Cedar City UT Drew Down Its Aquifer For Years; Now It Wants To Drain An Aquifer 70 Miles Away
The ground in Cedar Valley is sinking and splintering. Fissures that snake through the region are a visible sign of Utah’s water woes, and the result of years spent overdrawing from an underground aquifer that supplies the area. And yet Cedar City, at the heart of the valley, continues to grow. Visitors flock to nearby national parks such as Zion and Bryce Canyon, adding to the flow of new residents expected to move here in the coming years. Cedar City is already the most populous in Utah’s Iron county, and finding more water has become an existential quest. Local officials have landed on a controversial solution – siphoning it from under an undeveloped valley to the north in neighboring Beaver county. Laced with scientific uncertainty, the proposal has united environmentalists, ranchers, tribes and officials from other counties in opposition. Supporters, meanwhile, say the city has a legal right to the groundwater and that it is essential for its growth and survival.
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Cedar City’s proposal is the culmination of decades of legal challenges. The Central Iron County Water Conservancy District (CICWCD), which supplies water to Cedar City and its surrounding areas, filed for water rights in three valleys outside the county back in 2006. Litigation went on for years amid opposition, before a 2019 settlement cleared the way for the agency to seek federal approval to begin pumping. The project, still awaiting the all-clear from the Bureau of Land Management, would kick off in Pine Valley, where the CICWCD plans to pump 15,000 acre-feet of water – or nearly 5bn gallons – a year. It would also include a new 200-acre solar facility exclusively built to power the project, and a roughly 70-mile pipeline that, if approved, will traverse across public lands.
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Earlier models from the US Geological Survey paint a more problematic picture. In a 2019 report, the agency concluded that the valley in question may yield less than 75% of the water the agency hopes to acquire each year. The drawdown could pull water from connected basins, affecting areas far from the project itself. Scientists say the taps may be hard to turn off once the changes to the water system are put into play. A separate analysis conducted by the Great Basin Water Network, a coalition of water conservation advocates who oppose the plan, which relied on the USGS data, found that the project “could result in lasting water resource impacts” to surrounding valleys and the ecosystems that depend on them, possibly even stretching into Great Basin national park and Fish Springs national wildlife refuge.
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Local water use, which was already close to triple the national average in 2020, has been on the rise. The state has finally cracked down on Cedar City’s overdrawing of its aquifer, limiting what can be pumped in the years to come. “Not only do we have an issue of supplying water for the growth that has been coming but we really won’t have enough water in the future for our current residents who are here now,” Monroe said. Critics have called on the agency to do more to conserve rather than search out new sources of supply. Monroe claims there has been progress, noting that the county is installing basins to collect runoff water and creating new reservoirs for rural use, which he says accounts for most of their consumption. There are also plans for diverting more treated sewer water for irrigation so farmers can idle their underground wells.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/03/cedar-city-utah-drought-pine-valley
= new reply since forum marked as read
... to a natural state? Are they recycling 100% of their sewage?
If not they have a ways to go before the can call this "an existential quest."
Mostly it's just a way to support new development in the least expensive way possible, damn the neighbors and natural environment.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216558766
