The Colorado

The Colorado

   Perhaps I should have titled this, The "Poor" Colorado to evoke some sympathy.  After all, there are only a handful of rivers that just hearing their names brings to mind their grandeur. The Amazon.  The Nile. The Danube. The Rhine. The Mississippi. And yes, the Colorado.  But despite the many great stories of dam releases and a resurgence of wetland growth and her bountiful waters once-again trickling into the Pacific Ocean, the Colorado River is not in great shape.  Thinking back, this once mighty river falls into one of the categories of being shaped and carved and manipulated by human kind, a river dammed and its waters controlled and used until its power at the end, its replenishing power, is sapped into submission.  And now the news that even its hidden underground supply is diminishing.

   As it turns out, a new study by NASA and the University of California at Irvine, is revealing that as much as 75% of the water being lost from the Colorado is happening from water being drawn underground.  From the study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters: “We don’t know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don’t know when we’re going to run out,” said Stephanie Castle, a water resources specialist at the University of California, Irvine, and the study’s lead author. “This is a lot of water to lose.  We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking.”...Water above ground in the basin’s rivers and lakes is managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and its losses are documented.  Pumping from underground aquifers is regulated by individual states and is often not well documented...“The Colorado River Basin is the water lifeline of the western United States,” said Famiglietti (Jay Famiglietti, senior water cycle scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California). “With Lake Mead at its lowest level ever, we wanted to explore whether the basin, like most other regions around the world, was relying on groundwater to make up for the limited surface-water supply.  We found a surprisingly high and long-term reliance on groundwater to bridge the gap between supply and demand.”  As the study notes: The Colorado River is the only major river in the southwestern United States.  Its basin supplies water to about 40 million people in seven states, as well as irrigating roughly four million acres of farmland.

   Already, Las Vegas is finding its intake pumps at Hoover Dam are too high to receive enough water and work has been accelerated to build lower intake pumps in the lake.  Near my mother's home north of Sacramento, orchards continue to be built, the old methods of flooding fields (although newer orchards are using targeted drip lines) continues at a rapid pace, each using groundwater (my mother's well had to be lowered another 15 feet, although the well company estimated she had only another 20 feet of water depth before running dry...three new orchards have opened around her home).

   Driving through some of the Western states, one can usually see the subsidized fields of hay and alfalfa dotting the rolling hills (water is rarely regulated here, often still allocated in acre feet --which is the amount it takes to flood an acre to a depth of one foot-- vs. water which is metered and gauged by the gallon).  A majority of this "feed" for cattle is exported to China, an export that is surprisingly more economical to ship from Los Angeles to Beijing than it is to send it from Los Angeles to the nearby central part of the state.  Two years ago, according to data from the USDA, 5 million acre feet of ground water was used just for growing alfalfa in California;  as a comparison, the entire city of Los Angeles uses about half a million acre feet of water in a year.  Think of your car and filling it up with 25 gallons of gas...now throw in another 13,000 cars behind your waiting to fill up with the same amount of gas -- that's the amount of ONE acre foot.  One-third of the hay grown in California goes to China, Saudi Arabia, Japan and the United Arab Emirates to feed their cattle.  As reader Gavin Curtis wrote in a comment to Sierra magazine, "Low-flow toilets, showerheads, etc.  Really?  Give up dairy and meat for a week and you have saved more that if you left the shower on 24-7 for a month."

   The U.S. Drought Monitor says that more than 40% of California is in a state of "exceptional drought."  And this from a state that produces about 400 major agricultural products such as beef, chicken, nuts and beans (not to mention such things as garlic and asparagus).  But when Sierra reported on the numbers of gallons needed to produce such items, the results seemed to reflect the concern of the above comment by Gavin Curtis.  An 8-oz. steak = 850 gallons of water, a pound of almonds = 970 gallons of water, a glass of milk = 51 gallons of water, a serving of rice = 40 gallons of water.  The lowest users of water?  An 8-oz. peice of chicken = 132 gallons of water (pork is nearly triple that), a serving of potatoes = 24 gallons of water, a glass of wine = 21 gallons of water, a glass of soy milk = 16 gallons of water.

   Of course, the Colorado and it's resulting underground reservoir is far from alone.  In the massive Ogallala Aquifer (equal to an area 200% greater than all of the Great Lakes), underground water is estimated to be about 30% pumped out, according to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek.  Another 40% is expected to go within 30 years at the current rate of usage.  One farmer, Rick Seedorf, was quoted as saying: If we had given more thought to where the soil was best or the supply was greatest, we might be able to get more out of the land...It would have been great if that had happened, but how do you fix that now?

   This is not to say that cities such as Los Angeles are ignoring a potential crisis, the city even placing "shade balls" in some of their reservoirs to try and prevent evaporation from such an exposed expanse of water.  In Australia, billboards are showing reservoir levels in real time (the method has actually cut water consumption by half where the billboards are present).  And that myriad of swimming pools that line southern California (over one million of them)...turns out that other than the evaporation (the EPA estimation is that the average home swimming pool loses about 3500 gallons per year to evaporation), cities are rethinking their attitudes toward them, thinking that that much area of lawn or garden has been permanently removed and no longer requires water (other than to refill the water lost to evaporation, which a cover can help reduce).

   But what about the Colorado?...once again, this is quite a large topic and so will move on to another post.  But here's something to think about in the meantime...in the magazine Nature, a list of cities considered water "stressed" was published and included Tokyo, Delhi, Mexico city, Moscow, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro and others.  Each has large populations, but each also recognizes the problem and are experimenting with innovation solutions (such as the shade balls Los Angeles is trying).  Beyond the residential side, what solutions would you envision?  Would you be willing to change your diet, or watch your landscape shift away from grass?  It's a question many of us might have to soon face, whether we want to or not...and the easiest solution might be a political one and exactly who or what is being subsidized at the cost of what you at or drink.