Water woes flow east

Water. It's essential to all of us. But pollution and limited resources threaten our water supplies, and a confusing web of entities control who gets water and how much. The Herald's exclusive, six-part series examines important water issues facing Franklin County.

The experts have started calling it "blue gold."

It's vital to people and the places where they live. But there is a limited supply of it, and a confusing web of entities control its distribution and safety.

It is water.

And it's already the top issue for Franklin County.

When the Ottawa Area Chamber of Commerce conducted a series of public forums concerning its strategic economic plan years ago, water was one of the top issues listed by public and business people, Tom Weigand, chamber president who helped write the plan, said.

And again last year and this year, when the chamber conducted forums for a new strategic study, water was the top concern, he said.

Weigand said he was struck by how often and how insistently the topic of water came up. He's not the only one.

"I think that was a revelation to our county commissioners and public officials,"  Charlene Lister, a member of the Marais des Cygnes River Basin Advisory Council, said of the studies.

One position paper issued by the United Nations calls water the top issue of the 21st century for the planet. The U.N. grimly says that many countries are already beginning to run out of water because of population growth, pollution and overuse and some countries may face economic ruin or major restructuring in coming years.

"I think what will be even more important than the quality of our education system for our long-term economy and sustainability and liveability of our state is water and energy," Tom Sloan, Lawrence legislator and member of the Kansas Water Authority, said.

In subsequent stories, The Herald will look at various aspects of water issues that confront the area.

Local challenges

"It's not so much a problem of supply as it is the growth in demand and the distribution of water," Don Stottlemire, Franklin County commissioner and board member of the Lake Region Resource Conservation and Development Council, said.

As more people move into the area, the influx strains older water systems designed to supply 1960s-style water demands. Those systems are at the limits of their useful design lives. Area cities and rural water districts are scrambling or are planning system-wide improvements or expansions.

That in turns, strains waste-water treatment systems and puts a premium on cutting the amount of pollution caused by rapid development.

"It's going to take a long-term approach,"  Lister said. "It's striking, the urbanization that's going on in our area."

Problems push east

The aquifer nourishes vital industries on the plains -- its rich soil produces the nation's beef supply and much of its wheat and corn crops.

Ulysses sits in a stretch of the corn belt where the water table has dropped about 25 feet in the last decade. Once-wild rivers have turned to gravel, and aboveground streams stopped running years ago. It's been a long time since anyone thought the sky might water their crops.

As Ulysses' biggest well approaches bedrock, Wiltse's trying to figure out how the town will pay to pump water from an aquifer that each year drops farther below ground.

It will only get worse, many experts say.

As the central and western Kansas's water problems deepen, people are picking up and moving east, William Harrison, Kansas Geological Survey staffer who's a member of the Kansas Water Authority board, said.

Looking at a map that shows population shifts are starkly illustrative, he said.

Most show an accelerating loss of population, he said.

"There aren't many gaining -- only a handful that are growing," Harrison said. "But there's a bucketful of counties that are losing."

And the trend will accelerate, Wes Jackson, director of the The Land Institute, Salina, which is seeking to reverse the flight of small farmers and residents from the rural areas of the Great Plains, said.

Water planners, who often look 20 to 50 years in advance, are overlooking global warming, which could have a significant effect on the population decline in the Great Plains, Jackson said.

Jackson is among those raising the alarm about Sunflower Energy's plan to build three new large coal-fired power plants near Garden City, which he said will only aggravate the problem of global warming.

"We need to be looking at other alternatives such as conservation and wind power," Jackson said.

The future of water

What that means for Kansas is still open to debate, he said.

Many scientific models would indicate that Kansas will get hotter and drier, he said.

"The American Southwest coming to meet us," Jackson said.

However, in many cases, Kansas is ahead of other states in dealing with water issues, Sloan said.

Sloan said he recently attended a national water conference in Phoenix and he observed how far ahead of other states Kansas is.

The state and organizations in the state has already started a variety of efforts to meet its water problems, including requiring the use of meters for all water consumers, fees for agricultural fertilizers to be used for water quality projects, conservation education areas and financing projects that help stretch out Kansans' use of water, he said.

What's more, organizations involved in water issues are cooperating and working out joint strategies for water use and improvements, he said.

    The Associated Press contributed to this story.