CHINO VALLEY – The gas-powered motor roars as water hits the near-empty trough, alerting cattle it’s drinking time. 

Adam Brice moves from one metal trough to the next with a green hose, filling them with a commodity that’s going dry in rural Chino Valley.

He is a water hauler.

The practice is not unusual in this town 16 miles north of Prescott. Growth in the region has caused lower water levels due to groundwater pumping and inefficient recharge. Prescott Valley alone has added 10,000 residents during the past 10 years, and the Prescott metro has about 250,000 residents.

The Little Chino Basin and the broader Prescott Active Management Area, which serves Prescott, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley and Dewey-Humboldt, has been designated outside of safe yield for 27 years by the Arizona Department of Water Resources. This means more water is leaving the area than is going back in. 

Rural homeowners have felt the effects for even longer.

"The wells that you're seeing right now that are drying up — that's the canary in the coal mine," Mark Holmes, water advisor for the town of Chino Valley, said. "The bird has died."

Local governments hope to mitigate the overdraft through regional cooperation and stormwater retention. But rural residents can’t wait. They have found some relief in hiring water haulers and setting up their own homemade storage methods. 

The region’s situation could be a harbinger for other Arizonans as the state faces a 30% reduction in Colorado River water under new federal guidelines announced in August. 

Water hauling demands “punctuality,” Brice said. For his job as the operator of Brice Water Delivery LLC, he wakes up at 6 a.m., drives to the local water station — a beige box with Chino Valley’s logo on its side — and enters a pin code. Water rushes through a hose into a 2,035-gallon black tank. It takes about eight minutes to fill up his truck.

On average, he does this five to eight times a day. It takes an hour to an hour and a half to fill up a home storage tank and return to the water station to refill. He said he has around 90 to 100 regular customers.

“With everything that's been going on for 15 to 20 years, you could have great water, and then two weeks from now you might not,” Brice said.

Brice knows this firsthand. His family’s well dried up in the early ‘90s. And he said the town’s problem isn't going away.

He took up hauling to take care of his parents’ property. Then, he saw the increased demand.

"I saw these water trucks everywhere, and I was like, 'I can do that. This is my neighborhood anyway,'" Brice said.

His pricing for customers in Chino Valley ranges from $85 to $90 per 1,000 gallons or $110 to $125 per 2,000 gallons delivered. An average Arizona resident uses 146 gallons a day, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

Water doesn't discriminate. Brice said his customers are from all walks of life, from working-class residents who can't afford the time to haul their own water to people in financial hardship who can't afford the equipment needed to haul water themselves.

"Some of them just can't do it physically, and we try to take care of a lot of those people price wise," Brice said.

For 74-year-old Emad Khoury, Brice is “from heaven.” 

Khoury said his doctors advised him not to go to his well after falling near it three times. His health problems are worsened by a stroke. 

“Sometimes I am in Phoenix or out of town for a doctor's appointment,” Khoury said. “He'll fill up the water, and don't charge me until I get back. Sometimes (it's) three weeks before I see him again. He's an honest man.”

Brice said he reduced Khoury’s bill because of his age and health.

Resident Emad Khoury, 74, sits on the porch of his house on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026 in Chino Valley, Ariz.

Photo by Kendall Makuta/Cronkite News

Why are the wells running out?

There are several reasons why wells in the area have run dry, according to Chino Valley water adviser Mark Holmes.

“We're not getting as much incidental recharge in the winter because of drought and climate change,” Holmes said, and “we're pumping a heck of a lot more groundwater.”

Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said wells that are drying up are not clear indicators of a whole basin lowering. Areas of an aquifer can differ in depth, and some wells are shallower than others, she said. 

But Holmes said the aquifer has shifted enough that certain spots have become “permanently” dry. He referenced West Chino Valley, a neighborhood in the western section of the town, and near Coyote Springs, southeast of Chino Valley.

“You can't deepen your well deep enough to get water because you're just in granite, so in those lands, the only thing you can do is haul water,” Holmes said.

Farther south, the Phoenix Active Management Area has never been in safe yield, but Porter noted there is a key difference between the two regions: Phoenix largely imports.

“That AMA (Prescott) doesn't have a backup supply of water to help get it off of groundwater, and that makes a huge difference,” Porter said.

The area doesn't import water from the Colorado River, and municipalities only use water sources in the region. Therefore, groundwater is its dominant supply source, according to ADWR. 

But as Colorado River cuts affect the Phoenix AMA and other regions in the state, Tracy Lund, the water resources adviser for Prescott Valley, said the area is navigating problems that regions like the Phoenix AMA may face in the future.

“I don't want to say we're an example, but we might be an example,” Lund said.

Gary Beverly, executive committee member of the Citizens Water Advocacy Group, looks out his truck window at a sign reading “City of Prescott Production Well Rehab Program” on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026 in Chino Valley, Ariz.

Photo by Kendall Makuta/Cronkite News

Growth spurs more groundwater pumping

While touring the area with a Cronkite News reporter and photographer, Gary Beverly, an executive committee member of the Citizens Water Advocacy Group, pointed toward a large station housing wells. Located in the heart of Chino Valley, the sign on the site says: “City of Prescott.”

“This is one of the best water parts of the whole aquifer right here,” he said, while sitting in his silver F-150 truck. “It has the deepest and the best production wells. And as you go out from here, it gets worse.”

