“If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and I have a straw,” fictional early 20th-century oilman Daniel Plainview explains to preacher Eli Sunday in the 2007 film There Will Be Blood. “And my straw reaches acroooooss the road and starts to drink your milkshake,” Plainview continues, reaching his arm out, pointing his finger down into the unseen earth and stalking across the room toward his guest, “I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!”
Plainview is talking about oil, but the theory applies just the same to water. It’s not a new idea, yet it is one we persistently forget, or fail to apply broadly enough. In Jefferson County and beyond, the milkshake problem looks set to emerge as the defining issue of the coming decades, underscoring how the region, and even the state, slurp from the same finite pool.
“This analogy gets used a lot and it’s coarse, but it is illustrative of a thing that happens,” Stan Bradshaw, a retired water attorney who argued cases for the state and the advocacy group Trout Unlimited for decades. “The phenomenon is real…I have seen instances where surface water flow is heavily influenced by either the lack or loss of groundwater within the system.”
