BETSY BLANEY Associated Press Writer | Posted: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:00 am
LUBBOCK, Texas - Despite a multiyear drought, there's still water in the Texas Panhandle. For now, anyway.
The waters of the Ogallala Aquifer lie out of sight, deep beneath the land's surface. But even as farmers use more efficient irrigation systems on their crops, the water level has dropped 20 feet in the past decade.
It's not just agricultural use that threatens the aquifer. Landowners want to stick straws deep into the earth to pump and sell the water to thirsty cities downstate.
Although there were many before him, it wasn't until oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens entered the picture that the issue of mining the aquifer got much attention.
Pickens, a longtime Panhandle landowner who formed Mesa Water Inc., and a group of other landowners, spent two years of haggling with groundwater officials before obtaining permits last May to pump water from under 150,000 acres in Roberts County.
"He got the spotlight because of his name," said C.E. Williams, general manager of the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District, which issued Mesa's permits. "We need to use his notoriety to raise the issue of depleting water out in front of the general public."
Conservation officials say raising public awareness is vital to coming up with solutions to the state's water problems, which are likely to become more critical as the population grows - it is projected to double by 2050.
Texas has 15 major river systems, 11,000 named streams and 400 hundred miles of coastline. Water is the state's lifeblood in human, economic and environmental terms.
"I don't think people think about water at all," said Larry McKinney, director of resource protection for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. "They just turn on the faucet and out it comes."
The department is trying to raise public awareness of the state's water needs by producing a documentary with Dallas public television station KERA. "Texas: The State of Water" is scheduled to air on 13 public-television stations around the state this week.
The documentary examines the Ogallala, El Paso's water shortage, the potential depletion of Caddo Lake in East Texas, the Pecos River area in West Texas, and the Colorado and Trinity River watersheds, which affect Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and Houston.
The program also looks at the once-mighty Rio Grande to show how rivers can wither. In recent years, the Rio Grande has intermittently ceased flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, and many areas have little or no water in the riverbed.
Back in the Panhandle, Pickens said the water beneath his land is "stranded" because the terrain above it isn't suitable for agricultural use. State water law gives landowners power to do just about anything with their groundwater.
Others in the Panhandle want to cash in on the law. More than 80 landowners in Roberts and Gray counties now have permit applications pending with the groundwater district.
Critics say Pickens is taking water away from a region in dire need. He has offered it to Amarillo and to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, which provides water to Amarillo and 10 other communities in West Texas.
The authority and Amarillo have said they are not interested, so Pickens is trying to find a buyer elsewhere, possibly El Paso, San Antonio or Dallas. So far he has been unsuccessful.
"I'm 75 years old. I need to realize the value of my water as soon as I can," Pickens said. "That's my property right. We have a permit to move the water anywhere in the state. We'll sell the water, you can be sure of that. People need the water."
What about landowners who don't want to sell their water?
Charles Bowers, board president for the Panhandle groundwater district, muses in the documentary that a simple solution to protecting the water of a landowner who doesn't want to sell would be to build a 700-foot-deep fence around his property to protect his water from being siphoned away by a neighbor who is selling his.
Impossible? Silly? Yes. But Bowers said pseudo fences - monitoring wells - are helping maintain the district's plan to have 50 percent of the aquifer's water remaining in 50 years. With monitoring, officials can study the aquifer to help regulate water producers and meet the goal.
"I'm not against water marketing," Bowers said. "That's their property. They bought and paid for it. On the other hand, the guy who doesn't want to sell his, he needs to be protected."
McKinney told the documentary makers that Texans must stop thinking the water issue is a choice between people and the environment.
"There is no such difference. People are the environment," he said. "If we don't have healthy bays, if we don't have healthy lakes and rivers, we're not going to have a healthy state."