'Planning for the worst': Groundwater pumping for border wall construction threatens border refuge

SAN BERNARDINO NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Arizona — The extraction of groundwater to build a newer, taller border wall in a biologically diverse and remote area of southeastern Arizona is the “greatest threat to endangered species” along the entire southwestern United States, according to internal emails from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The start of construction along the 2,369-acre San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge in late 2019 prompted staff from the federal wildlife management agency to take “life support” actions at the refuge to save some of those species found nowhere else in the United States, staff emails show.

The Fish and Wildlife Service manages a series of perennial wetlands in San Bernardino that are made possible by an expansive, millenary aquifer that rises to the surface within the refuge boundaries as it begins to flow south, eventually forming the Yaqui River that empties out into the Sea of Cortez in the Mexican state of Sonora.

The wetlands host diverse wildlife that includes endemic and protected species such as the Yaqui Chub or Yaqui Topminnow, two of four threatened or endangered native fish species that the refuge was created to protect.

Conservationists obtained the internal emails from the Fish and Wildlife Service through a request under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents describe some of the concerns from the federal government’s own wildlife experts who are responsible for protecting the refuge and its inhabitants.

In one example, Bill Radke, the land manager at San Bernardino, wrote in a Dec. 11, 2019, email to other FWS employees — nearly two months after border wall construction started at the refuge — that “refuge staff have salvaged fish and allowed three ponds to go dry" because of low water levels in the refuge tied to groundwater pumping for wall construction, according to the emails.

“We are developing/implementing contingency plans to protect at least a subset of the endangered fish population that once thrived on the refuge,” he added. “We are hoping for the best, but are planning for the worst.”

Although the internal emails are from between August 2019 and January 2020, concerns about water use for border wall construction, and its impacts on protected habitats and wildlife in the area, are ongoing.

"(U.S. Customs and Border Protection), in particular is a rogue agency. They operate outside the law. They are unaccountable and the culture of the agency reflects that," said Randy Serraglio, with the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, which obtained the emails.

The group has sued President Donald Trump's administration over the diversion of military funds to build barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border and its use of waivers to expedite construction.

In a separate case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in June that transferring $2.5 billion from the military for border wall construction projects, including the one in San Bernardino, was unlawful. But a Supreme Court stay in the case has allowed the federal government to continue with construction.

"They're building the border wall in a legal vacuum. They've waived 65 laws and counting over the last 15 years," he said.

Some of the waived laws required some public oversight before construction began. The waivers allowed construction crews to begin building the barriers near the refuge in October 2019 with little or no public input.

Crews with Southwest Valley Constructors, an affiliate of Kiewit, are in the process of replacing approximately 20 miles of vehicle barriers with new, 30-foot bollards in Cochise County, east of Douglas and stretching past the refuge to the New Mexico state line.

The project is valued at $408 million and is paid for using the $2.5 billion in diverted military funds, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who awarded the contract.

As part of the work, crews routinely pump water from wells adjoining the refuge to mix concrete that holds the barriers in place. They also spray water on the widened dirt roads constantly used by heavy machinery and construction vehicles along the project area for dust-control purposes.

"That’s the water that supports endangered species in the refuge," Serraglio said.

Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided a joint statement to The Arizona Republic in response to the concerns detailed in the emails and expressed by conservationists:

"CBP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) have coordinated regularly with FWS since the start of the Tucson Sector projects and on the status of the ponds at the refuge. This includes coordinating weekly, and more frequently on as needed basis, to answer questions concerning new border wall system construction projects and to address environmental concerns from FWS," the joint statement said.

Customs and Border Protection also said it was finalizing its Environmental Stewardship Plan for the area in and around the refuge and that it will be posted sometime this month. As of Wednesday, Aug. 19 it had not been posted.

Customs and Border Protection drafts stewardship plans whenever the agency uses  waivers to speed up construction along the border. They put together the plan using surveys done before construction to estimate the environmental impact. Observations from environmental monitors during construction also are included.

