HoleInTheRiverHistoryOfGroundwater

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29 impacts were “vague, conf licting, and indefinite.” The case established the legal precedent that groundwater was somehow connected to surface flows, but it also exposed the difficulty of demonstrating specific in juries in court base d on that relationship. Moreover, Hurdle’s case revealed a basi c awareness of large volumes of usable water underground. As this water became more accessible in the coming decades, agriculture in the region expanded, beco ming increasingly dependent upon underground supplies. But signs of stress also emerge d – some farms became pocked by dry wells, while other pumps surged or sputtered, indicating that something was wrong underground. Increased pumping strained th e established accomm odation between water use and availability, setting off alarms within the scientific community. One of Colorado’s foremost groundwater researchers was William E. Code. He began work as an irrigation e ngineer at the state’s Agricult ural Experiment Station in 1928, and for the next thirty years he devoted his career to groundwater investigations. His commitment to data collection along th e South Platte and other agriculturally productive river basins was un matched by any researcher before him. In the spring of 1944, as war raged across three cont inents and scientists worked to split the atom in Los Alamos, Code scoured the backroads of rural Colorado, measuring water in a cold, silent aquifer. On May 22, he set out from Fort Collins armed with a Kodachrome camera. Driving past fields of alfalfa, he stopped frequently to visit farmers, photographing their wells and recording local water-levels. He helped some irrigators repair broken pump motors; others he joined for ranch-style ba rbeques, all while discussing equipment and pumping operations. He braved sudden thunde rstorms and washed-out roads, observed 29 McClellan v. Hurdle , 3 Colo. App. 430 (1893). 13