By Don Wiltshire
Denise Fort, Professor of Law at UNM, delivered a talk a week ago last Wednesday at the Magdalena Public Library’s reading program on “Water.” She informed us, in no uncertain terms, that everything is not “Hunky-Dory.” (A curious term, the origins of which I’ll explain at a later date . . . also the punch line of a very long, very bad joke told to me by a co-worker.)
The long, convoluted history of water law in the Southwest has left us with the current opinion that water is a “commodity.” It will be supplied to the highest bidder. Bad news for us.
There is no current set of laws, “on the books,” that forbids this type of insane “water mining.” The entire matter of the San Augustin Ranch LLC’s “water-grab” application has been left to the discretion of the State Engineer, a State Governor’s appointee. Let’s try to pin down the Governor candidates’ positions on this situation.
The red water jug protest art is coming together. For our Old Timer’s Celebration, we could pass those red jugs down the parade route to let the candidates on their floats know that we are serious about this matter. Another concept is to construct a cube using 555 jugs, representing the amount of water that would be removed from our common aquifer in one second. It would be 4 feet square and 7 ½ feet tall. This would be impressive, but not frighteningly so. A much more impressive display would be the “one minute removal” rate: 16 feet square and over 27 feet tall, representing 33,295 gallons!
The hourly rate of withdrawal would be represented by a line of water jugs (6" square) set side by side from Datil to the Litigation Unit of the State Engineer’s Office in Santa Fe. The daily rate of withdrawal would be represented by a line of jugs set side by side from Juneau, Alaska to Miami, Florida. Now we’re getting into Christo-type projects!
Now let’s consider the proposed yearly withdrawal rate as set forth by the San Augustin Ranch LLC. It amounts to gallon jugs (painted red of course), laid side-by-side, encircling the earth 66 ½ times.
Having trouble picturing us painting all of those jugs red? Consider instead, a shimmering cube of water, 1,327 ½ feet (about 1/4 mile) in all directions. Just how many of those beautiful cubes of water do you suppose can be removed from our aquifer before we begin to feel the effects? It wouldn’t be long before we all look as helpless and pathetic as those oiled pelicans on the Gulf Coast: just more casualties of “business as usual.”
If you thought of leaving the ranch, the old homestead or parts of our Village to your children or grandchildren, forget it! This area would turn into a desolate wasteland, populated only by the “pumpers” at the SA Ranch and a few struggling workers at the VLA, trying to keep their radio dishes upright.
It’s the least we can do, to clearly illustrate the staggering amount of water that this proposal suggests. So keep saving those plastic gallon jugs; rinse them out and if you can’t rouse us at 405 Pine Street in Magdalena, chuck them over our fence or gate. We’ll paint them red as fast as we can.
On a lighter note, the 3rd Water Program at the Magdalena Public Library is scheduled for Wednesday, June 30 at 7 pm. It will feature Ian Jenness, speaking about his trials and successes at rainwater collection in Magdalena. This is a positive, proactive technique that we can adopt or at least think about in the face of losing our current access to water. Bring your questions, experiences or alternatives to this age-old technique of survival.
This just in: the Hunky-“Dory” has been redeployed to the Gulf to help lay oil-boom. It’s got its work cut out for it! The latest estimate of the volume of oil that has been released into the Gulf since April is over 100 million gallons! That is over 307 acre feet of oil!
BP has been frantically spraying highly toxic “dispersants” into the oil-gusher. This of course doesn’t make the oil “go away” (as they would have us think), it merely brakes up the oil into smaller droplets so that it doesn’t seem like so much.
If you were a fish, which would you rather contend with? One large blob of oil that you could perhaps avoid or billions of tiny droplets mixed with more than one million gallons of the Neurotoxin Pesticide, Corexit?
If you have any comments, problems, solutions, upcoming events, spare oil-boom, or Empty Milk Jugs, contact me at mtn_don@yahoo.com.
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