opportunistic price gougers.

The city’s entire budget is $10 million. 

That has spurred lawmakers in the town – whose main industries are agriculture and oil – to plea for help from officials in Sacramento, as well as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, in an effort to increase their increasingly limited water supply.

In response, its roughly 17,000 residents have already begun stockpiling five-gallon water jugs as water grows more scarce – in a predominantly Republican town home the hundreds of farmers. 

Moreover, Coalinga’s limited water supply comes from a reservoir located about 90 miles to the north. It is delivered along a portion of the California Aqueduct, a 444-mile-long pipeline that delivers water from the also drought-afflicted Sierra Nevadas to Central and Southern California.

That extensive system of canals, tunnels, and dams is known as The Central Valley Project, a nearly century-old federal undertaking that has since been severely hobbled by historic drought. 

Tens of thousands of farmers across the state received no allocation from that network this year – putting the livelihood and safety of those citizens at risk.

If the city fails to find relief, officials warn, it could be forced to buy additional water elsewhere, on the open market, with an exorbitant upcharge, with water that normally runs the city $190 per acre-foot now costing for as much as $2,500 per acre-foot.

That, lawmakers say could consume the city’s entire budget, spelling doom for thousands living in the small Republican outpost in a notoriously liberal state. 

In an interview this week, City Council member Adam Adkisson called those prices ‘criminal,’ saying, ‘We just don’t have $2.5 million to buy water.’ 

The city official went on to slam those responsible for the price gouging – usually hedge funds and other investors taking advantage of extensive capital to turn a profit in a time of apparent unrest.

‘In a natural disaster, you can’t increase the cost of bottled water 2,000 percent; you’d go to jail for that,’ Adkisson said. ‘But somehow, these people can increase it 2,000 percent and everything’s just fine.’

Concerns over that kind of ‘drought profiteering’ prompted State Senator Melissa Hurtado (D) to write Attorney General Merrick Garland in May demanding an investigation into those sellers that ‘literally steal our most life dependent resource from ourselves and future generations in exchange for a profit.’

Hurtado has since revealed that she spoke to Adkisson in August while searching for a solution to Coalinga’s problems, and found the city official ‘in panic mode,’ after he and his colleagues calculated the city’s supply would run out by mid-September.

Beyond that point, if Coalinga kept using water from their crucial pipeline, it would belong to another region in the state – most of which has also been severely affected by the drought and wildfires after a particularly dry summer.

‘The price of water, the cost of water, is increasing, but it’s not just going to be to the Central Valley; it’s going to be statewide,’ Hurtado said of the ever-worsening situation. ‘We’re in a crisis situation in a matter of weeks, I think.’

Sean Brewer, Coalinga’s assistant city manager, echoed those sentiments that month as well, after receiving the grim diagnosis regarding the town’s dwindling water supplies from Reclamation officials.

‘You don’t have the right to take that water,’ Brewer said of the town’s current predicament on August 4, begrudgingly telling the other members of the City Council of the prospective price gouging they may face if they want to keep their town afloat.  

‘I cringe when I say this,’ Brewer said upon delivering the news. 

The town’s water comes from the San Luis Reservoir, about 90 miles to the north, and is delivered along a portion of the aqueduct built in the 60s that helped spur the region’s agricultural growth. 

And as supplies dwindle, Coalinga has taken measures to deter locals form wasting water, with supplies set to run out as harvest season comes to a close after this month.

The city currently has code enforcers and even police officers patrolling the oil derricks and cattle ranches of town on the western edge of the state’s Central Valley looking for water violations.

Officials have put a moratorium on building swimming pools, raised water rates several times, and last year even began charging locals ‘drought fees’ for overusing water. 

However, shortly after, the city voted to refund the $277,000 it had collected in those fees, after noticing that water use was not declining fast enough to warrant doing so.

Now, farmers and locals alike are expecting major spikes in their water bills, with the town’s budget already exhausted. 

The mayor of the former coal mining town, Ron Ramsey, reportedly rapped his knuckles on the table and cursed at the situation to the City Council in an August meeting.

This fit of frustration came after everyone in the town’s directorate aside from Ramsey had just voted to ban watering front yards bring back penalties for overuse – measures officials admitted would still fall well short of garnering what was needed.  

Ramsey said that the measures were more than he could stomach, pointing to other less affected regions in the state further south, such as the state seat Sacramento.

‘It’s too much. Too fast,’ Ramsey told the room, arguing that enforcing those guidances was not fair to the town’s predominantly working class population.

‘Go to the state capitol and they got green grass, don’t they?’ he said. ‘They can do it, but why can’t we?’ 

The mayor added of the unprecedented crisis facing his residents, which includes hundreds of farmers: “We’ve never been this bad where they said we’re going to run out of water.’

The state’s years-long megadrought has left more than 531,000 acres of the state’s farmland unplanted, officials revealed this summer – leading experts to warn that supplies of key crops could become scarce during next year’s harvest.

At-risk crops include wheat, cotton, rice, and alfalfa, officials say, due to dwindling water levels and supplies incurred by the dry spell, which began in the early 80s and has been linked to climate change.

The increase in unplanted land represents a 36 percent hike from this time last year, shortly before California water officials warned citizens to prepare for another dry year after experiencing a significant lack of snow that winter.

