Sasha Khokha/KQED

A well on a farm in the Central Valley. Groundwater accounts for 30-to-40 percent of all water used in California.

[POST UPDATED, 4/3, 5:04pm]

It’s no secret that with several recent years of drought, California’s groundwater supplies have come under increasing strain. But Dennis O’Connor, a water consultant with the State Senate Natural Resources and Water committee, wants to rewrite an arcane piece of California water law that, for decades, has kept documents containing information on the state’s groundwater resources under wraps.

The documents O’Connor wants released to the public are called well completion reports, or “well logs” – technical documents filed by well drillers with the state. Under California water law, well logs are confidential, accessible only by individuals in state agencies or those who meet special criteria.

“These logs are rich sources of information. The data can help you connect the dots and create a three-dimensional picture of what’s going on underground,” O’Connor told me. Logs contain data on the depth, location and geology of the sites as well as engineering details such as the kind of casing used and the angle of drilling.

The information, says O’Connor, would be highly useful to hydrologists looking to map aquifers and study historical trends in the state’s groundwater supplies – the kind of macro-level understanding of groundwater that he says is lacking across the state. “You need to know the physical characteristics of a basin in order to effectively manage it,” said O’Connor.

California is the only state in the western U.S. that does not make its well logs available to the public. In states such as Oregon, Idaho and Utah, well log reports are accessible in searchable online databases.

O’Connor’s push for greater transparency seems to fall in line with a 2009 amendment to the state water code, which requires the Department of Water Resources (DWR) to begin monitoring seasonal and long-term trends in groundwater elevations across the state. According to Mary Scruggs, a DWR senior engineering geologist, the information contained in well logs is not always comprehensive but can be a critical asset in understanding long-term changes in the state’s groundwater basins.

With the extremely dry weather in recent years, aquifers throughout California have been drawn down rapidly. In an average year, according to the Department of Water Resources, California’s groundwater is overdrawn by 1.4 million acre-feet, a volume greater than what is used in an average year by all the residents in the San Francisco Bay Area.  A 2009 NASA satellite study found that during a period of prolonged drought between 2003 and 2009, overdraft was as much as 4.4 million acre feet per year – more than three times the average annual overdraft reported by the DWR.

While groundwater accounts for 30-to-40% of the state’s total water supplies, California has no statewide groundwater management plan. Groundwater basins are managed instead through local ordinances, joint management plans – known as GWMPs — and, when conflicts between water users arise, through the courts. There are currently 22 “adjudicated basins” across the state, most of which are in southern California.

American Water Surveyors

Aquifers are underground "reservoirs" where water is stored in porous rock.

O’Connor has been working with state senator and Natural Resources and Water committee chair Fran Pavley, a Democrat who represents sections of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, to draft legislation that would make logs for all new wells (or those modified, abandoned or destroyed after ratification) publicly available.

The bill, SB 1146, is currently in committee and is a modified version of a SB 263, a bill vetoed earlier this month by governor Jerry Brown. (In a subsequent memo [PDF], Brown wrote that well logs should be made public but that the proposed penalties under SB 263 were too severe.)

A key concern among opponents of last year’s bill was security of public drinking water. The San Gabriel Valley Water Association, a volunteer group of stakeholders in southern California, said confidentiality of well logs was necessary to “protect water supplies and facilities from sabotage and attack.” Others said the bill could expose well drillers to increased risk of lawsuits.

While investor-owned water agencies are presently concerned with security, O’Connor says the confidentiality of well logs has historically benefited private entities, in particular private well drilling companies, looking to maintain “proprietary” control over local groundwater resources.

“The incremental risks of this bill are as close to zero as you will find,” he said.

Kimberly Ayers

Is the 2012 water bond heading for the drain?

“There are two subjects water people least want to talk about: politics and money,” said the former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, David Nahai. He was speaking at the “Future of Water in Southern California” conference on a dry and windy Friday, here in the City of Angels. And those two were the uncomfortable topics State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) talked about in his lunch hour keynote.

Sponsored by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, the conference was generously sprinkled with Southland water and sanitation district staff. They’d just spent the morning presenting new ideas for water “banking,” and new technologies for advanced recycling, and Steinberg knew the idea of less money would not wash down well with the noontime pasta salad and sandwiches. In fact, a proposal to cut 25% from each project in the water bond measure even failed an Assembly committee vote on Jan. 10th.