Critics, including Serraglio, said these plans don't consider public input, and are often released long after construction has started. By that time, it is too late to prevent environmental impacts, the critics say.

How much water is being pumped?

One of the biggest questions on the minds of conservationists is how much water construction crews are pumping from the aquifer that supports the wetlands at San Bernardino for border wall construction.

That's a question even Radke, the land manager at San Bernardino, sought to find out, according to the released emails. The messages described the efforts his staff had taken at the time to measure changes in water levels, including installing equipment at wells to measure water flow and depth.

"The objective is to weekly load up our monitoring data so a team of hydrologists can begin crunching the numbers to create deliverables to document the ongoing damage to our aquifer and to try and determine and depict the point at which such damage is essentially permanent - can never be recharged," he wrote in a Dec. 20, 2019, email to other FWS employees.

In their joint response, Customs and Border Protection and Fish and Wildlife Service declined to provide the amount of water that the border wall contractor has extracted from the ground for construction along the 20 miles in Cochise County.

CBP "worked closely with the USACE and the construction contractor to obtain groundwater use information associated with the relevant projects and provided the information to FWS. USACE and CBP continue to provide regular updated construction water use data to FWS," the statement said.

Earlier this month, the Defenders of Wildlife, another conservation group, obtained a report compiled by Fish and Wildlife Service in June that provided some figures. The report showed that Southwest Valley Constructors, the contractor building the border wall at San Bernardino, has pumped out approximately 32 million gallons of water between November and May.

Jacob Malcom, the director for the Defenders of Wildlife's Center for Conservation Innovation, worked for eight years a biologist at San Bernardino. He said a lot of work has gone into researching how the aquifer works, and that the impacts on the refuge from pumping that much groundwater for construction were predictable.

"Those wetlands are just drying up, they're declining. Refuge staff are having to dry some ponds, close off certain wells, just so they can maintain enough pressure to have other ponds and those threatened and endangered species sustained elsewhere," he said.

Construction crews pumped the 32 million gallons of water cited in the FWS report from a single well, located about a mile and a half west of the refuge on the Glenn Ranch.

Kelly Glenn-Kimbro, a fifth generation rancher whose family owns the ranch and well, said her family had "strongly opposed" replacing vehicle barriers in the area, which she said were working well, with 30-foot bollards.

"The statistics on cross-border illegal activity in the valley were not high enough to warrant a wall of this nature," she said.

Customs and Border Protection does not publicize enforcement statistics by specific area, but rather at a sector level. The Tucson Sector, which covers San Bernardino, goes from the New Mexico state line in the east to the Yuma County line in the west.

Glenn-Kimbro said the well detailed in the FWS report was drilled in 2008 to put up the vehicle barriers that the new wall is replacing. The family agreed to let the contractor use it for the ongoing wall project out of concern they would drill another well close to theirs if they said no, or that the federal government would turn to the wells located in the refuge.

"It was going to happen somewhere and the well was established and originally had been drilled for the purpose of border security," she said. "Our thought was to continue to protect the refuge by keeping the water use away from the refuge."

Conservationists pointed out that because all the wells are connected to the same aquifer, pumping millions of gallons of groundwater from a well offsite would take a toll on the refuge.

The FWS report concluded that pumping at the well "is significantly impacting wells located at San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, leading to immediate and significant loss in pressure at (the refuge) within a week."

Glenn-Kimbro, whose family is a founding member of the Malpai Borderlands Group, which brings together landowners in the area who employ a more conservation-minded approach to ranching, said the wall project had sowed division among ranchers, with some ranchers against them specifically for allowing the use of their well.

But "the hard core truth" is that despite the cost, the project would have have moved forward regardless "with no consideration by the government" about the impacts on local communities, resources and wildlife, she said.

