Water recharge program facing challenges

Groundwater levels in the Eastern Snake River Aquifer have been declining for 50 years, according to the Henry’s Fork Foundation. That’s starting to create all kinds of problems.

There is a way to fix it, but it’s complicated.

“The main tool that’s being used to reverse the decline is to replace what used to be this incidental recharge from irrigation practices from what we call managed recharge actually purposefully taking water from the surface system and putting it in the aquifer,” said Rob Van Kirk, from the Henry Fork’s Foundation.

But that’s not as easy as it sounds because of all the restrictions.

“Physical restrictions, water rights restrictions, legal restrictions you know, upper valley versus lower valley. There’s a lot of things that need to fall into place to put water in the ground, including just plain old geology. You have to have the right type of geologic setting to effectively get water into the ground,” Van Kirk said.

Not to mention there has to be water supply.

“Transition from good snow pack to dry immediate weather has caused us a little trouble in our efforts to allow managed recharge,” said Mike Beus, from the Bureau of Reclamation.

The water recharge program is running, but it’s taking some time because of all of those challenges.

“It’s something that absolutely has to be done because the consequences of not doing it are pretty dire,” Van Kirk said.

Lack of water will severely hurt agriculture, one of the driving forces of the state’s economy.

“Idaho is becoming one of the top agricultural states in the country now especially with dairy, and shutting down a bunch of ground water pumping isn’t going to help that. But other entities have water rights, like Idaho Power has water rights to generate electric. So we have got to balance that. Getting the aquifer recharged is a big part of stabilizing water supply and making things more certain. But getting there is tough,” he said.