Without question the South
West is horribly vulnerable to an interruption of its water supply. It is not even a matter of if as when. It will happen. And the current regime is unable to actually
handle it.
After saying that
though, demand alleviation is around the corner in terms of viable energy
regimes that will divert demand for energy in particular. At the same time, water conservation in
agriculture is improving and the Eden machine once operational can literally
water deserts and in the long run make all this mute.
In short we will still
have close calls but likely little worse.
Never Again Enough:
Field Notes from a Drying West
Tuesday,
30 July 2013 10:09
Several
miles from Phantom Ranch, Grand Canyon, Arizona, April 2013 -- Down here,
at the bottom of the continent’s most spectacular canyon, the Colorado River
growls past our sandy beach in a wet monotone. Our group of 24 is one week into
a 225-mile, 18-day voyage on inflatable rafts from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek.
We settle in for the night. Above us, the canyon walls part like a pair of
maloccluded jaws, and moonlight streams between them, bright enough to read by.
One
remarkable feature of the modern Colorado, the great whitewater rollercoaster
that carved the Grand Canyon, is that it is a tidal river. Before heading for
our sleeping bags, we need to retie our six boats to allow for the ebb.
These
days, the tides of the Colorado are not lunar but Phoenician. Yes, I’m talking
about Phoenix, Arizona. On this April night, when the air conditioners in
America’s least sustainable city merely hum, Glen Canyon Dam,
immediately upstream from the canyon, will run about 6,500 cubic feet of water
through its turbines every second.
Tomorrow,
as the sun begins its daily broiling of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, and
the rest of central Arizona, the engineers at Glen Canyon will crank the dam’s
maw wider until it sucks down 11,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). That boost in
flow will enable its hydroelectric generators to deliver “peaking power” to
several million air conditioners and cooling plants in Phoenix’s Valley of the
Sun. And the flow of the river will therefore nearly double.
It
takes time for these dam-controlled tidal pulses to travel downstream. Where we
are now, just above Zoroaster Rapid, the river is roughly in phase with the
dam: low at night, high in the daytime. Head a few days down the river and it
will be the reverse.
By
mid-summer, temperatures in Phoenix will routinely soar above 110°F, and power
demands will rise to monstrous heights, day and night. The dam will
respond: 10,000 cfs will gush through the generators by the
light of the moon, 18,000 while an implacable sun rules the sky.
Such
are the cycles -- driven by heat, comfort, and human necessity -- of the river
at the bottom of the continent’s grandest canyon.
The
crucial question for Phoenix, for the Colorado, and for the greater part of the
American West is this: How long will the water hold out?
Major
Powell’s Main Point
Every
trip down the river -- and there are more than 1,000 like
ours yearly -- partly reenacts the legendary descent of the Colorado by the
one-armed explorer and Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell. The Major, as he
preferred to be known, plunged into the Great Unknown with 10 companions in
1869. They started out in four boats from Green River, Wyoming, but one of the
men walked out early after nearly drowning in the stretch of whitewater that
Powell named Disaster Falls, and three died in the desert after the expedition
fractured in its final miles. That left Powell and six others to reach the
Mormon settlements on the Virgin River in the vicinity of present-day Las
Vegas, Nevada.
Powell’s
exploits on the Colorado brought him fame and celebrity, which he parlayed into
a career that turned out to be controversial and illustrious in equal measure.
As geologist, geographer, and ethnologist, Powell became one of the nation’s
most influential scientists. He also excelled as an institution-builder,
bureaucrat, political in-fighter, and national scold.
Most
famously, and in bold opposition to the boomers and boosters then cheerleading
America’s westward migration, he warned that the defining characteristic of western
lands was their aridity. Settlement of the West, he wrote, would have to
respect the limits aridity imposed.
He
was half right.
The
subsequent story of the West can indeed be read as an unending duel between
society’s thirst and the dryness of the land, but in downtown Phoenix, Las
Vegas, or Los Angeles you’d hardly know it.
By
the middle years of the twentieth century, western Americans had created a kind
of miracle in the desert, successfully conjuring abundance from Powell’s
aridity. Thanks to reservoirs large and small, and scores of dams including
colossi like Hoover and Glen Canyon, as well as more than 1,000 miles of
aqueducts and countless pumps, siphons, tunnels, and diversions, the West has
by now been thoroughly re-rivered and re-engineered. It has been given the
plumbing system of a giant water-delivery machine, and in the process, its
liquid resources have been stretched far beyond anything the Major might have
imagined.
Today
the Colorado River, the most fully harnessed of the West’s great
waterways, provides water to some 40 million people and irrigates
nearly 5.5 million acres of farmland. It also touches 22 Indian reservations,
seven National Wildlife Reservations, and at least 15 units of the National
Park System, including the Grand Canyon.
These
achievements come at a cost. The Colorado River no longer flows to the sea, and
down here in the bowels of the canyon, its diminishment is everywhere in
evidence. In many places, the riverbanks wear a tutu of tamarisk trees along
their edge. They have been able to dress up, now that the river, constrained
from major flooding, no longer rips their clothes off.
The
daily hydroelectric tides gradually wash away the sandbars and beaches that
natural floods used to build with the river’s silt and bed load (the sands and
gravels that roll along its bottom). Nowadays, nearly all that cargo is trapped
in Lake Powell, the enormous reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam. The water the
dam releases is clear and cold (drawn from the depths of the lake), which is
just the thing for nonnative trout, but bad news for homegrown chubs and
suckers, which evolved, quite literally, in the murk of ages past. Some of the
canyon’s native fish species have been extirpated from
the canyon ; others cling to life by a thread, helped by the
protection of the Endangered Species Act. In the last few days, we’ve seen more
fisheries biologists along the river and its side-streams than we have
tourists.
The
Shrinking Cornucopia
In
the arid lands of the American West, abundance has a troublesome way of leading
back again to scarcity. If you have a lot of something, you find a way to use
it up -- at least, that’s the history of the “development” of the Colorado
Basin.
Until
now, the ever-more-complex water delivery systems of that basin have managed to
meet the escalating needs of their users. This is true in part because the
states of the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) were slower
to develop than their downstream cousins. Under the Colorado
River Compact of 1922, the Upper and Lower Basins divided the river
with the Upper Basin assuring the Lower of an average of 7.5 million acre-feet
(maf) of water per year delivered to Lees Ferry Arizona, the dividing point
between the two. The Upper Basin would use the rest. Until recently, however,
it left a large share of its water in the river, which California, and
secondarily Arizona and Nevada, happily put to use.
Those
days are gone. The Lower Basin states now get only their annual
entitlement and no more. Unfortunately for them, it’s not enough, and never
will be.
Currently,
the Lower Basin lives beyond its means -- to the tune of about 1.3 maf per
year, essentially consuming 117% of its allocation.
That
1.3 maf overage consists of evaporation, system losses, and the Lower Basin’s
share of the annual U.S. obligation to Mexico of 1.5 maf. As it happens, the
region budgets for none of these “costs” of doing business, and if pressed,
some of its leaders will argue that the Mexican treaty is actually a federal
responsibility, toward which the Lower Basin need not contribute water.
The
Lower Basin funds its deficit by drawing on the accumulated water surplus held
in the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, which backs up behind Hoover Dam.
Unfortunately, with the Lower Basin using more water than it receives, the
surplus there can’t last forever, and maybe not for long. In November 2010, the
water level of the lake fell to
its lowest elevation ever -- 1,082 feet above sea level, a foot lower than its
previous nadir during the fierce drought of the 1950s.
Had
the dry weather held -- and increasing doses of such weather are predicted for the
region in the future -- the reservoir would have soon fallen another seven feet
and triggered the threshold for mandatory (but inadequate) cutbacks in water
delivery to the Lower Basin states. Instead, heavy snowfall in the northern
Rockies bailed out the system by producing a mighty runoff, lifting the
reservoir a whopping 52 feet.
Since
then, however, weather throughout the Colorado Basin has been relentlessly dry,
and the lake has resumed its precipitous fall. It now stands at1,106
feet, which translates to roughly 47% of capacity. Lake Powell,
Mead’s alter ego, is in about the same condition.
Another
dry year or two, and the Colorado system will be back where it was in 2010,
staring down a crisis. There is, however, a consolation -- of
sorts. The Colorado is nowhere near as badly off as New Mexico and the
Rio Grande.
How
Dry I Am This Side of the Pecos
In
May, New Mexico marked the close of the driest two-year period in the
120 years since records began to be kept. Its largest reservoir, Elephant
Butte, which stores water from the Rio Grande, is effectively dry.
