(thunder rumbling) - There's a common misperception that there is no recharge to the Ogallala Aquifer.

- For recharge, we need rainfall.

And on an average, we have 15 to 17 inches rainfall in the season, in the entire season.

(light music) - Don't think we get rain, you just need to be here the day it all comes.

- The issue is not that there's no recharge, it's that we're pumping so much more than the recharge.

- Pumping is a fact of life here, whether it's for this house, for the municipality we're next to, for the farm, the crops we grow, we've gotta have a source of water to have humans here, and animals, but there's a way to balance it.

- You can make big changes with a little bit of effort.

(light music) - [Announcer] Funding for "The Rain We Keep" has been provided by The Tecovas Foundation, the Carol K. Engler Foundation, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Our first project was on private ranch land north of Amarillo, and so it's just on the north side of the Canadian River.

So this ranch has been in existence since 1910, and in 1910, there were nine streams that had live water that always flowed.

Today, there are no streams with live water.

- Anybody that's been out here a long time knows a lot of places that they've seen firsthand that are a wreck of what they were 50 years ago.

Springs that have gone dry, creeks that have gone dry, beautiful cottonwood groves that are all dead.

- We can look at some like historic aerial images.

And so there's some images of around the 1950s, you can see roughly what the watershed condition was like in the 1950s.

And it is just dramatically different from today.

It's like hard to believe.

It's hard to comprehend.

And I think that is like the problem is the degradation is so slow.

It's like multi-generational.

We don't know what we lost.

The streams are incised.

And so you have this kind of like old broad drainage, and over the past century, because of roads and because of grazing and different practices, decreased in size.

And so it's like instead of having a broad channel, it's like a gully.

You have a broad channel with a V or a U in the bottom of it.

And so now, whenever it rains, all the rain goes down this incised channel.

It rapidly drains the landscape.

- [Narrator] Ogallala Life crews built 120 dams on the ranch.

- It's basically a check dam.

We're putting a bunch of stuff in the path of the water to slow the drainage from the landscape.

They're built outta rocks and dead wood, and we're capturing sediment.

And so we don't want to stop the water.

We wanna slow the water down, and we wanna catch the sediment and the nutrients.

And so on some of these watersheds, we have, like it was a dam, and it was like this high.

Now, the dam is full to capacity with sediment.

And so the upstream part of the dam is just the ground.

And that ground is like a sponge, kind of marshy.

And that's the point is create these little, like a distributed chain of wetlands that can soak up flood water.

- [Narrator] The natural dams spread the water, giving it more opportunity to saturate the land and drip through to the aquifer beneath, providing hyperlocal results.

- Measuring the recharge isn't hard, because you'll see, like you'll see spring start to flow again.

You can also measure the wells and see rises in the water table.

The harder thing is to measure the recharge that we are responsible for.

And so like what is our impact versus what is just the general recharge, because we got 20 inches of rain.

The way we're doing it is remote sensing and looking at changes in vegetation.

- It's a cheap and easy way to do this.

One thing that I do see hope in all this is that you can build these dams, and in one or two years, there's like new trees sprouting up.

There's a big patch of sunflowers that wasn't there before, and you got a covey of quail hanging out there.

- Instead of having like roughly kind of desert terrain on both sides and a gully, you have riparian corridor with willow and cottonwood and tall grasses.

On a local scale, I think that it is achievable and beneficial.

The problem is, how do we scale it to a bioregional level?

And that is why we need the public engaged.

- But if you wanna understand Southern High Plains, the Southern Great Plains, it's really about the groundwater, about the aquifer.

Even rivers like the Canadian River that run through, they're being replenished by the outcroppings of the aquifer.

- Folks talk about, often talk about groundwater and surface water as two separate things.

In Texas, legally, they're treated as two separate things.

Policy-wise, they're treated as two separate things, but the reality is they are joined and connected together.

Flows in a river, in a stream can leak into an aquifer and recharge an aquifer, and then water in an aquifer can also come up and feed a spring or feed a perennial stream.

The Canadian used to be raging river known for massive floods, basically.

I mean, they would rain in the Rocky Mountains and just send these rip-roaring floods downstream that would go all the way into Oklahoma and wipe out communities in Oklahoma.

- [Narrator] Aware of the Canadian's long history of flooding and alarmed at the growing number of irrigation wells across the region, Texas Panhandle leaders put together a project to build Sanford Dam on the river and create Lake Meredith near Fritch in the 1950s and '60s.

Spring Creek rancher, John F. Allen, shot a film about creation of the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority and construction of the dam.

