At the Open House in September a question was asked about our well water production over time. We have summarized the data we have on well production from 2005 to 2024 to see what our trends look like. The graph below shows total annual production in US gallons. We are missing data from 2015 to 2018, but overall we think the graph indicates two things.
First, production varies between about 5 million and 6.5 million gallons per year – this variation is primarily due to comparable variation in water use. In other words we pump what we need to meet demand; when demand is low, such as in winter, we pump less. Note that we think the unusually high value in 2023 is incorrect. Well production in 2023 was probably closer to 6.5 million gallons.
Second, and perhaps more important, there is not a clear trend in well production over time. Production from 2005 to 2008 was very similar to production from 2021 to 2024. As we said above, variation in well production mainly reflects variation in demand, so this suggests to us that water demand in VPID has not increased significantly over the past 20 years.
Of course this still leaves open the question of whether water supply is declining – that is, how much water our aquifers can provide annually. A decline is supply might be caused by more frequent and longer summer droughts. Some of our wells do show signs of stress in late summer, but we haven’t noticed an increase in this in recent years.