Mark Arax writes:

As he guided me out to the almond orchard in the colony of Fairmead on the county’s northern fringe, Matt Angell, the well fixer, a big man with kind eyes, wasn’t sure what role he had assumed. Was he a whistleblower? Was he a communitarian? When I suggested that he had the tone and tilt of an agrarian Cassandra, he paused for a second and said, “I like that.” We pulled into the orchard, row after row of perfectly spaced trees laced by the plastic hoses and emitters of drip irrigation. It looked to be one more almond orchard in the 2,350-square-mile vastness of almond orchards up and down California. He stepped out of his white heavy-duty truck and pointed to two wells in the ground. They told of the dilemma, the moral quandary, he was now facing.

The first well, 350 feet deep, had been dug decades earlier by a Midwestern corn farmer who had moved to the San Joaquin Valley to become a nut grower. This well had done yeoman’s work in keeping the drip lines running until the drought of 2012–16, a history-breaker. To make up for the scant flow of rivers, farmers across the valley had pumped so much water out of the earth that thousands of wells came up dry. This well surged and groaned, a death rattle, and finally succumbed in 2014, years after the farmer had.

His family, needing to grab a bigger share of the aquifer, dug the second well 1,100 feet deep and called on Angell to install a more powerful pump. He lowered its tentacles until he hit the ancient lake beneath the valley, a mother lode, and went home thinking that was the last of it.

Now it was seven years later, and he’d been summoned back to the almond orchard to figure out why the second well, barely broken in, was failing. He snaked his camera down the stretch of hole where he remembered the aquifer being. It wasn’t there. He went deeper, but the only flow he could find was pinched off. What little water the pump was drawing was so fouled with salts that the orchard was burning. If the well wasn’t fixed—it happened to be a $40,000 job—the trees would be as good as dead before the crop came in.

Angell could see what was all around him. The snow on the mountain had melted two months earlier than normal (whatever “normal” meant), and the San Joaquin River was running so low it had been turned into a series of ponds decorated with lilies. But nature alone didn’t explain what had gone wrong with this well and scores of others—ag wells, home wells, business wells, the junior-high and high-school wells—that were bringing up so much air.

As the aquifer gets over-tapped, wells in the San Joaquin Valley are running dry more frequently. (Jim McAuley for The Atlantic)
From the data on his devices, Angell calculated that the underground water table in Madera County, one of the most over-tapped in the West, had dropped an astounding 60 feet over late spring and summer. So many agricultural pumps were dipping their bowls into the same depleted resource that the aquifer was collapsing, a descent he had never witnessed. “I’m 62 years old. I’ve been doing this more than half my life, and I’ve never seen this. Not even close,” he said. “This is all brand new, and it’s shaken everything I believe in.” [Continue reading…]