Trona, still without water, struggles to recover after 2 major earthquakes, Ridgecrest has many services restored

Weary, thirsty Trona residents struggled Monday, July 8, to arrange for services to the earthquake-damaged community, where they’ve been without running water since the first of the twin earthquakes rattled through the region last week.

In nearby Ridgecrest, services had largely been restored by Monday.

“It’s painful where I am. I don’t have any water at all,” Trona resident Mike Peterson, 51, said as he picked up bottled water from in front of Trona High School. “I’ve gotten so worried I took my kids down to my sister’s house in Victorville, to get them out of harm’s way.”

The area was rocked Friday by a 7.1 temblor centered roughly 11 miles northeast of Ridgecrest, near where Thursday’s 6.4 magnitude quake hit, the USGS said. Thousands of aftershocks continue to rattle the area, including Monday. The two quakes knocked some homes off their foundations, set fire to others, and sent items in stores and homes crashing down. No deaths or major injuries were reported.

Crews continued working to patch the water line from Ridgecrest, hoping to restore running water to Trona. When the system is working, the water is pumped into holding tanks, that feed the town. There is no estimated time for when service will be restored, according to San Bernardino County Supervisor Robert Lovingood’s office on Monday.

“All the attention has been on Ridgecrest,” Peterson said “I  appreciate whatever they have tried to do (for Trona), but we need more,” he said as he stood outside the high school, where volunteers and National Guard personnel handed out flats of bottled water to residents.

MORE: ‘Ridgecrest was known as the earthquake capital of the world’

Trona, in San Bernardino County, has a population of less than 2,000. Nearby Ridgecrest’s population is 29,000, just over the Kern County line.

Following the July 4 quake, emergency responders descended on the area near the quake’s epicenter, to offer help and later to help assess damage. Fire crews and equipment from throughout the state will remain in the Ridgecrest area for the near future, “in case something happens,” Kern County Fire Department Battalion Chief Dionisio Mitchell said Sunday.

The U.S. Geological Survey said after the 7.1 -magnitude earthquake Friday night the estimated economic losses are at least $1 billion dollars.

Lovingood’s office said Monday that Red Cross emergency response vehicles had been traveling through Trona to offer help, and one was going to set up at Trona High School to serve sandwiches and meals-ready-to-eat from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily until safe water is restored.

While a shuttle bus was arranged to take people from in front of the high school in Trona to the Red Cross shelter in Ridgecrest, 26 miles away on Highway 178, Trona needs “some kind of shelter, somebody to cook hot food for those who don’t have much,” Peterson said.

It turned out that only one Trona resident boarded the Victor Valley Transit Authority bus set aside for the shuttle to Ridgecrest on Monday, even after driver Jonathan McDowell listened to Trona residents Jonathan Schmid and Robert Martinez talk to him on the sidewalk, and agreed to make two additional impromptu stops as Schmid worked to put out word on social media about the added bus trips.

“They said they needed help, so they came to help,” McDowell said.

MORE: What is a ‘foreshock,’ a ‘mainshock’ or a ‘pre-shock’ and how can you tell the difference?

Schmid, 36, and a Trona native, is a vice-president of the non-profit Trona Care, a non-profit dedicated to the restoration of the area.

“It’s three different parts of town — Argus, Trona and Pioneer Point, and they’re pretty spread out and a lot of people don’t have vehicles to get to different places,” Schmid said. He and Martinez had asked McDowell to add Pioneer Point and Argus to his stops, which he did.

“We do have a lot of elderly and a lot of disabled in town that can’t necessarily go any place, so we are trying to facilitate getting a lot of help to people who can’t help themselves,” Schmid said. Volunteers were picking up water at the high school and delivering it to homes in the community.

Although McDowell made the added stops, only L. Bynum, who declined to give her full first name,  boarded the bus for the round-trip ride to the Red Cross shelter in Ridgecrest, where she planned to get a phone card and take a shower, she said.

Bynum doesn’t have a car, and said local residents did their grocery shopping at a Dollar Store in Trona, which remained closed Monday.

Victor Valley Transit Authority director of operations Simon Herrera said the agency planned to use smaller vehicles to get into some Trona neighborhoods, where low-hanging overhead wires prevented a full-size bus from entering.

MORE: How to help residents of Ridgecrest and Trona

In Ridgecrest, Jazmin and Shawn Aguirre and their 3-year-old daughter had slept in a tent in their front yard Saturday night, but said they had decided to return to sleeping inside their home where it was more quiet.

“Now a majority of people have said they are going back inside,” she said. “We are leaving (the tent) up, just in case.”

Some residents lined up at the Ridgecrest Salvation Army Monday for food.

April Newman, 33, and her daughter Alaina Carlin were there at Salvation Army. The pair spent their nights in a tent after the large quake broke a front room plate-glass window. Her brother Sean Newman, 32, and his son Jonathan Newman, 7, from Highland, were with them on a visit that had been planned before the quakes.

April Newman said her father, who walks with a cane, had returned to sleeping in their home.

She and her dad were in the city’s Walmart when the larger quake struck on Friday night.

“It looked like it was going to come down,” she said.

“The one thing that I did notice, the people of Ridgecrest, they weren’t running out, they were asking people if they were OK. I’ve never seen that,” she said