Where does your drinking water come from? Ground water.
Where does ground water come from? Rain.
How does the rain get there? It permeates through the soil, and in Sussex County with a shallow ground table, it takes only a few days for the water to reach the water table and replenish it.
Development covers the soil and prevents water from soaking in and permeating down to the ground table. In essence, covering the agricultural fields of Sussex with apartment buildings and shopping malls is resulting in the slow starvation of the water table that we depend on for our drinking water. I will leave it to the citizens and the paid lackeys of the developers to draw their own conclusions as to why we are occasionally running out of water.
Thomas Negran showed how much water will be lost by a development such as Atlantic Fields. The same approach can be applied to any large apartment or condo development. One of the questions that should be asked of any development is, how will you replace the rain that the ground water will lose by you covering the ground?
One solution is to capture more of the stormwater runoff from developments and let in slowly filter down to the water table.
A closing question for community debate is, what is the highest and best use of the remaining agricultural land in Sussex County? Is it short-term profits for the farmer and the developer, or the long-term sustainability of our ground water?
The bottom line is the greed of short-sighted economic gains hides the dangers of long-term economic decline due to the lack of drinking water.
P.S. I have not touched on saltwater intrusion into the groundwater due to overpumping.
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