New Mexico is “drought free”, sort of

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New Mexico is "drought free"

New Mexico is “drought free”

For the first time since Nov. 30, 2010, New Mexico has been categorized as entirely free of “drought” in this morning’s federal Drought Monitor. 26 percent of the state remains “abnormally dry”, but none of the state is in any of the monitor’s formally designated drought categories.

This does not mean that we are free of the sort of problem that one might normally label as “drought”, because it is a word with no one meaning, which is one of its difficulties. It depends entirely on how you use and perceive your need for water. If you are a farmer dependent on snowpack and reservoir storage to water your Hatch chiles, “drought” is not over. If you are a piñon in the low mountains of northern New Mexico sapped of soil moisture by warming temperatures, “drought” may never be over. If you are me, sitting in Albuquerque with a full reservoir of banked water upstream, a backup supply of groundwater in an aquifer that has been rising despite a long term precipitation deficit, and water demand that continues dropping because of conservation success and population growth that has nearly stopped because of a tanked economy, “drought” may be an increasingly unhelpful conceptual category.

Defining drought’s end

Otowi Index Flow

Otowi Index Flow, not drought free

Some good numbers:

  • The Albuquerque National Weather Service gauge has received 10.5 inches of precipitation in 2015 to date, 17 percent above the long term mean.
  • The aquifer at Jerry Cline Park, near my house, has risen 18 feet since the winter of 2008, which is the turning point for Albuquerque groundwater management.
  • Flow on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque this morning is 1,830 cubic feet per second, more than double the mean for this date.

Some bad numbers

  • Elephant Butte Reservoir remains extremely low, at 11.5 percent of capacity. This is the reservoir that serves the most economically productive farmland in New Mexico.
  • Since 2000, we have had just two years of above-average flow in the Rio Grande.
  • The average temperature in the state’s forested northern mountains in 2010 has been 2.5F above the long term average. The last year that was below the long term average (as measured by a bit more than a century of records) was 1991.

Tamarisk beetle now entrenched on New Mexico Rio Grande

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The Tamarisk Coalition’s latest survey maps for work done over the summer of 2015 show that the beetle has now spread along the entire Rio Grande in New Mexico. The light blue dots are areas where the beetle showed up this year:

tamarisk beetle map

Courtesy Tamarisk Coalition

The beetle was originally introduced in Colorado and Utah as an experiment in invasive species control, an attempt to halt the spread of the Eurasian tamarisk tree, seen (rightly or wrongly, the science is mixed) as a water hog. But the bugs quickly spread farther than expected, and as you can see they’re now pretty widespread across the West. (Background here.)

Notice the populations also showing up on the Montana-Wyoming border. What’s up with that?

New Mexico, borderlands

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New Mexico has always seemed the least borderlandish of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands states. Unlike Texas, Arizona, and California, we don’t really have a large twin city spanning the border (think Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, El Paso-Juárez, the Nogales’s, San Diego-Tijuana). My former Albuquerque Journal colleague Lauren Villagran in a poignant column this morning on the scars left by Juárez drug violence bids us not forget:

If it’s easy in Albuquerque to forget New Mexico is a border state, but it’s not so simple down south, where families often have connections on both sides and many people, their friends or family were in some way touched by the violence.

She tells the story of a young Juárez-El Paso rapper named Luis Barron:

Barron, 35, was born in Juárez, grew up there, went to school in El Paso and, like many other people in the region, crisscrossed the border daily. A U.S. legal resident who works as a driver for an El Paso health clinic, he was raising three daughters on the El Paso side when his wife was deported in 2008 and given five years before she could apply to return. The family went with her to Juárez.

This is the life that’s hard to understand when you’re farther away from the mysterious line we’ve drawn on the map – a community that spans the border, moving back and forth, with connections often tighter across the border than to the distant national centers of power and influence – borderland as third nation.

The drug violence that so devastated Juárez during those awful years was not a thing just in “Mexico”, but in that shared third nation of the borderlands.

Juárez, at peace, wants to move beyond its violent past, but there are scars that no slogan can erase.

I should have written a book about pizza cheese

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A colleague notes an interesting bit of business in Dan Boyd’s story in this morning’s newspaper about the state of New Mexico’s “closing fund”, a state government goody bag to help fund economic development:

The most recent project to be allocated closing fund dollars is the expansion of a Southwest Cheese Co. factory in Clovis.

data source: USDA

data source: USDA

My book-in-the-making includes a riff on “burgers and pizza cheese,” because a significant fraction of the water we use for agriculture in the western United States goes to alfalfa and other forage for animals, and a significant fraction of that goes to dairies, and a significant fraction of that goes to the production of pizza cheese. Per capita U.S. consumption of Mozarella (mmm, pizza) has increased ten-fold since 1970 to 11 pounds per year. In the early 2000s Mozarella caught up with perennial favorite cheddar. For a few years it was neck-and-neck, but Mozarella ended the clear winner.

So when we as a state fund an eastern New Mexico cheese plant as a tool of economic development, we are funding the topmost rung of a ladder that is based on farmland devoted to alfalfa and other yummy cow food. It’s the alfalfa->dairy->pizza cheese supply chain.

 

Myths of rising water demand

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I’m not sure what Nebraska attorney David Cookson was up to in this recent talk in Kearney. He seems to be trying to scare the crap out of Nebraskans about water wars risk, of Californians and rich Wall Street money hounds coming after his state’s water. Whatever, this statement, at the heart of his argument, is flat wrong:

“The demand for water never goes down. Ever,” he said.

