After A Century Of Depletion, CA Government Inches Closer To Regulating Groundwater [View all]

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California has put a water-stressed farming region on notice for having “inadequate” plans to curb its overuse of groundwater, bringing officials closer to directly intervening, for the first time in state history, in the way growers manage their underground water supplies. Regulators said Thursday that they would first hold a public hearing on the region, the Tulare Lake sub-basin of the San Joaquin Valley. The decision to even consider stepping in signals a willingness to take farmers to task for not doing enough to protect their aquifers.

Officials will need to tread carefully, said Andrew Ayres, an environmental economist at the University of Nevada, Reno. “If you really come down and you say, ‘We want groundwater sustainability and this is how we’re going to do it,’ that has trade-offs for local communities,” he said. If, for example, farmers respond to water restrictions by fallowing their land, those plots could become sources of dust, worsening the region’s already poor air quality.

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Groundwater is effectively a nonrenewable resource: It can take decades, even centuries, for nature to replenish aquifers, the layers of dirt and rock into which water seeps and collects. In some parts of California, so much groundwater has been pumped out that the land has sunk irreversibly by a foot or more in a year. The most severe land subsidence has taken place in the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley, where the Tulare Lake sub-basin sits.

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On Thursday, the state’s water regulator, the State Water Resources Control Board, said it would first consider further action in the Tulare Lake sub-basin, a 540,000-acre area where farmers grow grain, tomatoes and other crops. The plan for the basin isn’t specific enough about how it would address the damage caused by groundwater overuse, said Natalie Stork, a manager at the state board. Last year, for instance, 27 of the area’s wells went dry, and the state estimates that 700 wells could be tapped out in a future drought. The land has sunk by as much as six feet in the past decade or so, forcing residents to raise local levees to protect the city of Corcoran from flooding.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/climate/california-groundwater-tulare-lake.html