The lake's namesake, Austin A. Meredith, narrated.

- [Austin] Although rainfall on the stake plains is infrequent, when it does rain, it comes primarily from thunderstorms, dumping inches over small areas in a short time that flow into creeks, which flow into rivers.

The Canadian River crosses the Texas Panhandle, and it periodically floods up to half a mile wide and 10 feet deep.

In the late '40s, it was estimated that 400,000 acre feet of rainwater was lost every year.

Wasted water, which if contained, could help satisfy the needs of Panhandle residents.

- When Texas had developed an agreement on the Canadian with Oklahoma, Oklahoma was like, "You can have all that water."

And so Lake Meredith, it's a water supply reservoir, but it's also a flood control that's protected everything downstream as well as Oklahoma.

And the New Mexican reservoirs also help in that as well.

- [Narrator] In New Mexico, the Canadian funnels through dams at Canchas Lake near Tucumcari and Ute Lake at Logan.

Did we know what we were doing when we were putting up dams?

- No, and I think that is like really good warning for people like me, or environmentalists, and that is "the road to hell is paid with good intentions."

I think that people that built our dams did think that they were providing, well, they did, they provided a few decades worth of water supply to our communities.

That's great.

I think the people that built dams were also political people, and that dams are instruments of political power, and so the building of large reservoirs on our rivers is very literally an act of colonization.

- Meaning?

- We're subjecting the landscape to state control, and the people that live on the landscape need to rely on the state for the provision of water.

So it's about governance.

(light music) - We tend to over reservoir rivers, and so it's helping on flood control, but then there's not as much water coming down the river into Lake Meredith.

- I grew up right over near Harbor Bay.

We moved to Fritch when I was five years old.

My dad was the previous general manager.

He was the second general manager at CRMWA.

And so had a lot of fond memories growing up as a kid out here on Lake Meredith.

In my opinion, it's one of the more pretty lakes in Texas.

It's unique in that a flooded canyon, if you will.

It varies a lot.

It's not a constant level lake like you're used to seeing in a lot of parts of Texas.

It can vary drastically in water quantity and as well as quality.

Our watershed is 6,050 square miles.

It's mostly in Texas and New Mexico, but it does cross into a sliver of southwestern Oklahoma.

Everything that doesn't fall into Ute then ultimately comes our way.

- Lake Meredith has been struggling a lot over the last 30 years, and I think it's a collection of issues.

There's warmer temperatures, there's upstream reservoirs, but groundwater production is part of it, because there used to be springs along the canyon that would go in and feed the lake and those springs no longer flow, because of the groundwater pumping.

Downstream of Lake Meredith, you still see springs, you do see perennial flow.

That's all groundwater flow except during severe storms, and expectation would be that would decline over time.

If there's not as much water in the aquifer, there's not gonna be as much water coming out of the aquifer to feed the river and feed springs.

And that has environmental consequences, but it also has consequences for folks that use that surface water downstream.

- We had a lot more rainfall in the first 35 years after this dam was constructed than we have since 2000.

So yes, I mean, we would love to go back to those days of high inflow.

- So we're just getting whatever natural flow is coming in from- - It's rainfall, primarily.

I mean, there may be some spring flow or there is some spring flow, but for the most part, it's rainfall.

And then usually, it occurs from the heavy rainfall events.

Let's say we get 20 inches of rain per year, we want that all to happen in one day, whereas maybe in the agricultural world, you want that half inch per week or whatever that may be.

Sometimes, an agricultural drought and the water supply drought can be different.

We want it all to happen as quickly as possible because it doesn't have a chance to soak in and collects on the surface and runs off to the lake so we can store it.

(light music) - Without getting too complicated, the projections on climate change, the nature of rainfall, instead of getting six or eight or 10 rain events during the year, and including some soaking rains, that what's projected for maybe as soon as 25 or 30 years from now is we're gonna get three or four big rains.

- So meteorologists generally study the weather, and the weather is more of a day-to-day pattern.

So we to not look so much into the long term as we're looking at what occurs on a day-to-day basis and help people make weather decisions based on what's occurring in the short term.

Climatologists, they are the ones who study the really long-term effects of weather patterns and how the climate has been changing over tens of thousands of years.

- Does our water planning include changes in climate?

- Well, it's really hard to include that.

What we can do is look at the last 10 to 20 years of change and try to figure out what it means for us.

But climate planning is notoriously fraught with ideological overlays and technical overlays that not everybody agrees on.

So I guess I would, I don't hear it used explicitly except looking back over the last 10 to 15 to 20 years to see what trends have developed, if any.