The unprecedented dry period has put further pressure on the state’s roughly 70,000 farmers, whom have already been hopelessly hampered by inflation and pandemic-related supply chain backlogs.

The new estimates on the lack of acres farmed from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) cast a light on the plight of those farmers, who are struggling to procure water to irrigate their crops as the drought persists for a third year.

Meanwhile, the state’s two largest reservoirs are currently at historically low levels – indicating that its inhabitants, like much of those in the rest of the US West, can expect a scorching, dry end to this summer, further compounding the crisis.

The drought, experts say, is the worst the region has seen in more than 12 centuries, and is connected intimately with climate change. 

California has experienced increasingly larger and deadlier wildfires in recent years as climate change has made the western United States much warmer and drier over the past 30 years.

Scientists have said weather will continue to be more extreme and wildfires more frequent, destructive and unpredictable.

Most of the state, meanwhile, is feeling the effects of the drought, US Drought Monitor data shows, with about 17 percent of the state – mostly in the Central Valley – experiencing what is known as an ‘exceptional’ drought, or a drought with heightened fire and water shortage risks.

‘That’s going to mean less water available for agriculture in certain parts of the state, most likely,’ Aaron Smith, professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis, said. 

‘We will see some reductions in land use and certainly, I would expect less alfalfa, rice, cotton and wheat, which have been declining anyway.’

The situation described by Smith has farmers already struggling with inflation taking extreme measures to cut losses incurred by the drought – with the Farm Bureau Federation estimating that more than a third of farmers in the state are killing off their existing crops and sell their livestock amid the ongoing conditions.

According to a recent report from the Farm Bureau – an insurance company and lobbying group that represents agricultural interests – 37 percent of farmers from the Great Plains through California are killing off crops that won’t reach maturity – up 13 percent from last year. 

One-third of farmers have also reportedly been destroying or removing orchard trees and other multi-year crops, according to the bureau – up from 17 percent the year before.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of respondents reported selling off portions of their herd or flock to help rescue their bottom lines.

The drought, now in its 23rd year has left millions in the state without water, causing the US Bureau of Reclamation to issue emergency requests urging citizens to reduce their water usage over the next year and a half to compensate.

Worsening the matter is the fact that this week, officials confirmed that Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir, was at just 55 percent of its total capacity – after it reached its highest level for the year last month. 

Meanwhile, Shasta Lake, California’s largest reservoir, was at 40 percent capacity last month – after the state endured its driest start to a year since the late 19th century.

Both reservoirs are located a few hundred miles north of Coalinga. 

Experts attribute much of the water loss to evaporation caused by unusually extreme heat and low humidity seen in the area over the past decade, including in the American Southwest, which has also been at at the mercy of the megadrought. 

A combination of extreme heat coupled with low amounts of rainfall is also pulling moisture from plants and soil resulting in tinder dry conditions, ripe for wildfires. 

Wildfire season has become longer and blazes more intense, scorching temperatures have broken records and lakes are shriveling.

However, what lies ahead might be far worse for the 17,000 living on the western edge of the state’s Central Valley in Coalinga, with officials projecting the city will use up their water supply before the year is out.

The worsening climate conditions has forced Californians, and those in other afflicted states Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wyoming, to rexamine and completely overhaul their water usage.

In August, Gov. Gavin Newsom presented a 19-page plan to deal with the expected loss of 10 percent of the state’s water supply by 2040, after declaring a state of emergency in northern county Mariposa, in the Sierras north of Fresno, following the catastrophic Oak Fire, the worst of many wildfires the state had seen all year.

‘The hots are getting a lot hotter. The dries are getting a lot drier,’ Newsom told reporters at the time. ‘We have to adapt to that new reality, and we have to change our approach.’

Farmers are getting little surface water from the state’s depleted reservoirs, so they’re pumping more groundwater to irrigate their crops. That’s causing water tables to drop across California.

State data shows that 64 percent of wells are at below-normal water levels.

Water shortages are already reducing the region’s agricultural production as farmers are forced to fallow fields and let orchards wither. Some 531,00 acres of farmland went unplanted this year because of a lack of irrigation water, the US Department of Agriculture says.

The increase in unplanted land represented a 36 percent hike from the previous year. Experts say supplies of such key crops as wheat, cotton, rice, and alfalfa could become scarce during next year’s harvest.

The state started the year with its driest four months on record, with snowpack in the Sierra Nevada region coming as a small fraction of the historical average. 

And like in Coalinga, dwindling reservoir levels across the state have also led to restrictions on outdoor watering for millions of residents across the Golden State.

Meanwhile, the future fate for residents of towns like Coalinga has been left largely up in the air, as city officials continue to look to the state and federal governments for some relief.

Speaking about the city’s situation earlier this month, Hurtado asked local officials delegating over the crisis: ‘What do you do when the water runs out?’

That, sadly, for the time being, remains to be seen. City officials have yet to report they have run out water for the town – though according to federal calculations from the Bureau of Reclamation, that could happen any day.

‘You don’t want to say that they’ll never turn the water off,’ Mayor Ramsey said of the town’s fate in the coming months, saying ‘I don’t see how they could.’

He added: ‘I hate to say this, but with the government we have right now, you never know.’