Calif. wells keep drying up
By Matt Stevens, Los Angeles Times
Just a few months ago, the state’s top water officials said they had reason for optimism. Rain was cascading down on California in December and water conservation passed 20%.
“I, for one, had high hopes,” Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources, told a California Senate joint oversight hearing on the drought last week.
Cowin and his colleagues sat before lawmakers and took turns delivering a series of sobering facts and figures about the state’s persistent drought: The mountain snowpack was dismal; conservation is falling far short of Gov. Jerry Brown’s 25 percent mandate; officials are curtailing water rights.
One fact in particular caught senators’ attention, though. About 1,900 wells have gone dry, Cowin said.
Calif. wells are drying up. From what I’ve seen, some people around here think that because we live next to a big lake they don’t have to conserve water.
Hey, guess what? We are on well water here too! Once the wells go dry we are all left high and dry.
Please conserve water and be careful with fire. We are going into a high fire danger season and we have little to no snow pack to fill the streams that fill the lake. OLS
Does anyone know how to find out depth of a private well. I would like to know level of water
Janis,
I was on a well for decades until it froze. Wish I would have drilled a new one instead of paying through the nose to hook-up to STPUD. My well was old and used a Berkley pump that sucked water as apposed to pushing it.
You can’t suck water forty feet without it turning to vapor so my well was less than forty feet deep.
I never had problems in the last four drouths three of which were worse than this one.
If the aquifers were being drawn down STPUD would have their multi million dollar marking department on every news channel in the area.
The pump you are describing uses the atmospheric pressure to push the water up the pipe. The maximum depth for such a well, here at Tahoe, is about 26 feet.
The question for us here at Tahoe is whether the aquifer is dropping at the STPUD wells to the point where the supply is threatened? I don’t know but suspect not.
I had a friend who had a well during the 1977 drought and his well water depth dropped about six feet. Perhaps his well connected to the lake.
Thanks Rob5.