Groundwater resources of the Dallas-Monmouth area, Polk, Benton, and Marion Counties, Oregon

Abstract

The Dallas-Monmouth area is in the west-central Willamette Valley of western Oregon. It comprises a total of about 400 square miles in Polk, Benton, and Marion Counties. Tertiary consolidated rocks underlie the entire area. These rocks include marine sandstone, siltstone, shale, tuff, basalt, and gabbro. In the lowlands, the consolidated rocks are overlain by unconsolidated deposits of clay, silt, sand, and gravel which reach a maximum thickness of about 125 feet locally. The consolidated rocks generally are poor water-bearing formations and yield only small quantities of ground water to wells. From 1956 to 1976, about 6 percent of all wells completed in basalt and 14 percent of those completed in marine sedimentary rocks were reported to be "dry holes." The median yield of wells completed in the consolidated rocks was less than 10 gallons per minute, and the maximum reported yield was 200 gallons per minute. Shallow ground water in the consolidated rocks is generally of good quality, but with increasing depth in these rocks the water contains increasing concentrations of dissolved minerals. It is estimated that about 5 percent of all the wells completed in the consolidated rocks yield poor-quality water. The best water-bearing units are sand-and-gravel beds in the unconsolidated deposits. Near Independence, the sand-and-gravel beds are hydraulically continuous and exceed a saturated thickness of 10 feet over an area covering several tens of square miles chiefly within the Willamette River flood plain. Properly constructed wells in these deposits can generally obtain yields of 100 to 500 gallons per minute, and large quantities of additional ground water can be developed from this source. Outside the above area, sand-and-gravel beds generally are less than 10 feet thick, lenticular in shape, local in extent, and generally yield less than 30 gallons per minute to wells. Sand-and-gravel beds probably are absent in the Baskett Slough drainage basin, in the E. E. Wilson Wildlife Management area, and in the Luckiamute and Little Luckiamute River valleys upstream from the U.S. Highway 99W bridge.