12 April 2016
Of aquifers, bottles, and lawyers
Opponents of the Montana Artesian Water Company’s plan to bottle and sell groundwater pumped from the Flathead aquifer near Egan Slough have formed a new organization, Water for Flathead’s Future, that’s dedicated to keeping that plant from filling even a single bottle with water from the Flathead’s aquifer.
Here’s how WFFF describes its goals and mission:
Water for Flathead’s Future is a grass roots organization that advocates sustainable use of our surface and underground water resources to assure that the needs of the people, fish and wildlife of the Flathead Valley of Montana can be met now and for generations to come. Any person or company that endangers the quality and availability of this most valuable resource by shipping large quantities of it away from the local area poses a threat to our livelihoods, our happiness, and our economy. We work to prevent this from happening by advocating land use reform and denying permits for any such activities.
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We are working hard to organize as fast as possible to stop this water mining from changing everything we love about the Flathead Valley. It will take a great deal of money to hire the attorneys and other consultants necessary to do this work. The people behind the bottling plants had a big head start.
MWAC has applied for the right to pump 700 acre feet of water per year from the deep aquifer, through which, report scientists at the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, 200,000 acre feet flows annually. Although some irrigation water drawn from the shallow aquifer returns to it, no water drawn from the deep aquifer returns to it through downward seepage:
[MTBOM’s John Wheaton] …said removing water from the aquifer and shipping it away in water bottles would not be significantly different than irrigating agricultural lands in terms of replenishing the water source, according to his research. Only 10 percent of water sprayed from pivot irrigation systems, and 20 percent from general sprinklers, returns to the shallow aquifer. None of the water taken from the deep aquifer in the valley floor returns to its original depths, Wheaton said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which operates the fish hatchery at Creston, filed an objection to approval of the water right for MAWC’s water bottling plant, arguing that among other things, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation’s analysis of, and assumptions about, the deep aquifer were wrong. The hatchery uses water from the deep aquifer.
Sorting out the law, facts, and science, will be profitable for lawyers and experts, contentious for the community, and could drag on for years.
Meanwhile, MAWC’s proposed plant will become part of a never ending debate over the safety and morality of bottled water. WFFF’s nascent website contains a link to Food and Water Watch’s webpage on tap water versus bottled water.
I do not take the position that bottled water is an intrinsic evil. MAWC’s product will be filtered, and sterilized with ultraviolet (UV-C) light. It will be expensive compared to tap water, but certainly a lot healthier for humankind than carbonated and sugared bottled water, water based beverages containing ethanol, or lead tainted tap water in cities such as Flint, Michigan.
On question that I have not heard raised is whether MAWC can turn a reasonable profit with less than 700 acre feet of water — and if so, with how much less. Bottling plants are scaleable. Could MAWC make money with 100 acre feet a year? With 50? What do reputable economists say?