An Arizona drought is killing a town
The Town That Runs Out of Water in 66 Days — And the 1935 Law That Says They Can't Save Themselves
On Mother's Day, a town of 2,000 is counting the days until the faucets go silent — and the answer may have been buried since 1935.
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There is a swimming pool in Kearny, Arizona that hasn't been filled in years.
I know because I helped build it. Twenty years ago, I worked alongside Ken Piggott and the Leslie's Pool Supply commercial crew to remodel the town pool — the one where kids launched cannonballs in the summer heat and mothers sat in plastic chairs watching their babies learn to float. That pool was the heartbeat of a town that never had much but always had enough.
Today the mothers of Kearny are filling jugs. Not pools — jugs.
An 85% water cut is already in effect. The Gila River, which has sustained this copper mining community since before Arizona was a state, is being rationed under a legal decree written in 1935 — a year when nobody imagined that "drought" could last a quarter century. Under the Globe Equity Decree, Kearny holds junior water rights. That means when the river runs low, Kearny drinks last. And this summer, hydrologists are projecting a "zero water day" by mid-July.
No car washes. No gardens. No pools. Families timing their showers to the second. Mothers choosing between laundry and cooking. This is not a developing nation. This is an American town in 2026.
▶ Watch: Kearny's Water Crisis — FOX 10 Phoenix
This is a Black Swan.
Not the kind Wall Street talks about — not a market crash or a pandemic. This is the original meaning. An event so outside the frame of normal planning that the system has no mechanism to survive it. The 1935 decree was brilliant for its time. It allocated a river among farmers, miners, and tribes with surgical precision. But it was designed for a world where droughts lasted seasons, not generations. It never accounted for a climate that would simply stop cooperating.
And here is the cruel irony: every attempt Kearny makes to save itself — drilling a new well, tapping a new source — gets legally classified as a "diversion from the Gila River." The decree doesn't just limit the town's water. It criminalizes the search for more.
So what do you do when the law says you cannot look forward?
You look down.
That is Project 88.
Beneath the shallow alluvial sand and gravel that the 1935 court adjudicated — the subflow, the water legally tied to the river — there exists a deeper geology the lawyers never thought to write against. Granite-vault aquifer formations. Crystalline rock fracture zones that held stable hydrostatic pressure for centuries before anyone built a canal or filed a water right. USGS well-log archives confirm it. Arizona Department of Water Resources drilling records show it. Pre-industrial static water levels in these formations held consistent for decades, undisturbed by surface drought, because confined aquifers in deep granite do not evaporate. The sun cannot reach them. The heat cannot touch them. They are, by the laws of geology, drought-proof.
Project 88 proposes to recharge and repressurize these formations using Managed Aquifer Recharge and Storage — a proven technology already deployed by Salt River Project and the City of Chandler less than 90 miles from Kearny. We are not inventing anything. We are applying what already works to a town that has run out of legal options on the surface.
But here is what makes this more than an engineering project.
The partners are already at the table. ASARCO — whose Ray Mine has operated in the Kearny basin for over a century — needs water stability for its next hundred years. Resolution Copper, one of the largest proposed mining operations in North America, needs a community that is still alive to support its workforce. The Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project have been in negotiations with Kearny since last August. The willingness to collaborate is real. What has been missing is the architectural layer that makes collaboration permanent.
A one-time water transfer is a gesture. A recharged granite aquifer is a covenant.
Imagine the tribes, the corporations, and the town — three entities with a complicated, sometimes painful shared history — coming together not around a short-term deal but around a geological promise. Water stored in rock that will outlast every contract, every board of directors, every election cycle. Water that belongs to no one's politics and everyone's grandchildren.
The family trees growing in Kearny are not metaphorical. They are the cottonwoods along the river, the mesquite in the yards, the actual bloodlines of families who have been born, married, and buried in this town for four generations. Those trees need roots that reach deeper than a 1935 ruling.
Project 88 is not asking Kearny to hope for rain. It is asking Kearny to look at what was always underneath — stable, silent, waiting — and build a future the Black Swan cannot reach.
The pool is still standing. I'd like the town around it to be standing in fifty years.
Powell Parker is the founder of Project 88, a water infrastructure initiative focused on managed aquifer recharge solutions for climate-threatened communities in the American Southwest.
