The purpose of rivers

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The century just ended will be recognized as the time when America’s water resources were attacked with all of the sophistication and power that one would expect of an economic and technological superpower. Unruly rivers were straightened and channelized , massive levees and dikes were thrown in the way of encroaching water, cheap electricity was wrung from falling water, harbors were carved from shallow inlets, locks and dams turned wild rivers into barge canals, salmon were butchered in turbines on their way down rivers – and are proving inconveniently resistant to lessons to teach them to climb ladders on their return journey , wetlands were drained to grow crops we probably did not need, and yes the “desert was made to bloom as the rose.” The nation grew rich as a few well-situated entrepreneurs prospered. The rivers were to foster commerce, and federal water policy was the single-minded pursuit of that goal with the nation’s taxpayers putting up the money.

Was this history a mistake? Of course not. To insist otherwise would be Whigish. Young nations have different needs from mature ones, and America is, alas like some of us, no longer young. Now it is time to re-direct the purpose of the rivers. Dams and dynamite now conjure a very different image than in the early years of the century. But what dynamite helped to create, dynamite can help to undo. Is this transition in water policy fair to those whose lives and livelihood are inextricably bound up with the shifting purpose of the rivers? There is no easy answer to that. A civilized nation cushions the inevitable transitions for those caught in the vise of shifting priorities and purposes. Perhaps Water War II will concern the nature and scope of policies to alleviate the social and economic harm of the new purpose of the rivers. How will the Axis and the Allies align themselves this time? (emphasis added)

Bromley, Daniel W. “Program evaluation and the purpose of rivers.” Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education 116, no. 1 (2011): 3. (pdf)

thoughts on optimism in western water

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In which Sarah Tory interviews me for High Country News about stuff:

When John Fleck began covering water (among other things) in 1995 for New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal, he assumed he’d be writing stories about dried out wells and cracked mud. After all, as a Los Angeles native who grew up in a suburb that had replaced an irrigated citrus orchard, he’d grown up reading books like A River No More, by Philip Fradkin, and Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, essential reading for water nerds.

As a journalist, he went looking for the kinds of stories these authors promised: stories of “conflict, crisis, and doom.” But he found a very different narrative and after nearly 30 years spent covering some of the most pressing water issues in the West, Fleck is now writing a book, which is due to be published by Island Press next year. He recently spoke to HCN about the dilemma water journalists face these days— and why the West’s water problems aren’t as bad as we think.

Resilience, and pulling the cap on the new Las Vegas Lake Mead intake

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Southern Nevada Water Authority crews pulled the end cap off of the agency’s new, deeper Lake Mead intake today, and by this weekend they’ll be pumping water from the new system. This is a major milestone in a system that, when completed, provides critical water management breathing room for the entire Colorado River Basin.

Las Vegas Lake Mead intake schematic, courtesy SNWA

Las Vegas Lake Mead intake schematic, courtesy SNWA

Theorists of “resilience” have adopted ideas from the study of ecology to what they call “social-ecological systems”. One of the critical elements is the idea of “regime shifts” – points in the evolution in the system at which change becomes sudden rather than gradual. A drought-driven forest fire is an example of a “regime shift”, or the sudden dieoff of fish once a river’s water temperature or flow levels cross a critical threshold. The water supply to the greater Las Vegas metro area is one such clearly identifiable scenario where a Colorado River Basin regime shift could happen. As the reservoir from which Las Vegas gets its water, Lake Mead, drops, there reaches a point at reservoir surface elevation 1,000 at which Vegas simply can no longer get water out of the lake. As the lake approaches 1,000, Vegas gets increasingly serious water quality problems, but at 1,000 it’s a city of 2 million people largely without water. “Vegas without water” is the sudden forest fire of the Colorado River Basin. As I’ve argued previously, this has little to do with the use of water by Las Vegas itself, which has become a water conservation model. Agriculture and cities downstream are responsible for most of Lake Mead’s decline. Las Vegas is, in some sense, vulnerable to the water use of others.

“protect elevation 1,000”

This has created an interesting dynamic in Colorado River Basin water management. This high risk scenario – a city of 2 million people losing 90 percent of its water supply – ends up driving everything else, removing management flexibility because of a need to, in the jargon of the water managers, “protect elevation 1,000”. The risk removes resilience by creating an unacceptable risk of regime shift. It also means that those other downstream water users in California and Arizona are vulnerable to Las Vegas’s intake problems, because there’s still a lot of usable water below 1,000 feet that they would not be able to use without drying up Las Vegas in the process.

Opening the new intake, an $817 million project, solves half the problem. But SNWA still needs to finish a pumping plant to take full advantage of it. That $650 million project is projected to be completed by 2020. This is cutting it close. The latest Bureau of Reclamation model runs suggested a one in 25 chance that Lake Mead would fall below elevation 1,025 by 2019, which is pretty risky territory when you’re betting the water supply of a metro area of 2 million people. But imagine the risk scenario if Las Vegas had not been willing to spend the $1.5 billion on the new intake system.

Met eyeing sewage recycling for Southern California supply

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Southern California water policy is looking like a game of speed chess right now. Amid the moves to supplement its Colorado River flow with extra water from Las Vegas and Imperial (agenda pdf), Met’s board also is considering spending money on cleaning up and reusing more of the sewage effluent Southern California currently dumps in the ocean. Here’s Matt Stevens’ take:

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is in talks with Los Angeles County sanitation districts about developing what could be one of the largest recycled water programs in the world.

In a committee meeting Monday, the agency’s staff presented the framework of a plan to purify and reuse as much as 168,000 acre-feet of water a year – enough to serve about twice that number of households for a year.

Doing so would require MWD to build a treatment plant and delivery facilities and comply with various environmental regulations. Officials say similar projects have cost about $1 billion.

Sewage recycling a shift?

Stevens and one of the board members he quotes call this a shift away from water importation for Met, but I’d argue that shift has been underway for nearly 20 years, since the development of Met’s “Integrated Resources Plan” in the mid-1990s. It was the IRP’s emphasis on more reuse, conjunctive groundwater management, and similar measures that positioned Met to successfully cope with the 2003 Department of the Interior decision to slash the agency’s Colorado River Aqueduct supplies. (Buy my book! As soon as I finish writing it! I’m almost done!)

But Southern California still dumps a lot of treated effluent into the ocean, so this option still leaves the region more room yet to move on the recycling front.

That time Lawrence Ferlinghetti visited the Salton Sea

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From the Paris Review, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s journal of his 1961 visit to El Centro and the Salton Sea:

Even at the Salton Sea, the face of death has its smile. In the morning the wind is still blowing but the sun is bright, and life is stirring. Even at the bottom of a well, there’s life.

He took a bus, and seems to have left as quickly as he could, headed for San Diego. It does not sound as though he enjoyed San Diego either.

Despite drought, California farm employment rising

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I sometimes think that, in trying to understand the impacts of drought, we pay too much attention to the water numbers. It’s not that it doesn’t matter how much is in the reservoir, or is being pumped from the ground, but it’s only the first link in the chain of impacts.

California economist Jeff Michael points us to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which provides a relatively reliable and quick measure of employment impacts in the agricultural sectors, which is one area we would expect to see a societal response to drought. Here’s Jeff’s latest on the data, showing continued employment growth in California farm sector in spite of four years of horrendous drought:

For a number of years, the largest growth in farm jobs has been in the winter months rather than the peak summer months.  It suggests there is some restructuring going on in the seasonal patterns of the labor market, probably caused by the increasing number of permanent crops.  It could also reflect a tighter labor market which makes employers (in all industries) less willing to layoff workers during slack times.

What adaptive capacity looks like.