SAN LUCAS — Three or four times a week, Melva Garza and her 40-year-old disabled son throw shampoo, soap, towels and fresh clothes in a bag, pack up their car and make their way to a truck stop eight miles away to take a shower.
She keeps the shower tokens — 50 cents each — stacked next to the truck stop faucet, each one worth three more minutes of water.
The Garzas haven’t showered in their own home in over a decade.
For years, Garza hasn’t turned on the taps that spew only fetid, discolored water into her house. She has five-gallon jugs strewn about for everything from washing her hands to cooking and cleaning her clothes. She uses her two bathtubs as storage.
It’s a reality the family has faced for 11 years since nitrate levels in San Lucas’s only freshwater well spiked to dangerous levels. Her family is one of the dozens in the small Monterey County farming community that must live daily with the inconvenience, danger and fear of contaminated water — and she is one of the hundreds of thousands of people across the Salinas and Central Valleys who face water insecurity in a state that is the world’s fourth-largest economy.
Hundreds of plastic jugs of water arrive on trucks twice each week, delivered down the town’s dirt roads and paid for by the farming business the state blames for the contamination. The state water regulator — which quickly approved a long-term solution for the town, then scrapped the plan a year later — continues to wrangle with the community about a permanent fix, leaving the town’s residents caught in the middle of a slow-motion standoff over who will pay to restore the water supply.
“I have to leave my home to shower. I have to haul water up to my house,” Garza said. “It’s like living in a third-world country.”
‘The rug was just pulled out from under us’
In 2013, the state ordered the roughly 300 residents of San Lucas to stop drinking from their faucets, after nitrate levels spiked in the water…
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