[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 4/1/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment

 

April 1, 2008

 

1.  Top Item

 

Water-shortage fears pump up well-drilling business in Central Valley

Sacramento Bee – 3/30/08

By Jim Downing, staff writer

 

MADERA – Steve Arthur loves a good drought. But trouble in the Delta serves him just as well.

 

Arthur, a stocky 48-year-old, runs one of the biggest agricultural well-drilling operations in the state. This year, he has enough orders to launch himself into early retirement.

 

"Everybody's planning ahead, because they know the water situation's not going to get anything but worse," he said.

 

A well-drilling boom not seen since California's last big drought in the early 1990s is under way in the San Joaquin Valley, as farmers chasing high crop prices tap the region's vast, largely unregulated groundwater reserves in the face of an increasingly bleak outlook for water from the state's rivers and reservoirs.

 

"Business is unbelievable," Arthur said on a recent morning in a field soon to be planted with almond trees.

 

Through sunglasses splattered with mud, he watched the hoses on his drill rig buck as they spat water and sand from 700 feet underground.

 

California's reservoirs will be filling up this spring, thanks to an average winter snowpack. But court-ordered pumping restrictions intended to protect fish populations in the Delta mean that many San Joaquin Valley farmers won't get as much water this year as they would have in the past.

 

For the years ahead, the forecast only gets drier. The ecological crisis in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta shows no signs of abating. A restoration plan for the San Joaquin River has permanently reduced some farmers' water about 15 percent. Climate change may diminish the Sierra snowpack. And new reservoirs or canals, if any are built, would be years away and might not appreciably increase supplies of farm water.

 

But if farmers are fretting about water, they've also been rejoicing about the high prices commanded by a smorgasbord of the Valley's biggest crops, from alfalfa and dairy to pistachios and walnuts.

 

Those economics are keeping Arthur and other well-drillers busy. Fresno County permitted 204 new farm wells last year, the most since 1992. In Madera and Tulare counties, the number of new farm wells tripled between 2006 and 2007. The three counties are on pace in 2008 to sink even more wells than last year. Drillers from coastal areas and even other states are flocking to meet the demand.

 

To keep up, Arthur has just added a $500,000 rig, his seventh, to his drilling fleet. His crews work around the clock, breaking only for Saturday night. His pickup truck, which idled next to the rattling drill rig, has logged 140,000 miles in 18 months.

 

On this day, Arthur was drilling for Charley Rose, who manages some of the 13,000 acres of fields and orchards run by AgriLand Farming Co. Inc.

 

Rose, 71, stood near Arthur's rig in khakis, dusty black loafers and a royal blue windbreaker stitched with the AgriLand logo. He has ordered a pair of wells for what will soon be an 800-acre orchard of almonds and citrus.

 

All told, the wells, which he hopes will deliver 1,200 gallons a minute, will cost AgriLand about $440,000.

 

But that's simply one of the costs to play in the fruit and nut market. If prices hold, Rose said, sales will pay back the cost of the wells, along with planting and tending the new trees, in eight to 10 years.

 

AgriLand, which farms in Madera, Merced and Fresno counties, has ordered seven big wells this year. It's a response, Rose said, to a dry year in 2007 and anxiety about the future. On many of its fields, the company has only tenuous rights to water in the San Joaquin River, and Rose expects deliveries to become less and less reliable. But that's not stopping AgriLand from planting more trees.

 

"This is good land. It grows good crops – if you can get the water," Rose said.

 

Rose has farmed in this area for three decades and said he's seen the summertime water table drop from about 160 feet below the surface to roughly 220 feet in recent years.

 

"It never comes up. It just gets deeper and deeper," he said. The new wells will reach to 840 feet.

 

The San Joaquin Valley's first big round of groundwater pumping came in the 1920s, as the introduction of high-capacity pumps and the spread of the electrical grid allowed farmers to profitably irrigate huge tracts of land that lacked access to rivers or canals.

 

But pumping quickly exceeded the aquifers' natural recharge, and the water table in many areas plummeted.

 

The voids left underground caused the earth to compact, and some sections of the Valley floor eventually dropped 30 feet.

 

The realization that such pumping was unsustainable provided a key argument for the government water projects that replumbed the state beginning in the late 1930s, drying up some sections of the San Joaquin River and sending snowmelt through the Delta to areas that would otherwise depend wholly on groundwater.

 

Still, even with canal supplies, 1 million to 2 million more acre-feet of water annually is pumped from California's aquifers than is replaced naturally by seepage, according to the state Department of Water Resources.

 

Folsom Lake, full to the brim, holds just under 1 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, the amount of water it takes to cover one acre to a depth of one foot.

 

Much of the heaviest groundwater extraction is in the San Joaquin Valley, said Thomas Harter, a groundwater hydrologist at the University of California, Davis.

 

"Those areas where there's a lot of drilling (today) are also those areas that notoriously pump more groundwater than they put in," he said.

 

Overdraft estimates, said Harter and others, are very rough. It's impossible to measure the volume of water that seeps into aquifers in a given year. To complicate matters, heavy pumping tends to increase the seepage rate, drawing water down from river and streambeds – thus reducing the amount of above-ground water available.

 

"When you use groundwater, you're borrowing against future surface water," said Carl Hauge, former chief hydrogeologist at the Department of Water Resources. "People think they're separate resources, but they're not."

 

What's more, nobody knows how much farmers pump out of aquifers.

 

While the fate of virtually every drop of summertime water in California's rivers and reservoirs is controlled by layers of private rights and government regulations, groundwater extraction is a comparative free-for-all.

 

Drilling an agricultural well typically requires only a permit from county environmental health officials, whose main concern is that the well be properly sealed to prevent contamination. Well owners do not have to report water withdrawals. Many irrigation districts monitor water table levels closely, but they generally lack the authority to compel farmers to stop pumping.

 

Bills to support closer state monitoring of groundwater levels have passed the Legislature in each of the last three years but have been vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who cited funding constraints.

 

In several areas in Southern California, groundwater is regulated strictly, with pumping metered to avoid depleting aquifers.

 

Farm-sector opposition so far has blocked such controls in the Central Valley, but Arthur wagers tighter controls are coming.

 

"It's just a matter of time," he said.

 

After 34 years in the business – he started working for his father, the company founder, at age 14 – Arthur has seen water tables fall and watched wells get more expensive. Yet when water is short, he's always in demand. #

http://www.sacbee.com/103/story/820056-p2.html

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