Mike Shannon first learned about the Ogallala Aquifer because he made a costly mistake.
In the mid-1980s, Shannon was new to city government when one of his hometown’s wells started to go dry.
“I just assumed, maybe I ought to go somewhere else and stick another hole in the ground and we’ll get more water,” Shannon said. “Well, unfortunately, I stuck a hole in the ground and there was no water there.”
He’d spent several thousand dollars on a test well that was bone dry, and he had to answer to his constituents for it.
Today, Shannon is still thinking about groundwater as the interim city manager for Guymon, the Oklahoma panhandle’s largest city.
In the decades since his mistake, well drilling prices have gone up. So has the risk of coming up dry.
Trouble in the Ogallala
The Ogallala Aquifer lies under eight states in the Great Plains. The bulk of it is under Kansas and Nebraska, plus the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles.
“Back then, I just thought there was a great big ocean underneath,” Shannon said. “And it's not a big old ocean. It's a sand gravel formation that was made millions of years ago from the Rocky Mountains.”
That sandy formation has held water for all that time. But the aquifer is being depleted — by cities like Guymon, whose residents need the water for drinking and cleaning and bathing. Farmers are also sucking up water to irrigate their crops or keep their livestock hydrated. Businesses and private well owners also have their own specific water needs.
In most areas, new water isn’t taking the place of what’s pumped out of the Ogallala. Between 1950 and 2013, the water levels dropped over 250 feet in an Ogallala well near Lubbock, Texas. The aquifer has seen more moderate declines elsewhere, but it’s causing problems for cities, well owners and irrigators alike.
Oklahoma only permits its irrigators enough groundwater to cover each acre of their land with 2 feet of water per year. But it’s an honor system — irrigators aren’t required to meter their usage. Kansas uses a similar system — irrigators report their usage by filling out a form every year.
“They know in the panhandle region it takes 4, maybe 5 acre-feet to grow corn,” Shannon said. “They know that. But they still allow the farmer to report they used 2 acre-feet. Until they prove me wrong, I'll keep saying it.”
Shannon acknowledged it’s a tricky problem. Even if corn producers are using more than their allotted water, it’s not for nefarious purposes — it’s to grow a vital product that’s a big part of livestock feed, food and fuel in the U.S.
“We're all taking this water out of the ground for very beneficial uses, and to their benefit is raising crops for the world,” Shannon said. “My benefit is giving it to the citizens of Guymon to survive. But it comes back to being very conservation minded.”
Local groundwater control
Below much of Nebraska, the Ogallala’s water levels have held steady or even increased in the last decade. Some of that is due to geological and climatological happenstance — Nebraska sits on a thicker part of the reservoir, so there was more water to begin with. But the state also has local water districts that often enforce irrigation limits
Nebraska’s twenty-three Natural Resource Districts are based on the state’s watersheds. Each district has its own groundwater usage regulations and metering requirements based on local needs and conditions.
“What's benefited us is all those decisions are made locally,” said Dustin Wilcox with the Nebraska Association of Resources Districts Office. “So it wasn't the state or any one entity saying we had to have meters statewide. It's been a process of establishing those in only areas where they're where they're needed.”
Those districts were established in 1972, and they started developing plans to manage groundwater quantity and quality in the 1980s.
“We've had a really long, slow, gradual process where we can ramp up to doing some of these meters,” said Katie Pekarek, an Extension educator with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Wilcox said the metering and permitting systems used across the state don’t just protect the future of Nebraska’s groundwater. They also safeguard present users who could be impacted by overburdening the aquifer.
Nebraska may have deeper water reserves than neighboring states, but people are still worried. Lincoln, the state’s capital, projects it will need a second water source to supplement the Ogallala by 2048.
Aaron Young runs the state’s groundwater monitoring program through the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. He said he has seen wells in Nebraska run dry, mostly about a decade ago during a prolonged drought.
“It does happen, but it's not happening anywhere near the level that they are seeing in Kansas or Oklahoma,” he said. “It's more of the irrigation wells that are on the edges of aquifers or are not constructed correctly for the location that they're in — they’re generally the ones that have problems.”
Source: nebraskapublicmedia.org
Photo Credit: gettyimages-songbird839
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