A little more than one-third of America’s total volume of drinking water comes from groundwater, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey. But small and rural communities are dependent on wells, which typically cost less than treating and transporting water from rivers and lakes. Of the nation’s 143,070 water systems, 128,362 rely primarily on groundwater, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Arizona said in June that it would stop granting permission to build houses in the Phoenix area because there isn’t enough water for the homes that have already been approved. Arizona has seen an explosion of wells, and they’ve gotten much deeper as the water level drops.
Craig and Lori Paup were forced to move from their house in the Sulphur Springs Valley of Arizona after their well went dry in 2015. The groundwater had dropped so much that their 300-foot-deep well could no longer reach it. Many of their neighbors faced the same problem.
In Minnesota, a drought during the summer of 2021 prompted farmers to crank up their usage of powerful irrigation wells to drench their fields in water. That caused stream and lake levels to drop and many people’s wells to go dry.
In Red Lake County, Minnesota, Allan Armstrong went without drinking water at his house for a month in 2021, but he was more concerned about the situation at his parents’ house nearby, where his father was receiving hospice care.
“We need water now!” Armstrong wrote to state officials.
The federal government sets rules on groundwater, but not its overuse or depletion, although experts say Congress has the constitutional authority to do so. Overall, federal responsibility for water is scattered among a half-dozen different agencies.
America’s approach to regulating water is “a total mess,” says Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University, in New York. Any effort to impose federal oversight would very likely face opposition from agricultural groups.