Drought Drives Drilling Frenzy for Groundwater in California

Steve Arthur practically lives out of his truck these days. But he's not homeless. He runs one of Fresno's busiestwell drilling companies.

"It's officially getting crazy. We go and we go but it just seems like we can't go fast enough," he says, sitting behind the steering wheel as he hustles up and down Highway 99 to check on drilling rigs that run 24 hours a day, probing for water.

Some days, Arthur doesn't even have time to stop for gas; he's got an extra tank hooked up to the flatbed of his pickup. He says he's lucky if he gets three hours of sleep a night.

"Toward the end of the week, I start to get run down pretty good," he sighs. "On a Friday afternoon, you might see me parked on the side of the road taking a cat nap."

Counties in the farm-rich Central Valley are issuing record numbers of permits for new water wells. Arthur says his company's got an eight-month waiting list. Some of his competitors are backlogged more than a year. Drillers like Arthur say they're even busier than they wereduring the drought of 1977,when Californians drilled28 thousand new wells.

"This is off the scales, here," says Arthur, shaking his head. "It's just amazing, the amount of people that call and want wells. A customer called this morning and I'm supposed to do two for him, and he said, ‘Add 14 to the list.'"

"You have to literally grab these guys and drag ‘em to your property and say ‘Please, please drill me a well!,'" laments citrus farmer Matt Fisher, who's beenscrambling to keep his trees aliveafter learning that he won't get any water from federal reservoirs this year.

"I have even heard of drilling companies that won't tell growers who's in front of them, because guys are trying to buy the other guy's spot in line," says Fisher. "Its crazy, some of the things that are going on, but if you're in our shoes, and you have to pay a guy $10,000 for his spot in line, that's cheap compared to what you're going to lose if you lose your whole orchard."

It's not always aboutlosingtrees, though. Right where a brand new almond orchard will be planted in rural Fresno County, a 70-foot high drilling rig bores a hole in the earth 2,500 feet deep. This well will cost the farmer about a million dollars.

Juan de La Cruz works on this rig 12 hours a day, seven days a week, carefully guiding the drill bit. He's standing in a little hut next to the drill hole that they call ‘the doghouse.' It's where workers keep a log of the layers of sand and clay they find, collecting samples every ten feet as the drill probes deeper.

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Taxonomy

• Groundwater Recharge
• Aquifer Recharge