As Rivers Rage Along, So Does Spokane Aquifer

Sat., June 7, 1997

By Tracy Ellig tracye@spokesman.com

While the swollen Spokane River crashes through the Valley carrying a record volume of water, there is another flood moving silent and invisible underground.

A huge surge of water has been moving through the Spokane Aquifer in recent weeks.

“The water table of the Spokane Aquifer is higher than we’ve ever seen and we’ve been digging for 25 years,” said Dan Murphy, president of Central Pre-Mix Concrete Co., which owns a gravel pit near Sullivan Road.

The water in that pit is five to 10 feet higher than Murphy ever remembers. “It went down about a foot in the last week,” Murphy said. “But it will be late summer before it gets back to normal.”

Central Pre-Mix’s pits and those owned by Acme Materials and Construction Co. are windows into the aquifer, said John Buchanan, professor of geology at Eastern Washington University.

“The Spokane Valley is like a bathtub filled with sand and gravel that is mostly open at either end,” Buchanan said.

“As the river flows across the surface there are places where it loses water to the ground and places where it receives water from the ground,” Buchanan said. “So there is a close link between ground water and river level.”

The high water forced Central Pre-Mix to discontinue use of its gravel pit conveyor belt. The pit is still producing gravel, but the rock is being taken from a higher level by trucks, Murphy said.

At the Acme pit, near the intersection of Park Road and Broadway Avenue, the water has “never, ever been as high,” said Dennis Sweeny, Acme general manager.

Even at high water, the company usually has eight or nine feet separating the end of a conveyor that stretches into the pit and the water’s surface. This week, there was only a 5-inch gap, Sweeny said.

The company has twice been forced to raise some electrical systems in the pit because of the high water and is even using a small boat to reach its gravel dredge in the pit. The dredge was designed to float, so it has not sustained any damage from the rising water, Sweeny said.

Just as the river’s flow will recede in coming weeks, so will the volume of water moving through the aquifer, Buchanan said.

However, all that water in there now has to go somewhere and it’s boiling up in a series of springs north of town near the Little Spokane River, Buchanan said.

There are lots of wet basements in that area and, Buchanan said, “I’ve gotten a bunch of calls from people seeing springs where they haven’t seen springs in a long time.”

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