Montana and water and the strange case of science and politics
March 12th, 2007Posted by: admin
You probably don’t know who Eloise Kendy is, but you should. She’s a hydro consultant up in Helena, Montana, now with the Nature Conservancy, who writes nifty little papers exploring the collision of hydrologic realities with political and policy dream worlds (if you can get it, see pages 14-20 of Issue #19 of The Water Report). I covered one of her papers last summer in this post.
For a while Eloise has been writing about how the state of Montana doesn’t think that groundwater and surface water are connected. Well, everybody knows that the two are usually so connected that they are inseparable, but the state of water policy in Montana deems them connected only if a groundwater withdrawal directly removes water from a stream. Your withdrawal creates a cone of depression that allows for less recharge of groundwater into surface water, but as long as the cone of depression doesn’t intersect with the stream and thus directly draw from the stream you aren’t considered to be depleting the surface water. (If you want the science on this, try here, especially this circular.)
This legal alternate reality arose when the state legislature defined groundwater in 1993 as water that “is not immediately or directly connected to surface water.” Immediate or directly connected is not a hydrologic term, which left it open to interpretation by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC). According to Kendy et al. in the Water Report paper I linked above: