California drought hits San Mateo County coast particularly hard

Six-year-old Quill Markegard sips water while her mother Doniga Markegard, drives the family back to their ranch. Six-year-old Quill Markegard sips water while her mother Doniga Markegard, drives the family back to their ranch. Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close California drought hits San Mateo County coast particularly hard 1 / 42 Back to Gallery

Showers were one of the first things to go when the spring dried up at the Markegard ranch south of Half Moon Bay.

Forced to rely on trucked-in water, the four children — ages 4, 6, 7 and 12 — now bathe once a week, often sharing the same tub of water.

“The cleanest kid goes first,” said their mother, Doniga Markegard, 33, who on a recent morning soaked her two youngest, daughters Quince and Quill, followed by 7-year-old Larry. “As my grandmother said, 'Wash your pits and parts, and you’re good to go.’”

The historic statewide drought has struck especially hard along the southern San Mateo County coast. While other parts of the Bay Area are served by big water agencies with steady if shrinking supplies, most of the homes and small farms here, less than an hour’s drive from Silicon Valley, rely on creeks and wells, many of which have stopped flowing.

That’s left scores of people struggling mightily to get by with little or no water.

“People don’t think there are rural communities on the San Francisco Peninsula that have run out of water,” said Chelsea Moller, project coordinator with the San Mateo County Resource Conservation District, which is trying to help families shore up their water needs. “I think they really get overlooked.”

For Doniga and her husband, Erik, 45, running their small family ranch along Highway 1 wasn’t easy even with an abundance of water. So when the rationing started in July, their routine became that much harder — flushing toilets with bathwater, running spigots slowly or not at all, and foregoing showers after a long day.

The biggest hit, though, has been to the bottom line. The family had to move their cattle herd — the heart of their grass-fed-beef business — off their property and lease wetter land elsewhere, an unforeseen and devastating expense.

Watching crops die

Not far from the Markegards, on Tunitas Creek Road, grower Bill Laven saw the stream behind his house dry up and the output of his two wells plunge 90 percent. In August, seeing no other option, he shut down his farm.

“That field would be waist-high in vegetables if we would have had water,” Laven said as he surveyed an expanse of barren soil dotted with withered cabbage and some other unrecognizable greens. “We basically stopped watering it and watched it all die.”

Laven, whose Potrero Nuevo Farm provides organic produce for two local food banks, eventually had a run of luck. After a local dowser tipped him off to underground water on his land, he hired contractors to dig two new wells. He’s now replanting his fields and making another run at a crop in the coming months.

His fortunes, however, aren’t the norm.

Even the area’s larger property owners, with more wells and more creeks, are seeing their water supplies erode. Marchi Central Farms, for example, a major supplier of Brussels sprouts, leeks and fava beans in Pescadero, planted almost 30 percent less this year, the partners say, because a stretch of the San Gregorio Creek dried up for the first time in 26 years.

In nearby Loma Mar, a popular county park, with 154 campsites, closed because the Pescadero Creek is low, and officials wanted to save what remains for residents.

Still, property owners downstream of the park have been limited in what they can draw from the creek and are having to get by with a lot less.

“It went dry where we are,” said Sean Coombs, who had to stop pumping water to his 10 acres for growing organic produce. “We dry-farm a lot now.”

Tending fields without irrigation, Coombs said, is actually working out OK. While he’s lost crops, he’s found that others have grown as well, if not better, like tomatoes, peppers and summer squash.

The local farm bureau says that the few hundred growers in the area, who produce upward of $100 million worth of goods annually, have all taken significant losses. Most have cut production, some up to one-third.

Fickle water supplies

California has seen three consecutive dry years. And the current one isn’t shaping up much better.

The weather station in Half Moon Bay, run by the National Weather Service, recorded less than 7 inches of rain last year compared with an annual average of 26.2 inches. This year rainfall is down significantly as well, at 38 percent of normal.

While the southern San Mateo County coast has long survived on water from three major creeks and groundwater reserves, it’s no secret that those supplies were fickle — and one day would be tested by a drought.

Property owners have long sought to divert more water from streams and build new wells, but efforts have been slow. Concern about promoting development or taking water from wildlife often got in the way, along with the sheer expense of new construction.

“People will throw a foot valve into a stream rather than fix a well,” said Steve Simms, a lifetime San Mateo County resident who runs a Pescadero plumbing business and consults on water. “It becomes this whole layer of bureaucracy and costs that they have to deal with.”

The geology of the area also has limitations. Underground water, usually the most dependable source for residents, is not always easy to find and is sometimes laden with salt.

“In a lot of places, when you have trouble getting water, you just drill deeper and deeper,” explained Aaron Lingemann, who has been digging wells in the region for 25 years. “But that’s often not an option along the coast. There are a lot of areas that if you drill over 100 or 200 feet it’s salty.”

Still, the number of well-drilling permits issued countywide this year is nearly double what it was last year, county records show.

Lingemann, who runs Earth Flow Drilling Co. out of Santa Cruz, is having his busiest year in decades. He has a backlog of jobs and is trying to get to them as fast as he can because he understands what it’s like to have no water.

“People are feeling it. You see the water trucks running up and down the roads,” he said, referring to the contractors who deliver water to residents for their day-to-day needs. “If I was 10 years younger, I might go out and buy more drill rigs.”

Emergency funding

The county Resource Conservation District received $3.9 million from the state this month to help people with water shortages. The money is among funds that Gov. Jerry Brown committed after declaring a drought emergency in January.

The funding is designed to help property owners tune up water systems and, in many cases, provide more storage. Most agree that capitalizing on existing water assets is the first step to boosting supplies.

For the Markegards, the solution is rain — and they’ll probably need more than just one storm. It may take a few years of wet weather to nourish their spring back to life and refill the dozen or more stock ponds on their property that went dry this year.

Because the couple are leasing their 1,000 acres, they’re not in a position to invest in pricey water projects. Money is better spent leasing additional land where there’s water for their almost 500 belted Galloway cattle, a furry heritage breed originally from Scotland.

But paying for almost twice as much acreage as usual — with the same number of cows — is a losing proposition.

“We know the rains are going to come and the grass is going to grow and we are going to get out of this,” Doniga Markegard said.

'We’ll remember’

When she spoke on a recent morning, the tank behind her house had recently been filled, so there was a rare sense of plenty in the home. Water boiled for coffee. Two pumpkin pies baked in the oven. Things seemed normal.

But it would be three weeks before the water truck would come again, and everyone knew it.

“We’ll remember these times,” Doniga Markegard said. “We’ll remember when we were bathing with 5-gallon buckets and recycled water. ... When you’ve been there, then the other side is so much more rewarding.”

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander