Water Resource Development Part 2

Water Resource Development Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.
A good portion of the water used in growing crops in the eastern part of Washington State comes from the Columbia Basin Project. Mike Schwisow is a lobbyist for the Columbia Basin Development League which is helping to promote the project. There has been a lot of politics involved over the years including a big push back in about 2003.

SCHWISOW: The Development League started to focus attention on the issue of the declining aquifer in the Odessa groundwater management sub-area. And it’s an area that the state allowed the development of deep wells in basically with the feeling that the Columbia Basin Project was going to continue to develop and that these lands would switch from deep well irrigation to project water supplies at some point in the future. It was a temporary fix.

Due to the stalling of the Columbia Basin Project those deep wells just kept pumping.

SCHWISOW: The aquifer in that area is in really serious decline now. It’s failing in many areas and it’s kind of a race to the bottom. How deep can we dig our well before it’s either no water or it’s uneconomical to lift it the thousand feet. So the league started to focus on that issue.

Schwisow says that initial reports saw a long time before completion.

SCHWISOW: You have to remember that this project when it was first envisioned, in the first feasibility report that Reclamation sent to Congress in 1945 projected it would take 75 years to build the project out it was so big. and it would be done incrementally.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.