“There are some problems with the water from city system,” she said.
Sanchez, who has lived in East Porterville for nearly five decades, said she is still using bottled water to cook and drink in addition to the $60 monthly bill she now pays for municipal water — up from the $40 she was paying.
Sanchez is among several East Porterville residents who were recently hooked up to the municipal water system, moving away from domestic pump wells.
Not all East Porterville residents had their wells dry up.
She was among the first East Porterville residents to be connected.
The home’s well didn’t run dry, but the landlord decided to connect to the system.
Sanchez said she was told the monthly bill for those who connect to the municipal system would be about $30.
“When I finished paying for it, they came and told me about connecting to the city system,” he said.
However, Lollis said the city is interested in adding East Porterville residents right away.
Dennis England, Water Resource Program director, said the county needed to jump in and help East Porterville families.

For the last few weeks I’ve been looking at the problems posed by plastic pollution.
From the companies that make and use plastic bottles through to the people who pick up plastic litter on our canals.
As a director of a Midlands spring water firm said to me: "No one wants to take a glass bottle of water to the gym."
At Wenlock Spring in Shropshire they produce about 20 million bottles of water every year in the shadow of Wenlock Edge itself – that actually makes them a smaller player in the Midlands bottled water firmament.
The company has also found it hard to source acceptable recycled plastic and only found one firm that could supply the right material it needs for the new bottles.
The Norway way All of this shows up a bit of a problem with our plastics recycling.
Here, of course, we use kerbside recycling and that produces a complex mix of plastics that makes it much harder to extract the right material for a company like Wenlock Spring and their new bottles.
Although this switch to recycled plastic bottles will cost a company like Wenlock Spring in the short term, it hopes it will encourage others to follow its lead and increase demand for recycled plastic as a material.
As demand increases, that should start to push costs down and perhaps even lead to us looking again at how we collect and recycle plastic in this country.
Ironically, to tackle plastic pollution, one thing we could do as consumers is continue to buy products like bottled spring water – but make sure those bottles are made of recycled plastic.

After a decline during the Great Recession, bottled water sales are back and bigger than ever—even eclipsing soda sales for the first time in 2016.
But people buying bottled water might not be aware that it’s nearly 2,000 times more expensive than tap water and four times more expensive than regular-grade gasoline.
In its latest report on the impacts of the bottled water industry on people and the environment, Take Back the Tap: The Big Business Hustle of Bottled Water, Food & Water Watch looks at the industry’s predatory marketing, the extraction of communities’ water resources, and the powerhouse lobbying that has helped bottled water corporations see sales soar since 2010.
Bottled water advertising targets people of color, women, mothers, children and lower-income groups.
Industry marketing strategies designed to promote the safety of bottled water to people who historically lack access to safe tap water (especially recent immigrants) prey upon those who may mistrust tap water and communities concerned about obesity and sugary beverages.
In 2014, Nestlé spent over $5 million advertising Pure Life — the most advertised U.S. bottled water brand — and three quarters ($3.8 million) went to Spanish-language television advertising.
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Thousands of bottles of water will be delivered to New Plymouth schools this week after the State of Emergency was lifted earlier today.
New Plymouth mayor Neil Holdom says the bottled water will be a big help to families in the region.
"Areas affected by the damage caused to our supply network during ex-Cyclone Gita are still under a boil water notice – and this will apply until our testing programme is complete," Mayor Holdom said.
Almost 100 primary and secondary schools, and early childcare centres, will benefit from the water delivery while the boil water notice is still in effect.
Principal of Mangorei School and President of the New Plymouth Principals Association, Michael Carr, says the delivery will be welcomed by the schools.
"Now water supplies have been restored for toilet facilities, the delivery of drinking water can mean we can get on with teaching our kids this week," Mr Carr said.
"Parents should check their school’s social media or webpages to confirm they are up and running from Monday."
Taranaki Civil Defence, along with volunteers and other agencies, is co-ordinating the delivery effort.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Black and Hispanic U.S. adults are half as likely as whites to drink tap water and more than twice as likely to drink bottled water, according to a recent Penn State analysis.
The findings also support past research that indicates that minorities and more vulnerable populations have a higher distrust of tap water in America, and that those who do not drink tap water and instead consume bottled water are at greater risk of health issues and financial burdens.
A study led by Asher Rosinger, assistant professor of biobehavioral health and anthropology at Penn State, found that from 2011 to 2014 nearly 53 percent of Hispanic adults and 46 percent of black adults consumed bottled water on a given day compared to just over 26 percent of white adults.
At the same time, more than 61 percent of white adults consumed tap water on a given day, compared to 38 percent of black adults and just over 38 percent of Hispanic adults.
“These findings demonstrate that when there’s distrust of tap water, this reduces usage of public water systems for drinking purposes.
A lower trust in tap water manifests in dietary behaviors and results in shifting to bottled water for hydration as well as less healthy options like sugar-sweetened beverages,” Rosinger said.
To reach the findings, researchers analyzed nationally representative dietary data on 20,676 adults to examine differences in tap and bottled water consumption among Americans.
Specifically, researchers used National Health and Nutrition Examination surveys from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The Flint water crisis, which affected low-income, primarily black neighborhoods, is the most recent highly publicized failing of the public water system in America, which has led to more distrust,” Rosinger said.
These behaviors of relying on bottled water are rational in the context of uncertainty, but overall, U.S. tap water is the safest hydration option for most.”