Weather forecasting and climate forecasting are two different things.

We're getting a lot better at weather forecasting, seven days out.

I know what I'm gonna do, and I'm usually pretty close to right.

Climate forecasting is a different ball game altogether.

It's really fraught with problems, trying to make firm projections about climate.

It's just very difficult to do that and be confident about it.

So the Ogallala, interestingly enough, is pretty insulated from the impacts of climate change, at least the natural processes.

And a big reason for that is because it takes so long for that water to get through the sand and the dirt down to the water table.

Hundreds of years.

At some point, that'll be an issue, but we're probably talking 400 or 500 years in the future.

It is an issue though because the droughts are gonna get fiercer and longer, which means plants are gonna need more water, which means there's gonna be more pumping.

So we could see the Ogallala deplete faster.

- As the whole globe starts to warm a little bit more, you might see daily temperatures that start to creep up a little bit more, and you might see more overnight lows that aren't as cool as they used to be.

So we might see our averages going down for how much snow we might get over the course of a year, or it might become more rainfall.

But if it occurs fast enough, it can just run off and not really give us that soil moisture benefit.

So one thing that snow actually does is it just sits there and slowly seeps in.

But if we're going into more of a warming climate, where we don't get as cold to produce as much snowfall, then that can affect your soil moisture as well.

- If these climate change projections are right, and runoffs gonna double, well, we've gotta get more serious about doing this quickly.

We're gonna get about 10% less rain in 30 years.

So that's a problem.

But that's not really the problem.

The problem is that we're gonna get it all at once.

And when you get it all at once, that percentage of runoff jumps from 20% to 40%.

And so the range land out here is gonna get even more degraded.

What we did at Wildcat Bluff is it's downstream of 8,000 acres.

And so it was sort of a flood control thing.

We're just trying to stop this, but if we put a bunch of rock dams up higher in the landscape in that 8,000 acres, you wouldn't have a flood problem at Wildcat Bluff that you sink that water into the ground and grow grass way up there.

- Across the High Plains region, more than 20,000 Playa Lakes could also help keep rain where it falls and recharge the aquifer.

- We don't have mountains, we don't have rivers, but we have the most playas in all the world.

So what does that mean?

For us, it means our playas are like the Amazon.

They're the lungs.

They're the entry points to the Ogallala Aquifer.

If a playa is healthy and functioning, it recharges water into the aquifer.

So I think our belief and our understanding was that, no, they're just kind of wasteland.

They're mud holes, but actually, they're the lungs.

Between Amarillo and Lubbock, there's one per square mile.

- So they're more classified as a wetland versus a lake, 'cause a lake is more of a permanent water structure.

We think wetlands are supposed to be wet all the time, and that's not necessarily the case.

Playas are what we call ephemeral.

It means that they function through a wet-dry cycle, and in this region, they're dry actually more than they are wet.

- [Narrator] Clay lines the bottoms of playa lakes.

When the lake is dry, large cracks form in the clay.

As rain comes, water from higher ground drains into the lakes.

The grass buffer surrounding a playa stops sediments and filters the runoff.

Water continues to the playa and down through the cracks.

As playa's clay becomes saturated, the cracks close, allowing the lake to hold water.

But water continues to move underground through surrounding soil, and along the deep roots of plants in and around the playa.

It can take decades or even a century for water from a playa to reach the deepest aquifers.

(light music) - So it's called Randall Clay.

So it's amazing, it has all these seeds in it.

So you don't plant a playa.

It has a seed bank that gives you different kinds of plants in different kinds of seasons.

And when it dries and is dry for a year or two, they contract, clays contract and you get cracks that open up, and sometimes big enough to put your arm into or your leg.

So then finally, when you get to a rainfall event that sends water into the playa, into the basin, those cracks will be the way that the water can get down to the aquifer for the first 36 hours, maybe 48 hours.

- When it gets wet, clay particles will expand, it closes up those cracks, and that's where you start to see the ponding of the playa.

- And then any recharge is mostly happening on the edges.

- [Narrator] Most playas, however, are not functioning as they should.

They have filled with sediment over time, no longer have grass buffer zones around them, and many have been altered for farm irrigation or development.

Some can never be rehabilitated.

The Texas Playa Conservation Initiative works with landowners to mend the viable lakes and rebuild ecological systems.

- It's a partnership between Playa Lakes Joint Venture and Texas Parks and Wildlife.

And then we have other partners that also provide some funding like Ducks Unlimited and then some corporation partners as well.

Water is a people problem and a wildlife problem, right?

