After 54 years of thirst, the U.S. and Mexico partner to save the Colorado River Delta

Since 1960, the Colorado River has not flowed regularly to the sea. While pockets of green remain, the Colorado in its delta is a parched river begging for relief. The dry, sandy channel glares in the bright sun, abandoned by the river that has been overtapped and overworked for too long.

Colorado River

It’s hard not to think of the lost potential of an ecosystem that once thrived. After an adventure there in 1922, American author, scientist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold wrote:

“On the map, the delta was bisected by the river, but in fact the river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf [of California].”

The Colorado’s delta was once a landscape of plenty, the basis of rural economic activity and local employment. Tourism, recreational hunting, sport and commercial fishing – all have been lost to overuse and over exhaustion of a limited resource.

For decades, it seemed nothing could be done. I spent much of the past 15 yearsshining a spotlight on the sorry state of the Colorado River Delta for audiences across the country. And while it is true that these conversations would quickly turn to the byzantine complexities of water law and the difficulties of caring for shared cross-border resources, it is also true that most people are truly unsettled by the reality that the Colorado stops short of its natural destination.

Now we are taking a major step to right the wrong that has been done to the Colorado River Delta. For the first time in history, the U.S. and Mexico will send a modest volume of water into the Colorado River Delta in the form of a temporary “pulse flow,” which will mimic the natural spring floods that once nourished the delta. Never before have we deliberately sent water below Morelos Dam, the last dam on the river just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, to benefit the environment. This month, water from the Colorado River will literally pulse through the border as a sign to the rest of the world of what we can accomplish through cooperation between nations. It feels like a triumph of human optimism over acquiescence.

Some may grumble that this is not the time to send water to the environment, but that objection ignores the broader context of the recent binational agreement and the many benefits it brings to both countries. In addition to breathing life back into the delta, this new framework more broadly allows the U.S. and Mexico to share surpluses in times of plenty and reductions in times of drought, provides incentives for leaving water in storage, and conserves water through joint investments in projects from water users in both countries. These benefits extend to water users throughout the Colorado River Basin – in all seven U.S. and two Mexican states.

By abandoning the old framework of “who gets what” and establishing cooperative management of our shared resource, the U.S. and Mexico are achieving benefits for communities and nature alike. With this kind of cooperation, I have renewed hope that in the not-so-distant future we will see delta ecosystems and economies thrive once again. More

On a potentially dying planet shared resources are a no-brainer. Editor

 

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California on track for having the worst drought in 500 years

LOS ANGELES — The punishing drought that has swept California is now threatening the state’s drinking water supply.

With no sign of rain, 17 rural communities providing water to 40,000 people are in danger of running out within 60 to 120 days. State officials said that the number was likely to rise in the months ahead after the State Water Project, the main municipal water distribution system, announced on Friday that it did not have enough water to supplement the dwindling supplies of local agencies that provide water to an additional 25 million people. It is first time the project has turned off its spigot in its 54-year history.

State officials said they were moving to put emergency plans in place. In the worst case, they said drinking water would have to be brought by truck into parched communities and additional wells would have to be drilled to draw on groundwater. The deteriorating situation would likely mean imposing mandatory water conservation measures on homeowners and businesses, who have already been asked to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent.

“Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing” said Gov. Jerry Brown, who was governor during the last major drought here, in 1976-77.

This latest development has underscored the urgency of a drought that has already produced parched fields, starving livestock, and pockets of smog.

“We are on track for having the worst drought in 500 years,” said B. Lynn Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Already the drought, technically in its third year, is forcing big shifts in behavior. Farmers in Nevada said they had given up on even planting, while ranchers in Northern California and New Mexico said they were being forced to sell off cattle as fields that should be four feet high with grass are a blanket of brown and stunted stalks.

Fishing and camping in much of California has been outlawed, to protect endangered salmon and guard against fires. Many people said they had already begun to cut back drastically on taking showers, washing their car and watering their lawns.

Rain and snow showers brought relief in parts of the state at the week’s end — people emerging from a movie theater in West Hollywood on Thursday evening broke into applause upon seeing rain splattering on the sidewalk — but they were nowhere near enough to make up for record-long dry stretches, officials said.

“I have experienced a really long career in this area, and my worry meter has never been this high,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, a statewide coalition. “We are talking historical drought conditions, no supplies of water in many parts of the state. My industry’s job is to try to make sure that these kind of things never happen. And they are happening.”

Officials are girding for the kind of geographical, cultural and economic battles that have long plagued a part of the country that is defined by a lack of water: between farmers and environmentalists, urban and rural users, and the northern and southern regions of this state.

“We do have a politics of finger-pointing and blame whenever there is a problem,” said Mr. Brown. “And we have a problem, so there is going to be a tendency to blame people.” President Obama called him last week to check on the drought situation and express his concern.

Tom Vilsack, secretary of the federal Agriculture Department, said in an interview that his agency’s ability to help farmers absorb the shock, with subsidies to buy food for cattle, had been undercut by the long deadlock in Congress over extending the farm bill, which finally seemed to be resolved last week.

Mr. Vilsack called the drought in California a “deep concern,” and a warning sign of trouble ahead for much of the West.

“That’s why it’s important for us to take climate change seriously,” he said. “If we don’t do the research, if we don’t have the financial assistance, if we don’t have the conservation resources, there’s very little we can do to help these farmers.”

The crisis is unfolding in ways expected and unexpected. Near Sacramento, the low level of streams has brought out prospectors, sifting for flecks of gold in slow-running waters. To the west, the heavy water demand of growers of medical marijuana — six gallons per plant per day during a 150-day period — is drawing down streams where salmon and other endangered fish species spawn.

“Every pickup truck has a water tank in the back,” said Scott Bauer, a coho salmon recovery coordinator with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “There is a potential to lose whole runs of fish.”

Without rain to scrub the air, pollution in the Los Angeles basin, which has declined over the past decade, has returned to dangerous levels, as evident from the brown-tinged air. Homeowners have been instructed to stop burning wood in their fireplaces.

In the San Joaquin Valley, federal limits for particulate matter were breached for most of December and January. Schools used flags to signal when children should play indoors. More

 

What the New York Times misses about the Colorado River

When the New York Times features an alarming story about water in the West, people pay attention. This week’s story, “Colorado River Drought Forces a Painful Reckoning for States” by Michael Wines, trended as the Times’ most emailed piece for much of Monday. The article helped to elevate the reach and understanding of Western water issues, but for those of us in Colorado and other basin states, this reality is one we must face every day.

Colorado River

Ongoing drought

Drought has gripped the Colorado River basin for fourteen years, and reservoir operation rules that address dwindling water supply are being triggered. For the first time since the 1922 Colorado River Compact was signed, this year’s water delivery from the Upper Basin states (CO, NM, UT, and WY) to the Lower Basin states (AZ, CA, and NV) will be reduced. Barring an epic snow year in the Rockies – since the Colorado’s supply relies heavily on snowfall – water shortages may be imposed on Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico as soon as 2016. Drought, whether or not influenced by climate change, is dealing a tough hand to this arid-leaning region of North America.

The good news, as reported by the Times, is that many water managers understand the dire circumstance of reduced snowfall, as well as the options available to avoid water rationing. Water conservation – already widely employed across the region – is an imperative moving forward, whether or not the drought persists.The Great Recession temporarily slowed the region’s meteoric rise in population, but its cities are growing again. In some cities where people bathe, drink, water lawns, and wash cars with Colorado River water, historic tightening of supplies has successfully and dramatically reduced per capita use, extending supplies. Many cities use less water now than they did a decade ago, despite population growth.

Still, even the most water-thrifty cities in the basin have a long way to go before they achieve conservation levels seen in other cities across the globe, such as those in Australia and Israel.

