Water Rites

      See if this makes sense to you.  You live in the desert --as in 118 degree heat-- and you farm water-intensive crops such as cabbage and other leafy produce, as well as corn and alfalfa.  Your water comes from a dam that diverts nearly 7 million gallons of water from the Colorado River, which doesn't sound like much except that the amount is 7 million gallons each minute!  420 million gallons each hour, or nearly 11 billion gallons per day.  And how is this all legal when other areas are drying up or struggling to get their own dams full enough to run their turbines? (Lake Powell and Lake Mead are pretty much only surviving because the federal government ordered other reservoirs to release some of their water to keep both Mead and Powell from reaching deadpool status; however, many stopped once their own water levels dropped to a 60% level).  Welcome to the world of  "grandfathered" water rights, pacts generated from over a century ago and still locked in stone in many states (the above example is from the Imperial Valley in southern California).  Now for some of you, water isn't much of an issue, either because your state or area still has plenty of water, or your water usage isn't metered (this is the case in many parts of California as water gets drawn from wells and aquifers, but is changing due to growing usage). Or perhaps you live in an apartment or a condo that simply doesn't use much water (such as not having a lawn).  Wrote an article in High Country News, farmers in parched areas are trying to adapt, and yet still flood fields and grow water intensive crops such as alfalfa and cotton...even Bermuda grass.  And many parts of Arizona "have no legal limits on pumping water from the ground."  One farmer, now considering selling his land to solar developers, told the magazine: We are at a crossroads.  Are we going to continue to farm the way we are farming and heavily subsidize growers that can't make ends meet?  Society has to come up with an answer.

     Because of archaic compacts, water rights have passed down through generations of families (think those massive ranchlands that encompass thousands and thousands of acres).  Attempting to break or reduce such grandfathered water rights is a third rail for politicians (unless you're dealing with native Americans in which case treatises and deals can be quietly amended or broken with little recourse*).  But here's the crazy part about such "rights," at least in our state.  If you don't use the allocated water, you lose the right to it.  One friend told me that he owned 20 acres which he had to flood each year to a depth of 3 feet, even though he didn't grow anything and didn't want to use the water.  If he stopped flooding his field, he would lose the right to that water in future years.  Such "grandfathered" rights can be sold, however, which is what data centers try to buy when they purchase land (the head of our state senate was voted out when he denied any knowledge of a data center he approved without public input...he had also purchased 25,000 acres nearby, before the vote was released to the public).  Unfortunately, when data centers buy such land for its water rights, they often tap into aquifers as well (many water rights mostly cover spring runoff, or what's termed "irrigation" water), affecting those farmers and rancher still using well water from those aquifers.  All that said, it's difficult to picture how much water a river such as the Colorado can carry (a good example is that the flow from the much-larger Amazon can fill St. Paul's Cathedral --site of royal weddings such as that of Princess Di-- in one second).  So for those states near water (or a river such as the Colorado) taking a little bit here and there (as in those millions of gallons) doesn't seem that big a deal.  But as water flows grew less and less, those grandfathered allocations became a problem.

     Quick aside, a 1/16-inch hole in a pipe will end up dripping about 25,000 gallons over a month.  Our home is somewhat typical, about 2400 square feet with a small front yard and an average back yard.  We tend to run our sprinklers twice a week for about 17 minutes per station, of which there are six; two of those stations being on drip lines so minimal wastage compared to average sprinklers.  Our fixtures have low-flow shower and sink heads, our dishwasher (which we run about every 5 or 6 days) uses 12 gallons for a complete cycle (newer models use even less), and our washer uses about the same.  There's only two of us so figure a shower every other day or so.  With that, our water usage is about what that leaky pipe above uses...25,000 gallons.  Multiply that by a zillion households, parks and fields across the US and you can visualize how quickly that runoff river water can literally go down the drain.  Anyway, back to how such water gets divided, at least regarding the Colorado...

    The original pact dividing how much water each of those states could divert, was done back in 1922, when the Colorado had one of its highest runoff levels.  Here's how the Water Education Foundation described that original compact: The Colorado River Compact divided the Colorado River Basin in two, apportioned the annual flow between the upper and lower basins and provided a framework for management of the river for years to come.  The compact is the cornerstone of the “Law of the River” – a complex set of interstate compacts, federal laws, court decisions and decrees, contracts and federal actions that regulate use of the Colorado River.  Before the compact, the seven Basin states – Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada and California –  were anxious about securing their share of the Colorado River but could not agree on how to allocate the river among themselves.  States in the upper watershed grew alarmed as proposals for building the Boulder Dam (later renamed after President Hoover) and All-American Canal gained congressional support at the urging of California, a state that contributed the least amount of runoff to the Colorado River.  They wanted to protect their interests if the projects were to be built.  Those concerns intensified in June 1922 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the water rights doctrine of prior appropriation – whoever used the water first has first claim to its use in times of shortage – applied regardless of state lines.  When that original compact was drawn up, there was plenty of water.  But with growing populations demanding ever more water, states were given years to work out a new agreement because continued drought conditions didn't allow those states to continue meeting earlier allocations.  The states couldn't agree, so the feds stepped in and decided for them...

