During our initial March 31 Our Valley, Our Water meeting co-sponsored with the Lower San Pedro Collaborative, community members signaled strong concerns about water resiliency in the Lower San Pedro and requested a follow-up meeting. (If you haven't done so, you can still respond to our community values and concerns survey.)
In follow up, approximately 85 residents attended LSPWA's Our Valley, Our Water: Once It’s Gone, It’s Gone event held on Tuesday, Aug. 25 at the Mammoth Community Center. Whether you attended or not, below you can find a summary of expert findings, as well as links to their presentations and to the public Q&A session.
Attendees heard from regional hydrologist Dr. Laurel Lacher, who presented sobering realities about the Lower San Pedro River’s historic use, past mining-water-withdrawal figures and impacts. A second presentation, given by regional water-planning specialist Garland Speight, addressed critical hydrological threats from upcoming proposed industrial projects that include mining, pipeline projects, transmission lines, and data centers. We encourage you to watch both presentations, in their entirety, to also understand why our river no longer flows its entire length.
Watch Hydrology & Water Resources of the Lower San Pedro River Basin by Laurel Lacher
Watch Understanding Industrial Water Use in the Lower San Pedro by Garland Speight
A lively public Q&A session, with input from local stakeholders as well as activism, policy and legal guests, underscored the degree to which our local communities are concerned, engaged and ready to take action to protect our region's vital water resources.
Listen to the public Q&A portion of the event
If you haven't yet done so, please take our Survey on community concerns and values.
The Lower San Pedro watershed has no regulations for groundwater pumping, and has more than 3,600 wells in the Mammoth sub-basin, alone, with some wells capable of pumping 1,000 gallons per minute.
Groundwater pumping during a 45-year mining operation resulted in an 8-mile cone of depression around the Magma mine, with the mine diverting 7.5 billion gallons of water per year, resulting in an estimated depletion of 6.9 billion gallons per year—enough to supply almost 60,000 average households in Arizona.
With Faraday’s impending acquisition of BHP’s 27,000 acres and 17 wells along the San Pedro River, the company will assume unlimited water-pumping rights moving into a drier future with less groundwater recharge (and additional industrial threats).
Threats to Aravaipa: simple models show that the additional groundwater pumping from mines in development could impact the perennial flow through Aravaipa Canyon.
The San Pedro Valley is facing significant water withdrawal from proposed industrial threats including two mining projects, a natural gas pipeline, an energy facility in San Manuel aimed at fueling AI data centers, a petroleum pipeline, and a second industrial-scale transmission line in the Cascabel area. A first-order estimate shows that expanded groundwater consumption in and around the Lower San Pedro to support these proposed developments is on the order of 8.6 billion gallons per year.
Thank you to all attendees, including the 35 first-time participants, as well as our partners in attendance: legal and community counsel from Center for Biological Diversity, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, Arizona Mining Reform Coalition and Watershed Management Group. These presentations laid bare the magnitude of the threats we face.
Won’t you help us continue this community outreach by joining up as a volunteer and/or member and sharing this webpage with family and friends? We also welcome your input as we brainstorm with partner organizations on ways to provide answers to our community’s most pressing question: “What do we do next to address these water threats?”
We can improve the health of our river, but not with the industrial proposals that threaten to drain even more water from our Watershed.