Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Arizona’s solution was the same most other western states relied on; it began sucking up its groundwater, the legacy of many millennia, as if tomorrow would never come. By the 1960s, despite the Bureau’s big Salt River Project—which captured virtually the entire flow of the Gila drainage—four out of every five acre-feet of water used in the state came out of the ground. The annual overdraft—the difference between pumping and replenishment by nature—went past 2.2 million acre-feet a year, which was more than the historic yearly runoff of all the rivers in the state. In dry years, it approached four million acre-feet. In the early days, artesian wells flowed around Phoenix. By the 1960s, some farmers could drill to two thousand feet and bring up nothing but hot brine. Parts of Maricopa County, which included metropolitan Phoenix, literally began to subside as the water below was pumped out and the aquifers collapsed. Drivers heading toward Tucson on Interstate 10 learned to watch for fissures opening in the highway as a vast block of land sank several inches and the one next to it stayed put. Arizona had reversed the pattern of some western states—it had fully developed its surface water first, and then began to overdraft its groundwater. Except for its Colorado River entitlement—whatever it was—it literally had nothing left.