Project helping protect equus beds

A bleak vision of the future has led Wichita and Harvey County to this point: the start of phase II of the Aquifer Storage and Recovery project.

The project is designed to prevent a future where the equus beds, the source of Harvey County’s and Wichita’s drinking water, become unusable because of salt infiltrating the water supply and depletion of the reserve.

“To do nothing lets the water out here get so salty it is not drinkable, unusable for irrigation or anything,” said David Warren, director of public utilities of Wichita.

Warren was part of a public meeting Wednesday at Halstead High School to present the second phase of the equus bed recharge project — a project Wichita began researching 15 years ago.

The first phase of the project was a small-scale recharge project designed to see if using water from recharge wells would work as intended.

It used three recharge wells and a water treatment plant northwest of Halstead to pump water into the equus beds.

“Before we invested huge amounts of money in this, we want to see if it would work like we said it would,” Warren said. “It did.”

The first phase was completed in 2006, costing $27 million.

Phase II, currently being designed, will cost an estimated $230 million. It will include replacing 12 miles of raw water lines built in 1940 and 10 miles of new water line. It will use 26 recharge wells in addition to diverting up to 30 million gallons of water a day from the Little Arkansas River when river flow exceeds base levels.

“I think people are beginning to realize this is something we need to do,” said Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick. “They understand we need to preserve our water, and if we do nothing, it will become unusable.”

Representatives from Wichita, engineering firms and the division of waste resources were at the meeting to answer questions from landowners — whether those questions be about water quality, how water would be collected or easements for pipelines and equipment.

“This gives us the benefit of knowing concerns,” Warren said. “We are in the design phase now, and it is much easier to address concerns now than when we start building. ... We want this project to be a positive for our community — rural and urban. ... These are our friends and neighbors. Community is not just Wichita, it is south-central Kansas. We need the farmers and ranchers here, and they need us.”

When all four phases of the recharge project are complete, it will capture up to 100 million gallons of water a day and store up to 65 billion gallons in the equus beds.

Warren said it’s about preventing a bleak future if nothing were done and the beds became unusable — or insufficient for the area’s water needs.

“The city of Wichita’s water rights are the senior most rights out there. At the time we need to make use of those rights, it is assured we cannot do that because the beds are over extended,” Warren said. “We’d have to claim an impairment, which would cause the Division of Water Resources to curtail water rights to those users with less senior water rights. That would mean curtailed use for irrigation and other municipalities. The economic impact on the area would be too awful to think about, and we really don’t have to experience that.”