The Colorado, Part II

The Colorado, Part II

   In the last post, the discussion fell on the ongoing water crisis facing cities, not only from rising demand from increased populations, but also from groundwater depletions due to low runoffs and drier climates in general.  In a piece in Nature, it was mentioned just how pervasive this making up of the water shortage is among cites around the world: When we turn taps on, we take for granted that clean water will flow out.  But accomplishing this feat takes a lot of infrastructure: Cities move about 130 billion gallons of water per day a distance of nearly 17,000 miles.  About 41 percent of Earth’s land area acts as a funnel for urban regions, gathering rainfall and directing it toward the 3.9 billion people who live in cities.  These lifelines will be under intense pressure...(Los Angeles) draws more water from outside its natural watershed than any other in the world.  To safeguard its water, Los Angeles owns about 315,000 acres in the Sierra watershed, yet with warmer temperatures, more frequent forest fi res and decreased snowfall, the supply is in jeopardy.  The region is in a state of “water stress”: It uses more than 40 percent of the water available to it. 

   Much of this water is directed for agriculture, and often for water-intensive and fertilizer-intensive crops, from rice to peaches to nuts, whose fields have to be flooded until the water is standing deep.  Also, the demand for grain and feed for cattle adds more stress to groundwater supplies, as hay and alfalfa are directed at grazing animals.  China's imports of cattle from Australia, New Zealand and Uraguay has jumped 800% in just three years (last statistics were from 2011 but the imports continue to rise), causing the country to shift much of its agriculture from rice to corn for cattle feed (corn is also uses less water and fertilizer than rice and its production in China has jumped 125% over the last 25 years; in the process, says National Geographic, "fertilizer use dropped by 7.7 million tons." 


   The Colorado River is 1450 miles long, a good length but not at all the longest compared to some rivers.  Still, at its history shows, it carved massive canyons and easily reached the sea in Mexico, said the magazine Nature in a piece called The River's Return by Victoria Schlesinger: Historically, the river pushed miles out into the Gulf of California every spring at a rate of 1.8 million gallons per second, leaving layers of sediment 3 miles thick in places.  Waves would mount high enough to upend a small boat when the ocean tides clashed with the river.  The sodden land burst with cottonwoods, willows and mesquite.  The river and wetlands teemed with fish.  It was home and a respite for millions of birds a year, as well as jaguars, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, deer and raccoons, to name just a few species. Today, the picture is different. 

   As you likely know, so much water is siphoned off from the river upstream that thoughts of its water making it to Mexico and to the sea are little more than a dream, although a compact was worked out to allow a "pulse" of water, a 100,000 acre-feet of water released by dams over the course of 8 weeks starting back in March of 2014 and continuing on for 5 years with a "base flow" of 17 billion gallons. This was the first time that the river's water had reached the sea in nearly 30 years.  Part of the reason is an old agreement worked out with the states for what's simply known as first use = first rights.  This was further explained in a piece in The New Yorker called Where the River Runs Dry by David Owen.  Kent Holsinger is a Denver lawyer whose specialties include water law.  “Water law in Colorado and most states in the West is based on what’s called the doctrine of prior appropriation,” he said.  That doctrine holds that the first person to make “beneficial use” of water gains the right to use that quantity for that purpose forever, and that the claim takes precedence over every claim made later...The prior-appropriation doctrine originated during the California gold rush, which began in 1849, and during a similar gold rush in Colorado a decade later.  The most common mining technique in that era involved shovelling earth into a wooden trough, called a sluice box, then directing a swiftly moving stream of water over it, in the hope of washing away everything but gold.  Disputes arose when newcomers made diversions upstream from existing operations, because water was so scarce that dividing the flow among multiple miners could make it useless to all. Early farmers faced identical conflicts.  The solution, through much of the West, was a new conception of water rights whose central tenet was “first in time, first in right.”  Proximity to the source counted for nothing, because miners and farmers sometimes had to move water long distances.  The critical factor was the date of first use.

   But here's what happened as the legal disputes escalated: In 1922, representatives from Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California reached an apportioning agreement, called the Colorado River Compact, which divided the river’s watershed into two basins, upper and lower, and allocated the flow equally between them.  Working out the details took several more decades and required the involvement of Congress, the Supreme Court, and Henry Kissinger, but the basic agreement is still in force.  It’s the central element of what’s known as the Law of the River, a loosely defined and circumscribed body of rules, precedents, habits, treaties, customs, and compacts which isn’t written down all in one place but is invoked almost any time two water users disagree about who’s entitled to what...The compact granted 7.5 million acre-feet per year to each basin.

