Transcript

David Getches/Jeff Fassett: The west is the most urbanized area in the country

David Getches: There are some great possibilities for ground water injection and storage, and there are many projects that are going on well beyond the experimental stage. In southern California, for years they've stored water underground from several sources including the Colorado River, and now they are reclaiming sewage, pumping it underground, and then re-extracting it for urban uses. This is the ultimate ingenuity in water conservation, and cities are having to look there. In the West, we are the most urbanized area in the country. Most people do not realize that: more people percentage-wise live in cities than in the country, and so we have to make the most of these scarce resources. That is one way of doing it.

Jeff Fassett: There isn't much of that in the State of Wyoming except for the city of Cheyenne has got a conjuctive use management approach to surface groundwater resources. I think that the history of our state laws again kept those resources separate for many, many years but I think that science has always been ahead of the law and science has clearly acknowledged the issues of conjuctive use and the issues of hydraulic conductivity between ground water and surface water supply. And those are slowly coming together in our state so that you are looking at both of those sources in the same manner and managing them and being able to regulate and use those sources in the same manner as well.

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