Friday the 13th was a lucky day this June for the southwest Iowa city of Avoca, pop. 1,700. Restaurants along Main Street had their best week since problems with the city’s water supply began.
“It was the first time we hit our standard Friday mark in weeks,” Andrea Radd, owner of Raddberry’s Bakery and Cafe, told Little Village. “It was a big relief. Business had been picking up all week — not back to where we were prior, but pretty good.”
The Regional Water Rural Water Association (RWRWA), a nonprofit utility headquartered in Avoca that provides water to communities in parts of five southwest Iowa counties, issued a boil water advisory and declared a Level Red water conservation emergency on May 11. The four-year-long drought that affected most of Iowa ended last spring, but drought conditions have persisted in the state’s southwest, straining rural water systems.
RWRWA began looking for new groundwater sources in 2016, and over the last nine years has drilled almost 100 test wells in three counties without success. The utility has searched for both shallow aquifers (200 feet or so below the surface) and mid-level aquifers (about 500 feet deep), and even considered drilling down more than 2,000 feet to try to tap a bedrock aquifer, the Jordan.
“At least in this part of the state, they’re saying you’ve got about a 40 percent chance of hitting [the Jordan aquifer] at a cost of about a million bucks,” RWRWA General Manager Tom Kallman told Iowa Public Radio. “And for a nonprofit utility, that’s just not a good risk of our customers’ dollars.”
By the second week of May, RWRWA’s wells were only pumping at 60 percent of the standard capacity because the groundwater levels in its wells were still dropping. Eventually, water pressure decreased in the delivery systems to the point officials were no longer certain water from the top was safe to drink, so the boil advisory was issued.
“It pretty much killed business,” Radd said. “A lot of customers refused to come in when we were under the water boil. I understand that. They were worried that businesses weren’t doing their due diligence when it came to water. But we were.”
Radd used bottled water in the bakery, and was driving to Atlantic (a 40-mile roundtrip) and Council Bluffs (a 75-mile roundtrip) to fill 25-gallon water containers. The weeks following the boil advisory were stressful for everyone in Avoca and other RWRWA communities, and especially tricky for Radd.
Raddberry’s had only been open for a few months. Radd, a trained pastry chef originally from California, quickly gained a loyal following after the bakery opened in February, not just for her breads and European-style pastries, but also for the lunches served in the bakery’s cafe. Even with that successful start, Radd didn’t have the sort of cash reserves to fall back on that the owner of a long-established business might have. With few customers, she had to severely cut staff hours.
“It was kind of scary because it put us way behind on production,” Radd said. “And it put us in the red.”
The boil advisory was lifted in Avoca on June 2 (it lasted longer in some of the other communities). The Level Red water conservation emergency was reduced to Level Yellow. Things started to approach normal. On Friday, June 13, Avoca held “Pour Into Avoca,” a special event to attract people to the Main Street businesses that had been impacted by the water crisis. It was a good day at Raddberry’s.
The next day, RWRWA declared another Level Red emergency. No water boil advisory this time, just a return to the strictest conservation measures.
“It’s very frustrating,” Radd said.
Groundwater is essential to life in Iowa. Eighty percent of Iowans rely on groundwater sources for their drinking water, but public water supplies only account for 49 percent of the water pumped from wells in Iowa annually. The rest goes to agriculture (for both crops and livestock), power generation, industrial and other commercial uses. But the first thing that’s important to know about groundwater in Iowa is “it’s not evenly distributed,” Keith Schilling, the state geologist and director of the Iowa Geological Survey (IGS), told Little Village.
Northeast Iowa has the most abundant groundwater supplies, thanks to the porous nature of rock formations that allows water to move through them fairly easily and its shallow aquifers to be recharged relatively quickly by precipitation. Its proximity to the Mississippi River also helps, as water leaks from the river into groundwater deposits. Even the Jordan aquifer, the state’s most productive bedrock aquifer, is nearer to the surface in northeast Iowa, making it easier to tap into.
The Jordan aquifer stretches beneath almost the entire state. It dates from the Cambrian-Ordovician period of the early Paleozoic era, roughly from about 541 million years to 444 million years ago. Depending where a well is located in the state, it can reach water in the Jordan at anywhere from 300 feet to more than 2,000 feet.
There are three other important, but smaller bedrock aquifers in Iowa located in the geological layers above the Jordan. The Silurian-Devonian (mostly used for water in north central Iowa and eastern Iowa), the Mississippian (used in north central) and the Dakota in northwest Iowa, which is of limited use because of the mineral content of the water.
