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Five hundred people in the Golden Valley area near Kingman went more than a week without reliable water service after a well failed.
Thankfully, this isn’t a common occurrence in Arizona. You might even call it a worst-case scenario. But it carries an important truth as the state becomes more reliant on groundwater and the push grows to pump from deeper depths.
When the Golden Valley Improvement District was formed in the 1980s, it had four wells serving this unincorporated area, all more than 1,000 feet deep. In the early 2000s, two of those wells were decommissioned because of high levels of arsenic and salts.