Word: ogallala
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...down its banks, leaving popular beaches high and dry, while parched Reno threatens to pump the lake still lower. In Arizona water scouts from the booming cities are roaming the landscape with checkbooks ready, buying farmland 90 miles distant just to get the groundwater rights. The vast Ogallala Aquifer, an underground lake that stretches from South Dakota to Texas, is being overdrawn by wells at a rate of 5 ft. a year in places, driving entire counties out of irrigated agriculture. Meanwhile, farms and cities from Salt Lake City to San Diego are literally drinking dry the Colorado River, which...
...only a slight blemish on an otherwise heartening demonstration that there apparently still exists among regular people a reservoir of affection that is deeper than the Ogallala Aquifer. Something like 75,000 people lined the streets of Columbia, which only has 66,000 residents. There were a few dissenters, of course: THE EMPEROR HAS NO BRAINS read one sign, and another said FARMS NOT ARMS. But mostly it was a greening vista of kids and parents on lawns fresh with forsythia; they were eager to show off Hickman High, one of the tops in the nation, whose...
Your story on the "Ebbing of the Ogallala" [May 10] points out the severity of the water shortage problem. The depleted Ogallala Aquifer is a result of the Government's refusal to address two problems. First, there is no federal water policy that would ensure all states the right of access to the water. Under the current laws, Nebraska, for example, could pump the entire aquifer into its reservoirs without any repercussion from its surrounding water-dependent neighbors...
Although the cause of the trouble is obvious, the cure is not. Indeed, there may be no fundamental solution to the ebbing of the Ogallala. "We can prolong the supply," concludes John Weeks, a U.S. Geological Survey engineer who heads a five-year U.S.G.S. study of the situation, "but we are mining a limited resource, like gold, and we can't solve the ultimate depletion problem...
Last week a committee representing the Governors of states that tap the Ogallala published a list of 20 recommendations for action. Most of the suggestions, based on a $6 million federal study of the problem, involved stopgap efforts rather than cures. Except one. The committee wants further study of a proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers for huge canal systems that would import water from South Dakota, Missouri and Arkansas. The routes - all of which would be uphill - range in length from 376 miles to 1,135 miles. The cost- from $3.6 billion to $22.6 billion - currently places...