Meanwhile,
parched Texas has filed suit against New Mexico in multiple
jurisdictions, including the Supreme Court, to force the state to send more
water downstream -- water it doesn’t have. Texas has already appropriated $5 million to litigate the matter.
If it wins, the hit taken by agriculture in south-central New Mexico could be
disastrous.
In
eastern New Mexico, the woes of the Pecos River mirror those of the Rio Grande
and pit the Pecos basin’s two largest cities, Carlsbad and Roswell, directly
against each other. These days, the only thing moving in the irrigation canals of the
Carlsbad Irrigation District is dust. The canals are bone dry because upstream
groundwater pumping in the Roswell area has deprived the Pecos River of its
flow. By pumping heavily from wells that tap the aquifer under the Pecos River,
Roswell’s farmers have drawn off water that might otherwise find its way to the
surface and flow downstream.
Carlsbad’s
water rights are senior to (that is, older than) Roswell’s, so in theory --
under the doctrine of Prior Appropriation -- Carlsbad is entitled to the
water Roswell is using. The dispute pits Carlsbad’s substantial agricultural
economy against Roswell’s, which is twice as big. The bottom line, as with
Texas’s lawsuit over the Rio Grande, is that there simply isn’t enough water to
go around.
If
you want to put your money on one surefire bet in the Southwest, it’s this: one
way or another, however these or any other onrushing disputes turn out, large
numbers of farmers are going to go out of business.
Put
on Your Rain-Dancing Shoes
New
Mexico’s present struggles, difficult as they may be, will look small-scale
indeed when compared to what will eventually befall the Colorado. The U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation expects the river’s 40 million water-users to grow
to between 49.3 and 76.5 million by 2060. This translates
into a thirst for Colorado River water of 18.1 to 20.4 maf -- oceans more than
its historical yield of 16.4 maf.
And
that’s not even the bad news, which is that, compared to the long-term paleo-record, the historical average,
compiled since the late nineteenth century, is aberrantly high. Moreover,
climate change will undoubtedly take its toll, and perhaps has already begun to
do so. One recent study forecasts that the yield of the Colorado will decline
10% by about 2030, and it will keep falling after that.
None
of the available remedies inspires much confidence. “Augmentation” -- diverting
water from another basin into the Colorado system -- is politically, if not
economically, infeasible. Desalination, which can be effective in specific,
local situations, is too expensive and energy-consuming to slake much of the
Southwest’s thirst. Weather modification, aka rain-making, isn’t much more
effective today than it was in 1956 when Burt Lancaster starred as a
water-witching con man in The
Rainmaker, and vegetation management (so that trees and brush will consume
less water) is a non-starter when climate change and epidemic fires are already
reworking the landscape.
Undoubtedly,
there will be small successes squeezing water from unlikely sources here and
there, but the surest prospect for the West? That a bumper harvest of
lawsuits is approaching. Water lawyers in the region can look forward to full
employment for decades to come. Their clients will include irrigation farmers,
thirsty cities, and power companies that need water to cool their thermal
generators and to drive their hydroelectric generators.
Count
on it: the recreation industry, which demands water for boating and other
sports, will be filing its briefs, too, as will environmental groups struggling
to prevent endangered species and whole ecosystems from blinking out. The
people of the West will not only watch them; they -- or rather, we -- will all
in one way or another be among them as they gather before various courts in the
legal equivalent of circular firing squads.
Hey,
Mister, What’s that Sound?
Here
at the bottom of Grand Canyon, with the river rushing by, we listen for the
boom of the downstream rapids toward which we are headed. Sometimes they sound
like a far-off naval bombardment, sometimes more like the roar of an oncoming
freight train, which is entirely appropriate. After all, the river, like a
railroad, is a delivery system with a valuable cargo. Think of it as a stream
of liquid property, every pint within it already spoken for, every drop owned
by someone and obligated somewhere, according to a labyrinth of potentially
conflicting contracts.
The
owners of those contracts know now that the river can’t supply enough gallons,
pints, and drops to satisfy everybody, and so they are bound to live the truth
of the old western saying: “Whiskey’s for drinkin’, and water’s for fightin’.”
In
the end, Powell was right about at least one thing: aridity bats last.
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