Rural properties beyond municipal water pipes face most acute shortages
Connie Howie, 76, and her husband Gordon have started each morning this summer on their central Pennington County cattle ranch uncertain whether the kitchen tap will yield water. Across western South Dakota’s Black Hills region, shallow wells are running slow or going completely dry this year, in what the reporting describes as perhaps the worst in recent memory for shallow wells.
“We can’t do laundry or dishes or take showers other than with a little trickle,” Connie Howie told The Associated Press. “Other times we have a little water because it seems to come and go.”
The Howie family’s experience mirrors what many ranchers and rural residents throughout western South Dakota are navigating this summer. Their cattle ranch relies on a private well for both domestic and livestock water, a supply arrangement that reflects how rural households across the Black Hills region secure the water their lives and livelihoods depend on.
For some households and ranches, the failures have forced people to go to considerable lengths and expense to deliver clean water to themselves and to their livestock.
According to experts cited in the reporting, several consecutive years of limited winter snowpack combined with a rainfall shortfall and rising water consumption have lowered the levels of some underground aquifers that supply a large swath of the Black Hills region.
The problem is most acute on properties outside the reach of pipes from municipal and rural water systems — the households and ranches for which private wells remain the primary or only source of water for daily life and livestock.