Water is Sequim’s most important resource. As adults charged with protecting and conserving this precious resource — whether we’re parents, teachers, water experts, business owners or voters — how can we help ourselves and upcoming generations understand more about our water?
Let’s start with where our water comes from and where it goes. Here’s my explanation for — let’s say — a sixth-grade class: Go outside and look up at the sky. As we all know, that is where rain and snow come from, depending on various weather conditions. We can see, touch and measure rain and snow. We love the rain! It seeps into the ground to refill our aquifers (see below), waters the trees to reduce forest fires and fills the rivers for spawning salmon and thirsty Roosevelt elk. The snow is our water insurance program: It slowly melts during the spring and summer to give us year-round water, especially for irrigating crops in the summer.
Every drop of rain and snow we get is precious to us. But because we don’t have any way to capture it, much of it runs off into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. What a waste!
The American West is currently in a major drought. Even Washington, even Sequim. We’ve gone through a year of far too little snow. In fact, the snowpack was zero last winter which made it very difficult for irrigators this past summer.
As important as rain and snow are to us for various purposes, drinking water is not one of them. For drinking water, now you have to look down. Below your feet is a pot of gold: water! Drinking water lies in underground reservoirs known as aquifers. They take eons to fill yet mere generations to deplete unless rain and snow slowly refill them or water is pumped into them. We access the water by drilling wells and pumping the water out — sort of like using straws to sip water out of a glass.
The water in aquifers is not like rain and snow: It can’t be seen, touched or measured. At most we use the water table (where we first hit water when we drill) to see if the water is going up or down. Because we can’t measure it — we can only make educated guesses — we don’t know how much water we have.
That means we must be very careful to use as little of it as possible.
A further complication is that we don’t just use aquifer water for drinking water; we also use our drinking water for bathing, flushing our toilets, watering our lawns and gardens, and washing our clothes, dishes, sidewalks and cars.
What happens to this aquifer water after we use it? Where does it go? In Sequim it goes to Sequim’s Reclamation Facility where it runs through process after process to clean it.
Some of this recycled water is re-used by the city at Carrie Blake Park and other city facilities. But because we don’t have any way to store it and because rules governing its use still are being sorted out, much of it is dumped into the strait. Another waste of our precious resource.
We adults and the upcoming generations have much work to do to protect and conserve our water, a dwindling, limited resource. The more we understand about water, the more likely we’re going to come up with creative solutions to do just that. How can you contribute to our understanding of our water?
Jane Iddings is a retired attorney/mediator, university teacher, social policy analyst, newspaper columnist and world traveler. She invites you to e-mail her at jane.iddings@gmail.com, to read her blog at sequimswater.com and to join her for a cup of tea to discuss Water Matters.
