THE WELL FIXER’S WARNING

 

Mark Arax

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.

The first well, 350 feet deep, had been dug decades earlier by a Midwestern corn farmer who had moved to the San Joaquin Valley to become a nut grower. This well had done yeoman’s work in keeping the drip lines running until the drought of 2012–16, a history-breaker. To make up for the scant flow of rivers, farmers across the valley had pumped so much water out of the earth that thousands of wells came up dry. This well surged and groaned, a death rattle, and finally succumbed in 2014, years after the farmer had.

His family, needing to grab a bigger share of the aquifer, dug the second well 1,100 feet deep and called on Angell to install a more powerful pump. He lowered its tentacles until he hit the ancient lake beneath the valley, a mother lode, and went home thinking that was the last of it.

Now it was seven years later, and he’d been summoned back to the almond orchard to figure out why the second well, barely broken in, was failing. He snaked his camera down the stretch of hole where he remembered the aquifer being. It wasn’t there. He went deeper, but the only flow he could find was pinched off. What little water the pump was drawing was so fouled with salts that the orchard was burning. If the well wasn’t fixed—it happened to be a $40,000 job—the trees would be as good as dead before the crop came in.

Now it was seven years later, and he’d been summoned back to the almond orchard to figure out why the second well, barely broken in, was failing. He snaked his camera down the stretch of hole where he remembered the aquifer being. It wasn’t there. He went deeper, but the only flow he could find was pinched off. What little water the pump was drawing was so fouled with salts that the orchard was burning. If the well wasn’t fixed—it happened to be a $40,000 job—the trees would be as good as dead before the crop came in.

Angell could see what was all around him. The snow on the mountain had melted two months earlier than normal (whatever “normal” meant), and the San Joaquin River was running so low it had been turned into a series of ponds decorated with lilies. But nature alone didn’t explain what had gone wrong with this well and scores of others—ag wells, home wells, business wells, the junior-high and high-school wells—that were bringing up so much air.

From the data on his devices, Angell calculated that the underground water table in Madera County, one of the most over-tapped in the West, had dropped an astounding 60 feet over late spring and summer. So many agricultural pumps were dipping their bowls into the same depleted resource that the aquifer was collapsing, a descent he had never witnessed. “I’m 62 years old. I’ve been doing this more than half my life, and I’ve never seen this. Not even close,” he said. “This is all brand new, and it’s shaken everything I believe in.”

When he took a closer look at the well’s steel casing, he could see six hairline fractures that started at the 280-foot level and ended at the 900-foot level. But what he encountered between those two depths confirmed a phenomenon sometimes found in clay soils but rarely in sandy loams such as this. 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.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE