‘I’m afraid to use water’: Rural Paso Robles residents drill new wells as older ones dry up
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on how unsustainable pumping is depleting Paso Robles’ groundwater basin.
When Lloyd “Ed” Rickard moved to Paso Robles in 1986, he thought he lived on an oasis in the Mediterranean-like area of the Central Coast.
As his house was built, Rickard, now 63, had a potable water well drilled on his property — the norm for residents in the rural areas of San Luis Obispo County. At the time, his house and his well together were worth roughly $80,000, he said.
“The guy told me: ‘You live in one of the best areas in the county for water. You’ll never have to drill a new well,’” Rickard said, finishing the sentence with a bitter laugh.
Five or six years later, however, the well pump didn’t reach water any more, so he had to pay to lower it deeper. This began a pattern that persisted in the ensuing decades, each time the pump getting closer and closer to the bottom of his 400-foot-deep well.
Then, in 2018, Rickard’s well dried up completely.
For weeks, he trucked in water before he was able to use his inheritance from his mother and insurance money from a shoulder injury for the nearly $30,000 needed to drill a new well a full 300 feet deeper into the precious water source about 700 feet below his now-dry lawn.
“That’s all I could afford,” he said. “I’m afraid to use water. All my grass is gone; my trees are dead. We’ll have to go deeper in another 15 to 20 years, but hopefully I’ll be gone by then.”
Most, if not all, of Rickard’s neighbors have been, or will soon be, in the same situation — the sounds of well drilling in the quiet neighborhoods of eastern Paso Robles becoming almost commonplace.
Rickard’s home off Prairie and Dry Creek roads just north of Highway 46 sits upon the Paso Robles subarea groundwater basin, which has been declared “critically overdrafted” by the California Department of Water Resources after unsustainable pumping over the past few decades has caused the basin’s water levels to plummet, especially in drought years.
The county, city of Paso Robles, San Miguel Community Services District and the Shandon-San Juan Water District together are tasked with managing the groundwater basin. In 2020, they drafted a groundwater sustainability plan intended to articulate a path forward to restore the basin and submitted it to the state, which has yet to approve it.
The agencies were required to draft the plan under the 2014 California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA, pronounced “sigma”) because it is considered “a high-priority basin subject to critical conditions of overdraft.”
Meanwhile, in the past two years, the water levels in the basin have continued to drop substantially — a total of 122,300 acre-feet. For context, one acre-foot of water is nearly 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover a football field in one foot of water.
And since 1998, unsustainable pumping coupled with more drought years than wet years has caused the basin’s levels to drop by more than 700,000 acre-feet.
The basin’s sustainable yield — how much water can be pumped from it without causing any detrimental effects such as dry wells or ground subsidence — is estimated to be about 61,100 acre-feet per year.
More water has been pumped beyond the sustainable yield in each year since 2011, according to historical data included in the most recent annual report on the state of the groundwater basin.
That kind of consistent overpumping paired with persistent periods of drought has created a crisis for groundwater well operators who built their homes decades ago — before wine grape growing took off in the region in the 1990s — on the assumption that they were living in one of the best areas of California for water.
Nearly 200 wells in Paso Robles area reported dry, state data show
Since about 2014, 293 reports of dry wells in San Luis Obispo County — 178 of those in Paso Robles — have been sent to the California Department of Water Resources. That accounts for 7.5% of the total dry well reports in the state, according to the data.
However, many wells that have gone dry are never reported to the state, and other times, wells are reported to have gone dry when actually they were simply low performing due to declining water levels.
But ask around and you’ll soon find most everyone in the rural neighborhoods surrounding the city of Paso Robles has a story of their well going dry at some point. Or, if it hasn’t gone dry yet, they’re likely gearing up to get a new well after their existing one spits up nothing but sediment-filled water.
“I knew the time was coming, so I went ahead and saved up, then got a loan from the bank so I could get a new well when this one went dry,” said Rick Treinen.
His house just off Geneseo Road a few miles east of Paso Robles was built in 1995 with a 370-foot well, but as it was going dry in 2020, he paid $30,000 to have a new one drilled down to 800 feet — which he hopes will last him another 25 years.
“It’s like getting a car,” he said. “But you gotta drink, so this takes priority.”
For some residents in the area, getting a new well to hit water deeper underground is incredibly difficult. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to drill deep underground to find water — and the farther you have to drill, the more expensive it gets.
The financial stress has caused many to take out second mortgages on their homes, while others have felt marriages strained as they question why they moved out to the country for supposed peace and quiet.
