Are Louisiana's water sources drying up?

By Dave Raiford

July 24, 2000 Web posted at: 4:47 PM EDT (2047 GMT)

ALEXANDRIA, Louisiana (The Town Talk) -- It's not a crisis yet, but continued dry weather will put Louisiana water resources to the test and it may be time to rethink how the wet stuff is used throughout state.

"We've always taken it for granted, but there's more of us now and we need to start thinking about (water management)," said Rodney Hendrick, a water quality specialist for the Louisiana State University AgCenter in Baton Rouge.

The AgCenter is in the beginning stages in its development of multi-parish water-management groups, Hendrick said.

"It's an environmental issue, but it's also an agriculture and natural resources issue," he said.

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Dry weather has been no stranger to Louisiana over the past few years, and it doesn't take long for continued consumption rates and lowered water levels to head for a collision course, Hendrick said.

"If you exceed the recharge rate of an aquifer, saltwater encroaches and it can get to a point where you can't use it," he said.

"If you have several years of dry weather, it doesn't take long for those levels to drop." An aquifer is an underground layer of rock or sand containing water.

For the most part, "recharge" means rainfall, and that's something Louisiana has had a scarcity of in the past couple of years.

So far this year, Alexandria has received about 23 inches of rain. The average rainfall for the area by this time of year is about 32 inches.

Last year, about 39 inches of rain fell, nowhere near the yearly average of 58.5 inches.

"We haven't had a normal year in the last decade. It's either been too wet or too dry," he said.

Faced with the uncertainty of wet weather, farmers in Louisiana are turning to well and surface water for irrigation in increasing numbers, Hendrick said.

"It's a combination of the dry seasons and the realization that yields can be increased and the quality improved by having water there when you need it," he added.

"A lot of rice is irrigated from surface water and a lot of cotton, it's probably our second most irrigated crop." But pumping surface water has it's own mixed bag of competing interests.

"You do have a proliferation of irrigation, but people are proliferating too," Hendrick said.

In Rapides Parish, three lakes - Cotile, Kincaid, and Indian Creek - were built to supply water to area farmers.

But a shoreline can make a nice spot for housing development and the three areas are no exception.

"Those lakes were built for the sole purpose of irrigation. But a lot of land was sold and a lot people have put their houses there," said Donald Wilmore, a member of the Rapides Parish Police Jury.

The Police Jury controls the floodgates on the manmade lakes and when the weather gets too dry the spigot is turned on to feed Bayou Rapides and Bayou Boeuf for irrigation, Wilmore said.

"I catch a little flack sometimes from people when the lake level drops 8 or 10 feet. They ask, 'Why don't y'all get water from some other source?'" he said. "But there's not a lot that can be done about it." Wilmore is the watershed chairman for the Police Jury.

As it is now, the gates are up and lake levels are secure, but with dry weather in the forecast, that can change quickly, he said.

"So far we're in pretty good shape and no gates are open that I know about," he said. "But if the weather does what they're predicting, we'll have to open them up."

To ease the drain on the lakes, the Police Jury is considering some dredging work in Bayou Bouef to speed the flow of water and possibly raise a weir near Lecompte a couple of feet to hold more water, he said.

"We'd like to raise it another 2 or 3 feet," he said.

"That doesn't sound like much, but that's a lot of water." During the hot months of summer, the city of Alexandria gets close to its maximum capacity to supply water.

With 56 wells, the city is pumping about 26 million gallons of water per day, said Darrell Williamson, Alexandria Public Works director.

According to a 1998 water supply study of the city completed by Ballard & Associates, the pumping capacity of the city's wells averages about 23 million gallons per day with a maximum of 28 million gallons.

"We pumped 27 million gallons each day for a month last year," said Charles Miller, Alexandria Water Department superintendent.

According to the study, the city uses around 13.7 million gallons of water per day, and its largest customer - International Paper - averages about eight million gallons per day.

The city is looking for more water and test wells have been drilled in the Kisatchie Well Field in the Kisatchie National Forest, about 18 miles southwest of Alexandria.

"We're not in bad shape now, but if we have five years of this we'll have to do something," Williamson said.

Industry, agriculture, municipal water systems - they all need more water and there's only so much to go around, Hendrick said.

"That's why we need multi-parish water management," he said. "It gets the emotion out of it and gets down to the facts."

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