The race to save Arizona's groundwater

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**Chris Bentley** (0:17)
WBUR podcasts, Boston.

**Robert McDermott** (0:22)
So we had our 600-foot well go dry, and it was a hard deal to swallow there.
They'll just pump this place till it dries up and blows away. And what are we going to do?

**Chris Bentley** (0:33)
It takes tens of thousands of years for groundwater to accumulate in aquifers deep underground, and a relative instance to use it up.
It's Wednesday, June 24th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.
There is a water crisis in the American West. In some ways, it's been decades in the making, as human-caused climate change has shifted weather patterns and dried up an already arid region. And it's getting close to a breaking point with the country's two biggest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, at historically low levels. But there's another less visible water crisis unfolding literally beneath our feet. And that is what Peter O'Dowd sent out from his home in Arizona to explore.

**Peter O'Dowd** (1:37)
On this June morning near Phoenix, the birds don't mind the rising heat. The kill deer and the herons have come to this spot near the main channel of the otherwise bone-dry Salt River. Because right here, there is water. Lots of it.
Okay, so this is a recharge basin. This pipe that you can hear, the water is gushing out of it into a giant field. And that water is just going to soak into the ground, infiltrate through the rock and the gravel and the sand, and eventually make its way down to the aquifer as groundwater.
Listen, birds, wild horses.

**Sharon Morris** (2:20)
Yeah, wild horses. Yeah, so wildlife loves it.

**Peter O'Dowd** (2:23)
Sharon Morris manages groundwater for the Salt River Project. The utility serves the Phoenix area and operates a series of dams and reservoirs upstream. Some of that dammed up salt river water is channeled here. It spreads out over these basins to soak 200 feet underground. And then when you're ready, you can pump the water back up and send it to the cities and the people who need it. There are millions of people who need it all around this gigantic city.

**Sharon Morris** (2:49)
So imagine your savings account at your bank. You put money in there. So this is the surface water is like the money and you save it for a rainy day.
In our case, we're saving it for a not so rainy day.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:02)
That day is here. The Southwest has been withering in a drought for more than 20 years. The Colorado River, which serves cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Vegas, is overused and dangerously low, which means groundwater is more important by the day.
Morris says this recharge basin has stored a million acre-feet of water since it began operating in 1994, almost the equivalent of a large reservoir upstream. So it's keeping the groundwater levels up?

**Sharon Morris** (3:29)
Yes.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:30)
In this particular area?

**Sharon Morris** (3:31)
Yes.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:32)
In other areas where this doesn't happen, the water table keeps falling?

**Sharon Morris** (3:35)
That is not the case in other areas of the state. You're absolutely right.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:38)
In fact, across the Colorado River Basin, groundwater levels have been dropping for decades. Jay Famiglietti is a professor at Arizona State University.

**Jay Famiglietti** (3:47)
So I have to be exceptionally careful because it took tens of thousands of years to accumulate.
We're burning through it on a century time scale, and there is essentially no hope of high-magnitude replenishment. Famiglietti uses satellites in space more like a scale in the sky to measure groundwater in the desert. Since water is so heavy, when the large amounts of groundwater leave the region, they actually perturb the satellites, the scale in the sky, because there's less of a gravitational tug on them. And so we're able to map out the rates of change.

**Peter O'Dowd** (4:26)
And it's changed a lot. Since the 1980s, Arizona has regulated groundwater pumping, especially around big cities. But Fomaletti says the vast majority of the state is still unprotected. Meanwhile, the Colorado River is on the brink of collapse, and cities that are eager to grow need new sources of water. Pressure is growing on the aquifers.

**Jay Famiglietti** (4:48)
It's a disaster that is presenting itself on a much longer time scale. Ultimately, it will be as big or bigger than the Colorado River problem.