     Backing up yet again, let me give you a simple example of what many in the west are facing.  Our state is still in its typical 26-year drought, which some have now raised to be a 50-year drought cycle, nothing that unusual since Utah is considered a part of the southwest where ancient indigenous peoples such as the Anasazi, Sinagua, Pueblo, and many other once-thriving cultures vanished.  As Archeology Southwest wrote: The ultimate question Southwest archaeologists are asking is, how did people survive, thrive, and solve the problems of living in this rugged and arid land for millennia?   But then this is an area of desert (much of Utah and the surrounding states south and southeast of us), areas we've over-populated, mined, logged, and beefed up with dams, reservoirs, cattle feedlots, and data centers, all of which need lots and lots of water.  In such parched areas, the infrequent thunderstorm does little to fill up lakes or reservoirs, even if it temporarily perks up groundcover.  The snowmelt from the mountains feeds into catchments which treat and divert the water for different uses, from agriculture to cities to reviving the Great Salt Lake   Our main catchment that feeds much of the Salt Lake Valley crosses Wasatch Boulevard, which happens to follow a major fault line.  Its current distribution pipes are made of concrete.  And they are on the verge of failing...

      As you can see by the photos (some from the construction company charged with replacing the entire line), changing the path and diverting a city's original water line is an enormous job. Our area hooks into two treatment plants and has already taken nearly a year of work just to reach the 3/4 point.  Imagine if you were a city with a large amount of lead or rusting piping and faced with the task of replacing all or most of it (a Biden-era fund set aside $15 billion for repairs to lead piping),  Here's what the Natural Resources Defense Council noted from 2024: Lead pipes occur in all 50 states, but some states have a disproportionate problem.  These include Illinois, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida, which are especially heavy hit.  Other states, including North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Indiana, and Louisiana, also are among the states with the most reported lead pipes.  Several cities report massive numbers of pipes with lead, including Chicago (387,000), Cleveland (235,000), New York City (112,000), Detroit (80,000), Milwaukee (74,000), Denver (64,000), St. Louis (63,000), Indianapolis (55,000), Minneapolis (49,000), Buffalo, New York (40,000), Cocoa, Florida (37,000), Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) Water in Maryland (36,000), Atlanta (31,000), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (29,000), and Philadelphia (25,000).  Hmm, and here you thought that you were out of the woods (a more updated and interactive map shows that a majority of the lead pipe service lines are located in the east).  Picture a year-long disruption to traffic in a city such as Boston or Manhattan (our city's population is 32,000 and is one-seventh the size of Boston).

     Watching this pipe replacement happen in real time in my area has been quite the education.  First off, ignore the obvious road detours as construction crosses streets, something necessary for those huge water lines (and the newer flex-lined pipes in the photos are smaller in size than the original concrete pipes).  The construction company has to keep the water flowing while hooking up the newer pipes, even through two-way or four-way junctions.  For residents, if your property happens to run along the path of a water line (as you can see in one of the photos), it has to be dug up, even though the contractor will replace and repair what they can (they've so far have done an excellent job, even saving brick mail boxes and replanting what trees they can).  One way to avoid disrupting the current flow of water is to dodge the old water line entirely and dig around it, which avoids the possibility of cracking the old pipe.  As the new pipes go in, so do many other cables alongside the pipe, whether for current use (electric, communication, etc.) or future use (a fiber optic company just finished its own digging and replanting, itself an engineering marvel as they avoided buried gas, water, and television cable lines).

     The trench is first dug out, supports put in place, then the pipes are lowered by two backhoes with chains, one end sloped lower so that the pipe can slide into the pipe already in place.  Welders then weld any seams from inside the connecting pipe (with heavy ventilation fans constantly blowing in fresh air), then it's onto the next section.  All of this takes about 4-5 days for each section of pipe, the engineers constantly checking schematics of existing gas or sewer lines to avoid any breakage (this includes the depth of the trench),  In certain completed areas, the lines are tested and flushed (this can cause air to develop in home lines, causing milky-looking water that takes a minute or two to clear; when that happens, the lines are then flushed even more which means running the water line for several days, as if a fire hydrant were simply left open).

