Water in the desert: San Luis Valley, Colorado

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Center pivot irrigation, San Luis Valley, Colorado, June 2015, by John Fleck

Center pivot irrigation, San Luis Valley, Colorado, June 2015, by John Fleck

On my way home from Boulder Saturday, I diverted off the interstate and up over a low pass into the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, where the Rio Grande (or its Mexican name, the Río Bravo) starts its long, frequently interrupted journey to the sea.

It’s a broad, flat, high desert valley, 7,500 feet (2,300 meters) in elevation, less than 10 inches of precipitation a year on the valley floor. But between groundwater and the river, it’s become a robust agricultural region. According to the new basin plan (pdf, a part of Colorado’s water planning effort), farmers in the valley have 523,000* acres under irrigation, which is comparable to the vast acreage of the Imperial Valley in southern California. But it’s a different kind of farming. With a shorter growing season, San Luis Valley alfalfa growers, for example, get a yield of 3.15 to 4.5 tons per acre. In desert climates of the lower Colorado River, where there is nothing one might call “winter” to get in the way of crop production, you can get something close to twice as much alfalfa per acre. But there’s a relationship between the consumptive use of water and the amount of crop grown. To first order the farmers in San Luis both use less water per acre and make less money per acre than the farmers in Imperial. (I don’t know of any dollars/crop per unit of water comparisons – that would be interesting.)

San Luis Valley ditches

San Luis Valley ditches

The governance structures also are different. In headwaters regions, you have many diversions from the many tributaries that gather the water. You have many governance structures to match that. So in the San Luis Valley, you have six major ditches, each with its own governance structure, and many more small ones.  In the lower reaches all the waters have collected into a single river and you have more centralized diversions, and more centralized governance structures to match – in Imperial, for example, the Imperial Irrigation District. The Rio Grande is a lot like the Colorado in this regard.

The other thing about the San Luis Valley that’s different from Imperial is that the high mountain valley, as you can see from the picture, is gorgeous. It’s been wet this spring, and the Rio Grande was big when I crossed it at Alamoso, but the gauges suggest it was a lot bigger upstream, before the farm ditches snagged their share. I’ve a fondness for the low desert farm valleys like Yuma and Imperial, but I realize that is not universally shared. It’s an acquired taste.

* The Census of Agriculture puts the acreage at 387,000 acres (pdf), illustrating the maddening difficulty of figuring out how much land is under irrigation in the West. In putting together this post I reread the methodological bits in Mike Cohen’s invaluable Pacific Institute report on Colorado Basin ag, which would be hilarious if the process he describes were not so painful.

** Thanks to Matt Hildner who covers the San Luis Valley for the Pueblo Chieftain for helping me understand a bit about how valley plumbing works.

Arizona – a century of fear that California wants to steal its water

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In the fall of 1934, Arizona Gov. Benjamin Moeur dispatched the Arizona National Guard to the banks of the Colorado River near its junction with the Bill Williams to try to block efforts to build what would eventually become Parker Dam. Their fear: that the Colorado River Aqueduct, which would tap into the new reservoir, would steal Arizona’s god-given Colorado River water, siphoning it off to dreaded Southern California.

Arizona Republic, 1965

Arizona Republic, 1965

It’s the most dramatic case of a longstanding Arizona tradition – the fear that California is out to steal Arizona’s water*. It is good to see, in Brandon Loomis’s Arizona Republic story today, that Arizona is not straying from its roots:

Arizona currently has 9 million acre-feet in the ground, having socked it away in aquifers during years when the river provided more than it needed. Californians are starting to look at that cushion as their potentially their own, (Grady Gammage) said, while others question why some Arizona farmers are growing cotton with water that could save California food crops.

“That is penalizing us for being responsible,” he said, “and rewarding them for being irresponsible.”

Phoenix water services director Kathryn Sorensen said the state’s water providers are starting to talk about a California threat. One potential area of concern is a California drought-relief bill now being envisioned in Congress.

“California has not shared what they’re doing,” she said.

* To be fair, California did succeed in snagging a lot of the river’s flow and, more importantly (as Brandon’s story explains) a deal under which Arizona bears pretty much the entire risk for shortage in severe, sustained drought.

As Lake Mead drops, who is really vulnerable?