Here’s the water use trend data, from the U.S. Geologic Survey:

U.S. water use

U.S. water use

There’s a frustrating linguistic confusion that I need to sort out between “use” and “demand”, which have both technical and plain English meanings that don’t always line up and hide conceptual difficulties. But by whatever word you choose, water use/demand across every sector of the U.S. economy – irrigation, municipal, power plant cooling – has gone down.

Water scarcity in U.S. Indian Country

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When we talk about water scarcity in the western United States, it’s usually a conversation couched in acre feet of water and groundwater regulation and the Lake Mead bathtub ring and gallons per capita per day. But a dive into the data as I was cleaning up one of the chapters in my book-to-be reminded me that any conversation about water scarcity needs to start with whether we’ve got plumbing at all.

I’d been writing about water in Native American communities in the Colorado River Basin, and looking at Census Bureau data tables on who does and does not have indoor plumbing. But it didn’t really pop out until I plotted it up in a map:

plumbing

plumbing

Apache County in Arizona and McKinley County in New Mexico are, by far, the most water-scarce communities (by this measure) among populous areas in the Lower 48 states. This is the heart of the Navajo Nation, a native community that has struggled for years to win rights to the water implied by the promise of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1908 Winters decision. One in three homes in Apache County, nearly 11,000 of them, don’t have the full suite of toilet, hot and cold running water, and a shower or bathtub. Another 7,000 homes in McKinley County (27 percent) are lacking. I’ve written about this before, in stories about efforts to leverage the right to water under the U.S. legal system to an opportunity to actually bring plumbing to these distressed communities:

The public health implications for the communities that lack running water are enormous, Robertson pointed out. A 2007 federal study, noting that a wide variety of diseases are common without access to clean water, put the health care savings of the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project at $435 million over 20 years. “There is a clear connection between sanitation facilities (water and sewerage) and Indian health,” the study concluded.

Some caveats about the data: I’ve left Alaska off (most of the highest rates of homes without plumbing are rural Alaska counties, but I don’t know enough about rural Alaska and native issues there to sort them out). My cutoff for “most populous” is arbitrary, but McKinley and Apache counties have far more homes without plumbing than those Alaska counties, or anywhere else in the nation for that matter. Shannon County in South Dakota, the Oglala Lakota reservation, has a 24 percent lack-of-plumbing rate. The county on the Texas-New Mexico border that looks dark on the map is Loving County. Almost no one lives there. Terrell County on the U.S.-Mexico border, west of Big Bend, has a 27 percent lack-of-plumbing rate, but hardly anyone lives there either.

There are only a couple of counties in the eastern U.S., all in western Pennsylvania, that have low rates of indoor plumbing, especially Forest and Potter counties. I think that’s Amish country?

There’s also a lengthy and fascinating discussion here about the methodological sensitivity involved when Census Bureau surveyors come calling to ask people about their plumbing: “Asking explicitly about flush toilets has resulted in negative attention from the public.”

 

A legend in the making: Albuquerque Tumbleweed Snowman 2015

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Seen on my bike ride this morning, Albuquerque’s Tumbleweed Snowman in preparation in the back lot behind the flood control authority offices and workshop:

Tumbleweed Snowman under construction, November 2015

Tumbleweed Snowman under construction, November 2015

Tumbleweed Snowman history

Some years ago I got the help of retiring Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority engineer John Kelly to trace the history of the snowman, which by tradition is emplaced along Interstate 40 just east of the I25 interchange on the Monday after Thanksgiving:

Kelly was there at the start back in 1995 when a group of the agency’s executives cooked up the idea of a tumbleweed snowman out behind their main office between Menaul and the interstate.

“Some things are worth doing for fun,” Kelly explained.

Tuesday, Kelly pulled up in a pickup truck on his last day on the job, bearing a sack of burritos for the crew’s mid-morning break and eyeing the snowman’s rising three-lobed physique.

Spray-painted white, three tumbleweeds are assembled atop a steel frame that Moya and his colleagues have refined over the years. A sturdy steel hat with “AMAFCA” on the front sits atop his head as he greets drivers speeding past on the interstate.

Legend has it that Larry Trujillo, the flood control authority’s maintenance supervisor, looked at Kelly like he was crazy when the idea first surfaced 15 years ago.

Trujillo, sitting in an office Tuesday morning overlooking the yard where the snowman assembly was under way, did not dispute the legend. But he seems to have softened over the years, now that he has grandchildren: “They say, ‘Grandpa, grandpa, we see your snowman!'”

On this date in water history: Arizona governor, state senator, fisticuffs over the Colorado River

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87 years ago today in Colorado River water management history, water apparently was for fightin’ over:

Butte Montana Standard November 27, 1928, page one

 

POLICE CALLED TO STOP BATTLE IN STATE HOUSE

Affair Outcome of Argument Between Governor and Senator on River

LIVELY MELEE HAS MANY PARTICIPANTS

Gov. Hunt Declares Blow Received from Opponent Was “Purely Accidental”

PHOENIX, Ariz., Nov. 26 – Police were called to the Arizona state capital late today when Gov. W. P. Hunt was engaged in a brief fist fight by State Senator Fred Colter. The governor was struck one or two blows by Colter as the climax of an argument in the capitol lobby. Interference by J.S. Strode, secretary of the governor, ended the affair.

The affair, witnesses said, was the outcome of an argument between Hunt, Colter and several legislators on the question of the Colorado river state commission, to which Senator Colter is opposed.

Arizonans have always taken their water very seriously.