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Well-drillers doing booming business in the Central Valley as farmers prepare for water cutbacks

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 30, 2008 at 11:02 am

From the Sacramento Bee:

Steve Arthur loves a good drought. But trouble in the Delta serves him just as well.  Arthur, a stocky 48-year-old, runs one of the biggest agricultural well-drilling operations in the state. This year, he has enough orders to launch himself into early retirement.  “Everybody’s planning ahead, because they know the water situation’s not going to get anything but worse,” he said.

A well-drilling boom not seen since California’s last big drought in the early 1990s is under way in the San Joaquin Valley, as farmers chasing high crop prices tap the region’s vast, largely unregulated groundwater reserves in the face of an increasingly bleak outlook for water from the state’s rivers and reservoirs.

“Business is unbelievable,” Arthur said on a recent morning in a field soon to be planted with almond trees. Through sunglasses splattered with mud, he watched the hoses on his drill rig buck as they spat water and sand from 700 feet underground.

California’s reservoirs will be filling up this spring, thanks to an average winter snowpack. But court-ordered pumping restrictions intended to protect fish populations in the Delta mean that many San Joaquin Valley farmers won’t get as much water this year as they would have in the past.

Read the rest of this story from the Sacramento Bee by clicking here.

March 30, 2008 · Filed Under Agriculture

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