“The fire chief noticed it when he tested hydrants in August — a rare occurrence as Coalinga desperately seeks to conserve water — and the first one shot out a foot-long block of compacted dirt. The second one ejected like a can of Axe body spray.
The schools superintendent could only think drought on the first day of school when a 4-year-old fell onto unwatered turf, breaking an arm; or when the chain saws dropped three coastal redwoods outside Henry F. Bishop Elementary that had withered and died. Superintendent Lori Villanueva even lost a portion of her own right lung last year from a drought-aggravated illness, valley fever, that’s caused by breathing soil fungus whipped up off the dry ground.” Welcome to Coalinga, and the future of a lot of other places that are drying up. A California city’s water supply is expected to run out in two months.

+ “Ingomar turns tons of San Joaquin Valley-grown tomatoes into ketchup and tomato paste. The natural by-product of that process is water, which, until now, just went down the drain. ‘We evaporate a lot of the tomato to create ketchup. And that evaporative condensate is what we catch. Then we run that through our purification process.'” An Australian startup is “growing” water for drought-parched California. (We just need to maintain enough water to grow the tomatoes in the first place.)