Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
withdrawal would be legal, but there are consequences for Utah,”
he adds. “The greatest impacts of large-scale groundwater with-
drawal and consequent lower water levels in the Snake Valley would
be [on] irrigation operations and reduced discharge of springs that
provide habitats for sensitive species and grazing rights.”
Owens Valley revisited?
“In one sense we have a David versus
Goliath,” says Jerald Anderson, a longtime farmer on the Utah side
of Snake Valley. He also holds degrees in physics and accounting,
and is a 25-year veteran in computer systems and construction man-
agement. Anderson recounts what he's seen water-wise since joining
his dad on the ranch about a dozen years ago.
When I fi rst came out to work this farm in 1996 [Anderson's
father had bought it 10 years earlier], we were fl ood irrigating. My
dad was a civil engineer, and he had planned all this—done soil
tests, water analysis, and devised a system that worked very well for
irrigating the ground.
A year later, we started into a period of drying. It wasn't
drought yet, but we started to have less recharge, less rainfall.
What had happened weather-wise in the 1980s was a very wet
period that included fl ooding and the creation of new lakes, all of
which recharged the aquifer. Over the next years, we used water
that had accumulated because of that particular wet period.
But starting in 1999, the irrigation system we were running
couldn't keep up with the dryness of the land anymore, so we
started being unable to fl ood irrigate. In 2003, we put in a pivot
irrigation system. The drying forced us to change our irrigation
practices, not just because there wasn't the water to pump, but
because the ground was so dry and the climate had dried so much
that we simply couldn't move the water the way we had before.
“It's not that we don't want Las Vegas to have water,” Anderson
says. “It's that we sincerely believe that science and experience will
prove that if they try to take this water, it won't work. We would
rather they understood everything before they messed it all up
and then said, 'Oh, well, we'll have to fi x that later,' like they did in
Owens Valley in California back in the 1920s.
