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National Geographic : 1993 Nov 30
Contents
Challenge of delivery On the surface and below, two giant cities wrestle with distri bution problems. New York City workers blast a shaft through bedrock for a five-billion dollar tunnel built to increase capacity and relieve two older tunnels. Squatters outside Mexico City fill buckets at a public tap; the government is spending a billion dollars to modernize the capital's crumbling system, strained by 2,000 newcomers a week. sign on the wall of Maurice Rim kus's home 70 miles west of San Antonio. "Just like you can have my gun.... When you 'pry' it out of my dead hands." His house and farm stand on top of an unusual reservoir of groundwater, the Edwards aquifer, which is subject to enough legal disputes to flood Texas with depositions. The Edwards is not like most aquifers, which are made of sand and gravel through which water moves slowly. It is a karst aqui fer, which means the water flows through high ly permeable limestone, sometimes in caverns as big as the Chamber at Site 2B. The aquifer is like a huge tilted Swiss cheese that fills from its northwestern side and spills water out of springs to the southeast. Because water moves through it so easily, how much you get depends mainly on the size of your pump. The demands on the aquifer mirror the pres sures on water everywhere. Rimkus and his fellow farmers want to irrigate with it. San Antonio wants it for industry, commerce, and domestic supply for its one million people. The springs drain into the Guadalupe River and provide water for both agriculture and indus try downstream. And, as if this weren't compli cated enough, several endangered plant and animal species depend on the springs and may die if they dry up. The state of Texas controls surface waters with laws based on prior appropriation and permits. But, adhering to principles outlined by an Ohio judge who wrote in 1861 that groundwater movement was "secret" and "occult" and could not be administered, Texas law-with few restrictions-lets you take as much groundwater as you can use from below your land. This suits Rimkus, who irrigates about 1,500 acres of corn and cotton with Edwards water. It also suits water entrepreneur Ron Pucek, who, thoroughly confounding the issue, recently drilled a hole in the aquifer in its southern edge, where it is under pressure, and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SPECIAL EDITION
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