THE WELL-FIXER'S WARNING

[douglas9]

The well fixer and I were standing at the edge of an almond orchard in the exhausted middle of California. It was late July, and so many wells on the farms of Madera County were coming up dry that he was running out of parts to fix them. In this latest round of western drought, desperate voices were calling him at six in the morning and again at midnight. They were puzzled why their pumps were coughing up sand, the water’s flow to their orchards now a trickle.

It occurred to him that these same farmers had endured at least five droughts since the mid-1970s and that drought, like the sun, was an eternal condition of California. But he also understood that their ability to shrug off nature—no one forgot the last drought faster than the farmer, Steinbeck wrote—was part of their genius. Their collective amnesia had allowed them to forge the most industrialized farm belt in the world. Whenever a new drought set down, they believed it was a force that could be conquered. build more dams, their signs along Highway 99 read, even though the dams on the San Joaquin River already numbered half a dozen. The well fixer understood their hidebound ways. He understood their stubbornness, and maybe even their delusion. Here at continent’s edge, nothing westward but the sea, we were all deluded.

Besides, he couldn’t turn them away. His company, Madera Pumps, was his livelihood; the city of Madera was his home. He farmed his own acres of almonds near the center of town. The voices on the line weren’t simply customers. Many were lifelong friends who were true family farmers. So he was patching up their irrigation systems the best he could to get them through a last drink before the nut harvest began in mid-August. At the same time, he knew that something fundamental had changed. If he was going to keep on planting wells, pursuing a culture of extraction that had defined California since the Gold Rush, he could no longer remain silent about its peril.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/well-fixers-story-california-drought/619753/

[quaint]

1. Good read

The casing had been bent by a profound force; the steel was rippled like a crushed soda can. That force, he knew, was the downward pull of subsidence. As a consequence of too much water being sucked out of the aquifer, the earth itself was sinking, first by inches and then by feet, shearing off pumps, eating away at ditches, canals, and aqueduct, stealing gravity from California’s one-of-a-kind water-delivery system that counted on gravity to flow.

So sad and getting worse daily.

[multigraincracker]

2. Looking to reverse the Grapes of Wrath.

Load up the F150 and head to the Mid-West. I hear tell they have lots of water. The streets are paved with water. Yes, sir-eee.

[Canoe52]

3. Well worth reading!

Seriously, definitely good reading, sums up the water situation there.

[hunter]

4. This is a "Tragedy of the Commons."

The commons in this case is the groundwater.

In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

The local groundwater problems in California's Central Valley are very similar to the larger problem of global warming.

The solutions to the problems are obvious, but there are no political or social mechanisms to deal with them and too many fucking idiots who believe in magic -- that if you build more dams, pay off enough politicians, and pray for rain then some idiot god will provide.

To quit fossil fuels you have to quit fossil fuels. You have to leave coal, oil, and gas "reserves" in the earth, which means they are not reserves, they are not assets.

To stop the overdraft of groundwater you have stop pumping. If that means you have to quit certain water intensive crops (silage for cows would be one example) and restore certain agricultural lands to a somewhat natural state, then that's what you have to do.