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As Lake Mead drops toward a Lower Colorado River Basin shortage declaration, a group of UC Santa Barbara students have done an excellent analysis (pdf of their summary results) that shows where the real vulnerabilities are. They conclude that Las Vegas and the municipal areas of Central Arizona are on solid ground. Arizona farmers won’t do so well, and Southern California has some potential problems at the margin:

vulnerability as Lake Mead drops

vulnerability as Lake Mead drops

 

Recreation at Lake Mead will take a hit, they found, as will power generation. Their full report is here.

Friday in Boulder, I will be optimistic

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So this is happening Friday afternoon in Boulder, Colo., at the annual University of Colorado Martz Summer Conference of Water Law and Policy Nerds:

  
I’ll talk about social capital and adaptive capacity some, and try to make it clear that I was paying attention to the rest of the conference, but mostly I’ll just fidget nervously thinking to myself, “I’m on the same panel as Justice Hobbs!”

Farming nature

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Going through files recently, I ran across this fascinating little bit of New Mexico water policy documentary history. It’s from 2011, when the Audubon Society and the Elephant Butte Irrigation District were trying to figure out a way to collaborate on a habitat restoration project on the Lower Rio Grande. The idea was to lease agricultural water rights and use them to irrigate riparian habitat along the river channel. Audubon was anxious to do this because this is the sort of thing Audubon does, and EBID was interested because of the protection such habitat might offer against Endangered Species Act claims.

But federal law that created the irrigation project stood in the way, because it specified that the project’s water was to be used for agriculture. The solution? Call this agriculture:

 

Chandler builds a land use-water use widget

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Kathleen Ferris explaining the new ordinance in Chandler, Ariz., creating a linkage between land use and water use as the city builds out its last vacant acreage:

Chandler’s new ordinance helps the city make decisions about land use and water use simultaneously. The new ordinance allots water to new businesses based on the square-footage and type of the building or buildings. If a business needs more water than the base allocation, the business must demonstrate it benefits the city commensurate to the extra water it requires to operate.

 

Drought and media bias

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Tom Curwen has a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times of the sort that I’d like to see more of – beyond “OMG California is toast” drought coverage to look at what works in the state’s water management, what sort of adaptive capacity exists in the places where water is not running out. Which, it turns out and breathless headlines notwithstanding, is much of the state:

National headlines ask: “The End of California?” News stories track the diminishing snowpack and disappearing reservoirs, and a small fish in the Delta is scapegoated, almond growers and consumers are shamed and the mythology of Western resolve is questioned.

The crisis has led many to wonder whether the state has lost its historic resilience.

But the drama hides reality and for those who have studied California’s long relationship with its water, the drought is serious but hardly a disaster.

“The sky is not falling,” said Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California.

Scary drought map that feeds the "bad news" meme

Scary drought map that feeds the “bad news” meme, only it really is bad!

Distance from my former career (newspaper journalism) has made more obvious something that bothered me while I was in it – the bias toward the bad. The incentives are deeply embedded in the newsroom culture – the knowledge that “gotcha” and failings and trouble are more likely to get you onto the front page, which is the currency of newsroom status (if not financial reward – the jobs mostly pay shit). A friend today shared an interesting bit of research that offers (for me, at least) a fresh explanation. It’s “You get what you want: A note on the economics of bad news“, by Jill McCluskey and colleagues (Information Economics and Policy Volume 30, March 2015):

In a framework where news is informative and consumers are risk averse, diminishing marginal utility implies that information about a negative income shock is more valuable than information about a positive shock, which leads to disproportionate reporting of bad news.

Seems like a reasonable model that could explain a quip from one of my editors that always bothered me: “We don’t write about planes that don’t crash.” I get that writing about the planes that crash is really important, diminishing marginal utility of information and all, but the fact that most planes don’t crash seems important as well. To only write about the crashing ones is to mislead.

Matt Stevens of the Los Angeles Times, who’s been doing a lot of really good drought coverage, had a viral story last month that captured the dilemma – California water officials deliver sobering facts on depleted wells. State water officials had told legislators that 1,900 California wells had gone dry. As has happened repeatedly in California drought coverage, Stevens zeros in on Tulare County, in California’s Central Valley:

More than half of the dry wells are in Tulare County, southeast of Fresno, state officials said. Most of the dry wells there are within the community of East Porterville, where hundreds of residents have gone without running water and volunteers have delivered emergency supplies.