Incentives for saving water

Where water has been plentiful, by dint of geography or law, investments in water conservation are less common. John Fleck makes this point nicely in a recent Albuquerque Journal post: “When there is more water, people use more water. When there is less, they use less. The trick is making the transition from one to the other. New data from state water managers suggest New Mexicans are doing better at this task than I expected.”

Santa Fe is a terrific example of a city that has adapted to and thrived in dry conditions, as are Tucson, Long Beach, and other Western cities. This should be a call to action for the rest of the Basin: the time to increase incentives that promote water saving is now – before regulations and requirements become necessities.

Water conservation in agriculture will be more of a challenge. While the Timescites laser-leveling of fields as a practice to reduce farm run-off, this practice may not actually save water. Much of the water that leaves farms is already going back into our water supply where it is used over and over again. Limited but promising options for conserving water in agriculture are technologies that reduce evaporation, such as drip irrigation of high-value crops. These technologies can also add resilience to farming operations. But to make such technologies effective at saving water, farmers will need financial incentives to reduce water use and changes to law and regulation that allow them to profit from the savings.

Historically in the West, water has been permanently taken out of agriculture to feed the thirst of our growing cities, and the acreage of irrigated fields has declined. That’s something to consider as Western communities make choices about water supply: do we want lawns if it means we have to buy-up and dry-up our irrigated open spaces and our culture of farming and ranching?

The lifeline of the American West

Another important point is one Wines failed to capture in his story: what all of this – the problem of extended drought and the solutions we employ – means for the Colorado River itself. The mighty Colorado is not simply infrastructure for water delivery. It is the lifeline of the American West. It is a river of legends, with awe-inspiring canyons that have for centuries seduced people to explore their depths. Citizens of the West and the rest of the globe alike love the Colorado River for the thrill of its rapids, the shade of its riverside forests that make for epic fishing, and the serene calm of a morning view from a houseboat on one of its large reservoirs. Colorado River recreation adds some $26 billion to the economy every year.

Those with the power to affect Colorado River water management – our elected leaders and the officials they appoint – have the power to preserve the natural wonders of the American West. Persistent drought presents these leaders with a significant challenge, and how they respond will have an enduring impact, not only on the economic viability of our cities and rural counties, but also on the health of the Colorado River.

In the words of Anne Castle, Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the Department of Interior, “we can’t simply sacrifice recreational and environmental flows when times get tough. We know that outdoor recreation is an important driver of the Southwestern economy, just like agriculture, so we’ve got to consider all of those things together. It’s essential to our economy. It’s essential to our way of life.” More

 

Dwindling Colorado River Forces First-Ever Cuts in Lake Powell Water Releases

More than a dozen years of drought have begun to extract a heavy toll from water supplies in the West, where a report released last week forecast dramatic cuts next year in releases between the two main reservoirs on the Colorado River, the primary source of water for tens of millions of people across seven western states.

After studying the problems facing the river for the past two years, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation – the agency charged with managing water in the West – announced Friday that it would cut the amount of water released next year by Lake Powell in Arizona by 750,000 acre-feet, enough to supply about 1.5 million homes.

It marks the first reduction in water flows since the mid 1960s, when the lake was created by the construction of Glen Canyon Dam. "This is the worst 14-year drought period in the last hundred years," said Larry Wolkoviak, director of the bureau's Upper Colorado Region.

The move could trigger an "unprecedented water crisis within the next few years," the business coalition group Protect the Flows told USA Today, as reductions could have major ramifications for farmers and businesses downstream that depend on those flows, as well as on hydroelectric power generation.

"The river is already severely endangered due to way too many dams and diversions," Gary Wockner of SavetheColorado.org told National Geographic, noting the impact the reduced flows also would have on fish and wildlife throughout the Grand Canyon. "The impact on the health of the Colorado River is unsustainable."

It's difficult to overstate how important the Colorado River is to the West. From Lake Powell along the Arizona-Utah border, the river flows more than 300 miles through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead in Nevada, supplying drinking water to more than 36 million people in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah.

