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Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

You’ll read a lot of comments on this, both good and bad. A lot of passionate arguments have been made on both sides. I have two things to add to it—and feel free to take them as you will. People I know in the area with wells had them go dry after the nestle plant opened. These were wells that had previously been high (for wells) throughout, just drying up. The plant also got special tax rebates and other incentives to open with the idea they’d make it back with taxes and jobs but it’s never materialized.

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I don't know specifically about this Nestle plant -- although they are shits for going after limited water resources in the Shasta watershed in California.

But as to various forms of high-capacity wells in general, in neighboring Wisconsin, not only are other pre-existing wells at risk from this -- which the Republican state government continues to seek to reduce regulation of and control over, meaning planning and effective and fair management of a limited resource. New high-capacity wells are also threatening and impacting lakes. A lot of those wells are for agri-business, such as very large capacity commercial animal husbandry/farming.

In those cases, the other risk is resulting animal waste; disposal often leaves it contaminating the aquifer.

Quite arguably, this isn't "conservative" at all. They aren't conserving resources -- nor existing property rights and businesses. It is "Conservative", an ideology that places money and individual short-term gain before all else.

I'm from Wisconsin as well and agree completely. The conservatives haven't been conservative in this state for many years. They're just Super PAC and special interest representatives running under the flag of the Republican party.

> People I know in the area with wells had them go dry after the nestle plant opened. These were wells that had previously been high (for wells) throughout, just drying up.

That (if true) is a legitimate complaint and Nestle should make them whole.

Edit: as someone else noted, this is less than one swimming pool's worth of water per day. If wells are going dry because of that, they were marginal at best.

> Edit: as someone else noted, this is less than one swimming pool's worth of water per day.

We're talking an olympic size swimming pool @660k gals each day, not the backyard type which is probably 1/6 the size [1].

Also rates matter. It's not how much is there, it's the depletion rate - recharge rate (families probably don't use nearly that much per day, so over time it would be many many olympic sized swimming pools).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-size_swimming_pool

Swimming pools are huge and not often emptied. Homes usually pay ~$6,000 to fill a pool. 576,000 gallons / day is ~6000 people's daily usage.

Wells have specific recovery rates. I don't know whether the amount they're pumping will exceed that rate-- environmental studies should include that information.

> Homes usually pay ~$6,000 to fill a pool.

Where? I'm seeing anecdotes of an average of $100-300 to fill up a pool with a hose, and $1250 to bring a truck in.

I think you need to double check those numbers. Last time I refilled a pool it was a maybe $250-$500, and that was with summer water rates in the middle of a desert. The average person's pool is definitely not 576,000 gallons (that's about 160 ft by 100 feet if your pool's mean depth is 5 feet). Even if it were, $8 per hcf seems high.

> Homes usually pay ~$6,000 to fill a pool.

Nonsense. Maybe in Phoenix or Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Not in Michigan.

I don’t know anything about the price of water in any of those places, can you cite some numbers?

By the way, why are you so passionate about this topic? You’ve made 17 comments on this thread, or 17% of all of the comments here as of this writing. Thst seems extreme to me. The one I’m responding to isn’t substantive, another is just a single word. Dominating a conversation with sheer volume seems extreme, and impolite.

> You’ve made 17 comments on this thread, or 17% of all of the comments here as of this writing.

Because I hate innumeracy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16759428

Following that through, you clearly hate being backed into a corner, and don’t mind engaging in “innacuracy” when it suits you.

Wells in aquifers don't work quite that way - they aren't open bodies of water that can flow freely.

When a well draws water, it creates a cone-like depression of the water level around the well (think of all those nifty gravity diagrams of planets). A well which was drilled sufficiently deep to work with existing draws can be made "dry" by getting a new neighbor who draws enough to lower the aquifer below their well head.

Those wells can be made to work again, but only by having a company come in and make the well (perhaps significantly) deeper.

An search on "aquifer drawdown" will provide a lot of reference material.

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