     Yet another diversion since I do live near the once-Great Salt Lake.  A piece in the New York Review talked about these large entrapped water basins: Unlike freshwater lakes, which drain through rivers or streams, salt lakes have no outlet to the sea...They exist mainly in the driest parts of the world, forming where water gathers at the lowest point of closed basins.  Rivers flow in, but they cannot get out: the only way for water to escape is to evaporate, leaving behind the dissolved minerals that were suspended in it...salt lakes must be viewed in more generous terms, not least because they are drying up.  For decades the rivers that once fed them have been diverted for use in irrigation, and because of climate change, the water that does get to the lakes now evaporates more quickly.  The Aral Sea, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once the largest salt lake in Central Asia and the fourth-largest in the world.  But since the 1960s, as a result of the Soviet Union’s demand for cotton, its water level has decreased so rapidly that the lake has just about vanished altogether—it’s barely visible on satellite images.  Its disappearance is now a kind of shorthand for ecological catastrophe.  To the west, the Caspian Sea—the world’s largest inland body of water, covering about 149,200 square miles—is also shrinking.  In the United States, the Salton Sea is rapidly disappearing, and Owens Lake in eastern California is nearly gone.  The Great Salt Lake has lost 70 percent of its water.  Tracey [author Caroline Tracey] points out that “far more of us than we realize are implicated” in the disappearance of these ecosystems.  “If you live in Los Angeles, your drinking water comes at the expense of two salt lakes, Owens and Mono.  If you live in San Diego, your drinking water once fed the Salton Sea.”  We underestimate the consequences of losing them.  For one thing, their disappearance represents a public health crisis, already well underway in some parts of the world.  The lake beds exposed by the receding water contain residue from multiple pesticides, arsenic, mercury, and other industrial and agricultural toxins.  They become poisonous deserts whose dust storms can lift thousands of tons of contaminated sediment into the air.  Women in the Aral Sea region are warned against breastfeeding because of the levels of toxicity in their milk, and cancer rates are exceedingly high.  Children who live around the Salton Sea have reduced lung function and “a novel form of asthma.”  Scientists are worried that the air in Salt Lake City could eventually become lethal to breathe.  For another, if the lakes go, then so do the birds.  The species that depend on these “freakish habitats” have nowhere else to feed, molt, and double their body weight during migration.  In the Great Basin—a 220,000-square-mile area that spans six states in the American West and contains more than twenty major salt lakes, including Mono, Owens, and the Great Salt Lake—waterbird populations have declined by 70 percent since 1973.

    And yet another book, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman by Mariam Horn, pointed out this: The Mississippi River watershed --an immense funnel spun of 7,000 tributaries reaching from the Rockies to the Appalachians and draining 40 percent of the continental United States-- is central to the American story.  The third largest in the world (behind only the Amazon and the Congo). this basin holds most of the nation's wealth and produces most of its minerals and food: metals and coal from its mountains, meat from its northern grasslands, grains and beans from its central plains, fish and black oil from its delta...America depends of these grand working landscapes, and they in turn depend on a small number of people: the families who live by harvesting their bounty.  Farmers and ranchers make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population but manage two-thirds of the nation's land; agriculture has greater impacts on water, land and terrestrial biodiversity than any other human enterprise.  That's true everywhere, making this region a model for the world.  Half of Earth's ice-free land is in pasture or farms.  Crops now cover an area the size of South America and livestock graze an expanse as big as Africa; together they use 70 percent of all fresh water (the author also notes the contrast between a corrupt Republican President then and one now: Richard Nixon created the EPA and signed more major environmental laws than any president before or since, including the Endangered Species Act, which the Senate passed 92-0 and the House by a vote of 355 to 4.)

     We take all that water for granted, don't we?  That of course we can turn on the tap and clean water will flow; and of course we can simply throw our clothes in the washer and it will be freshly washed in about 30 minutes.  And of course we can just water our garden with the hose.  Or can we?  Recent cyber attacks on water systems have hit at least twelve states including Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.  Most analysts feel that Iran or another nation state is likely behind the attacks; but Trump apparently blamed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for the attacks, wrote USA Today.  The targets appear to be programmable logic controllers, or PLCs (what??).  But stay with me and go back to those pipes buried beneath our streets that make this water-to-our-homes possible (and the drains and gutters which were also built to safely direct any excess water away from our homes, for imagine if taking a shower meant standing in a pool of dirty water.   Beyond all the city planning and the engineering involved, ask yourself: what do we really know about water?  

