A lone pickup truck barreled down East Army Post Road on a weekday afternoon. Sunshine refracted through the 500-gallon water drum the truck hauled, shimmering on the barren farm fields and scattered homesteads it passed.
Dr. Dennis Woodruff, a retired veterinarian and former mayor of Carlisle, sees the same truck go by several times a day. It heads west from Carlisle into the Des Moines city limits near the southeast bend of Highway 65, where at least 20 homes aren’t hooked up to the city’s water system.
The Avon tract, known as the Southeast Annexation Area, was officially annexed into Des Moines in 2009, 11 years after the city laid claim to it against its residents’ wishes. They live in and pay taxes to the city, yet waterlines in southeast Des Moines only extend to 36th Street, about three-quarters of a mile to the west of their homes.
They have long relied on well water. But as Iowa enters its fourth year of drought, those wells are largely dry. And so residents of a neighborhood in the state’s largest city are forced to resort to the costly inconvenience of trucking in water.