Water Mining
Angie Hong
Stillwater, MN - December 17, 2009
Palm Springs, California is a land of contrasts. In a place that seldom sees more than two inches of rain per year, the streets are lined with bougainvillea and golf courses glisten with lush green grass. Wealthy retirees live in gated communities, while outside the gates a younger, increasingly Latino population is steadily growing. You can hit a local taqueria for lunch, spend less than $5 for one tamale and three tacos, and then throw down more than $100 for dinner at a swanky supper club later that evening. I arrived in Palm Springs after a week spent exploring cliff dwellings and hot springs in New Mexico, an Ironman weekend in Tempe, and two frigid nights of camping in the Grand Canyon, just in time for Thanksgiving with my dad and family.
In addition to eating way too much pecan pie and drinking way too much Riesling, I was finally able to visit the spectacular Indian Canyon Palm Oases while we were in town. You see, long before Americans began building luxury resorts and modular home parks in the middle of the desert, Agua Caliente Cahuilla Indians were living in the area and growing abundant crops with water from the natural springs seeping out of the ground. There’s some truth to the cartoon image of a nearly dead desert traveler climbing over a hill to discover a palm-lined tropical oasis on the other side. In some palm oases, the ground is merely moist, but in the Indian Canyons, crystal clear streams run magically through the middle of a parched landscape.
You’ll find little resembling a natural palm oasis in Palm Springs and the surrounding desert cities. The exotic palm trees lining the streets look nothing like the native California fan palm, and the country club swimming pools are filled with aquifer water pumped from deep underground, not natural springs. People are able to live, farm and golf in Palm Springs because of these underground aquifers. As the area continues to grow, however, the aquifers continue to shrink.
To reverse this trend, the Coachella Valley Water District now purchases water from the Colorado River to percolate into the ground and recharge aquifers. Since 1973, they have sunk over 2 million acre-feet of water into the ground. In spite of this enormous effort, businesses, farms and neighborhoods in the valley still continue to pump groundwater faster than it can be replenished. Two months ago, the CVWD opened an additional groundwater replenishment facility and yet another is under construction. In a poignant statement from a 2009 engineering report, the CRWD writes, “In effect, the groundwater sub-basin is being mined, since it is not being replenished sufficiently to recover fully.”
It seems crazy to soak the equivalent of five Lake Minnetonkas into the ground, and even crazier to think that this amount has not been enough to keep up with demand. We are not immune to these kinds of water issues here in Minnesota, though. The Metropolitan Council has warned that groundwater aquifers in Woodbury, Cottage Grove and other parts of the east metro will drop ten to 20 feet in the next two decades unless water use changes dramatically. If that happens, St. Paul has offered to sell water, derived from the Mississippi River, to Woodbury and other suburbs. We’re saved from performing the same kind of hydrologic acrobatics as California and Arizona mostly because we’re lucky enough to get rain, not because we’re any more frugal when it comes to watering the lawn or taking a shower.
A movement is underway in California and other parts of the southwest to encourage people to replace turf lawns with native plants like cactus that don’t require watering, a practice known as xeriscaping. Here in Minnesota, watershed agencies and conservation districts are making a similar push for businesses and homeowners to convert lawn to prairie, woods and other native landscapes that don’t require watering. As an added bonus, these native plantings do a better job of soaking water back into the ground to recharge groundwater resources when it does rain. You can’t create a palm oasis here in the Midwest, but you can use native plants to create your own living sanctuary. To learn more about Minnesota native plants and resources for planting projects, visit www.BlueThumb.org.
Angie Hong is an educator for the East Metro Water Resource Education Program, which includes Brown’s Creek, Comfort Lake – Forest Lake, Middle St. Croix, Ramsey Washington-Metro, Rice Creek, South Washington and Valley Branch Watersheds, Cottage Grove, Dellwood, Forest Lake, Lake Elmo, Stillwater, West Lakeland and Willernie, Washington County and the Washington Conservation District. Contact her at 651-275-1136 x.35 or angie.hong@mnwcd.org.
Posted: December 17, 2009