Ground Water Basin Management

Abstract

D ESPITE ITS recent drenching, Southern California is experiencing its eighteenth year of drought. The effects of low rainfall have been accentuated by increased per capita use of water and aggravated by a booming population resulting from the western migration. The result is a serious demand on California's water resouces, as well as on her scientific, engineering, management, legal, and political resourcefulness in meeting the challenge. The problem can be met in two ways: increase the supply or limit the demand. Both are necessary. Methods of increasing the supply range from experiments in saline water conversion, rain making and bizarre flirtations with juvenile water,' to bold and expensive projects to transport water great distances over the mountains from watersheds with surplus to areas of deficiency. Great aqueducts are not new in California, but the 1,750,000,000 dollar California Water Resources Development Bond Act to conserve and transport water from Northern California to Southern California is the most ambitious project of its kind in America.2 In limiting the demand for water California has been less imaginative. Americans are less prone to curb their appetites than they are to invent new ways to satisfy them; hence, there have been few attempts to stretch the available water supply. Conservation and reclamation are viewed as a last resort. While this philosophy is responsible in part for the people of California voting a multi-billion dollar project to import water into thirsty areas, it is equally accountable for squandering the local supply. One means of checking this waste lies in fully realizing the potential of the ground water resources of the state, followed by the inauguration and enforcement of a basin management program of ample scope to maximize the use of the state's ground water basins.