About a quarter of the United States’s irrigated cropland sits on top of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains. But water levels are dropping, and states are taking different approaches to monitoring how much groundwater irrigators are pumping out. Mike Shannon first learned about the Ogallala Aquifer because he made a costly mistake. In the mid-1980s, Shannon was new to city government when one of his hometown’s wells started to go dry. “I just assumed, maybe I ought to go somewhere else and stick another hole in the ground and we’ll get more water,” Shannon said. “Well, unfortunately, I stuck a hole in the ground and there was no water there.” He’d spent several thousand dollars on a test well that was bone dry, and he had to answer to his constituents for it. Today, Shannon is still thinking about groundwater as the interim city manager for Guymon, the Oklahoma panhandle’s largest city.
Source: KCUR News
