You can’t supply unlimited amounts of water to every person for every purpose.
– Phil Isenberg, vice chairman of California’s Delta Stewardship Council, in today’s New York Times.
Water Cops
Crystal: “I’m not even going to the pool.”
Cop: “What’s with the noodle, then.”
Also, a dude busted for eating almonds.
Halfway through June, another million acre feet on the Colorado River
The June mid-month forecast from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center is up a million acre feet from June 1.
Total April-July inflow into Lake Powell is now projected to be 6 million acre feet, up from 5 million acre feet forecast on June 1. That’s still below average, just 84 percent of the mean. But it’s double the forecast on May 1.
Details from USBR here (pdf).
Taking more water from the Colorado River’s upper basin
If successful, the project would allow the state to use the bulk of its remaining allocation under the Colorado River Compact, diverting another 149,600 acre-feet from the Green River annually, according to state documents.
The legislation tackles a technical question: the need for improvements to Fontenelle Dam to allow Wyoming to fully use its water. I don’t know squat about the technical question. I’ll refer you to Angus Thuermer’s story for that, he does a good job with that context.
The basin-scale policy question, though, is clear. In a general sense, the water simply isn’t there to do things like this. But Wyoming’s dogged pursuit of the project illustrates what I think is the core Colorado River Basin policy dilemma.
All of the states of the Colorado River’s Upper Basin (Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah) are using substantially less than their current full legal allocation. The Colorado River Compact allocated a total of 7.5 million acre feet of water to those four states. In 2012 (the most recent year for which we have good data – pdf here) the Upper Basin States used 4.639 maf. But even though they are using far less than their share, the big reservoirs on the system, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are dropping.
There is simply not enough water in the system for everyone to take their full legal allotment.
Here is the dilemma. People who work at the basin scale understand this. They understand that, in the long run, some sort of grand bargain (or federally imposed solution) is going to have to restrict the number of straws sucking water out of the river and the amount of water moved through each straw.
But everyone working at the basin scale has to go home and face a domestic politics that is not particularly attentive to this basin-scale problem. There, people point to the pieces of paper (the Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin Compact), and say, “Yeah, but we’re entitled to that water, it says so right here!”
You can see this tension playing out in the back-and-forth earlier this year between Colorado senior water dude James Eklund and his basin counterparts over Colorado’s new draft water plan:
“If anybody thought we were going to roll over and say, ‘OK, California, you’re in a really bad drought, you get to use the water that we were going to use,’ they’re mistaken,” he said.
Eklund, who lives at the boundary between these two worlds – basin-facing politics and domestic water politics – got slapped around a bit, because the language flew in the face of the delicate diplomacy now underway. But the dilemma remains unresolved.
Ultimately the water for the Upper Basin to keep dipping in new straws to expand use into its full legal entitlement just isn’t there. In the short run, with Lake Mead at record lows, the basin has more pressing problems, focused in the Lower Basin. But in the medium to long term, sorting out this issue is the central challenge of Colorado River Basin water management.
When the drought story is really a poverty story
Andrea Costillo in the weekend Fresno Bee:
East Porterville’s poverty and education shortcomings stand out in a state analysis of communities with the highest health risks. The analysis from the California Environmental Protection Agency shows the town’s poverty level is among the highest 10% in the state. In education, the community ranks worse than 91% of the state.
Poverty and education are among more than 20 factors, including air pollution and groundwater problems, that the state analyzed to arrive at rankings reflecting heightened health risks. East Porterville has more health stress than three-quarters of California.
Yes, as we keep hearing, East Porterville is the California community without water. But it is East Porterville’s poverty that leaves it vulnerable, lacking resilience, powerless to respond.
New Mexico: kinda wet lately, but….
Before I went on the Children’s Hour this morning on KUNM (archived for now here, go to June 20, 9 a.m.), I looked at a few graphs. Here’s the first – Albuquerque precipitation since Oct. 1. It’s the accumulated precip on the Y axis, date on the x. The brown line is mean, the green line is actual:
Albuquerque precip, water year to date
Kinda wet since early May, as you can see, and definitely above average for the water year. But is “the drought” over? That was Katie Stone’s question to me when she invited me on.
It was a setup. Neither she nor I think “the drought” is “over”. Here’s a key bit of graphy evidence. It’s the 12-month average Palmer Drought Severity Index for New Mexico as a whole. Palmer is a statistical oddity about which details don’t matter, beyond the fact that it pairs both precipitation and temperature, and does a useful job of integrating over time. By adding spatial aggregation (instead of just Albuquerque, I’ve grabbed the statewide PDSI number), you can get a feel for broad drought conditions over longer periods of time and larger spatial areas, which is what really matters. Yellow is bad:
12-month PDSI, New Mexico
The key bit is that we’ve only had three years since 1999 that have green bars. The rest are yellow. More dry than wet. So if the long term water availability is what matters to you, like if you’re a tree with deep roots or a farmer depending on the still-mostly-empty Elephant Butte Reservoir, this graph suggests a big hole out of which to dig.
Big thanks to Katie for having me on. The Children’s Hour is a great New Mexico institution – a fun show, but taking its mission of education seriously.
