INCREASING REQUIREMENTS 225 



water for industrial use. It is evident that pipelines and stream 

 channels are far superior to aquifers for transmission of hun- 

 dreds of millions of gallons a day to points of concentrated 

 demand. 



In spite of these evident disadvantages of ground water as 

 an alternative to other sources of water supply, it is likely that 

 an increasing proportion of the nation's expanding require- 

 ments for water will be met by pumping from wells. The ad- 

 vantages of uniform temperature and quality, and absence of 

 suspended load, will be paramount for many industrial uses, 

 particularly air conditioning. And any trend away from the 

 present centers of population will spread industrial and public 

 demands over a broader area. Most ground-water reservoirs 

 are at their best when called upon to supply water to widely 

 dispersed wells. 



The chief factor favoring additional ground-water develop- 

 ments is the tremendous capability for storage in many 

 ground-water reservoirs. Underground storage can be utilized 

 in many places where surface storage would be extremely 

 costly, either because of the expense of dam construction or 

 because of the loss of valuable land which must be flooded by 

 a reservoir. In arid regions underground storage has the addi- 

 tional advantage of minimizing the loss by evaporation, which 

 may be as much as half the water stored in surface reservoirs 

 of large holdover capacity. 



It is true that our efforts to utilize this storage in the past 

 have been unsuccessful enough to bring forth popular articles 

 with such titles as "Are We Running Out of Water?" But con- 

 sider the efforts: We pump wells in blissful ignorance of the 

 characteristics which govern the flow of the water under- 

 ground and then are chagrined when the water is not replaced 

 where pumped out. Generally, ground-water utilization has 

 barely reached the stage arrived at in stream utilization half 

 a century ago, before reservoirs were constructed and when 

 the users were dependent upon the natural flow of the stream. 

 We have depended upon the natural flow through ground- 

 water reservoirs and have experienced more trouble with that 



