By Dionne Searcey and Delger Erdenesanaa
Part of a series on the causes and consequences of disappearing water. | Nov. 2, 2023
The Times asked all 50 states how they manage groundwater. The answers show why the country’s aquifers are in trouble.
AMERICA’S STEWARDSHIP of one of its most precious resources, groundwater, relies on a patchwork of state and local rules so lax and outdated that in many places oversight is all but nonexistent, a New York Times analysis has found.
The majority of states don’t know how many wells they have, the analysis revealed. Many have incomplete records of older wells, including some that pump large volumes of water, and many states don’t register the millions of household wells that dot the country.
Even states that do try to count wells or regulate groundwater use often have other problems: Some carve out exemptions for powerful industries like agriculture, one of the nation’s biggest users of groundwater. And every state relies to some extent on well owners self-reporting their water use, the Times analysis found. That policy raises the risk of under-reporting or deception by users big and small.
Regulations in some states, including Oklahoma, are guided by a principle of letting users extract groundwater at rates that exceed an aquifer’s ability to recharge. Some hydrologists call it groundwater “mining.”
“I hate to say this, but essentially we don’t care if everything goes dry,” said Christopher Neel, a division chief at the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, although he added that this mindset is starting to change as groundwater becomes scarcer.
Oklahoma does limit pumping in certain areas and is studying how much water remains in its aquifers, information that lawmakers could use to set limits on pumping. Nevertheless, in parts of the state the expansive Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates farms across the middle of the country, is dozens of feet lower than it was in the 1950s.
For generations, groundwater regulations around the country were routinely based on legal principles or economic forces that prioritized the needs of the moment, like farming and ranching in the West, or urban expansion in Eastern states. At the time, states often had little or no idea how much water aquifers held or how they might interact with lakes and rivers.
‘People are shopping around for where they can exploit groundwater.’
There is no shortage of rules. In fact, states have created such a tangle of regulations that it can be difficult to understand how much water is being extracted from aquifers, complicating the efforts to protect them. Yet groundwater is more important than ever as climate change intensifies heat, drought and erratic rainfall, making rivers and streams less reliable as water sources.
The Times asked officials in all 50 states detailed questions about how they track and regulate groundwater use — the drilling of wells, the pumping of water and the punishment of overusers. It is part of an investigative project revealing a nationwide groundwater crisis that is draining and damaging valuable aquifers.
The depletion threatens not only the tap water that supplies just over one-third of America’s drinking water, but also some of the most productive farmland in the world, which has become increasingly reliant on groundwater.
While farmers face severe risks from groundwater depletion, many warn that too much regulation would harm their livelihoods and the nation’s food supply.
“Farming would not exist as we know it in California without the use of groundwater,” said Chris Scheuring, a water attorney at the California Farm Bureau and a family farmer himself. Groundwater has helped much of the American West to become “marvelously productive,” he said, despite the region being a dry landscape where farmers can’t rely on rainfall and surface water alone. “And you know, farming is all of us.” (Visit The New York Times for the entire article.)
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