California has had drought years and wet years, several “years of the woman” and the last few years may well have been called “years of housing increases,” at least in terms of making new laws. Fully 56 such laws passed in 2023.
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The state has never had a “groundwater year,” though. Yet few resources are as important or as diminished as the unseen aquifers that sustain everything from apricots to avocados, almonds and asparagus, just to name a few crops.
This is not to mention what the aquifers do for millions of city dwellers, who also get substantial parts of their water from underground basins. Drive almost any major highway in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley — including state Highways 99, 152, 46 or 58 — and you will see them: narrow pipes standing several feet above ground level.
If you had driven the same roads 20 years ago, those pipes would have gone unseen, even though they had already been present for decades. That’s because each of them was almost completely underground at that time, while now they stand tall. Their height is the most visible sign of subsidence, a drop in the level of the farmland around them because of groundwater pumping.
This is because every time there’s a drought — and California has already had a few major ones in this century, lasting as long as five years each — farmers and cities pump groundwater. No one knows exactly how much, because for many years there were no meters to measure it, and even now measurements are far from complete.
Yes, the Tulare Lake basin, once thought to be the world’s largest extinct freshwater lake, saw an unexpected revival during the hugely wet year of 2022-23. That extra-wet year only partly refilled most aquifers, though, in part because some of them had collapsed into much smaller spaces (from the sheer weight of surrounding rocks) during the large-scale pumping of the latest long drought.
The Tulare Lake basin actually saw 27 major wells go dry in 2022 and 700 others enter the “at-risk” category. Those wells serve not only farms, but an area with about 146,000 residents.
That’s why the state Water Resources Control Board is at last doing something. How much it can do remains to be seen because a 2014 groundwater control law puts no limit on how much anyone can pump before 2030, still a few years away.
The law did increase metering somewhat. Despite then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s touting it as a great achievement, though, the law actually was a ho-hum approach to what was already an urgent problem by then. Now the water board staff recommends that several Central Valley groundwater agencies be put on probation because of how much they’ve drawn from under the surface.
One issue: When some farmers extend their wells ever deeper, they can draw water away from the shallower wells of neighbors, and no one can be sure it’s happening until nearby wells run dry.
If some agencies are put on probation — which could happen as soon as April, they could be forced under the 2014 law to report their full use and pay something for the groundwater they use. Plus some large users may have to install meters, at last making their precise consumption known.
That’s important because many experts have estimated that restoring aquifers in the Central Valley to their former levels may take a decade or more if subsidence has not already changed their shape and capacity too much.
Forecasts suggest the current water year could be about as wet as the record-setting year that recently ended. That’s sheer speculation, though, and the year could end up a dry one.
That’s why getting a true handle on the water usage of all well owners may be vital, regardless of how deeply they’ve drilled. Unless state officials know who’s using what and just where it’s originating, equitably managing the current limited underground supplies will remain impossible.
Email Thomas Elias at [email protected], and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.
