BOARD00985

• Board Meeting Date: 2/5/1969
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

state have already been appropriated. With
that conclusion, we began looking at how we
could make the same amount of water serve a
greater number of people.

Ten years ago we knew that we had some
groundwater. We didn't know how much. We
knew that there was a great number of wells
in the state, but we didn't know how many or
where or how much water they pumped. One
conclusion was inescapable - that we had to
integrate, as part of our water system, the
use of groundwater with surface water. In
many cases the use of groundwater is more
important than the use of surface water,
because of the lack of surface water. When
we analyzed the situation we could see that
the future of Colorado would be built upon
changing uses, moving water around, and
making the maximum use of both ground and
surface water.

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As we studied the problem we concluded
that no matter what law might be passed it
could not be carried out because of lack of
sufficient knowledge concerning the many
facets of groundwater. We had complete in-
formation only about the flow of the surface
streams. Obviously we had to know much more.
We had to know how many wells there were,
their locations and pumping capacity. We had
to know how much groundwater we have and
where it is. We had to know its rate of flow
and its rate of recharge. We had to know the
specific yield of the various areas. By that
I mean that although we may have two million
acre-feet of groundwater in storage in any
particular location, it may be that only one
million can be extracted. This is because of
the affinity between water and soil. In any
event, you can never extract all of the ground-
water that is located in, any particular area.
In some cases it is only a small percentage,
in other cases it is a high percentage. We
had to know factors concerning precipitation,
evaporation and transpiration.

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