Last fall on November 16 I watched a very disturbing episode of the CBS Sunday night program 60 Minutes about how our groundwater is being pumped out much faster than it can be replenished. I wonder how many of ElPasoNaturally readers saw this episode. It is available online at 60 Minutes November 16, 2014.
I am sure that many agree that speaking out on environmental issues is critical to our quality of life and the quality of life of those who come after us. I plan to watch this episode again and then come up with a new list of questions for those who may have some answers. We have good people working in El Paso for the El Paso Water Utilities. They need our support and feedback and I hope that more people in our community will become involved with our water concerns.
Last year Jim Tolbert launched a petition calling for saving land on both sides of the Franklin Mountains, One of the reasons why Jim believes that this effort is so important is because "preservation means conserving our scarcest resource: WATER. We have more land than water. " Can we all agree that Jim is correct? Is protecting natural open spaces before they are bought up and subdivided important to conserving water? If we agree then we need to be working with Jim now in gathering more signatures. I hope you will join me.
Another way to save groundwater is to capture the water that falls on our residential, commercial and industrial properties and let it sink in on those properties instead of sending it down our asphalt streets into concrete trapezoidal channels to holding ponds where it can be pumped to the Rio Grande which is a separate groundwater basin from the Hueco Bolson. Retrofitting existing built communities is necessary. In Los Angeles the Department of Water and Power has a case study - Elmer Ave Neighborhood Retrofit project to install "a large infiltration gallery underneath the street right of way which is estimated to infiltrate 16 acre-feet annually. The gallery is a sub-surface groundwater collection system, shallow in depth, constructed with perforated pipes into which runoff water flows and is then allowed to infiltrate into the ground to recharge the local groundwater basin."
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