The folks at Colorado Mesa University have sent ’round their call for abstracts (pdf) for this fall’s Upper Colorado River Basin Water Forum:
Call for abstracts
(Disclosure: I’m on the forum planning advisory committee.)
Precipitation this winter at Crater Lake, in northern California southern Oregon, is a tad above normal. Snowpack is at record lows:
On Friday morning, the snow level was at 32 inches, tying the Feb. 27 record for low snow. However, snow was falling Friday from a new storm system bringing rain to the Rogue Valley and snow to higher elevations.
Grimes said the park is actually at 104 percent of its average precipitation for this time of the year. But warmer temperatures have caused much of that moisture to fall as rain rather than snow.
Unite and Conquer
Matt Jenkins, the best journalist we’ve got covering water in the western United States, has an insightful cover story in the latest High Country News on Pat Mulroy, the recently retired head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. (Not on line yet – subscribe!)
Mulroy is known for being brash and pugnacious, but Matt gets beyond that gloss to a deeply reported picture of the former SNWA’s critical role in moving Colorado River Basin problem-solving past an age of fighting and the defense of entrenched interests to one of sometimes tense but ultimately productive collaboration.
He adeptly characterizes Mulroy’s transition from someone pushing big, Vegas-style moves, like her famous failed effort to buy water rights from west slope Colorado and her storming 2005 threat to solve the basin’s problems through litigation, to a more quiet cooperative incrementalism that has become the hallmark of current river problem solving. The key is to live within the “Law of the River” while bending it in clever ways to meet new realities:
All of the innovations since the drought began – while carefully pitched as pilot programs and interim measures – have been small advances in Mulroy’s broader initiative, launched more than two decades ago, to open up the law of the river to broader possibilities. That, in large part, is her legacy: pushing everyone into the new era of aquatic contortionism that it will take to fit everything through the knothole.
It’s an optimistic piece, the first in “Glass Half Full,” an occasional series at HCN focused on water solutions. “There’s more than enough, if we’re wise to keep the glass half full.” Yes!
Brandon Loomis at the Arizona Republic, with an O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism through the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University, is trying to help us with this:
Will Arizona and the Southwest continue to lead the nation in growth as the Colorado River dries?
The first round of stories, with Republic photographer Mark Henle, is terrific:
BOULDER CITY, NEV. – I was standing at a pullout on the Arizona side of Hoover Dam late this afternoon, taking pictures of the big empty, when a Japanese family got out of their car and walked up to the edge. One of the men pointed down at the big empty, then made a broad gesture at the “bathtub ring”, the white mineral deposits on the opposite wall of black canyon that starkly mark the great emptiness of Lake Mead. He spoke words I understood despite not sharing a language. It was a version of the same comments I heard over and over this week as people came upon the great emptiness of Lake Mead.
Hoover Dam from the Arizona side at sunset, Feb. 27, 2015, by John Fleck
I was shooting into the sun, so this picture doesn’t quite do it justice, but you get the idea. It’s the physical manifestation of a system that, to borrow the language of one of the people I talked to at length this week, is not in “equilibrium”. All you have to do is get out of your car and look down.
Melinda Harm Benson, part of my University of New Mexico water policy posse, has been teaching me about “resilience”, which as she carefully defines it means the ability of a system to absorb a shock and retain its basic functional characteristics. In a very helpful paper applying this line of thinking to the Rio Grande, Benson borrows this definitional language from Brian Walker and David Salt: “the capacity of a system to absorb a spectrum disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks—to have the same identity.”
Colorado River Indian Tribes alfalfa field
What we are seeing in the great emptiness of Lake Mead is a disturbance – substantially less water than we’ve every had before in the system, with demands that are simultaneously as large as, if not larger than, anything seen before in the system.
But the definition of resilience I’m using here begs an important question: who gets to decide what functions are to be retained? What is in, and what is out?
When I say “the system,” I intend something that requires some care in definition. It includes not only the river, but the infrastructure we have built on top of it over the last century to move its water for uses elsewhere, and the society that we have built based on the availability of that water.
Mirage hotel, Las Vegas Strip, February 2015, by John Fleck
So I mean, for example, the alfalfa fields of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, and the befountained resort/casinos of the Las Vegas Strip. I mean Phoenix and Los Angeles as well, and farming in the lettuce and alfalfa belt of Imperial and Yuma, and maybe even the Salton Sea. (Really John, the Salton Sea too? Would you like fries with that and a large drink as well?) The water manager who introduced the word “equilibrium” into our conversation as a goal meant much the same thing – a system that is able to take care of all sectors of the human economy that depend on it (including recreation) while leaving water for the natural environment.
Can we have all of that?
I think the answer is “yes”, that each of the functions I’ve chosen to ascribe to include in the system can survive intact, with much the same relationships and feedbacks to the whole, but at some smaller scale. Every piece of the system must have the capability of getting by with less water – more so if we are going to include “the environment”, which in some areas we’ve already zeroed out. We need to get the institutional plumbing right in a way that backs away from our current precipice. New water sharing and distribution rules are needed that can offer more flexibility – more resilience to shocks.
