SPANISH FORK — Eldon and Charlene Money's household well has gushed fresh, cool water for 114 years. Now, the artesian flow has slowed to a trickle.
"It's still running a little bit, but not anything near what it should be. We have to do something," Charlene Money said. "You get half-way through a shower and the cold water quits."
Fretting about the state of water wells, farmers in south Utah County point the finger of blame to neighboring cities. They have formed an ad hoc committee to seek help from the state engineer, Utah's top water rights authority.
"It's mostly homes that are being hurt," committee member Kevin Anderson said. "It's a big issue. Cities are causing the problem."
Spanish Fork, for example, pumps well water for its new $16.8 million urban irrigation system to save creek water for household use. That takes it from farmers' culinary wells, Anderson said.
And Spanish Fork resident Shane Sorensen, an engineer, said the city has it backwards.
"It makes no sense," he said. "They should put (creek) water into the irrigation system and supplement it with wells."
Well water should be preserved first for household use, he said.
However, the city also uses well water as a household summer supplement to its mountain spring water. When the city stops pumping in the fall, well water levels come back, Sorensen said.
"I won't comment on that," City Engineer Richard Heap said.
Rural folks typically pump well water into a holding tank or cistern, then use it in their homes.
As wells sputter, they have to haul water to fill their cisterns.
In these dry days, says Utah State University agriculture extension office director Dean Miner, "it takes heroic efforts" to keep water coming from wells.
That's because as artesian pressure and water levels retreat, pumps must bring the precious liquid to the surface and not all wells are equipped with pumps.
Some West Mountain wells are starting to producing undrinkable water with sandy grains, a warning that a well is caving in deep underground and could fail, Anderson said.
But Mayor Dale Barney blames the drought — not city pumping — for west-side wells going dry. Water use in Spanish Fork is down 15 percent from last year, he said.
Some households close enough to Spanish Fork have hooked up to city water after their wells quit giving.
In nearby Salem, city officials changed an ordinance banning water hookups outside the city limits and will now to allow them in emergencies without annexing.
Spanish Fork plans to sink two more wells to add to the two city wells that now feed its irrigation system. It also has a five-acre reservoir in the works for the southeast foothills. That water will also go into the pressurized irrigation system.
Barney says the city is also using as much irrigation water from the Spanish Fork River as it can, along with two Ensign-Bickford Co. wells.
Ensign-Bickford continues to flush the groundwater under its explosives manufacturing facility at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon, filtering out explosive residue before it sends the water into the city's irrigation system.
City officials hope that using well water for lawns and gardens is only temporary. Some day that water will go into Spanish Fork households, Barney said, if the city can get Strawberry Reservoir water for urban irrigation through the Central Utah Project pipeline now under construction in Diamond Fork Canyon. Strawberry supplies most of the farm needs in rural south Utah County.
The huge $133 million Diamond Fork Canyon project is scheduled for completion in 2004. City officials are vying for a pipeline from that project to feed their pressurized irrigation system so it can dedicate its wells to household use.
E-mail: rodger@desnews.com