Oregon Public Broadcasting

In Eastern Washington, water is everything. It makes cities, crops and industry grow. But now a new study finds Eastern Washington cities and farmers are running out of water – fast.

The report says that large underground aquifers are not being recharged enough to sustain business as usual. Correspondent Anna King reports.

A ground water management agency in Othello, Washington did the study.  It determined that farmers and cities in four surrounding counties are currently drawing on water left over from the Ice Age floods some 10,000 years ago.

And those waters aren’t being recharged because it’s beneath an impermeable layer of basalt rock.

Study-director Paul Stoker says the situation is sobering but not unique in the West.

Paul Stoker: “Many of the Basins in the Western United States at the current rates have between five and twenty years of water before they run out – just allowing people to pump until they run out isn’t a solution.”

Stoker says there are no magic fixes. One option he can think of is filling dried up lakes and streams. That allows water to drain down into the aquifers.

The water agency has requested another state grant to look for more possible solutions.