The Bunker Hill ground-water basin, in the vicinity of San Bernardino, Calif., is being artificially recharged with imported water. Current and future artificial recharge of the basin may cause the potentiometric surface in an area of confined ground water to rise above land surface and water to flow from uncapped and unplugged wells. This could cause damage to structures where the soil becomes waterlogged and where buried wells begin to flow beneath the structures. A well-response model was used to generate a series of water-level hydrographs representing the response of the ground-water basin to six possible combinations of conditions for each well; one pumping rate, two artificial-recharge rate, and three natural-recharge rates. Inflow to the ground-water basin exceeds outflow for all tested combinations. According to model predictions, the accumulation of stored ground water resulting from the excess of inflow is sufficient to cause the water level in the selected wells to rise above land surface for all but one of the combinations of conditions tested. Water levels in wells are predicted to rise above the land surface as early as 1981 for the combination with the greatest excess of inflow. (Woodard-USGS)