But Stevens also points out that California has between 1 million and 2 million wells. So (contrary to a Times copy editor’s mistaken math) somewhere between 99.8 percent and 99.9 percent of California’s wells haven’t gone dry. I’ve talked about the Porterville problem before (and before that, when it was drought in Texas in 2012, the Spicewood Beach problem – if there’s just one place running out water, it’ll get a lot of media attention). Don’t get me wrong. If I was in California doing journalism, I’d be doing Porterville. In New Mexico in 2013, I wrote about Maxwell, which was our East Porterville/Spicewood Beach. But in retrospect, I realized I’d done it badly, and felt a need to come back and write another story to clean up the mess.

The question of what is going right, or at least not going wrong, in those 99-plus percent of not-dry wells seems like a critical question. What distinguishes East Porterville from the many other Central Valley communities that haven’t run out of water?

Curwen’s story offers a version of this, taking readers down into the weeds to understand the formation of the Santa Ana River Watershed Project Authority, one of a zillion institutional widgets that have evolved over the years to manage California’s increasingly scarce supplies of water. Things are tight everywhere in California, but most places where the water is not running out, which are most places in California, have a story like the Santa Ana.

It is in those myriad details that we’ll understand where future failures loom and how to avoid the next East Porterville.

University of New Mexico Water Resources Program: my newly remodeled career

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UNM Water Resources Program 573 class at Rio Grande Central Avenue Bridge, Albuquerque

UNM Water Resources Program 573 class at Rio Grande Central Avenue Bridge, Albuquerque

Thursday morning I found myself standing knee deep in the Rio Grande. Grinning.

University of New Mexico water resources faculty members Mark Stone (that’s Mark in the green shirt helping the knee-deep students learn to measure river flow) and Becky Bixby were out at the river with the summer field course students. It was a trial run for a multi-day field trip to the Valles Caldera, and a chance for me to tag along and…. Well, I’m not quite sure what I do.

When Bob Berrens, an old friend and the newly named head of UNM’s Water Resources Program, invited me a couple of years ago to join the faculty as an adjunct and help teach the introductory “Contemporary Issues” class, I hesitated. I was working at the newspaper full time and trying to write a book. But my eyes lit up when I realized the faculty appointment came with full university library privileges. Library privileges! Plus, look at this course description:

With a focus on southwestern US, students examine contemporary issues in water resource systems, including water quality; ecosystem health; alternative institutional arrangements and property rights regimes; stakeholder concerns; economics; water supply and demand, policy, management and allocation.

I’d want to take that class if I wasn’t teaching it! That’s fun stuff, right in my wheelhouse. I’ve never been big on planning my life, but once I began working with students any hesitation I might have had melted away. These are bright, engaged people who care about water and are hoping to make a career of it. If I care about helping to solve water problems, which was the whole point of my journalism, it’s hard to think of a better way to invest a bit of my time and energy. Huge potential returns. I couldn’t have planned it better.

As I drifted away from newspaper journalism, the Water Resources Program gave me an office on campus, which has turned out to be a delightful place to spend days in the company of people thinking about water – both students and faculty.

When it comes to the actual scientific task of measuring things, which Mark and Becky are teaching in the summer course, I’m just a dilettante, a dabbler, but I’m always happy to stand next to smart people and ask questions, which I did Thursday morning, mainly of the students. They were measuring the rate of water infiltration into the clay-y soil on the river bank, and the Rio Grande’s flow, and collecting samples of algae and other itsy bitsy life.

Mark demanded I clamber down the bank and into the river with the rest of them, for which I thank him, the Teva nearly lost in the muck notwithstanding. They were learning how to use an acoustic doppler current profiler, which I know all about having done a story on the history of stream gauging. When I say I “know all about it,” I mean that in the manner of the journalistic dilettante, by which I mean I know enough to slot it into a web of knowledge about how stuff works, but not nearly enough to do it myself or teach it to others.

There seems to be some value in my newly remodeled career to this intellectual habit of stitching together disparate elements needed to tell stories, and if I’m not entirely sure what a diatom is, the students can always explain it to me. As I mentioned, they’re pretty smart.

Moving toward drought

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A fascinating analysis by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program concludes that 57 percent of the nation’s population growth between 2000 and 2014 happened in places currently experiencing drought. Weird. But there also is this:

In the midst of these challenges, though, some of the fastest-growing places like Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio, and Austin are pioneering new ways to recycle and conserve water, while increasing flows into urban streams and rivers. These innovative steps represent crucial steps to address the country’s needed investment in water infrastructure, as states and localities look to overcome a host of economic and environmental costs in the years to come.