   For the city of San Diego, that allocation isn't enough.and so they are now paying the nearby Imperial Valley for some of its water (within a few years, they will be buying about 25% of its water allocation).  This is great news for the Imperial Valley (which grows many crops such as hay for export) but bad news for the once vibrant Salton Sea.  Once home to an estimated hundred-million tilapia fish and countless birds and animals and fisherman that fed upon them, the Sea is dwindling to little more than a small lake, the water growing so brackish and filled with salt and selinium that most of the fish are gone (the Salton Sea once drew more visitors than Yosemite Valley nearby).  Once the lake totally dries, an estimated 100 tons of "fine caustic dust" could be swirled and cast upwards with the winds, leading to respiratory illnesses downwind says a piece by Dana Goodyear in The New Yorker.  “The sea is the linchpin between Colorado River water and urban Southern California,” Michael Cohen, a senior research associate at the Pacific Institute, a water-policy think tank, says.  Without the inflows, the sea, already shrinking, will recede dramatically, exposing miles of lake bed loaded with a hundred years’ worth of contaminants.  Much of the wildlife will disappear—poisoned, starved, or driven off.  The consequences for people around the region could be dire, too.  Before irrigation, the valley was plagued by violent dust storms.  With the water gone, the lake bed could emit as much as a hundred tons of fine, caustic dust a day, leading to respiratory illness in the healthy and representing an acute hazard for people with compromised immune systems.  No one knows how far that dust can travel on the wind.  Mary Nichols, the state’s top air-quality official, says, “The nightmare scenario is the pictures we’ve all seen of the Dust Bowl that contributed to the formation of California in the first place.”  The San Diego contract expires in little over a year.

   The water compact done in 1922 was an exceptionally wet year and the Colorado simply cannot produce the water that was estimated back then, meaning that as populations and agricultural needs grow, more water will be drawn from wherever it is found, in this case, underground.  In some parts of central California, the land has sunk nearly 12 inches due to suspected water depletion (the water deficit, that is, what water is being produced and what is projected to be produced annually is about 1.2 million acre feet or over 2 years worth of what Los Angeles uses).  Highlighted in the article by David Owen was the measures Las Vegas is taking to conserve water (the city being in the middle of a desert, after all).  The metropolitan area today has a population of close to two million, and ninety per cent of the water it uses comes from the Colorado River...Las Vegas barely existed when the Colorado River Compact was negotiated...Today, ninety-three per cent of the water that’s used indoors in the metropolitan area is treated in a plant to the east of the city and is then either used again locally, for irrigation, or returned to the lake, earning a “return-flow credit.”  The regional water authority has a long-running Xeriscaping program, which pays people to remove turf and has been copied in other Western cities, and one result is that Las Vegas today uses less water than it did fifteen years ago.  A spokesman for the authority told me that, if Nevada were to withdraw a full year’s worth of its net Colorado River water use in a single gulp, the lake would fall by thirty inches.  “For context,” he continued, “California uses about forty-four feet of water a year.  Arizona uses twenty-eight feet.  Mexico uses fifteen feet.  To put it in even more context, the evaporation off Lake Mead alone is four times our annual usage as a community.”

   Obviously, such efforts are a good beginning; but with attention focused on the "bathtub ring" around the lake, groundwater depletion is estimated to be 6 or 7 times that amount.  Multiply that by the many declining reservoirs around the world and one begins to see the scope of the problem.  Cities (and many consumers) are trying different methods to save water; but it would appear that at the rate of ground water depletion, it all might not be enough.  At that point, eyes would likely go to excessive and water-wasting causes, from water-intensive agriculture and meat production to green lawns and disappearing golf courses (about 100 close each year in the U.S. due to declining water among other reasons).  Soon, such items as bottled water might prove something necessary for survival instead of a luxury, and washing a car might be viewed with disdain.  But stressful times often lead to creative endeavors and solutions are dimly making their way forward...if it's not too late.  The Colorado is merely one river, taxed and strained to the extreme...but it might prove just a small example of the veins and arteries of our earth, a system so complex that we have only started to understand its vastness and importance.  We can only hope that we are recognizing what is happening before us, and before it is indeed too late...