Small Towns at Risk

Teresa Hall is the mayor of New Underwood and serves as a board member for WDRWS. “It’s a really worthwhile project,” she says. When she was first presented with the findings of the 2019 SD Mines study, she was shocked. “I was just blown away by the information and the enthusiasm of those who presented it,” Hall says. Hall concluded that the work of WDRWS was something that she and her hometown of New Underwood needed to be a part of. “I really think it’s important that New Underwood gets in on the ground floor. If we don’t take part in things like this, we’ll get left behind. This will keep our town alive.”

Hall deeply cares about her hometown, and adores the lifestyle that New Underwood provides for her and her family. “I moved to New Underwood when I was in seventh grade. I graduated high school here, moved away and then moved back. I just really prefer small town living,” she says. “I’ve got family here. My husband’s family is here. It’s been the best.”

New Underwood was incorporated in 1908. The town has relied on two wells for their water. “And they’re always at risk of failing,” Hall says.

Almost all of the drinking water in western South Dakota comes from underground aquifers, namely the Madison Aquifer. This underground source of water has provided residents of western South Dakota with plentiful and high-quality water for generations. As officials from South Dakota consider the water needs of their communities, an increasing number of them are considering this critical aspect of progress and growth from a long term perspective. And many of them are seeing a need to create redundancy in their water systems.

“I don’t want us ever to be without water. If we don’t have water, we don’t have a town,” Hall says. For communities like New Underwood, the need to create redundancy in their water system may be even more pressing than that of larger communities.

The conventional approach for communities shoring up their water futures is to secure diverse sources to draw on and establish a system of conservation. Communities are able to take stock and create “if-then” scenarios — if this water source fails, then we can rely on this one. If these wells are running low, this sort of conservation measure can be taken. Some communities, though, have fewer choices when it comes to these redundancies.

Communities — especially those located in between the Missouri River and the Black Hills — are at higher risk for being impacted by dwindling water supplies. Due to geological and topographical features, these communities usually rely on shallow wells to tap into aquifers. These shallow wells are typically more vulnerable to degradation of water quality and depletion. For this reason, it is likely that as water sources are strained more in western South Dakota, the first communities to feel the repercussions in an irrecoverable way would be smaller communities on the outskirts of the Black Hills — like New Underwood.