The river also supplies water to 22 native American tribes, 11 national parks, 7 national wildlife refuges, and 4 million acres of farmland, ThinkProgress reports.

At Lake Mead, water levels will lower by 8 feet as a result of the reduction, after the lake already has dropped by about 100 feet since the current drought began in 2000, the Wall Street Journal notes. That would bring water levels there – now about 1,105 feet – within striking range of 1,075 feet, considered the threshold for the U.S. Department of the Interior to declare a water shortage.

Lake Mead

Today, Lake Powell is only about 45 percent of its full capacity while Lake Mead stands at 47 percent full, according to Chuck Collum of the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which delivers water from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona.

He told USA Today that the forecast would mean CAP would see its water releases reduced by about 320,000 acre-feet, or a cut of about 20 percent. CAP says this will have no impact on the cities and Native American tribes it serves, however, because the reduction would impact largely underground storage and non-Indian agriculture.

For Las Vegas, which draws most of its water from Lake Mead and grew by more than 6,000 people a month in the 2000s, the extremely dry conditions of the past decade already have prompted a raft of water restrictions and conservation measures -- including banning grass front lawns in new home developments.

But the city isn't counting on conservation alone. If the conditions of the past several years continue indefinitely, by 2015 water levels at Lake Mead could drop below one of Las Vegas's two intakes there, imperiling the city's water supply. Today, its water authority is scrambling to build a third intake to allow it to draw water at levels below 1,000 feet -- an insurance policy if the lake's levels drop low enough to put its first intake out of service.

(MORE: 20 Cities That Could Run Out of Water)

"It's essentially a race for us," Scott Huntley of the Southern Nevada Water Authority told National Geographic, because the lake likely "is going to drop more precipitously than seen in the past."

At their root, the potential water shortages both lakes face is the result of what has happened to theColorado River over the past decade. Long-running drought across the Southwest has starved the river to its current low flows, and climate change is expected to reduce them by 5 to 20 percent over the next 40 years, University of Colorado geoscientist Brad Udall told Smithsonian Magazine.

Its impacts will be felt at each stage of the river's development: less snowfall in the Rocky Mountains will mean less water enters the river at its start, while hotter air temperatures and drier weather will mean longer droughts and more water lost to evaporation. More

 

Goodbye to All That (Water)

Martha and the Vandellas would have loved it. Metaphorically speaking, the New York Times practically swooned over it. (“An unforgiving heat wave held much of the West in a sweltering embrace over the weekend, tying or breaking temperature records in several cities, grounding flights, sparking forest fires, and contributing to deaths.”)

Colorado River

It was a “deadly” heat wave, a “record” one that, in headlines everywhere, left the West and later the rest of the country “sweltering,” and that was, again in multiple headlines, “scary.” The fire season that accompanied the “blasting,” “blazing” heat had its own set of “record” headlines -- and all of this was increasingly seen, in another set of headlines, as the “new normal” in the West. Given that 2012 had already set a heat record for the continental U.S., that the 10 hottest years on record in this country have all occurred since 1997, and that the East had its own sweltering version of heat that wouldn’t leave town, this should have been beyond arresting.

In response, the nightly primetime news came up with its own convenient set of new terms to describe all this: “extreme” or “severe” heat. Like “extreme" or "severe" weather, these captured the eyeball-gluing sensationalism of our weather moment without having to mention climate change or global warming. Weather, after all, shouldn’t be “politicized.” But if you’re out in the middle of the parching West like TomDispatch regular William deBuys, who recently headed down the Colorado River, certain grim realities about the planet we’re planning to hand over to our children and grandchildren can’t help but come to mind -- along with a feeling, increasingly shared by those in the sweltering cities, that our particular way of life is in the long run unsustainable. Tom

Never Again Enough

Field Notes from a Drying West

By William deBuys

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. More

 

Colorado cattle ranchers preparing to face third year of drought

Colorado cattle producers are preparing to face down a third year of drought.