From a wildlife point of view, with the playa restoration, we're looking at putting habitat back on the landscape, especially migratory water fowls, shorebirds as well as local wildlife.

When we have functioning healthy playas, which is also a really good ecosystem, we also have healthy water systems.

Our program actually pays them a small incentive payment as well as cover the cost of the restoration itself.

So the landowner then has to just agree 10 years to lead the playa in the restored stage, as well as they have to keep a grass buffer.

- Things are changing.

You have a different economics for row crop production, and we're in the point of the cattle cycle that the markets are really good at the moment.

And so it makes the livestock deal much more appealing.

And the real appeal on the livestock deal and the grass-based system here is that those grasses have stood the test of time.

They are not introduced plants as a whole, especially the native species, the buffalo grass, the blue gramas, the sideoats gramas, happen to be a state grass of Texas.

They're very well-developed for the semi-arid region.

- [Narrator] These plants will survive drought and come back with rain.

- They're protecting the land and covering the soil, giving some benefit for places for wildlife to survive and live and hopefully thrive, and all the insects and everything else that goes with it.

- Conservatively, you could say all land recharges some water to the aquifer very slowly.

But a playa basin will recharge 10 to 100 times as much water as upland soils.

- People like to think of the water table as a big bathtub, and they like to think of, okay, it doesn't matter where you're pumping from in the bathtub.

You'll eventually pump it down if you have enough pumping capacity.

And what we learned was that is not an accurate way of looking at it.

What we really have in the aquifer below us, it is not homogeneous at all.

There are areas of, you know, there's areas of sand and rock down there, and what the deal is that water actually columns.

It does move sideways.

As a farmer, we think in terms of grain.

So if you put grain in the middle of a bin, it falls from that point and it builds, it stacks up like that.

Water does much the same thing underground.

- [Narrator] After restoring playa lakes and natural grasses on some of his land, Grotegut began seeing hyperlocal results.

His well levels were rising.

- The High Plains Underground Water Conservation District has a well monitoring program.

They measure thousands of wells across the region every year.

We were seeing some rises.

And when we started seeing some rises in the area, and other parts of the county were going down, even not very far from us, wells were still going down.

Fortunately, we found out that, yeah, if you do these things, that you can get your water cycle working better and you can get your water table to come up some, and you can balance what you're pumping.

And if we can maximize balancing our usage with our recharge and optimize, do things such as put large areas to grass and getting the health of the playas back and get that water to go across that entire basin to where when it rains, it can go in.

It provides a better wildlife benefit on one side, which is good, and it provides a better recharge benefit, which is also good.

- It'll never replace or provide the amount of water that irrigation needs.

But in grazing or rain-fed agriculture, it'll make a difference.

So an example, right out here in this playa, it's really important.

There's very little farming.

There's some dry land farming, but most of it around here is now grass.

But I estimate within a half mile to a quarter mile of this playa, there are 50 people who need water through their domestic wells.

All those domestic wells are getting recharged by this playa.

Any of these smaller communities, Olton, Silverton, Panhandle, Cactus, all of them within a mile or a half-mile of their well fields have a complex of playas.

Sadly, they are not high functioning in most cases, but they could be restored.

And if they are, over time, they can recharge water not for the whole world, for that well field, for that town.

And why is that important?

Because as the water becomes more and more restricted, there's not going to be a pipeline coming to Nazareth or Silverton, although they just got some grant money to dig more wells, of course.

We're not going to get water brought into these communities.

We're going to have to have sources around us.

So one thing we could all do that would be very smart policy for rural communities is ask ourselves, okay, how can we recharge our well fields that exist right now with the playas that are around them?

- If we don't think about water, there will be a crisis.

I mean, there's just no two ways about it.

I don't know how long that crisis or how extreme it will be, but it's just not something that doesn't lead to that.

We've seen that globally.

But in conversations that I have sometimes with residents, they are not coming from a place that it could just be gone.

And I get it.

That's a very scary thing, and it's not something that we as Americans have ever really had to deal with.

The thing that we can control is the timing of that and the urgency of that.

So even if it's probably something that's gonna happen, it doesn't mean that we should sort of throw up our hands and just let it go however it's gonna go, 'cause it's something that we are impacting, which means we can impact it in a more beneficial way.

- [Narrator] Next time on "The Rain We Keep."

- Ultimately with an aquifer like the Ogallala, to extract less is the way of conserving.

- We don't have the reliability of the same amount of water that we once did 10 years ago.

- If we have to totally rely on rainfall for Mother Nature, that really raises the bar.

(light music)