As our interactive map (below) shows, the $11.1 billion proposal’s largest proposals are for water storage, Bay-Delta sustainability, groundwater clean-up, and advanced water treatment and recycling.

View KQED: California’s Water Bond – Where Would the Money Go? in a larger map

The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) is already on record as opposing any reduction, calling the cut “premature” in Capitol testimony earlier this month. In an Op-Ed piece for the Sacramento Bee, ACWA chief Timothy Quinn — also a former head of the Southern California Metropolitan Water District — brandished a Field survey it commissioned in which 84% of voters agreed, “the state has major water problems and must invest in its water infrastructure to ensure reliable water now and in future years.” And 64% said “investing billions of dollars in a state bond package (such as the one on the November ballot) would be worth it to ensure reliable water supplies.”

Steinberg conceded that most think the bond is “too large,” and critics say it’s overladen with pork. “I can accept that but one person’s pork is another person’s regional water solution,” Steinberg told the gathering. “We’re not going to be able to sell an $11 billion bond to voters during a very precarious period of economic recovery.” The alternative numbers he gently lobbed were in the range of seven-to-ten billion dollars.

A nationwide poll, “The Value of Water,” by hydro technology firm Xylem, Inc., showed — as of 18 months ago — water users were up for spending 11% more a month to upgrade their water systems. But the Natural Resources Defense Council had postprandial admonitions about the need to get truly creative with water system financing. NRDC’s David Beckman pointed to the group’s Center for Market Innovation, which is working to create large-scale private sector financing for energy efficiency projects.

In closing, Steinberg floated a compromise: “The choice may be do it our way and risk getting nothing or do the best we can — albeit with a smaller bond.”

The New York Times this weekend published a story and useful graphic describing new findings on the intensity of groundwater pumping in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

One eye-opening note from Felicity Barringer’s article:

“…the total loss of groundwater from the Sacramento and San Joaquin River basins in California’s Central Valley from 2003 to 2010 was just under 16.5 million acre-feet — approximately the volume of the Lower Colorado River reservoir, Lake Mead, when it is full.”

Lake Mead is the nation’s largest man-made reservoir (and has not been full for some time).

The research, by scientists at a Massachusetts arm of the Stockholm Environment Institute, includes projections for water supply and demand in California and the Southwest. The article points out that about a third of Californians’ total water use is groundwater.

California’s Central Valley has lost nearly enough water in the past six years to fill Lake Mead, according to NASA scientists presenting at the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco this week. Nearly two-thirds of that loss–20.3 cubic kilometers of water–is from groundwater depletion.

With the recent drought, groundwater has been an important water source for California’s Central Valley agriculture, but getting a picture of that water use hasn’t been easy. Water districts haven’t been required to report groundwater pumping in their areas. That’s something the recent Delta overhaul package of legislation now requires, but according to Jay Famiglietti of UC Irvine, the records to date aren’t very complete. Wells are sparse and the measurements have been sporadic.

The majority of the water loss since 2003 has been focused in the San Joaquin Basin at the southern end of the Central Valley, which is losing 3.5 cubic kilometers of water each year. The bulk of that loss is the result of groundwater depletion.

Famiglietti says this is due to a “triple threat” in California.  First came the drought, then decreased water allocation and more groundwater pumping. Finally, with less surface water, the groundwater aquifers have a reduced opportunity to recharge. Famiglietti says it’s clear that California is using groundwater at an unsustainable rate, which “poses significant threats to food production in US and the California economy.”

Groundwater basins in the Central Valley. Image: NASA

This large-scale picture of California’s groundwater comes from NASA’s Grace project. Twin satellites orbiting the Earth detect changes in the gravitational field, caused by the movement of water. Those satellite measurements act like a“scale at the bottom of the ocean weighing how much water is in each of these spots,” according to NASA’s Michael Watkins.  They also detect changes in snow, surface water and soil moisture.

The Grace project, though, is becoming a “senior citizen,” according to Watkins and is reaching the end of its technological life. He says quality of their water research, which has included other spots around the globe, speaks to the need for another generation of the project.  Famiglietti says, though this data can’t replace ground measurements, he hopes it will be taken into account by state agencies faced with making the tough choices about California’s aquifers.