Follow the water
on its frantic gravity trip downhill, not knowing where it is flowing, but
going there directly. The stream in my
backyard, Willow Creek, still flows wildly during snowmelt season, recharging
the local aquifer along with its related wetland but it shuts down abruptly
when the snow is gone and our local water companies start capturing it for peak
summer irrigation use. Local lawn and
garden irrigation increases water demand on our municipal suppliers tenfold but
Willow Creek recovers nicely in the fall when irrigation ceases. The diminishment of surface stream flows also
inhibits the recharge of the meadows and park areas that serve as a storage
sponge for late summer stream flows, like The Snyderville Meadow, Park Meadows,
Deer Valley, Heber, Midway and the Rhodes Valley of Kamas. The groundwater discharge areas and wetland
behind my house flow nicely all spring in conjunction with Willow Creek and the
high local water table. As the creek
flow abates in the summer and autumn, the discharge stops and the wetland dries
up along with the local aquifer, which does not recover until next spring.
The Snyderville
Basin geology is bound by folded and faulted sedimentary rocks, mostly
sandstone, quartzite, shale, and limestone to the west and south, and by the
Keetley volcanics, tuffs and breccias to the east. The basin is filled with unconsolidated
alluvial (stream) and colluvial (glacial) deposits, as thick as 275 feet deep. These deposits are typically coarse grained
at the mountain interface, which is great for recharge, but are unfortunately
fine grained in the basin and therefore do not yield water as easily as many of
the unconsolidated fill basins in Utah like Salt Lake City or Heber.
The Silver
Springs behind the Park City Nursery and Church is the networked source of most
of the culinary water for our subdivision of the same name. It typically flows about 500 gallons per
minute (gpm) of cool, clean mountain water, suitable for bottling, although it
is considered relatively ‘hard’ because of the limestone source. This flow can increase to as much as 5,000-15,000
gpm in the spring because of surface snowmelt runoff infiltration. This high flow, however, is not usable due to
water quality issues. Recently the springs ran red at high water because of
golf course construction above it in the Nugget or Navajo Sandstone. In our effort to get more golf we nearly ruined
our perfect source of gravity-fed spring water.
Luckily, the spring cleared up in a few months on it’s own and has not
run red since.
In addition, the
Silver Springs Subdivision was built in a wetland, before that was illegal, and has an extensive underdrain system that
depresses the local water table, so our homes do not flood, or float and our
foundations do not implode. The
underdrain system flows several hundred gpm in the spring and never really
drops below 100 gpm all year round, draining a billion pounds of water safely
away by gravity every year. Some
homeowners want to abandon this underdrain system, due to maintenance costs, at
our own puerile. This illustrates the
conjunctive relationship between surface water, groundwater, nuisance water and
casual water along with water quality concerns in our local neighborhoods. Hydrology, along with politics, is
local.
Our population in
the Snyderville Basin is expected to double in the next 25 years, bringing with
it challenges and choices between conservation and consumption, balance and
blind ignorance, sustainability, and selfishness. Snow making water demands are increasing
and even though this use is more like winter water storage in the snowpack than
depletion or consumption of the resource, it is somewhat indulgent and energy
intensive. A quarter section of agriculture
alfalfa can use as much water as Silver Springs Subdivision and our big landscape
trees drink more free water from the near surface aquifer than we pay for
through our water meters. Mine water is
being collected, used and sold, drying up local streams. There is no more casual, free or extra water.
Importing new water into the basin is expensive
but necessary and critical as we outgrow the local supply that we have.
A punitive
conservation rate has been in place for years that cuts our use and the costs
to reasonable homeowners but as much as sixty percent of our water is pumped over
Promontory from the Weber River, ten to fifteen miles away. There is a huge
pumping station there with a full-time, live-in caretaker to watch the
pumps. Water is power and energy, and
vice-versa. Local private water
companies are running dry and need to buy this expensive water for millions of
dollars per year. They are starting to
realize the value, worth and cost of water.
Their water bills are going up. Something
has to give.
We can over pump
our wells and import expensive new water to the basin until the cows come home
but eventually, we will have to balance supply and demand. This will involve charging a price reflecting
the cost of what water is worth, so we conserve it and recognize its value. Despite
years of consternation and conflict that wasted time, money and water there has
been recent foresight and success. There has been an effort to regionalize and coordinate
the wholesale and retail companies in the basin for efficiency, redundancy, and
reliability of our shared resources. With
prudence and good leadership this is possible, but only with cooperation and
conservation by all of us.
Keep Park City
Kind. Keep Park City Cool.