Las Vegas church that used to have lawn, now xeriscaped, February 2015
This is not impossible. It is easy to imagine Las Vegas – currently consumptively using 124 gallons per person per day – going down to 100 and still retaining its same basic structure and function. It is easy to imagine Imperial Valley with 350,000 irrigated acres during dry years instead of 450,000, still retaining its same basic structure and function.
There are other conceivable approaches. We could decide that some pieces of the system are expendable. We’ve already largely done that with large segments of the natural environment, though the river’s managers now seem to be genuinely trying to find a way to undo some of that damage. We could solve the entire river’s water deficit in one stroke if we decided that it no longer makes sense to farm the Imperial Valley. I’m not advocating that, and I don’t think it’s needed, but there are those who think it’s inevitable.
If we set to squabbling rather than figuring out how to share, we also could crash-land the system in ways that I think are unacceptable – letting Lake Mead drop below Las Vegas’s water system intakes is the system’s most dramatic near term risk scenario, but one also can easily see a not too distant future in which Phoenix and Tucson see their Colorado River water slashed while California loses not a drop. I also don’t think that’s desirable or acceptable, but that’s a realistic scenario if we don’t get the rules fixed soon. In any of those scenarios, the system would no longer retain its basic function and structure.
It would be a failure of resilience, it would not be “equilibrium”, and it would make me sad.
Used to be a lake back there, but they gave up extending the boat ramp when the lake went away. Las Vegas Bay, Lake Mead, February 2015, by John Fleck
With Lake Mead projected to drop 15 feet between now and mid summer, to historic lows, the National Park Service is planning to spend another $5 million extending boat ramps, Steven Slivka at the Boulder City Review reported today:
Vanover said drought conditions are expected to continue, and the Park Service is ready to deal with the repercussions.
She added that the Park Service is expecting to spend about $5 million this summer to extend launch ramps. All but one ramp had to be extended last year, she said, and the Park Service was forced to install temporary pipe matting and concrete planks because the lake was losing so much water.
While Lake Mead’s primary purpose is water supply, the Review quotes the Park Service reporting that there were 6.9 million visitors last year to Lake Mead National Recreation area (which includes both Mead and Lake Mohave). That’s more than the Grand Canyon.
Erika Moonin, the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s engineering project manager for construction of the agency’s new Lake Mead intakes, showed me a picture yesterday of water pouring over Hoover Dam’s spillways in 1983, the last time the reservoir spilled. When she was a youngster, her dad took her out to see the spectacle. Looking at it today, it’s hard to imagine. Current lake level is 137 feet below the 1983 peak.
I was trying to take pictures earlier this week that might illustrate the big empty. Here’s what the spillway looks like today:
Hoover Dam spillway, Nevada side
LAS VEGAS – I like the fact that Las Vegas, Nev., is preserving the relics of its water origin story.
Springs Preserve, Las Vegas, Nev., February 2015
From “spring hill” at the Springs Preserve municipal park, you can see the towers of Las Vegas’s gambling strip. Visitation at the park this afternoon when I snuck away for a bird-watching walk after a morning of meetings downtown was no match for the crowds around the Bellagio’s more famous water treatment. But it’s a lovely park, with walking trails that wind among the sites of the old springs around which the first incarnation of modern Las Vegas was founded more than a century ago.
I saw verdin, lovely little yellow-gray birds with remarkable adaptations to desert life, and flickers playing on the telephone poles.
I guess every city is defined by its relationship with its water, but Las Vegas is perhaps more so? The modern city grew around the springs that are now preserved at the park, which provided a water supply for the railroad’s construction and the town site that grew around the tracks. Artesian wells eventually were drilled all across the central valley, until the artesian flow stopped, then groundwater pumping followed.
The modern Las Vegas water story dates to the 1930s, when construction of Hoover Dam nearby drove a population boom (construction workers) and a tourist boom (folks driving up from L.A. to watch the construction). And it created a vast reservoir that borders to the Las Vegas metro area to the east. Lake Mead is both playground to and water supply for Las Vegas and the population boom that followed, long replacing an aquifer ill-suited to a city of 2 million.
Sunset over Boulder Harbor, Lake Mead, February 2015
Mead also has become a nervous reminder, to folks in Vegas who pay attention, of the fragile nature of life in the desert. A guy named Scotty, a 40-something who works in the Vegas convention industry, explained that nervous feeling as we chatted yesterday afternoon while he pulled his little aluminum Jon boat onto a trailer after an early fishing season scouting trip out of Boulder Harbor.
He moved here in 1997, and can remember when the reservoir was so full kids could drive out the dirt road along Gypsum Wash east of town to a spot where they could take eight foot dives off a little cliff into the lake. Today, it’s an 80 foot cliff with a sandy wash at the bottom as a landing spot. Mead’s surface elevation is 107 feet down from the year Scotty arrived, and watching the change – he’s out here fishing or boating the lake nearly every week, he said – makes him wonder whether Vegas will eventually just dry up and blow away.