In 1948, the city of Prescott purchased 164 acres in the middle of Chino Valley to drill wells. In 2024, the wells in Chino Valley made up 80% of Prescott’s groundwater supply.

“There are significant cones of depression around the Prescott wells that are constantly pumping, especially in the summertime, and they can actually impact neighboring wells,” Holmes said.

Brian Ruiz, the water resources manager for Prescott, said in a statement the city’s wells are in the lower unit of the aquifer, while most private wells in the town are in the upper portion. He said the city provides water services for those in the unincorporated area of Yavapai, the town of Chino Valley and the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe.

“As a regional water provider, we are dedicated to providing safe and reliable water to all users within our Service Area while responsibly managing the City's water supplies,” Ruiz said in the statement.

Holmes also said exempt wells, ones that meet the parameters to not have to report its data to ADWR, could also increase the risk of wells running dry. According to an ADWR report from 2022, 30% of all exempt wells in the state’s five active management areas at the time of the report were in Prescott AMA, despite the region only representing 3% of AMA land.

“It's competition between you and your neighbor of whose well will be impacted first,” Holmes said.

Uniquely, the Prescott AMA uses little agricultural water. Municipal water use overtook agricultural demand in the 1990s and has since skyrocketed. Statewide, the share is inverted, and is usually pointed to as a way to mitigate depletion.

“That means that they don't have the opportunity to impose efficiency on agriculture or retire agriculture and help the aquifer,” Porter said.

In 2022, ADWR published a report that said the area is “not expected to achieve safe yield.”

Residents search for solutions

Despite that prospect, Jerry Carter, an 87-year-old Chino Valley resident, said he isn’t leaving. He gets water hauled by Brice for his white horse, his flock of ducks and his family.

“My next move is going to be to heaven," Carter said.

But he wonders, coming up to the midterm elections, if any candidates are paying attention to Chino Valley, and how the future will look for the town’s water basin.

He said he considered setting up raincatchers on his property to grab stormwater before it evaporates, but he is yet to act on this plan despite recent stormy weather.

The past month had heavy rainfall. And rainfall during the monsoon season put the area on an emergency declaration for flooding.

Resident Jerry Carter, 87, with his horse on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026 in Chino Valley, Ariz.

Photo by Kendall Makuta/Cronkite News

Holmes and Beverly both believe stormwater retention could be the future for the town’s basin.

“Stormwater is the only delivered water supply that our region has,” Holmes said. “There's no Colorado River available for the town or the region. There's no SRP water available for the region. Stormwater is it, and we're currently treating it as a nuisance water supply through flood control.”

This isn’t just a hyper-local situation. Statewide, less than 3% of precipitation becomes recharge, according to a report conducted by Arizona’s three state universities this year.

Holmes proposed the region should do a cost-benefit analysis to see if prioritizing stormwater recharge could be cheaper than more costly alternatives, like building infrastructure to collect water from a nearby basin. But to do this, he said, the area needs to establish a regional water authority.

Holmes and Beverly both proposed the idea last year to Prescott, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley and Dewey-Humboldt to manage water conservation and combat overdraft through a unified approach. 

“This new regional authority needs to be created,” Holmes said. “That's the only solution, and if it continues on with every jurisdiction managing water in their own jurisdiction, well, then nobody's working together, and we'll only fail.”

Ruiz from the city of Prescott said they have discussed an authority, and the city “recognizes that regional cooperation will be an important step toward sustainably managing the AMA’s finite water supplies.”

The city is planning a “long-term water management plan” to evaluate future demand and existing supply, while identifying key conservation strategies, expanded water options and customer education, Ruiz said in a statement.

Lund from Prescott Valley said the town has planned discussions with Prescott and Chino Valley regarding regional efforts. But she said more standardized approaches should be taken for stormwater, rather than relying on a single recharge location.

“To only recharge the aquifer in one area is ignoring the rest of the aquifer,” Lund said. “It's not a bathtub.”

Overall, Beverly said no one solution can address the entire region’s problems.

“There's many little pieces,” he said. “There's no silver bullet.”

While local governments determine how to collect stormwater, homeowners can do it right on their own properties.

Rainwater harvesting, Beverly said, is done by placing a water tank next to a house to collect roof water, but it's not a common practice, he noted.

“That's not happening,” Beverly said. “And the tanks often are next to a little well house that'll be out away from the house.”

Unifying through water

For Brice, water hauling gave him the chance to serve those in need. He also noted it's not a one-man mission.

He communicates with several other water haulers in the area, and they pick up each other’s slack if urgent requests aren’t in their vicinity. 

“All of us water haulers work together,” Brice said. “We're more of a network. We don't compete at all.”

He said he has made friends with some of his customers. And he’s participated in town events like the Chino Valley Territorial Days parade earlier this month.

Brice said he wanted to be a part of the parade, but he had four trucks and only one worker: himself. So instead of going on his own, Brice’s neighbors, who are also his customers, drove the other three trucks. When he offered them a free water haul in return, they refused.

“It's just fun being part of the community and driving down a big old strip of 3,000 people, and 200 of them know you,” Brice said.

Adam Brice puts away the hose used for his water hauler truck on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026 in Chino Valley, Ariz. (Video by Kendall Makuta/Cronkite News)

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.