Wells and Community Water Systems

We read Searchlight Crusade every day and consider your essays a priceless education in avoiding the major pitfalls in the home-buying process. On behalf of all of us consumers, thank you so much for your hard work!

Please comment on any pitfalls in selecting a property to purchase that is on a community water system. How do we find out how many homes share the resource, how often the water is tested and what the results mean, the GPM rate and whether it's sufficient for usage without any rationing, etc. We've had a long-time driller tell us NEVER to share a well, but this is a community system, not a single well. Unless the system uses only a single well...?

To be honest, there aren't a lot of properties around here still on a well. The water table has gotten too low in the populated areas to make it work. Most of the properties that are on wells are isolated and in rural or quasi-rural settings.

First a little background for folks who may not understand anything about wells. You have to be aware of the well parameters, of which there are three that are most important: "How deep has it been drilled?", "How big is the holding tank?" and "How fast does the pump replenish it?" These aren't the only issues to pay attention to, but they're the ones that are guaranteed to bite you if you don't pay attention. Wells do silt up over time and may need to be re-drilled. Pipes and pumping mechanisms corrode, get old and break down. And water quality is sometimes a very big issue - for instance if the tank at the town filling station springs a leak, and it may even be caused by something nobody knows about. I knew a gas station owner who got fingered by the EPA for a leak and spent 4 years and over $100,000 digging it out, diluting the underground flume he couldn't get to, and everything else anyone could think of before someone discovered an old forgotten military tank left over from WWII that was the real cause of the whole thing. (No, he didn't get any of his expenses back). Not to mention the water may just taste bad. It happens.

Finally, I should also mention that most of the properties I know of that are on wells use septic waste disposal systems. It may be revolting if you think about it, but in some areas you won't have any choice if you're going to live there. People have been doing fine with these systems for quite a while and it's quite safe - but you need to be careful that both systems are completely up to snuff and separated by the appropriate buffers. I'm no expert on what those are, but be certain to check with someone who is an expert before you buy. This can also make it very questionable as to whether you're going to be able to do any expansions you may desire in a legal and safe fashion. Septic systems are only rated for so much, and if you want to add additions, you may need to expand them - if the soil will absorb the extra, and if there's room. Sometimes the soil won't, and there may not be the necessary expansion room even if the soil will take it.

Now, getting to your specific question: Do you know how many wells we're talking about, and what the communal capacities are? Ask yourself how much water you're likely to use, and multiply that by the number of folks on the system. Ask if there are any agricultural or industrial users on the system, and how much water they use. Add in a finagle factor for bumps in demand - for instance, if a main pipe or holding tank springs a leak, one of your neighbors hosts a family reunion with a fleet of RVs, etcetera. If one of the users is agricultural and it's a dry growing season, they're going to put a lot of demand on the system. I haven't encountered it personally, but given that southern California used to be the citrus capital of the world, I've heard older relatives tell me about water wars between citrus growers and between citrus growers and everyone else. It still happens today, even though most agriculture has now left the area.

Now, let me ask what feeds your water supply? What's the source of the water? Is it just rainfall, or is there some permanent stream nearby that feeds it? How is the water table holding up under current and projected demand? Is it holding steady or dropping? Go ask some people that have lived there for a while about dry years and whether they have water worries. Ask about whether there has been more demand placed upon the water available in the past few years. Ladies and gentlemen, my father told me stories about the San Diego River filling Mission Valley from side to side, so there wasn't any way across that didn't involve boats. I remember floods that completely filled the underground garage at Mission Valley Center, right up to the ceiling. In the last thirty years, however, there has been too much demand placed upon the water table for it to flood like that.

My point is this: water tables don't replenish themselves. There has to be water coming in to replace what is used. If there isn't enough coming in to replace what's going out, there's going to be a problem. Eventually, everybody is going to be out of water if this is the case. The only question is when. Do you want to buy into a situation like that? They can drill deeper and all the other stuff; it only delays the day of reckoning and makes it worse. This was one of the root causes of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s - everyone had kept putting increasing demand upon the aquifer that underlay an area basically several states in size, drilling ever more deeply to be able to water their crops one more year. A tragedy of the commons if ever there was one.

Which segues into another issue: All it takes is a small proportion of nitwits to exhaust the community water source. I've heard that your area is dry - perhaps not as dry as some of southern California, but that it doesn't get a lot of rain due to being in the rain shadow of some high mountains. If a few of your neighbors want to simulate a rain forest, it can leave everyone else without enough water. Exactly how many it takes depends upon the system and how much extra capacity it theoretically has. Even if everything is hunky dory now, all it takes is one water hog buying a property that's served by the system to possibly create problems. So let me ask you what the provisions are for limiting the water of abusers of the system? If you have to get law enforcement involved and go to court for years, where is the community going to get the money? Can you afford your share? Not to mention you would probably like to know where you're going to get water in the meantime. And what happens if the community water authority is run by control freaks? You don't necessarily have to do anything wrong to incur their wrath. Sometimes, all it takes is changing something they're used to, and even though it doesn't impact water use adversely, they'll try and use the water authority as a means of getting back at you (I suppose I should thank Larry Niven for introducing me to the concept of hydraulic despotism at a relatively early age). How big is the community water system? The bigger it is, the more nitwits it takes to drain the system, but the smaller it is, the more likely everybody is to make a good faith effort to get along and the less likely it is that some people see it as a lever for power over others. The issues aren't at all unlike those encountered by common interest developments in the cities, except that it's water rather than parking, recreational access, or loud parties that make it difficult for everyone else to live their lives, and a board that's more interested in its own power than in harmonious administration of common resources for the benefit of all. Unfortunately, these are all depressingly common occurrences.

Caveat Emptor