LITTLE ROCK – Some conservation districts in northeastern Arkansas are seeking designations as critical groundwater areas because water in two major aquifers is being depleted.

The district’s boards have asked the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission to approve the designation for the western portions of their counties.

Crystal Phelps, an attorney with the commission, says Clay, Craighead, Cross, Greene and Poinsett counties have submitted formal petitions and St. Francis County plans to.

Groundwater from two major aquifers in eastern Arkansas – the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer and the deeper Sparta-Memphis aquifer – has been withdrawn at unsustainably high rates for more than a decade in an area west of Crowley’s Ridge known as the Cache Study Area, according to commission data.

“We proposed a ’critical groundwater’ designation in that Cache Study Area maybe three years ago,” Randy Young, executive director of the commission, said of the 14-county area.

Under the Arkansas Ground Water Protection and Management Act of 1991, the designation encourages local officials to develop a groundwater action plan, provides state tax incentives for measures to conserve groundwater and prioritizes the region for federal assistance, he said.

Arkansas has two critical groundwater areas.

The south Arkansas critical groundwater area consists of Bradley, Calhoun, Columbia, Ouachita and Union counties. That area was designated as critical in January 1996 because large industrial withdrawals from the Sparta aquifer over the years had created a rapidly growing cone-shaped valley in the water table known as a cone of depression. Since 1999, the area’s water users have helped the Sparta recharge significantly by shifting much of their demand to the Ouachita River.

The Grand Prairie critical groundwater area – which consists of Arkansas, Jefferson and Prairie counties, and parts of Lonoke, Pulaski and White counties – was designated in June 1998. To date, no significant alternative water sources have been developed in the Grand Prairie area, and depletion of the area’s aquifers continues.

Arkansas ranks fourth among the 50 states in groundwater use, relying on aquifers for two-thirds of its water needs, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. About 98 percent of the groundwater is drawn from the alluvial and Sparta aquifers.

The largest water use is irrigation, which accounted for more than 90 percent of all groundwater withdrawals in 2005.

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Information from: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, http://www.arkansasonline.com