“The good news is we did see a significant recovery last year,” Allen Davey reported to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District board during its first meeting of the year. Davey serves as the water district’s engineer. He said from the fall of 2006 to the fall of 2007 the unconfined aquifer experienced a recovery of more than 242,000 acre feet according to data collected from multiple monitoring wells in a longitudinal study area in the west central part of the San Luis Valley. “I think we would all hope we see a significant recovery this year,” Davey added. The unconfined aquifer storage study showed drastic declines in the drought year of 2002 and subsequent years with a slight recovery in 2005 offset by about the same amount of decline in 2006. Since the study began in 1976, the aquifer had experienced a cumulative decline of more than one million acre feet, a large portion of that since 2002.

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