The Los Angeles Times turned its attention to tiny Borrego Springs, where the clock is ticking on the town’s water supply.
The town in the unincorporated part of San Diego County — surrounded by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park — is relying on a groundwater aquifer that is expected to last just 30 more years.
The Times reports:
At that point, according to the Borrego Water District, the water will be half gone, and pumping from the district’s 12 working wells and other private wells will become much more expensive and less productive. More recent studies this spring by the California Department of Water Resources worsened the prognosis: “There may be substantially less water in storage in Borrego Valley groundwater basin than previously interpreted.”
Preserving this area’s way of life may require dramatic changes, and water experts say some of the choices facing Borrego Springs — whether to fallow farmland that uses most of the water or allow desert flora to wither and die, starving wildlife — will increasingly be confronted elsewhere in the state as water sources become less reliable.