WESTERN Kan. (KPR) - Every January, a crew from the Kansas Geological Survey and the Division of Water Resources fans out across western Kansas to measure more than 1,400 water wells. The crew is checking on the health of the Ogallala Aquifer. Commentator Rex Buchanan has been helping measure those wells for more than 20 years and has watched the steady decline in water levels. Now, he's calling the situation a crisis.
(Transcript)
Back in the late 1970s, when I first started at the Kansas Geological Survey, my boss, the Survey director, would say, “We have a water problem, but it’s not a crisis.” Here we are, almost 50 years later, still talking about water. I noticed that, during her state of the state address the other night, Governor Laura Kelly referred to, and I quote, “our water crisis.”
So, I finally got around to actually looking up the definition of crisis, and I think, in all due respect to my old boss, the governor is probably right. A crisis is defined as “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.”
Now I don’t know if our water crisis is a time of danger. But it sure is difficult. The governor seemed to acknowledge that when she said, “I know it is a very sensitive political issue.” She said a mouthful, but if anything, that’s maybe an understatement. I’ve always said that if the legislature takes on water issues, let me know so I can sell tickets. Because it’s gonna be a show.
So what exactly is our water crisis? Well, just about everybody talks about declines in the Ogallala aquifer in western Kansas. In fact, it was conversations about the Ogallala that inspired my boss’s statement about a water crisis. I think he meant that declines were significant, but not an immediate problem. Yet when those declines go on for 50 years, maybe they do qualify as a crisis.
The state’s water issues go well beyond the Ogallala. Our reservoirs are filling up with silt, making them less capable of providing water for drinking, flood control, recreation, and even energy. Fixing that ain’t cheap.
The water infrastructure in the state’s small towns and rural areas is in need of help. And sometimes the small populations in those places can’t afford to fix things all on their own.
And while you hear less about this issue, I think the lack of streamflow in many of our rivers out west, like the Arkansas, is a perpetual problem, one with consequences for places like Quivira National Wildlife Refuge in central Kansas, where a lack of water affects wildlife, birds, and endangered species like whooping cranes.
And I haven’t even mentioned water quality.
The governor argued for more dedicated, regular funding for water. Some of that has happened already, but not nearly enough to deal with all of these issues. I hate to use Texas as an example, but that state’s voters recently approved spending a billion dollars a year, for twenty years, on water.
Sounds like crisis-level money to me.
We can live without lots of things, but take away water, and none of us survive for long. So, yes, I’d say the governor is right. It is a “time of difficulty.”
So, let’s call it what it is. A crisis. And let’s deal with it.
It’s about time.
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Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.