Water in El Paso Texas | The River and the Bolsons

Water in El Paso Texas | The River and the Bolsons

Hi, welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. In this episode, we are talking about water in El Paso. Hi thank you so much for checking out the YouTube channel. My name is John Peña, your favorite real estate agent in El Paso.

If you're considering buying, selling, investing, please consider reaching out. And one of the reasons you should reach out is because not only are we amazing real estate agents, but we are trying to provide you with value-add information such as where does El Paso get its water from, right?

Now I've lived in some other places. I've lived off Lake Michigan, I've lived off the Gulf Coast, and so water was never really a big concern, right? Here in the desert, and here in the Rio Grande River in April, water kind of is a concern.

And as more people move to this area, well obviously that's going to put more demand on our water supply. So I've always found water a pretty interesting topic, and so I really wanted to kind of dive into it here.

There was just an amazing exhibit at UTEP where they talked about water. So a lot of the information that I'm taking is directly from there. I did not come up with this. I stole this from UTEP's exhibition, which is amazing.

So a little bit about the Rio Grande River. The Rio Grande starts in southern Colorado. It flows south. It goes through Albuquerque, through Las Cruces.

Then it comes here. It keeps flowing. Behind me is basically Mexico. And so from El Paso Juarez, the Rio Grande goes southeast to the Gulf of Mexico, where

it is also the international border between the two countries. So the Rio Grande River is one source of our water right now. It's not the only source, thank goodness, because as you can see, it's bone dry, but it is one source of our water.

So it's important to kind of know how this ecosystem functions. And in a nutshell, the amount of water in the river is dependent on rain and snowmelt. So further upstream of this river, any rain, any snowmelt in the spring is going to funnel down to the river.

It's going to flow south to Elephant Butt Lake. Again, it's B-U-T-T. I don't know if it's Butt Butte. I'm going with butt now.

And that kind of serves as a holding reservoir. And so before they actually put dams in the Rio Grande River, it was actually a pretty tumultuous river. If it got a lot of rain or a lot of snowmelt, downstream could get pretty gnarly.

There could be flooding. But that has since changed because now they've dammed everything up. So typically now, the amount of water that's available in the river is really dependent on yearly precipitation, right?

So low snowfalls in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado typically means drought conditions here in El Paso. So now, currently, the water is being held upstream. That's going to, they're going to release water here probably in the next couple of

months or so, because we are still getting water from this river. We use it for agriculture and all sorts of things. Okay, so now we are far away from the Rio Grande River, relatively speaking. And now we are just east of the Franklin Mountains.

Why? Because the other source of water in El Paso is aquifers, underground water. These are also called bolsons. And so on this side, the east side of the Franklin Mountains, we are actually standing

in the Castner Range, which sits over top of part of the Hueco Bolson. On the other side of the mountains is another aquifer called the Mesilla Bolson. But what does this mean for El Paso? Well, in 1979, the Texas Water Development Board published a report stating that at the

current consumption levels, remember, this is in 1979, that in the current water consumption data, El Paso would be out of water by 2031. So as you can imagine, you know, water is a concern. And so the bolson that we're standing on top of, the underground aquifer, where does this

water come from? It's mostly water from rain, river runoff, right? And basically, we were doing pretty good. And then in the 1970s and 80s, it sounds like there was a pretty extreme amount of unnecessary

water usage by agriculture. I don't exactly know the details, but I can guess and say that, you know, people were probably drilling down into the aquifers and using the water that was probably very plentiful for crops that maybe weren't all that realistic in this climate.

So that's depleted the aquifers over time. That's really the, you know, we're sitting on a lot of water, which is great. However, if we don't responsibly use that water, it's not going to be so great unless we, you know, have some great rainfalls and snow melt over the next couple of years.

But if we find ourselves in this current drought situation that we're in, you know, we want to be very careful to manage the water that's below us, you know, as efficiently as possible.