It’s a shocking visual in these historically dry times. In a video making the rounds on Facebook, a Peoria resident shows water spilling out from a long pipe, flowing across the dry, dusty desert floor.
“What are they doing?” the person filming asks. “They’re just dumping water out. For what?”
WARNING: This video contains some profanity.
It’s a fair question, given Arizona’s limited water supplies and careful management strategies. Why is water dumping, seemingly uncontrollably, in a quiet patch of desert at a time when every drop counts?
The answer, according to local water officials, is a little complicated. But most importantly, they said, barely any water is being wasted.
David Burks, Peoria’s water services director, said it’s part of routine maintenance for a well in the area. To keep wells working normally, the city needs to “rehab” them with scrubbing, chemical cleaners and a flush of water. Before the city is allowed to use the well for public drinking supply, it needs to pump out water for hours across several days.
Then, the city has to decide what to do with all that water.
Burks said they looked at a number of options that would let Peoria keep the water within nearby pipes and canals, but they were all ruled out for different reasons.
A nearby sewer main couldn’t handle the water, simply because the well was producing so much of it. That amount of water — about 800 to 1,000 gallons per minute — would also overwhelm the nearby Jomax Water Reclamation Facility.
Peoria considered putting the water in the Beardsley Canal, which runs nearby. The canal is owned by the Maricopa Water District, which uses it to carry water from Lake Pleasant to farms and subdivisions across a roughly 60-square-mile area on the far western edge of the Valley. Burks said the agency is “very strict” about the water that is allowed in the canal, and would have put the well water through a rigorous testing system. Burks said getting that approval was too complicated.
After ruling out pipes, treatment plants and canals, Peoria decided that it would be best to put the water somewhere it could seep back into the ground.
Burks said the water pouring onto the desert isn’t getting lost, it’s just going back into underground aquifers, where Peoria can use wells to get it later.
“When you're dumping an 800 to 1,000 gallons a minute into one area,” Burks said, “you're going to get the majority of it back into the aquifer. Very little of it is going to evaporate because it's not sitting up there pooling on top of the ground.”
The area where water was dumped onto the ground is uniquely well-suited to recharge those underground pools. It’s about a mile south of a large recharge facility, where water is regularly poured onto the ground so it can percolate into the aquifer below.
Aquifer recharge is a common practice in Arizona. It’s a big part of water managers’ strategy to make sure the state has enough water saved to survive dry times going forward.
Peoria’s Burks said he’s seen the social media video and its questions about water waste. It first came to his attention when a resident called his office looking for answers.
He said Peoria is “very aggressive” on water loss, and does not take water waste lightly. The city only loses 5% to 6% of its water every year. Burks encouraged residents to call the city and notify officials if they suspect water waste or have questions about the system.
“I've been doing this a long time,” he said, “Which is why I always welcome a phone call to give us a chance to answer your questions and just give you the truth. If it's an answer that is the right answer, but it's not an answer we're proud of, we're still going to give you the right answer.”
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