Out in the rural countryside of the Arroyo Grande Mesa, on 8 acres of flowers, fruit trees, and animals, a zero-waste nonprofit ranch brings a feeling of freedom to those in the disabled community.
Rancho de los Animales for the Disabled is a therapeutic, educational, and recreational ranch run by Beth Currier, who became a paraplegic in 1955 after she contracted polio.
Currier said she found freedom among animals, especially while on the back of a horse, and she wants everyone who visits her ranch to experience that same feeling.
However, taking care of the ranch, Currier said, is becoming almost impractical. Getting water to the horses of Rancho de los Animales is a lot harder than it used to be, as the ranch’s well went dry.
“This started getting really bad around eight months ago. We have a very low well, and our horses require about 4 to 5 gallons a day, not to mention the people that live here and take care of the livestock,” Currier said. “I like to garden, too, and now I’m losing most of my plants because we have to get water shipped in to us by tanker trucks.”
Over the past four months, the water situation has gotten so bad that Currier, her team of seven ranch hands, and those who volunteer have needed Pacific Petroleum to truck water in twice a month from Santa Maria so they can fill two 2,500-gallon water storage facilities.
“We’ve been without water, having to have it shipped in for $1,100 a month, at least—probably a little more than that,” Currier said.
The nonprofit is trying to raise money to drill a new well on the property so they can cut the excess expense of trucking in water, but drilling is also pricey.
A local well driller in SLO County told the Sun that the cost of drilling private wells in the area depends on a lot of factors.
“The current price is going to be in the $65 to $85 a foot range, and that is based on price of materials, price of fuel, and things of that nature,” the driller said.
Even after a prosperous winter for rain throughout the state, Currier and others in the county are facing the need to drill new wells.
“We did have quite a bit of rain [this winter], but what happens is surface water like the reservoirs and the lakes fill up pretty quickly, but groundwater is a little different,” San Luis Obispo County Groundwater Sustainability Director Blaine Reely said.
Reely explained that it takes a while for water in the form of rainfall, streams, and rivers to penetrate through soil and eventually sink into the aquifers.
“Only a small amount of the rainfall we get actually makes it as recharge into the groundwater basins,” he said.
According to Golden State Water Company’s webpage, customers in the Santa Maria service area out of the Santa Maria Basin are in a Stage 2 restriction, which allows customers to irrigate outdoors only two days per week before 8 a.m. or after 7 p.m. due to low groundwater levels.
“While Cypress Ridge experienced historical precipitation in 2023, the rainfall did not sufficiently recharge local groundwater basins, the area’s primary water source. Until conditions improve, communities dependent on groundwater remain in Stage 2, and mandatory restrictions with surcharges for water use above allocations remain in effect,” Golden State Water Company’s website said.
Reely said that SLO County has seen a substantial number of rural domestic wells run dry lately, mostly in the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin area, but it’s happening in other groundwater basins as well.
“That’s a problem, and it’s something the county is really focused on,” Reely said. “Identifying those areas that are problems and then working out plans to make folks that have rural domestic water wells [at risk of] going dry to make them aware of that and then hopefully develop some tools and some initiatives to help them address those issues as they occur.”
He said that currently SLO County doesn’t have any programs to provide relief to community members whose wells are drying up, but it’s something they’re making a high priority.
“At this point, we don’t have a great outreach program or even [an] informational set of materials where folks within the county who are experiencing those problems can go to and find out what are their options; that’s something we’re working on right now,” Reely said. “Hopefully in the very near future, we’ll be able to launch those forms of public outreach.
“But right now, we unfortunately don’t have a lot of things that we can offer to folks that are experiencing that.”
Before community members with private wells get discouraged, Reely said that there are some faster solutions to try if they have been experiencing their wells drying up.
“There’s probably water deeper than the depth of their current well and they could probably drill a deeper well to get more water. It’s expensive, but it’s one solution,” Reely said. “Another thing we see commonly is that folks who we see all of a sudden have no more water coming out of their well, it could be other issues that aren’t really related to the health of the groundwater basin but really the condition of their well itself.”
Reach New Times Staff Writer Samantha Herrera, from the Sun’s sister paper, at sherrera@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Oct 5-15, 2023.