Above the bedrock aquifers in other layers are mid-level and shallow aquifers, and above them, the water table. Along rivers, there are alluvial aquifers, shallow formations in sand and gravel. Except for deep aquifers covered by non-porous rock like shale or glacial till, all of these aquifers are recharged by rain and melting snow, but at very different rates. Water from precipitation can begin to reach shallow aquifers anywhere from days to years, depending on soil conditions, rock formations and other factors. Deeper aquifers have recharge rates measured in centuries.
“We’ve dated some of the water in the deep Jordan aquifer, and found it’s tens to hundreds of thousands of years old,” Keith Schilling told Little Village. “We even found samples there that were up to a million years old. This is really old water that was recharged a long, long, long time ago.”
“There are two different systems going on here,” he continued. “The shallow system that’s recharged every time it rains, and deep systems that are not recharged that way, so you get one-time use of that water.”
Those two systems also have different challenges when it comes to water quality. The water recharging shallow aquifers can carry pollutants — often ag chemicals — bacteria and other contaminants into aquifers. In bedrock aquifers, local geological conditions sometimes result in high mineral content.
As a general rule, good, accessible groundwater becomes scarcer in Iowa once you go west of Des Moines or south of Des Moines. Resources are most limited in the southwest part of the state. RWRWA has decided to address its problem by building a pipeline across Pottawattamie County to bring water from Council Bluffs to its Avoca plant.
Of course, it’s not just the southwest that has issues with groundwater. There are examples from all around the state. In the southeast, the Poweshiek Water Association issued a mandatory water conservation order in March for customers of its Tama and Amana systems. The utility plans to drill two new wells this summer to increase supply.
Even in the northeast, where groundwater is plentiful, there are concerns over a mining company’s application to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to almost quadruple the amount of water it pumps annually from wells, from 977 million gallons to 3.7 billion gallons, including 1.4 billion gallons from the Jordan. (Because groundwater is considered a state resource, the DNR is in charge of all permitting.) The company says more water usage means more jobs, and the water not consumed in the mining process will be stored in disused quarries, where it will seep back into the ground, recharging the local groundwater supply.
Local residents, businesses and governments are concerned about the impact pumping that much water out of the ground will have on water levels in their wells and on the health of the area’s aquifers.
“These are valid concerns, but I’d caution everybody not to jump to any conclusions because the numbers are so big,” Schilling said. “We’re talking about a lot of water, but there’s a lot of water in that area. Everything depends on the hydrogeology of the site.”
The IGS is going to study the likely impact of the mining company’s plan.
To manage the demands on the state’s groundwater resources, Iowa needs a plan, Schilling said. The first step in making a plan would be creating a groundwater budget.
“Think of it like managing your checking account,” Schilling said. It’s a way of keeping track of what’s been pumped out of a system, how that system is recharging and if the current rate of use is sustainable.
But creating a groundwater budget requires detailed understanding of the state’s aquifers, and much of our understanding is based on research done in the 1970s, when the IGS had its own drilling program. Technological improvement in recent decades could create a much more accurate understanding of what is available and how long it will be available depending on how much it’s used.
Iowa is behind its neighbors in even basic groundwater monitoring. The state has a total of 49 wells in its groundwater monitoring network. Illinois has 307 wells in its network, Minnesota has 1,448 wells and Nebraska has 5,269.
But drilling wells takes money, of course. The IGS will be drilling a monitoring well into the Silurian-Devonian aquifer in Johnson County this summer. It will cost $30,000.
In 2024, the legislature did approve a one-time expenditure of $250,000 for the IGS to map shallow groundwater resources. The money was used to map alluvial aquifer resources along the Iowa River from Marshalltown to Iowa City.
“What we’re finding is that it’s infinitely more complicated than we thought,” Schilling said. As the course of the river has changed over the last million years, it has left behind a scattered network of alluvial aquifers in sand and gravel deposits that aren’t close to the river’s current course.
This year, that one-time appropriation became a line-item in the state budget, meaning it will likely be reoccurring for the foreseeable future. But the current appropriation doesn’t go very far in advancing the kind of research needed. The IGS will be requesting an additional yearly appropriation of $500,000 per year for aquifer mapping, as well as one-time funding of $300,000 for a new drilling rig.
What happens when the research needed to create a groundwater budget for Iowa meets the budget-making process at the Iowa Capitol remains to be seen.
In Avoca, Andrea Radd is also thinking about budgets, trying to work out what happens if there’s another water boil advisory.
“If it happens again, I may just have to shut down until it’s over,” she said. “But I’m not sure. I thought about a million things before opening a business,” she added. “But I never thought about running out of water.”
Related event:
Our Water, Our Future: A Look at the Central Iowa Water Quality Report, Harkin Center, Des Moines — Monday, Aug. 4, 2025, 7:30 p.m., Free
This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2025 issue.
