The paper quotes AZ Dept of Water Resources Director Herb Guenther as saying he has never seen one party secure that much water from a single basin.
Mohave County Board of Supervisors Chairman Pete Byers is quoted as saying, "We've got these animals coming in here eating up our entire county."
Coincidentally, AZGS just got notice of funding from the USGS StateMap program to start geologic mapping in the Kingman area in anticipation of growing demands for groundwater resources. AZGS geologists will start mapping the Dolan Springs quad in the Fall.
From the article: "roughly 70,000 acre-feet of groundwater per year from the same basin is available to Rhodes through his ownership of large tracts of land".
ReplyDeleteI'm from outside the US and curious about (ground)water management in the US (or in this case Arizona; I think regulations vary from state to state).
Do I understand correctly that by just owning a certain area of land, you are entitled to a withdraw a certain volume of water? Or is it just Rhodes' wish to get that much? Who has to decide on who may extract how much water? (A job I would not like to do...)
The amount of water seems rather big to me; I just try to get an idea of the numbers:
70000 acre-feet are approx. 86 Mio. m³ (more than a third of Berlin's yearly consumption). The basin has about 4700 km², that would require a recharge rate of almost 20 mm/year. (For simplicity, I assumed that the whole basin receives recharge, which it does not, of course. I just try to get an idea of the amount of water involved in terms I could relate to.) That would be a considerable amount under humid conditions like in Germany. For drier regions, it seems prohibitive. However, I don't really know the range of GW recharge in Arizona.
Sorry for all the questions...