     Okay, we all know its unique properties as an substance which can be a solid, a liquid, and a gas (ice, water, and steam).  But almost as important is its ability to mix with other substances (if water doesn't mix, it's termed a "suspension" and not a "solution").  Water is also a mix of hydrogen and oxygen, that famous H2O formula (quick quiz...two atoms of hydrogen, or two of oxygen?...the "Y" formation tells us that two of the atoms are hydrogen, but also that it is a "polar" formula because the oxygen atom, which form the water molecule, is a bit more negatively charged).  Water also has the rare quality of expanding as it freezes (think cracked pipes in winter).  Yet that same ice can act as an insulator since it is less dense than liquid water; water is densest at 39F, not 32F (who knew?...and lest you think I'm showing off some distant memorization from chemistry class ---my worst topic in school-- all of the chemistry stuff above came from the Amazing Book of Questions & Answers, a children's book which has proved both fascinating and humbling in how little I seemed to have actually learned --or retained-- while in school).  But imagine trying this at home, filling a 5-gallon bucket with water and pouring it onto your driveway.  Wait, you'll need more to completely cover your driveway, and even more to cover the sidewalk and lawn; and don't forget you'll also need to cover the street, enough so that the water will run freely off into the gutters.  Imagine the weight of doing that and how many buckets it would require, and to have it cover that large an area, or an even larger area such as an entire city.  How on earth can clouds hold so much weight? (okay, it's sort of a form of condensation at work here).  But consider the natural wonder of that, or that such evaporation can take salt water from the ocean, move it across vast distances and drop it back down to earth as fresh water (a process which tends to take about 10 days on average).

     Let's face it, water is seemingly everywhere around us.  Our bodies alone are 60% water.  And when we gaze out over a large lake or a sea, water can seem endless.  Stare out from the edge of an ocean and the amount of water is even more astounding.  Water, after all, covers over 70% of our planet.  But fresh water that is reachable and not frozen or buried underground, that semi-drinkable water, represents just 1% of that water.  And still, we flush away, and water decorative lawns, and throw virtually anything into our gutters and drains as if it will all be taken care of somewhere down the line.  Those forever chemicals and microplastics and harsh cleaners with sulfuric acid, and oils, and meds, and mucus, and dead aquarium fish.  Just keep that water coming.  But before you book that cruise or river trip, consider this: Annual textile production uses up enough water to fill at least 37 million Olympic-size swimming pools, wrote Scientific American.  Cotton agriculture alone uses 2.1 percent of the world's arable land.  And because roughly 60 percent of global textiles now contain plastic derived from fossil fuels, it is estimated that more than a third of the microplastics in the oceans today were shed from clothing.  The fashion industry is also responsible for up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- more than the aviation and shipping industries combined.  What??  Who knew getting dressed was so hard on our planet?

     Studies from 2024 from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has seen its climate change reporting shut down by Trump, last showed "that thicker ice which is more than four years old now forms only about 5 percent of the total," wrote the London Review.  As permafrost melts, and oceans warm, large chunks of ice break away, as happened in Nepal recently.  But the allure of water and the ocean remains: that frolic in the waves, that ride down roaring rapids, that picnic by the serene lake.  And way, way back, the allure of accidentally finding a rolled-up message in a bottle that had washed ashore.  The history of messages in bottles was told in a piece in The New Yorker, which told of one bottle recently found in Japan which contained a message written in French.  Originally from a small island, the sender had tossed the bottle over a boat in 2009, causing the local paper to report on the distant find: We can only be amazed  and say that many things that we do not think are possible are indeed possible.  So maybe if we can find a bottle that has traveled across an ocean, we can also find a solution to our shortage of water, or can at least equitably agree on each other's allotment of such water.  Or maybe we can even begin to conserve what water we have.  And the message that was inside that bottle?: My name is Jean-Paul Sundström.  I am a sailor aboard a merchant marine vessel traveling from Punta Arenas (Chile) to Yeosu, South Korea.  Let us all try, together, to build a better future and a better world --without war, without poverty-- where each of us opens our heart to others...The miracles of life are more frequent than we think -- this is the key that opens the door to hope.

*I threw this in at the bottom not because it wasn't important, but because I felt you might be more tempted to read it in this location.  It's unfair, it's typical, and it's yet another slap in the face for our Native Americans.  Here's what my local newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, had to say about how the new river compact would likely affect native tribal nations in Arizona, which is "home to 22 of 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin:"  During the driest conditions, the state [Arizona] could see its Colorado River allocation cut by as much as 77% under Reclamation's proposal...Hydropower generated from Glen Canyon Dam, and other dams part of the River Storage Project, provides electricity to over 50 tribal nations.  That included about 42% of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority' total electric supply, according to the Congressional Research Service...Reclamation has consulted with tribes, but the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) said in a statement that Reclamation has been sharing documents with states without "co-equal interaction or discourse" with the tribe, despite CRIT holding 28% of Arizona's Colorado River allocation.  If you've been following that proposal for "small" nuclear reactors to supply power for those data centers, take a guess as to where a lot of that needed uranium is waiting underground?