Immediate water supply looks OK
Question now: How do we secure the future?
By Susan Randall | Casa Grande Dispatch
The biggest water challenge today is the 15-year drought, its effect on the water supply and uncertainty about how long it will last.
“In my opinion, we have a sufficient amount of water resources to meet the needs of today’s Pinal County and Pinal AMA (Active Management Area),” said David Snider, chair of the Pinal County Water Augmentation Authority, “And if we do a prudent job of managing those resources, we’ve got enough water to supply the needs of the AMA and county, given reasonable growth, for quite some time.
“The challenge is when you begin to get out into the 50-to-100-year range. How do we make sure that what we do today does not prohibit growth, development and sustainability for our children’s children?”
Water is measured in acre-feet. One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons — enough to cover 1 acre of land, 1 foot deep. The Central Arizona Project’s share of Colorado River water is about 1.6 million acre-feet a year.