What do you do when your city is running out of water?
Settlements such as Gugulethu have long been marginalized.
“I don’t know what we’ll do if they stop flowing,” said Richard Ndabezitha, 60, who is living on a $200-per-month government pension.
In upscale parts of the city, bottled water has been sold out for days at a time.
TOP: A borehole is drilled at a home in Constantia, a wealthy suburb of Cape Town, by De Wet’s Wellpoints and Boreholes, a company that has been so overwhelmed by jobs that it had to stop taking on new work until they can catch up with their list.
The water shortage is far from the only example of how Cape Town’s poorest communities have struggled for basic services.
For some of the city’s poorest residents, the other stark reminder of inequality relates to the way water is used.
“They’re using water to fill their pools!” she exclaimed.
“That’s why we don’t have any left.” Still, she added: “If I had a pool, I guess I’d be filling it, too.” About 10 miles away from Gugulethu, in the suburb of Table View, Carsten Hensel, 31, was having a wellpoint installed in his back yard, next to his swimming pool.
Now, we’re able to stockpile water.” As the drought deepened last year, and people began to talk about the possibility of a water shortage, Cloete bought 250 liters of bottled water for about $65, filling a room in his home in the Bothasig suburb.

A PAIR of mobile filtered drinking water stations will be used by Bellingen Shire Council to show its determination to eliminate as much plastic waste as possible.
They will be used at community events as an initiative to support local activities in an environmentally sustainable manner and are easily fitted to an existing tap.
Research shows Australians spend over $500 million on bottled water every year and the single use plastic bottles have a devastating impact, particularly when entering the marine environment where sea creatures are killed after mistaking theme for food.
Transportation of the bottled water burns fossil fuels and most PET bottles end up in landfill taking up to 1000 years to break down.
Bellingen Mayor, Cr Dominic King, said tap water has one per cent of the environmental impact of bottled water and encouraged use of the mobile stations.
"It is the healthy and environmental alternative to plastic bottled water and can limit the amount of waste disposed of by cutting down on the amount of single use plastic drink bottles used,” he said.
The water stations are available to anyone who is holding a community event and arrangements may be made by contacting 6655 7300.

The notion that bottled water is cleaner and safer than tap water is a fallacy.
According to a new report released by Food and Water Watch, “Take Back the Tap,” 64 percent of bottled water is sourced from municipal water taps and is no healthier than tap water.
Unknowingly, American’s are paying $16 billion a year to drink water from a bottle that would otherwise be free, or cost a fraction of the price if U.S. household drank from their tap – “a gallon of bottled water costs $9.50” which is “nearly 2,000 times the price of tap water for municipal taxpayers,” according to EcoWatch.
“When bottlers are not selling municipal water, they are pumping and selling common water resources that belong to the public, harming the environment, and depleting community water supplies,” the study concluded.
The bottled water companies and lobbying groups for the industry have come up with a marketing scheme that promotes bottled water as safer, healthier and cleaner than tap water.
But according to the report, this information is misleading.
The study found that drinking water from the tap is more safe because municipal tap water is under scrutiny of the federal government, which places more requirements and safety monitoring that it does on company’s manufacturing bottled water.
The report pushes the government to pass the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability (WATER) Act in order to “dedicate federal funds to renovate the nation’s public water infrastructure to ensure renewed public confidence in tap water, and avert a water affordability crisis,” according to EcoWatch.
“The WATER Act will simultaneously deliver water justice to the millions of people in the United States who lack access to safe water, while creating nearly a million jobs,” the report stated.

It costs 2,000 times more too.
As Glastonbury Festival bans plastic bottles, and as communities around the world promote refill stations and water fountains over bottled water, it’s worth revisiting an oft-forgotten fact about bottled water: Most of it is literally the same water we get out of our faucets anyway.
In fact, according to a new report from Food & Water Watch, a whopping 64% of bottled water sold in the US comes from municipal supplies.
What’s more, bottled water can cost 2,000 times more than what we pay for at the tap (and four times the price of gasoline!
), and is now being marketed aggressively to people of color and low income families as brands look to make up for falling soda sales.
(Supermarket ‘own brand’ bottled water is often a particularly egregious example of such predatory marketing.)
As if that wasn’t enough, we all end up paying for it at the other end too—with municipalities paying upwards of $100 million a year for plastic bottled water waste disposal.
Luckily, movements are underway to counteract this expensive and rather pointless consumer trend.
In the UK, for example, high street coffeeshop chain Costa Coffee is teaming up with water utilities to offer free drinking water refills at its 3,000 locations as part of a broader nationwide drinking water refill network, and Network Rail—which manages many large railway stations and is one of the nation’s biggest retail landlords—is installing water fountains and refill stations to help cut plastic bottle waste.
Just in case saving money wasn’t enough motivation for you, it’s worth noting that BP is predicting that efforts to reduce plastic packaging will actually put a dent in oil demand growth over the coming decades.

Gugulethu old age home Ikhaya Loxolo was one of 11 institutions that received bottles of fresh water courtesy of the Gift of the Givers last week.
Gift of the Givers chief Dr Imtiaz Sooliman said the distribution of bottled water to the centre was in keeping with Gift of the Givers’ continued efforts to bring relief to water depleted areas in the Western Cape.
“Even though it is envisaged that Day Zero is on 9 July, in essence many areas are at Day Zero already.
“Interventions are in the form of boreholes, water management systems, provision of JoJo tanks and provision of bottled water.
“In December last year boreholes were drilled in Beaufort West providing 300 000 litres per day.
Two more boreholes have been drilled at old age homes in Beaufort West that will be functional next week.
Drilling at De Doorns is complete, water will be pumped into the municipality reservoir soon.
In the meantime 60 tons of water has been provided for animals with tons more in transit.
Bottled water has been distributed to many institutions in the last week.
“The recipients were ecstatic, clearly there is a crisis and people are in great distress.