#CharlestonSyllabus
In one of those wonderful emergent social media moments yesterday, a suggested reading list emerged on Twitter, hashtagged #CharlestonSyllabus.
I have two personal contributions.
I’ve written previously in this space about Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
I’m now in the midst of Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery
Keisha Blain and colleagues at the African American Intellectual History Society have curated a large list here, and explain the backstory behind the hashtag’s emergence.
San Juan-Chama project shortfall (trust me, it’s good news!)
For the second year in a row, New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project contractors (the biggest of which are the Albuquerque and Santa Fe metro areas) won’t get their full allocation of Colorado River Basin transboundary deliveries this year. But with the amazingly wet May and June, it could have been a whole lot worse.
I’m going to be on the Children’s Hour on KUNM tomorrow (Albuquerque public radio), so I’ve popped for a couple of days into “journalist” mode and made a round of calls to my New Mexico water posse to see how things are going. People are near giddy over the wet weather, because things looked like they were going to be so awful this year. But I’m also getting repeated reminders that while, yes, things are good, we still have some deep problems.
The Azotea Tunnel, which carries San Juan-Chama Project water, is running full right now, at a point in the year when it is usually dropping toward a trickle:
Azotea Tunnel, courtesy CDWR
The mid-June allocation for SJC contractors was 50 percent of normal, but that was based on the June 1 water supply. We’ve continued to get more since then, so it now looks like the final allocation could be more like 70 percent or more. That’s great news compared to where things were a couple of months ago (I lost a bet based on thinking the April allocations would merely be bad, when in fact they were awful). No longer awful, but worth remembering that at 70 percent, this is only the second year in history that San Juan-Chama contractors haven’t gotten a full allocation.
Last year was the first. Drought is deep, and a wet spring and early summer isn’t enough to fix it.
Friendly reminder: don’t freak out when Lake Mead drops below 1,075
Lake Mead at 1,075. Source: USBR
Your friendly reminder: don’t freak out when Lake Mead drops below surface elevation 1,075 in the next few days. We don’t have a Lower Colorado River Basin “shortage”* yet, and likely won’t have for a couple more years.
What counts is the August forecast of the January 1 level. Mead is forecast to drop below 1,075 this summer, but is almost certain, absent some sort of “water knife” attack to release water from the dam, to be back above 1,075 by August. Here’s the pertinent language from the 2007 Interim Surplus Guidelines (pdf):
In the development of the AOP, the Secretary shall use the August 24-Month Study projections for the following January 1 system storage and reservoir water surface elevations to determine the Lake Mead operation for the following Calendar Year….
In years when Lake Mead content is projected to be at or below elevation 1,075 feet and at or above 1,050 feet on January 1, a quantity of 7.167 maf shall be apportioned for consumptive use in the Lower Division States of which 2.48 maf shall be apportioned for use in Arizona and 287,000 af shall be apportioned for use in Nevada in accordance with the Arizona-Nevada Shortage Sharing Agreement dated February 9, 2007, and 4.4 maf shall be apportioned for use in California.
The June forecast (pdf) projects 1,083 on Jan. 1. That’ll could go up again in the next few months’ forecast reports because June has continued to be wet in the Upper Colorado River Basin. We’ve gone from a year that was projected to be below 50 percent to a possible “normal” (median) flow this year into Lake Powell. That’s 1.4 million acre feet above the June 1 forecast.
Yay.
* I think I’m going to start putting scare quotes around the word “shortage” after a conversation with a smart friend who points out that the word implies some deviation from what ought to be. We need to get used to variability as the normal state of affairs in the Basin, which sometimes includes less water.
Santa Barbara starting back down desal path
Living near the ocean, in terms of water supply, is a blessing, but maybe an expensive one? The Santa Barbara, Calif., city council yesterday (Tues. 6/16/2015) voted to spend the $$$ to restart its old desalination project:
The City Council agreed to spend $3.7 million in the design phase of the project. However, this is just a fraction of the amount of money that will be needed to power up the entire desalination plant.
Restarting the desalination plant will cost approximately $55 million, and more than $4 million a year to operate it.
Santa Barbara Water Resources Manage Joshua Haggmark says that’s a sizable amount of money, however, based on the information he has, restarting the desalination plant is the only choice the City has.
Ocean water desalination in affluent coastal communities is a bit of a yo-yo: build plant in drought, don’t need it on the wet side of the cycle. Lather, rinse, repeat, as the Pacific Institute’s Amanda Pebler explained last summer:
The idea of building seawater desalination plants during a drought is not a new one. In 1991, a desalination plant in Santa Barbara was constructed in response to the 1987-1992 drought. Once the plant was completed, abundant rainfall rendered the plant cost-inefficient, and it shut down in 1992. Currently, costs to restart the plant are being assessed as the technology and infrastructure are dated and would incur new capital investment. Likewise, six seawater desalination plants were built in Australia in response to the Millennium Drought. Today, four out of the six plants are left idle due to the availability of cheaper alternatives. These examples should serve as cautionary tales.
More good Pacific Institute background here. (pdf)