My conversations with the region’s water managers suggests that’s unlikely. But the visibility of the white bathtub ring around Lake Mead’s shoreline – it’s just a 30-mile drive from the Bellagio to Boulder Harbor – provides a fascinating visual reminder of the drought that few bit western cities.
It’s easy to make misleading connections here. Water use in Las Vegas has little to do with Lake Mead’s big empty. As I’ve written before, Las Vegas is one of the few water users on Lower Colorado River taking less then its full entitlement from Lake Mead, and what it is taking is far less than the big ag users downstream. But there’s also no way to avoid the unusually tight connection between this community and its water, which stretches in an unbroken historical line from the springs to Lake Mead. It’s what makes Vegas so interesting a story-telling water nerd.
People monitoring snowpack and planning for the coming water year use two quite different definitions for the “Upper Colorado” basin/headwaters/watershed.
Colorado Snowpack, courtesy NRCS
One definition involves the watershed above Glenwood Springs, within the state of Colorado, where the branch of the big river once known as the “Grand” and then renamed the “Colorado” begins.
(Bob in the comments offers this correction: “The original Grand River extended all the way to Grand Junction, CO, where the river below its confluence with the Gunnison River, was then called the Colorado River.” Thanks Bob!)
As of this morning, this “Upper Colorado Headwaters” had 92 percent of the mean for this date in the year.
But that is just one of many headwaters areas that feeds the larger “Upper Colorado River Basin”, the mingling of streams-turned-rivers that includes the Green, the Gunnison, the San Juan and more that collectively provide the water that feeds into Lake Powell, the collection point for the larger “Upper Colorado River Basin”.
Westwide Snowpack
You can see that green stripe in western Colorado – the “Upper Colorado” defined narrowly, is an outlier. While it has 92 percent of average snowpack this morning, the full “Upper Basin” stands at an estimated 77 percent, according to an aggregation of data from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
Hannah Holm did a good job with this in the Grand Junction Free Press, explaining why the variability matters:
After ending December 2014 above average, the snowpack in the Upper Colorado River basin has added very little moisture so far in 2015. As of Feb. 12, the amount of water held in the snow in the Colorado River Basin in Colorado was just 89 percent of average for this time of year. Other Western Slope river basins are in worse shape, with the Yampa and White river basins at 83 percent of average, the Gunnison at 71 percent of average, and the southwestern basins at a mere 58 percent of average for this date.
Dry conditions in southwestern Colorado are especially concerning, because this area has failed to reach “average” snowpack levels for several years in a row. This has led to the first-ever shortage in deliveries from the San Juan River to central New Mexico through the San Juan: Chama project.
So when you see a news article that talks about “snowpack in the Upper Colorado”, be careful to try to suss out which “Upper Colorado” the author is speaking about, or bookmark the links here to check for yourself:
Here’s my obligatory picture of Lake Mead’s bathtub ring, as seen this afternoon from Hoover Dam:
Hoover Dam, Lake Mead bathtub ring, February 23, 2015. Elevation 1088.97
The surface elevation this afternoon was 1,088.97 feet above sea level, the lowest it’s been at this time of year since 1956. It has dropped 20 feet since this time a year ago, which is among the biggest one-year drops in history.
The reason for the big one-year drop has interesting policy implications.
One of the innovations in the 2007 shortage sharing agreement among the federal government and the seven basin states was the creation of “Intentionally Created Surplus” water management widget, a tool to free Lower Colorado River Basin water users from the tyranny of “use it or lose it”. Its purpose, according to the decision document that created it (pdf), was to “minimize the likelihood and severity of potential future shortages” by allowing water users to bank unused water in Lake Mead:
ICS may be created through projects that create water system efficiency or extraordinary conservation or tributary conservation or the importation of nonColorado River System water into the Mainstream. ICS is consistent with the concept that entities may take actions to augment storage of water in the lower Colorado River Basin.
The 2007 agreement anticipated use of things like fallowing, desalination and canal lining to create ICS credits.
One of the big ICS users has been the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which by the end of 2012 had banked 489,389 acre feet of ICS credits in Lake Mead. But with drought hitting California and Met in a big way, in 2013 the agency began taking its banked water out, withdrawing 93,858 acre feet in 2013 and another 331,965 of ICS water in 2014.
This is a smart water management tool, allowing MWD to build some resilience by saving water now in order to consume it later. But it offers zero overall net basin water conservation over longer time frames – water conserved in one year is simply used in a later year. ICS simply moves water in time. That 331,965 acre feet Met took out last year above and beyond its normal allocation is five feet of elevation it put in in previous years and withdrew in 2014.
ICS is a cool tool, but the only thing that will keep Lake Mead from dropping is a new class of policy tool that would allow conserved water to stay in the reservoir for good.