Soquel residents celebrate full rainwater barrels

After months of dry weather, the 60-gallon water barrel in Lisa Sheridan’s back yard is now overflowing after a recent storm system dumped torrents of rain across the Central Coast.

“I realized aftersix months that I hadn’t used the rain barrel. So in the middle of the storm I woke up, I was in my pajamas, got the hacksaw went over there and sawed off the rain gutter,” said Sheridan, a resident of Soquel.

She stuck a converter on the pipe and put the rain barrel underneath, and within minutes the barrel was full. The water flows down from the roof, into the barrel and out of a spout at the bottom of the barrel.

“Some people have small barrels that are the size of a garbage can, and some people have large cisterns,” Leigh Ann Gessnerof the Soquel Creek Water District said.

The Soquel Creek Water District has a 3,000-gallon tank, and that too is full. But despite all the recent rainfall, district employees said residents here aren’t in the clear just yet. The water district gets all of its water from groundwater, and even with the rain, there’s still not enough of that to avoid serious problems.

“We are beginning to see seawater intrusion, which can contaminate the water supply and that’s our big problem,” Gessner said.

Meanwhile,at Sheridan’s house, she’s using anything she can find to catch all the rainwater she can get – water saved for a not so-rainy day.