When you run out of surface water, you stop farming and build a dam or a canal. When you run out of groundwater, you dig a deeper well and get a bigger pump.  Out of sight, out of mind. Therein lies the problem. Groundwater in the West, especially in the basin fill aquifers of Utah and the G reat Basin, is generally on the decline.  Historically replenished by the deep snowpack high in the surrounding mountains, these aquifers are declining from over pumping beyond the sustainable yield of the natural snowmelt recharge.  As the water level in these underground sponges declines, we start pumping ancient water from previous ice ages and from the ancestral Rockies 50 million-300 million years ago. This is one-time water that is not coming back. This needs to change. We complain about all the change in Park City, but what if we didn’t change. Cities and economies are like swimming sharks — if they stop swimming, they die.  We don’t want to go backward. It is easier to balance a glass of wine on a bowling bowl than it is for a place to remain the same, stationary or sustainable. So we take all the change and growth, development and upgrades, as we morph into something new, and hopefully better. Unfortunately, that takes water. Even though we have money and pump half of our water over Promontory from the Weber River, we are still mining local groundwater that was snow 500 years ago on the Wasatch and 16,000 years ago on the Uintas. We are deficit spending, and we just can’t print more water like we do money. The more than 1,000 miles of mine tunnels under our town, longer than the New York City subway system, acts as a huge under drain, further lowering the historical ground water levels.  With the modern change from mining and agricultural water use to municipal use by people, the changing demand has warranted a new $100 million mine-water treatment plant to augment the exaction of our regional groundwater by wells. Municipal wells in the Park City area therefore withdraw water from consolidated rocks, such as the fractured and faulted, Keetley volcanics, Weber quartzite, Park City limestone and Navajo/Nugget sandstone.  These rock formations are locally broken into separate block formations that can inhibit or isolate water flow and withdrawal, which can make finding reliable water difficult. Park City’s ground water is geologically compartmentalized and better on the east side, but recharge is not meeting demand for a sustainable yield. Because of the low capacity for bedrock ground water storage, the hydrological system is very dependent on the amount of annual precipitation and is therefore sensitive to prolonged drought and climate change.  Less than normal precipitation, or overuse, can result in substantial groundwater level decline both in the bedrock (affecting municipal wells) and in the basin fill (affecting stream flow), producing anecdotal and visible change.  The Colorado River and the Great Salt Lake are suffering likewise, partially because of our inability to limit groundwater usage in these basins.  Both the lake and the river are shrinking from overuse of surface and groundwater.  Many agricultural water users in Utah have supplemental water rights that allow them to take surface or groundwater, whichever is more prevalent or convenient.  The State of Utah has regulated surface water use since 1903 and groundwater use since 1935, but both have been systematically over-allocated on paper, relying on priority dates rather than regulatory restraint.  The state engineer tried to rescue the worst over-pumped and over-allocated groundwater basins in Utah back to sustainability at the turn of this century, but the Legislature insisted that we give water users 100 years to comply with reductions.  California has only been regulating groundwater since it got scarce 10 years ago, but they give their water users a similar ridiculous time frame to achieve compliance and sustainability.  In Texas, the biggest pump wins and they won’t change. They are not thinking of the future and the children, land subsidence or aquifer health. It is just mindless drill baby, drill. Over-pumping can cause the collapse of the aquifer and subsidence of surrounding surface lands, but the practice is relatively new and is not confined locally.  Since the development of submersible well pumps for oil in the 1920s and perfection of their application for water in the 1960s, these aquifer wells and their surface telltale crop circles have proliferated across the western United States.  The Ogallala aquifer is 175,000 square miles and 500 feet thick and extends from South Dakota to New Mexico and from Texas to Wyoming. It is being depleted two to three times as fast as it is recharging and could be gone by 2100.  By then agriculture in the Great Plains could be radically changed, with the imported cattle that require imported feed and water replaced by the American buffalo. These bison are the only living creatures uniquely suited to live in that harsh climate, which spans 150 degrees, and the limited surface water vegetation complex. That might be a welcome change. We cannot continue this selfish mining of historical, ancient groundwater, which can be a metaphor for how we treat all of our natural resources, using them up until they are gone.  To leave it up to the private sector, the profit motive, or human nature does not work in maintaining a sustainable yield and public welfare. Locally we need to empower the state engineer to step in and regulate this public resource for the common good. Tereasa Wilhelmsen is doing her job, for she would be blamed if we run out of water, but her hands are tied by the shortsighted capitalistic, developer-dominated Legislature.  This is not socialism. it is the law, written to promote fair, sustainable growth and wise, conservative use for the public benefit. What is out of sight cannot be out of mind.  Nationally and globally, we need to see our shortsighted abuse of water and our natural resources and change our ways. Think globally, conserve locally.  Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com The post Water and Whatever: Mining for water is becoming like silver appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less