Each morning this summer, Gordon and Connie Howie have awoken on their cattle ranch in central Pennington County and turned on the kitchen faucet, unsure if any water will come out.
“We can’t do laundry or dishes or take showers other than with a little trickle,” said Connie Howie, 76. “Other times we have a little water because it seems to come and go.”
Like many ranchers and residents in rural areas of western South Dakota, the Howie family relies on a well to provide them with water for their lives and livelihood.
But this year, perhaps the worst in recent memory, many shallow wells are running slow or have gone completely dry, forcing people to go to great lengths and expense to provide clean water for themselves or their livestock.
Experts say several consecutive years of limited winter snow pack and a shortage of rainfall have combined with increased consumption of water to cause a decrease in the levels of some underground aquifers that are a main source of water for a large swath of the Black Hills region. The problem is most acute in areas outside the reach of pipes from municipal and rural water systems.
High heat during the summer of 2026 has exacerbated the problem as people, crops and animals all require more water than usual to survive.
“We have a well at the house, but it’s just not keeping up because the aquifer is dry,” said Gordon Howie. “For 20 years you could trust that well 24/7, and it never quit on us, but now it’s not providing enough water for everything we need.”
The Howies are buying bottled water for drinking and positioning jugs of fresh water throughout the house for daily uses. On a recent day in late August, the couple hauled a trailer to a public-access water station in Rapid City and spent $17 to fill a 1,300-gallon tank they use to keep their 150 Texas longhorn cattle alive on their ranch in Caputa, about 10 miles southeast of Rapid City Regional Airport.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen it this dry, this hot, this long,” said Gordon Howie, who served in the Legislature from 2009-2011 and ran for governor in 2010. “We’ve seen some drought, but this is the worst one I can remember, and I’m 77 years old.”
Self-serve water sources aiding those in need
All across the plains of western South Dakota, some residents who rely on shallow wells — generally 1,000 feet deep or less — are being forced to find alternative water sources.
Some are utilizing a somewhat obscure system of obtaining water in which users insert quarters or bills into a vending machine that triggers a hanging water spout to provide fresh water that is collected in tanks in pickups or on trailers. Such water stations are available in Black Hawk, Deadwood, Piedmont, Rapid City, Spearfish and Sturgis.
Those self-serve water stations are much busier than usual this summer, particularly in Rapid City, where the spout at J&J Asphalt is the only bulk water available in town and is often accessible only after a long wait.
“Everybody is hauling water these days,” said Nick Randall, shop foreman at J&J Asphalt, whose shop and water station are located in an industrial area off Dyess Avenue.
Randall said the asphalt company built the water station for its own trucks that use water on paving jobs but decided to make a few extra bucks by selling it through the self-serve system.
Until this year, there were three or four places to buy bulk water in Rapid City.
But now J&J — which provides water it obtains from the Rapid City municipal system — is the only public-access spigot still flowing.
Lately, the long line of trucks and trailers at the spigot has caused some inconvenience for the business, Randall said.
“Some days, there’s so many people lined up that we can’t get our own trucks in and out,” he said.
Ralph Bifulco, 62, drives his pickup with a water tank in the back to J&J Asphalt every day to spend $7.50 to fill most of the 550-gallon tank with drinkable water.
Bifulco lives in the Ashland Heights community southwest of Ellsworth Air Force Base, where soil, surface water and groundwater have been contaminated by toxic chemicals produced by base activities.
The area has been declared an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site. Despite significant cleanup and remedial activities, drinking water wells near the base were found in 2016 to be contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the so-called forever chemicals used in firefighting foam, according to the EPA.
Bifulco said he needs the water from J&J for all everyday activities.
“We’ve got no clean water for anything,” said Bifulco. “If you can’t drink it, why would you shower or wash your clothes in it?”
Water hauler having a busy summer season
Many rural residents have clean water delivered by truck, which requires planning and expense.
Businesses such as Frontier Water in Rapid City are extremely busy this summer. It uses three trucks to carry up to 2,500 gallons per load to residences and ranches across the Black Hills region.
“With all these shallow wells going dry, it’s really boosted my business,” said Darin Klapperich, the owner of Frontier who also ranches northwest of Rapid City.
Klapperich gathers purified fresh water from municipal systems across the Black Hills and delivers it to anyone for any reason.
“From swimming pools to hot tubs to cattle to cisterns, if you want to pay the freight, then I’m your man,” he boasts.
But this summer, the majority of his runs are to provide drinking water for people and cattle.
On arrival, the water is dumped into a cattle tank or a holding tank for household use. At some locations, he fills underground concrete cisterns people use to store water on their properties and occasionally drains the water into a well to fill it part way, Klapperich said.
An average household uses about 150 to 200 gallons of water per day, but many rural residents are finding ways to reduce daily usage during the drought, Klapperich said.
“If you have a shallow well, you’re kind of in trouble. But it’s been amazing to see all the tricks people are using to conserve water right now,” he said.
Concerns over long-range aquifer depletion
While large, deep-water Black Hills aquifers such as the Madison, Minnelusa, Inyan Kara are lower in volume but still providing sufficient supplies of water, many smaller, shallower aquifers tapped by individual users of the aquifer are dry or getting close. Even some wells that don’t go deep enough into the large aquifers could be seeing reduced flows.
Mark Anderson, an adjunct geology professor at South Dakota Mines and a former director with the U.S. Geological Survey, said the Black Hills region is in the midst of a precipitation shortage that is preventing underground aquifers from recharging as fast or as much as usual.
Combined with the large number of wells being drilled, the lack of rain and snow is causing concern about the long-term ability of aquifers to recharge enough to meet the needs of a growing population, Anderson said.
As reported by News Watch, that concern was highlighted in a recent USGS study showing that water use within some of the six “sub-aquifers” in the Black Hills is outpacing the rate at which the aquifers are refilling.
Anderson, who now serves as a water consultant, said he is working with a client who recently drilled two new wells up to 1,000 feet deep and did not find sufficient water to justify completion of the well. It is unknown if drought or poor location was the cause, but Anderson noted that some monitoring wells around the Black Hills are indicating lower levels in recent years.
“When we’ve had years of successive below average precipitation, wells have demonstrated significant water level decline,” Anderson said. “This past year has been remarkable with the warm temperatures in the Black Hills with very little snow or rain.”
An expensive but necessary project
To avoid future dry spells, the Howies plan to drill a new, deeper well to replace the 30-foot well that has run dry. The couple will continue to use a reverse osmosis system in the house to purify the well water for drinking and other uses.
Before picking a site for the new well, the couple has hired a “witcher” who will use divining rods in hopes of identifying underground water in a process known as dowsing.
Gordon Howie said he expects a sizable bill for the project, with well drilling costing about $100 per foot and possibly a new pump ranging from $20,000 to $50,000.
Until then, he’ll continue his twice-weekly water-gathering ritual, positioning his trailer below the J&J spigot, climbing a ladder to connect an extension pipe to the spout, unfurling bills into the payment slot and filling the tank on his trailer.
“I let every last dribble go in, because those cattle have got to have water,” he said.
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This story was originally published by South Dakota News Watch and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.