Some families have been unable to afford the steep upfront cost of $20,000 to $50,000 to drill a deeper well and instead pay to have water trucked in on a weekly or monthly basis. There are grants and loans for low-income residents, but most residents in the rural Paso Robles area are middle class so they do not meet the income requirements.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever solve the problem of ‘Oh, we never have any domestic dry wells again,’” said San Luis Obispo County District 5 Supervisor Debbie Arnold, whose district includes part of the Paso Robles basin. “I think it’s kind of a lifestyle choice when you go out there and buy a piece of property and you know that in a severe drought, your well may not cut it.”
And wells that were sufficient during drought periods in the past now run dry as the basin is continually overpumped without any substantial wet years to allow it to recharge.
“If you run out of water — what are you going to do, burn your house down? No, you gotta drill a new well, and now they all have to be deeper,” said Wesley Powell of Powell and Murphy Drilling Inc., a local company that drills wells for residents and agriculture operations in the northern San Luis Obispo County area. “The 400-footers used to have a ton of water ... now 700 to 800 feet is the standard. Vineyards have a big effect on it, not gonna lie to you.”
Residents blame wine industry’s groundwater pumping for dry wells
Many locals point angry fingers at the massive influx of agricultural operations that have transformed once-grassy hills into neat rows of wine grape vineyards. The Paso Robles region is now known for producing top-quality cabernet sauvignon, merlot, zinfandel and other wine grape varieties.
Winemakers began flooding into the area in the late 1980s and early 2000s, attracted by the region’s ideal mix of warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters. Today, the crop dominates the region and more than 40,000 acres of vineyards line the hills of the Paso Robles American Viticultural Area.
While many growers work on ways to cut back on water use or find new sources of water outside of the Paso Robles groundwater basin — there are undoubtedly still many thirsty straws in the basin.
In 2021, agricultural operations — primarily wine grape growers — used 75,500 acre-feet of water from the basin, compared to the roughly 5,060 acre-feet used by public water systems and rural domestic users, and 1,553 used by the nearby municipalities.
That’s up from 60,700 acre-feet used in 2020, and 55,800 used the year before that, according to the annual report analyzing the groundwater basin. Rural domestic and other users have either pumped the same amount of groundwater or reduced their use in recent years, the report shows.
Some residents look around at their vineyard-lined properties and see the wine industry as the giant enemy of Goliath — with the money to drill deeper wells.
Others, such as Treinen, say they see the wine industry adds to their property values: “It’s hard for me to say they’re the bad guys here.”
State law gives clearer path forward for managing groundwater
Unlike in years past, these days the county alongside the other agencies that make up the groundwater sustainability agency for the basin are legally mandated to manage it responsibly so that the resource can be saved.
“What we’re trying to do with SGMA — and I’m 100% behind this — is to be sure we’re protecting the natural resource that is groundwater,” Arnold, the county supervisor, said.
One way to protect the water, she added, is to reduce how much is taken from the basin.
“We need to understand that the ground has only so much water to give and if we’re overtaxing that, then we have to stop it,” she said. “So in our groundwater plan for Paso (Robles), we talk about that — about reducing pumping.”
Mainly, the groundwater sustainability agencies plan to reduce pumping by enforcing pumping restrictions in some areas of the basin and finding outside sources of water to augment irrigation needs for agricultural operations.
This includes funding two wastewater treatment plants in Paso Robles and San Miguel, from which the recycled water can be used for irrigation, said Blaine Reely, the county’s groundwater sustainability director.
The county is also working with Monterey County and the California Department of Water Resources to allow water from Nacimiento Lake to be used for agriculture purposes within the Paso Robles groundwater basin area, Reely added.
The county is working to revise the groundwater sustainability plan, however, after the state found two key deficiencies.
According to the state, the plan, for one, did not adequately address how surface water may be connected to the groundwater basin’s supply and whether the overpumping of the basin was depleting the surface water. Should the county determine there is a link between depletion of the surface water sources and the groundwater basin, it must then find mitigation strategies to avoid such depletion.
The second deficiency is that the plan did not adequately assess the adverse impacts to residents with wells should the groundwater level dip to a certain level. To address the deficiency, the basin’s managing entities must establish better thresholds for how low the groundwater levels can reach before being considered “undesirable” for domestic well users.
The now-required management of the Paso Robles groundwater basin provides a bit of hope for residents who live off the water supply. But that hope is quickly tempered as any significant rainfall continues to evade the weather forecast and the region is thrust into a severe drought.
“We got enough rain a few years ago to really help matters. But last winter was bad,” said Matt Merrill, a resident on the Paso Robles basin, vintner and vineyard manager. “We didn’t get nearly as much as we did a few winters before, and we started to see some of the effects of that this year with the rumblings of some people starting to run out of water.”
Coming tomorrow: Can the Paso Robles wine industry continue to thrive as groundwater levels fall?
This story was originally published April 21, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
