Alma Shaw
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JUST RAIN Glen Ellen dry-farmer Will Bucklin, pictured among vines that have lasted since 1851 with no irrigation at all.
Sapping the Well A rising chorus criticizes wineries’ hoarding of unregulated groundwater. Is dry-farming the answer? BY ALASTAIR BLAND Note: This is the second in a series on the wine industry’s impacts on the environment.
T
yler Heck remembers the summer days that often sent him down the hill from his family’s home off Erland Road and into the cool waters of Van Buren Creek for relief. He remembers diving into the water and swimming, even in July and August. It was the 1980s.
By the 1990s, a person could still get wet, but those summer swimming holes had become knee-deep wading pools. Over the next decade, the creek’s flows continued to visibly drop. Its steelhead stopped returning to spawn. In the past three summers, the stream, which flows into Mark West Creek, has been completely dry. Heck, now 32, says several nearby vineyards—which have grown in size—have taken the water, draining the ground below via wells and pumps. Three neighbors, he also reports, saw
their wells go dry three years ago. At least one has had to pay trucking companies to deliver water. “And that’s just so they can have a drink and take a shower,” says Heck, whose own well still produces but seems fated to go dry soon. A decade ago, the water level stood 150 feet belowground; it has since dropped 500 feet. Still, development in the area continues, and a proposal by Heck’s adjacent neighbor to subdivide his property and build a second large home is now under review by the county.
Heck suspects the man, allegedly a Texas-oil millionaire who wants to sell the property, is going to plant several acres of vines to increase the appeal of the real estate. Heck lives at 1,300 feet of elevation, at the end of a long, winding road. Trucks carrying tons of water could never reach the top, he says, and Heck is formally appealing to the county on March 10 to block his neighbor’s building proposal, which Heck fears will facilitate the disappearance of his water supply. The widespread practice of spraying vines to protect them from nighttime frost would use even more water. Heck’s personal crisis reflects a greater issue affecting the entire state: the unregulated overallocation of groundwater. California is the last state in which groundwater use remains virtually unregulated and unrestricted, according to Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior policy analyst Barry Nelson. Anyone willing to drill for it and pump it from the earth can do so, free of charge, and the only restriction, it seems, may be the availability of water itself—and according to experts, it’s running out. In 2003, state hydrologists estimated that Californians are overdrafting their groundwater supplies by 1 million to 2 million acre feet per year. “We’re pumping it out faster than Mother Nature recharges it,” explains Nelson, who has closely studied the state’s groundwater and its relation to surface water, and who believes that overdrafting has grown worse in the past eight years. The problem has been most severe in Kern County, where dramatic land subsidence—as much as 30 vertical feet—has occurred as tremendous volumes of water vacate the ground below via wells. The Cosumnes River, a major tributary of the San Joaquin, has entirely disappeared in recent summers, Nelson says, because it’s been drained dry from below. In the South Bay, too, land has subsided measurably. South of Sonoma, wells have reportedly begun drawing up saltwater as San Pablo Bay’s