Ventura County Sheriff To The Rescue: Department Brings 6,000 Gallons Of Water To Residents After Main Break

NEWBURY PARK (CBSLA) — The Ventura County Sheriff's Department came to the rescue after hundreds of residents — many of them elderly — rang in 2020 without water service when a main broke.

With no water running from the tap Thursday, Vicki Teachout had to get creative to wash her dishes.

"Yup, this is a lot of fun," Teachout said with a laugh as she poured water from a one gallon jug.

Teachout is just one of hundreds of people who live in the Vallecito Mobile Home Park that lost water service after a main broke on Tuesday.

"My husband was out taking water to neighbors," Teachout said. "But he's 83, so it's kind of a little hard for him to do."

Neighbors did what they could to make the situation livable.

"They warned us to fill our bathtubs with water if we could," one resident said. "So, we did that and then they made pool water available to us so we could go up there, just for the toilets."

Work crews had problems making repairs to the broken line — extending the misery for residents.

"We've had on and off water since last Thursday," one woman said.

But when the Ventura County sheriff got wind of the service outage, he sent in help — 6,000 gallons worth of it — in the form of a military surplus water tanker.

"It's exactly for times like this when you need to have water to mass amounts of people," Sheriff Tyler Zaslove said. "It's a cool little system."

The water is not drinkable, but residents were allowed to fill up bags to use for toilets and washing other items.

"The sheriff's department, the fire department, management has been great," a resident said. "They've been doing everything they could. You know it's a community, we just help each other."

Water was restored for all residents late Thursday night.