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use groundwater is growing, fueled by <br />decades of division and a lawsuit filed <br />last year. <br />ansas' lawsuit spurred experts in all <br />three states to examine how water was <br />being used in the Republican River Basin. <br />That's when Chief Deputy State <br />Engineer Ken Knox got involved. <br />"We thought there was a better way <br />of doing this than an 18 -year lawsuit," <br />Knox says. "We're fussing over water, <br />Kansas is saying they've been deprived <br />of water, and we needed to find out how <br />to measure what is going on." <br />The individual states formed their <br />own technical teams and embarked on <br />the formation of a groundwater model, <br />a tool used to understand the way water <br />moves underground. <br />At times it was grueling. Knox com- <br />pares it to President Kennedy asking <br />NASA officials to make it to the moon on <br />a deadline, and he's not kidding. <br />"The U.S. Geological Survey ha.d <br />tried to do this, and they worked on it for <br />seven years and were unsuccessful," he <br />explains. "We did it in 14 months." <br />The meeting of academia, science <br />and bureaucrats made for an interesting <br />sequestration. <br />"Believe me, there was no lack of <br />self- esteem," says Knox. "There was a <br />room full of PhD's talking about high -end <br />mathematics." <br />During negotiations, he always tried <br />to keep the individual farmers in mind — <br />the people whose livelihoods depend on <br />whether they can plant their fields. <br />"We had to keep reminding everyone <br />that this is not some esoteric situation," <br />Knox says. "This is real life- and -blood <br />type stuff." <br />The groundwater model the three <br />states agreed upon uses complicated <br />mathematics to figure depletions from <br />the Arikaree and Republican rivers, <br />caused by water pumped from wells. <br />If left undisturbed, groundwater sits <br />in aquifers composed of variable sands <br />and rocks hundreds or thousands of <br />feet below ground. While some aquifers <br />are not connected to surface streams, <br />others such as the High Plains aquifer <br />are connected, and can add or subtract <br />water from local rivers. In a system of <br />give and take, these aquifers are then <br />recharged by precipitation or seepage <br />from streams. Some water also comes <br />back to the groundwater system from <br />irrigation return flows. <br />But the effect of groundwater <br />pumping is by no means straight- <br />forward. Water molecules follow a cir- <br />cuitous underground path and can take <br />m <br />After shutting down e portion of his- wells, Earl will <br />"still maintain two wells to water his livestock and <br />r grow sutficignt hay4@ feed his own cattle. <br />AW <br />maw <br />kL <br />