California Drought & Rural Wells

This is an excerpt of the June 21, 2021 edition of What's Up With Water. On Memorial Day, while many Californians were celebrating the unofficial start to summer, the residents of a house off of County Road 200 were contemplating a loss. That day, the homeowners in northern Glenn County submitted an anonymous report to a state database. It said that their drinking water well was on the verge of sputtering out. The well was shallow, only 75 feet deep, and the flow had slowed to a trickle. It pulled water from its site outside the town of Orland, an agricultural valley some 100 miles north of Sacramento, an area covered by almond, walnut, and olive orchards. The failing well was not an isolated case — and not a quick fix either, as the incident report went on to recount, saying: “Everyone around us and neighbors are having the same problems and with our water table being so low we will have to drill the well deeper but the wait list in Orland and Glenn County is months out and we cannot afford that cost.” In this blistering year in California, drinking water wells are going dry in increasing numbers. It’s rekindling memories of the historic drought of 2012 to 2016, when over 2,600 wells across the state stopped producing water. California is not yet to that level of emergency. But a state database for household water supply issues received 38 dry well reports in the first 12 days of June, the most for any month in nearly five years.