The drought has prompted county officials to contemplate dispensing with an eight year prohibition against residents of the county’s unincorporated areas relying upon the availability of drinking water trucked in by vehicles.
This week, at the prompting of San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors Chairman James Ramos, the board directed the county’s chief executive officer, Greg Devereaux, to have his office develop, within 30 days, an estimate of cost and time required to study the use of hauled water as the primary source of water for new individual single family residential construction in county unincorporated areas not served by water purveyors.
According to Ramos, “The county of San Bernardino requires that new construction in the county unincorporated areas be served by an existing public or private water purveyor, if available, or by well water. The use of hauled water as the primary source of potable water has been prohibited since 2007. This prohibition affects a number of properties in outlying desert communities where no water purveyor is available.”
Ramos defined hauled water as “the physical transport of drinking water, by a vehicle having a permanent mounted or detachable water tank, from a water source to a residential or commercial establishment for the purpose of human consumption.”
The water table in many desert areas has dropped to below the depth of many existing wells.