'It's like a big camping trip': Mountain View residents near a week without safe drinking water

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Dozens of Mountain View homes have gone nearly a week without safe drinking water after a construction mishap contaminated a city water main, forcing families to cook, clean and care for children using bottled water.

An 11-month-old baby uses lots of water for Mountain View resident Maggie Wang. There’s the bottles she must wash daily to keep him fed, the bibs she must clean after he eats, and, of course, the baby himself, who needs baths frequently.

But living in the Cuesta Park neighborhood of Mountain View, the 34-year-old mom has been without clean water for nearly a week after a water main was contaminated during a construction project.

Wang has not been able to give her baby a bath in a week. Since he is too young to eat restaurant food, she goes over to a friend’s house to cook for him after putting him to sleep. To wash the bottles, the family uses a large container they fill with soapy bottled water, Wang said.

“It’s like a big camping trip and we don’t know when it’s going to end,” Wang said.

Wang’s house is one of 67 impacted by the contamination incident, which began last Friday when a slurry mix came into contact with a water main that was undergoing repair and upgrade work, causing tests to come back positive for coliform bacteria.

City officials have not said whether the contamination was caused by contractor error or whether proper safety protocols were followed.

While limited in scope, the outage has highlighted how a single infrastructure failure can leave residents without one of the most basic necessities: safe drinking water.

The impacted houses, located on Carla Court, Drucilla Drive, Montalto Drive, the 600-700 block of Leona Lane and the 600 block of Cuesta Drive, have been placed under a “Do Not Drink Water” notice and can use their water only for toilet flushing.

Workers have been flushing out the water main to remove the remaining bacteria. Coliform bacteria is an intestinal bacteria found in warm-blooded mammals that can grow from fecal bacteria and cause illness in people, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

City officials did not immediately respond to a question Thursday afternoon about whether any bacterial sickness in humans had been reported.

But the California State Water Resources Control Board may not issue its clearance for the impacted homes to resume normal water use until Sunday, Mountain View Mayor Emily Ann Ramos said in a video message shared Wednesday night.

“We know the situation has been more than an inconvenience,” Ramos said.

The Cuesta Park neighborhood was quiet Thursday afternoon as a water delivery truck worked its way through the neighborhood, passing out large jugs of water and battery-operated pumps to impacted households. Residents greeted the delivery in their driveways or left notes with directions of where to place the jugs on their porches.

Norman Kitching, 23, has been staying at his family home alone. The family became nervous with so many neighbors staying in hotels that people may be casing the neighborhood to break into houses, and they didn’t want to take the chance.

“At first it was okay … I was like, ‘Ok, we can get by, not that bad, kind of like camping,’ ” Kitching said, adding that they all thought it’d be over in a couple hours or days. He recalled thinking that maybe they could take the opportunity to spend a long weekend at the coast.

But then, he added, “it was starting to get more serious.”

Kitching, who buys and sells boats for a living, has had to wash boat grease off his hands using water bottles – requiring a whole pack, he said. He has relied on eating mostly frozen and canned meals over the past week. The dishes have piled up in the sink because they cannot wash them.

“We’ve gone through the normal set of silverware, we’ve gone through the secondary set of silverware, now we’re starting to get into proper silver flatware,” he said. “We’ve gone through all the normal plates, all the glass plates, the secondary set and now we’re getting into the actual china.”

Zhentao Sun, 45, said that during the first few days after the contamination incident, he resorted to going to friends’ houses to fill up buckets of water and bring them back to his house.

“It was really tough because we had no water at all,” Sun said. “The toilet situation was really bad.”

It has improved since the city turned water back on for toilet flushing, he said, but there are continued challenges with showering and cooking. His family of four goes to shower at one of the aquatic centers offered by the city and to the laundromat to do their laundry.

Mountain View’s city council ratified an emergency declaration at their Tuesday meeting, which allows the city to seek reimbursement from state and federal sources for costs incurred in handling the water main incident. The city has been providing impacted residents with resources, including hotel stays, bottled water and access to showers at community facilities.

Residents expressed gratitude for the city’s handling of the situation and the resources they are offering to impacted residents, noting that city workers have been in the neighborhood almost daily.

“They’re doing a good job,” Kitching said.

Kitching’s parents have stayed in a hotel, and he has been using that option to shower, he said. But it is a “mental hurdle” to have to go shower outside his home – driving ten or fifteen minutes each way.

“It feels weird, like yeah, I’m going in and I’m checking in for 15 minutes,” Kitching said. “Then I’m going right back out with my bag.”

Wang’s family stayed briefly in a hotel offered by the city, but they found that the one-room setup was hard because Wang and her partner usually sleep in a room separate from the baby.

“It’s really hard to plan, especially with a young one,” Wang said.

Sun’s wife has also used a hotel to shower after work on a few nights, but on others she called around to find that all the hotel options were fully booked, he said. His family was also planning to utilize the city’s meal reimbursement on Thursday because cooking has become a hassle due to having to use only bottled water.

But many residents also noted that they want to know more about what is going on, such as the water quality tests the city is using and why the timeline has continually been extended. Sun said that he felt the issue with the bacteria contamination was “not fully” communicated with them.

“What are the remaining exams? What are the results?” Wang said. “When is it going to be safe for us to wash bottles?”

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