"People truly believe that a 30-foot wall is going to secure the border and America. ... It is not," Glenn-Kimbro said. "Until our systems are fixed, our laws are enforced, our leaders are not afraid to take a stand and fix things. ... A wall is only going to cost billions of dollars and is a visual band-aid on the real problems."

Tracking impacts on the refuge, wildlife

On a recent afternoon, as monsoon thunderstorms roared in the background and inched closer to the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, construction crews continued installing 30-foot bollard panels along the boundary with Mexico.

Occasionally, tankers filled with groundwater drove along the enforcement road that runs parallel to the border wall, spraying the ground with water to keep dust down as bulldozers and construction trucks zipped by.

Finished sections of the bollard fence included metal gates that open to the side, although it is unclear if they are intended to allow animals to cross through, or to prevent heavy rains from damming at the fence. 

Flooding has long been a concern, even before border wall construction began, especially at Black Draw and Hay Hollow, two streams that flow south into Mexico. Wall construction has reignited those concerns.

Severe floods at the refuge in 2014 washed away the road crossing over Black Draw. More recently, a large flood around Thanksgiving last year washed away an earthen road crossing built for the construction project, leading to habitat destruction in the refuge.

The FWS emails obtained through a records request showed pictures of erosion control gabions severely damaged when the earthen crossing built north of the refuge "catastrophically failed" and sent raging flood waters down Hay Hollow.

As a result, "the flowing stream has been covered with upstream sediment - eliminating existing wetland habitat and the endangered fish that occurred there," Radke wrote in a Dec. 17, 2019, email.

Construction crews are building another road crossing, this one made of concrete, over Black Draw as part of the ongoing wall project. Serraglio, with the Center for Biological Diversity, said that had the potential to create more problems.

"It's clearly erosion, and a change in the way that this stream functions," he said. "Imagine now if there's a big flood, it comes barreling through here, it's going to get backed up in several ways." 

In their joint statement, CBP and Fish and Wildlife Service claimed that a series of ponds in the refuge that are home to endangered species "remain intact." However, while some of the ponds were filled with murky water and had water pumping into them, others were almost dry.

"The current pumps in the water wells are being replaced by the construction contractor with higher capacity pumps to allow for increased water flows into the ponds," CBP said.

Across the border, conservationists in Mexico said they're also seeing impacts of border wall construction along protected lands directly south of the San Bernardino refuge. 

José Manuel Perez Cantú has been the land manager for eight years at Cuenca Los Ojos, a non-profit that manages 130,000 acres of designated conservation lands along Sonora's border with Arizona and New Mexico.

The organization works regularly with staff at San Bernardino to restore native species that live on both sides of the border, such as the Yaqui Chub and the Yaqui Topminnow.

"We share the same ecosystem; we share the same aquifer," Perez Cantú said.

Their collaboration is often touted as an successful example of binational cooperation. At the moment, they are seeing similar issues to their counterparts north of the border, such as decreasing water levels.

"We're very worried because we are in the desert and the aquifer is giving out," he said. "The San Bernardino River, which normally flows this time of the year, remains dry. The water is not flowing because of the lack of rain and the excessive extraction of water of this vital liquid for border wall construction."

Perez Cantú said they have noticed impacts to wildlife crossings too. The 30-foot bollards have stopped animals such as white tail deer and mountain lions that once crossed regularly to drink water at the San Bernardino refuge.

As a result, they had to install a solar-powered pump at an old well to bring water to the surface for the wildlife that is unable to cross anymore, he added. 

Perez Cantú said Cuenca Los Ojos and other conservation non-profits have tried to lobby Mexico's equivalent of Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas, to take action. But they were refuted with an explanation that floored him.

"They said they can't say anything because it's not a priority for the Mexican government to stop the border wall," he said.

"It's a tragedy. It's a disgrace that we're seeing how all of these species are being truncated by that wall," Perez Cantú added.

Have any news tips or story ideas about the U.S.-Mexico border? Reach the reporter at rafael.carranza@arizonarepublic.com, or follow him on Twitter at @RafaelCarranza.

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