HURON, Calif: The terrain near the Arroyo Pasajero Creek, which runs midway between Sacramento and Los Angeles, is too dry to farm in some years and dangerously flooded in others.

Amid the wet-dry cycles caused by climate change, a collaboration of local farmers and the adjacent city of Huron are attempting to transform former hemp and tomato fields into enormous receptacles that can collect water as it percolates into the earth during rainy years.

This project, and others like it across California's Central Valley breadbasket, attempt to contain floodwaters that would otherwise flow out to sea or cause damage to towns, cities, and crops.

Traditional water storage methods, such as damming rivers to build reservoirs, are harmful to the environment.

Water was so limited in the Central Valley this year due to California's unprecedented drought that Huron was only given a fraction of the water it was committed to receiving from the US Bureau of Reclamation.

According to engineering expert Alfonso Manrique, the community, one of California's poorest, had to buy water on the open market, boosting citizens' expenses.

The new initiative, known as a recharge system, converts idle fields into big ponds to collect water, allowing it to seep into the permeable rock and dirt beneath, building or restoring an aquifer rather than rushing to the sea. According to Manrique, the city is constructing a new well that will be fed by the aquifer.

Capturing runoff will also aid in protecting the city of fewer than 7,000 people from devastating floods.

The project near Huron is one among around 340 proposed by California water agencies, enough to store 2.2 million acre-feet by 2030 if they are all constructed, according to the state Department of Water Resources. That's enough to last a year for 4.4 million families.

"I'm hoping that we can make water more cheap for our citizens," Huron Mayor Rey Leon stated.

Outside of the United States, countries such as India are increasing their usage of recharge ponds to store water in natural or man-made aquifers.

Water use and resilience are among the issues being debated by world leaders this month at the United Nations COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

While the concept of storing water underground is not new, a recent California law regulating groundwater use has prompted a flurry of projects that the state is assisting in funding.

The Tulare Irrigation District is creating a new recharge pond on land acquired from a local farmer in the small village of Okieville, some 40 miles (65 kilometres) east of Huron, according to Aaron Fukuda, the district's general manager.

Several Okieville people ran out of drinkable water during the state's previous major drought, which lasted from 2012 to 2016. The new pond, located on approximately 20 acres of former farmland, will aid in the underground storage of water for residents as well as agriculture.

The project will cost around $2 million, with approximately $1.8 million in state funds.

In addition to the relatively small projects being built by rural water districts and farmers, the massive Metropolitan Water District, a regional water wholesaler that serves Southern and parts of Central California, is collaborating with local water authorities to build a 1,500-acre recharge pond in the high desert near Palmdale.

The last major dam was built in California in 1980. The state's population has nearly doubled to 40 million people since then. California's agricultural economy, one of the world's largest, is heavily reliant on irrigation to water its crops. New reservoirs are difficult to build and expensive to approve.

These man-made aquifers and subterranean water banks won't solve all of California's water woes, but they can help, according to Sarah Woolf, a water expert whose family owns some of the acreage used for the Huron project.

There is enough space beneath the agricultural area that the Huron project will serve to store 1 million acre-feet of water, or around 326 billion gallons—enough to feed 2 million families for a year.

"These are required everywhere," Woolf remarked.

Source: Reuters