http://youtu.be/r_1pqrKSGt0
With water resources shrinking, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas is trying to prevent legal battles for water between communities in New Mexico. To do this he is partnering with the New Mexico Water Resource Research Institute at New Mexico State University.
Attorney General Hector Balderas said water scarcity is a public safety issue, and has invested $1 million in the Water Resource Research Institute from the office’s consumer protection fund. Director of the Institute Sam Fernald says he is excited for the partnership.
“The attorney general is interfacing with the user groups who have various legal issues,” Fernald said. “And also with communities to look out for community members who are impacted by water issues, it might be safety or personal welfare type issue. And then our part of it is to do what we always do which is scientific research.”
Fernald says diminishing water could have economic, health, and safety risks.
“You have a town like Magdalena, New Mexico that ran out of water a few years ago,” Fernald said. “The reason is because of drought, there was less recharge, the water level dropped, and their pumps for their two wells broke. So, this is clearly a huge personal welfare issue, if you don’t have water.”
He says the money will be used for research on what is still unknown about New Mexico’s water.
“We don’t know how much water goes back to the atmosphere,” Fernald said. “How much soaks into the ground to groundwater, how much groundwater we have and what the quality of the groundwater is. So, out sort of overriding goal is too figure out how to get a bigger handle on New Mexico’s water resources, that’s kind of the big objective.”
Fernald says that in 6-12 months he hopes to have accurate information for individual counties and communities available on their website.
“What we’re shooting toward is a model that allows people to go on the web,” Fernald said. “Click on their watershed, their county, their water planning region and actually see the whole water budget and the different fluxes, and where the surface and groundwater go.”
He says they are looking at how to use the water we have to be able to fill all personal, agricultural, industrial, and natural needs.
“Our hope is that we can do some of these scenarios,” Fernald said. “Where we actually model what happens when you move the water around in different ways, so that everybody gets their water rights satisfied. But that you get more out of it by doing better integrated management of it.”
Attorney General Balderas says the goal is to be more innovative in dealing with water planning.
