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California's Groundwater Shrinking because of Agricultural Use
Will Drilling More Wells
in California Help or Hurt?
Garance Burke,
Christian Science Monitor
January 11, 2010
The government is spending $40 million in federal stimulus funds to pull water from underground aquifers in drought-stricken California, even as evidence is growing that the well-drilling boom could degrade the quality of water delivered to millions of residents.
Farmers, conservationists and engineers are criticizing the Interior Department's plan to spend taxpayer money on digging more wells, saying the approach risks marring the environment. Canals buckle, aquifers collapse and drinking water turns saltier due to so much pumping, and studies show that the state's water supplies are dwindling.
"We don't need any more straws going down there 'cause we're already doing a pretty good job of sucking it dry," says farmer Dan Errotabere, who has dug three wells as deep as 1,200 feet to irrigate his tomatoes, almonds, and garlic in recent years. "We're using this water as a last resort, but pretty soon we're going to need a policy to protect ourselves from ourselves."
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says the government is targeting its well-drilling effort to serve remote communities and prop up California's agricultural economy, a $36 billion industry that grows nearly half the country's fruits, nuts and vegetables.
"The role of the federal government is to provide a helping hand. But the federal government can't solve the water problems," Mr. Salazar says as he sampled sliced cantaloupe with local farmers several weeks ago. "California water issues are a big mess and have been a big mess for a long time."
Since the drought began in 2006, hundreds of new wells have been drilled and are pumping around the clock in the state, tapping aquifers that date to the days of the dinosaurs.
In the last six years alone, the amount of water that has been lost from the aquifers coursing beneath the parched Central Valley would be nearly enough to fill the nation's largest reservoir, Nevada's Lake Mead, NASA researchers says Monday.
Salazar announced in July the department would send emergency drought aid from President Barack Obama's stimulus package to drill and renovate up to 135 wells. The total number has dropped since then, and authorities are still drawing up plans about how and where to drill.
The money will go to dig up to 50 new wells, retrofit up to 40 old ones and install temporary pipes and pumps to move water to crops and orchards, federal officials says. More than $2 million of the funds will be used for monitoring the real-time ecological impacts of wells in sensitive areas, and proposed new wells will undergo environmental review.
While everyone agrees the state's aquifers are quickly being drawn down, no California or federal rules govern how much water can be pumped out. Driven by a similar set of concerns, other Western states have set up laws to limit pumping.
Dennis Freeman, who oversees a main canal that irrigates the valley's farm fields, says even without government-financed wells, it is already costing millions to fix the damage wrought by decades of pumping.
"There's no doubt about it, the canal is sinking," he says, gesturing at cracked and buckled concrete panels lining the structure's edge. "There's more wells going in, because our growers gotta get water to their crops. But we're always concerned about the effect that will have."
Garance Burke,
Christian Science Monitor,
January 4, 2010
New data from satellites show the vast underground pools feeding faucets and irrigation hoses across California are running low, a worrisome trend federal scientists largely attribute to aggressive agricultural pumping.
The photograph above illustrates subsidence in the San Joaquin Valley, California. In the photo, USGS scientist, Joe Poland shows subsidence between 1925 and 1977 due to fluid withdrawal and soil consolidation.
The measurements show the amount of water lost in the two main Central Valley river basins within the past six years could almost fill the nation's largest reservoir, Lake Mead in Nevada.
"All that water has been sucked from these river basins. It's gone. It's left the building," says Jay Famiglietti, an earth science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who led the research collaboration. "The data is telling us that this rate of pumping is not sustainable."
Hundreds of farmers have been drilling wells to irrigate their crops, as three years of drought and environmental restrictions on water supplies have withered crops, jobs and profits throughout the San Joaquin Valley, where roughly half of the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables are grown.
Developers and cities dependent on the tight supplies also have joined the well-drilling frenzy as the crisis has deepened.
NASA scientists and researchers from UC Irvine presented their findings at a recent conference, showcasing data from twin satellites that pick up changes in the aquifers coursing underneath the state.
The NASA mission represents the first attempt to use space-based technology to measure how much groundwater has been lost in recent years in California and elsewhere in the world.
From October 2003 through March of this year, Mr. Famiglietti and his team tracked how Earth's gravitational pull on the satellites changed as the amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins dried up.
As river water, snowmelt, soil moisture and aquifer levels declined, the satellites sensed less of a pull to the planet, which allowed scientists to extrapolate over time how much water had disappeared.
More than three-quarters of the loss was due to groundwater pumping in the southern Central Valley, primarily to irrigate crops, researchers found.
If drilling keeps on at the same clip, scientists warned, more wells could start running dry.
"We've known about the conditions in California for a while since it's one of the most pumped aquifers in the United States," says Michael Watkins, NASA's Pasadena-based project scientist for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission.
"Hydrologists were just surprised to see that the deep water conditions had dropped so much, since it was more than we had expected," he says.
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