UNDERGROUND WATER

Here's a link to start a search, but there's very little limit to what a person can discover online.

https://deq.mt.gov/Portals/112/Water/WPB/SWP/PDFs/GW_wells_Choteau.pdf

We’re used to water coming from overhead or from up the mountain and staying on the surface.  But there is a LOT of action under the ground.  in fact, there so much of such complexity and mythology that I can only point to categories and maybe suggest search engine material.

In spite of obviously shrinking population, Valier keeps needing more water and the water uses keep increasing rules and standards.  For instance, the old water tower that had supplied the town “forever” was measured and found wanting — not able to supply enough water to put out a fire in the school, for instance.  This was outside anything anyone had imagined, but there was no way to just ignore it.  Today there is a second water tower big enough and tall enough to need a red light on top to warn airplanes.

The well levels had been shrinking. We already had four, and wanted to sink another one.  There was enough money for four attempts.  Two were inadequate and were simply capped, though there was a scheme to use one as slow irrigation.  Things were tight, debatable, and dependent on human memory and theory about where to drill.  Finally some people insisted on a water witcher and it’s blurry whether or not that worked.  It was controversial.  In the end a successful well was found and seems to work.

Here are some stats from Pondera County.

Ground Water Information Center | MBMG Data Center Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology Montana Technological University

Number of wells in County	1519
Deepest well on record (feet)	2080
Shallowest well on record (feet)	3
Most recent well on record	7/2/2019
Oldest well on record	1/1/1885
Number of water quality samples	173
Number of measured water levels	204174
Statewide Monitoring Network wells	4

As I began to search materials to begin this little post, I watched for hot springs, one of the most beloved luxuries of Montana, cherished by humans and bears alike.  I’m not talking about Yellowstone, which is a bit over the top, but rather the ones that have been developed into spas.  But I’ve always wanted to visit the quiet, small, nearly secret ones cherished by hippies and other lovers of the land — like bears.  I was surprised that hot springs seem only to be recorded on the West side of the Rockies.  Technically, these are surface pools, not underground.  But that may just be an artifact of reporting.  I knew a family who warmed their large chicken house with hot water from the ground.  

There’s a catastrophic side to thinking about underground water.  When the continental glaciers melted 10,000 years ago, huge aquifer reserves formed underground.  When found, we thought of them as inexhaustible and freely pumped them out to crops.  Now we discover we are emptying the spaces, creating grottoes that might collapse.  Because there is always tectonic pressure from the Pacific plate, this might weaken the area along the Rockies, creating another massive earthquake as we know has happened in the past.  There is no way to ever replenish these subterranean bodies of water.

Fracking, pumping water full of chemicals down oil wells to force out more oil, has also become a worry as ground water becomes contaminated and small earthquakes are triggered.  We have the idea that the ground is much more solid and inactive than a long term look shows us. Common ingredients of fracking fluid include methanol, ethylene glycol, and propargyl alcohol. Those chemicals, along with many others used in fracking fluid, are considered hazardous to human health.

Many old wells, some of them once artesian, even oil wells, have been simply abandoned rather than plugged and recorded.  Sometimes they are marked by rusting debris left behind or leaking poisons draining into waterways.  People have seen the hazards and costs of this failure to repair our endless burrowing and piercing, so they have worked at recording their location and size.  Legal requirements would be enforced if the miscreants could be found.

Small towns and homesteads are dependent on water.  Valier is a source of water for local “dry” farms where there is no well.  An assigned access for improvised tank trucks in town is always busy.  An earlier hydrant next to the small grass airfield had to be shut down because it had been used by a crop duster who stored his chemicals nearby.  He moved his operation to the country, but not without urging since it was so convenient.

The town itself is basically a cooperative meant to take in underground water, distribute it to households, and accept back a system of septic pipes that take it to lagoons designed to treat and settle it.  The piped systems of gas and wired systems of electricity and electronics follow that pattern.  There is always argument about how much of the underground well water is oozing over from Lake Francis and how much is following separate paths through the geology of the East Slope.  Constant testing of the incoming potable water and outgoing lagoon water is required by the state.

The Valier town employees spend a lot of their time digging up yards and streets in search of broken pipes.  The trees the residents enjoy constantly try to infiltrate water systems for their own uses.  In my yard two big fir trees have separate fates.  We removed a huge root from one that might have forced a sewer break, but the other one never gets water except from rain.  Some of us stopped watering when state-required water meters made it expensive.    Both are approaching the limits of their life and pessimists like to tell me they will fall over on my house.  They’re slanting.

The underground with its water secrets makes a potent metaphor.  I’ve stood next to the backhoe watching to see what will appear and the town workers are just as curious.  Until recently when the state is demanding a map of pipes, no one really knew what was down there or even what it was connected to — early day improvisations meant shared or doubled or abandoned lines.  At one point a city employee had asked for a device for holding ditches open so it didn’t collapse on shovelers down in the trench.  It is expensive: two big steel plates with legs in between that has to be moved by the backhoe.  The town council refused to buy one until a collapse trapped a man.  It didn’t kill him, only wrenched his back which will afflict him a long time.

We are sustained by the flow of water through the earth and sky just as we live because of the constant flow in and out of our bodies through flesh and breath.