Even with the release of extra water from upstream reservoirs, Lake Mead outside Las Vegas is forecast to continue dropping in 2015 and into 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s latest monthly “24-Month Study” (pdf). At this point, as Lake Mead drifts deeper into record emptiness, it goes without saying that the big reservoir, the key to supply water for urban-suburban Nevada, Arizona and Southern California, along with the vast agricultural empires of the southwestern deserts, is heading into record territories.

Storage in Lakes Mead and Powell. Data source: USBR, graph by John Fleck

But for the record, the current forecast end-of-water-year level for Sept. 30, 2015, is 1,075.32 feet above sea level, which would be a record low for the end of a water year. Forecasting into 2016 should be taken as little more than median flow arm-waving, but for the record, 2016’s 1,070.64 would be, yup, another record. The forecasted drops would happen even with an anticipated release of surplus water from upstream, according to the Bureau’s analysis.

Faced with serious risks if dropping reservoir levels continue, the board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority last week voted in favor of spending another $650 million to build a new pumping plant capable of sucking water out of the reservoir at very low levels. Brett Walton reported the details:

The water authority’s two existing intakes will be exposed to desert air if the lake’s elevation drops below 1,000 feet above sea level. A third intake is currently under construction, but it would require a separate pumping station — like the one that the committee recommended — to operate at the lowest water levels, those below the 1,000-foot mark.

This is not Las Vegas expecting Lake Mead to drop that far, but rather buying some extremely expensive insurance against an enormous downside risk. To senior managers at SNWA, that risk has to appear in the realm of possibility. Since 1998, Mead’s elevation has dropped 133 feet. The 1,000-foot mark – the point at which a major U.S. city’s water supply is gone – is just another 81 feet away.

Source data

So the folks at Island Press will be publishing my book, tentatively titled Beyond the Water Wars, about the problems facing the Colorado River Basin and how we might fix them. I couldn’t be happier.

Its basic themes will be familiar to readers of this blog – the end of the age of fat reservoirs and full canals, of vast suburban lawns and alfalfa fields stretching as far as the eye can see; the growing but uncertain shift away from legal confrontation, toward collaborative arrangements to share; the risks of the system crashing if we fail to pull off that shift.

Boulder Harbor, Lake Mead, Oct. 18, 2010

We don’t have a firm schedule yet, but it looks like publication is a couple of years away. (Very different from the publication pace of my newspaper life.)

I’m excited to work with Island Press. The people I’ve been dealing with in developing the project have been extraordinarily smart about helping me think through how I might turn my sometimes mushy ideas into a readable and therefore useful book. Now it’s on me to write that book. A lot of it will be based on work I’ve done over a number of years, and I plan to spend the next year doing a lot of fresh research and reporting. (Alfalfa fields, stranded boat ramps, suburban fountains. Road trips!)

I can still vividly remember standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon as a little boy (I think I was five), looking down in awe at the river below. If you’ve been there, you understand that you get only glimpses, tiny bits of the brown ribbon peeking into view, a river obviously there (witness the gaping hole it created) but elusively out of a little kid’s view.

Years later when I boated the Grand Canyon, I realized that it’s the same way looking up from the river. Often you can’t see the rim, can’t see out of the marvelous canyon you’re in. (Metaphor alert.)

I’ve been on and around and thinking about the river ever since, and have wanted to write about it since I was grown enough to want to write about things. But I don’t think I understood what the story was until the spring of 2010, when Jennifer McCloskey, then of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma office, sent me off driving down the levee road behind the Bureau’s Yuma headquarters. A couple of miles downstream from her office, what’s left of the river hits Morelos Dam and the Colorado River ends. By that time I was already deep into the politics and policy side of the thing, trying to make sense of what we had done and might do with the Colorado. But nothing quite prepared me for seeing this river I’d been so obsessed with my whole life simply stop.

Pulse Flow, courtesy IBWC

The International Boundary and Water Commission today released its initial science report (pdf) on this spring’s Colorado River pulse flow. A few key bits:

• When you add water, stuff grows. Satellite imagery in June ’14 compared to a year earlier showed a 36 percent increase in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. The NDVI increased in all but one area (the area where vegetation was cleared to prepare for flooding and new plant germination, which makes sense).
• Cottonwoods liked it. Tamarisks loved it. In the 4,522 acres of channel and flood plain inundated by surface water, cottonwoods seedlings seemed to take hold in the “Reach 1” and “Reach 4” sections of the pulse flow area (see map). Non-native tamarisk did well everywhere. What happens next depends on the availability of soil moisture fed by groundwater. More study, more time needed.
• Birds seem to be liking the habitat restoration areas. That also makes sense. I’d like them if I were a bird.
• The water table rose, but the rise was really focused in the river channel area between the levees.

A digression that’s important: When I was giving a talk about the pulse flow this fall, a cranky member of the audience took issue with my enthusiasm for all this, pointing to Aldo Leopold’s “green lagoons”, the two million acres that used to be the delta. This was 4,522 acres. As we discuss and describe this very promising experiment at the interface of water management and environmental restoration, it’s important to keep the scales in mind.

tl;dr Everyone on the Colorado River has a legitimate argument that they’ve already sacrificed, and that they have a legal entitlement to what’s left. If everyone digs in their heels on these points, the system will crash. We need to be willing to share the pain. But (scroll to the bottom) there is hope on that front.

Colorado Basin, map courtesy Pacific Institute

longer – The Unhopeful Part

In reading and interviews for my book, I frequently run across arguments of the form that “we” (usually a state, but also sometimes a smaller water-using entity) have already done “our” share for solving the Colorado River’s problems by (insert specific sacrifice already made here).

They all, of course, are right. Consider:

Arizona

With the 1968 approval of the Colorado River Basin Project Act, Arizona agreed to subordinate the bulk of its Colorado River water rights to California in return for the political supported needed to build the Central Arizona Project, which brings water to Phoenix, Tucson, farms and Native American communities in the central part of the state. As a result, Arizona currently shoulders (at least on paper) much of the risk in the face of shortfalls in the lower basin. Under the current law, all of Arizona’s CAP water would be cut off before California loses a drop. That was a major sacrifice.

California

But wait, didn’t California already lose a bunch of drops? Yup, in 2003 California was cut back from its historical use of in excess of 5 million acre feet per year to 4.4 million. That required major water conservation and supply shifts in metropolitan Southern California, and the fallowing of land in the Imperial Valley to free up enough to keep Southern California’s economic engine humming. So yeah, the next big cuts would hit Arizona if there’s a shortage, but that’s only because California already took a big hit.

Nevada

Nevada took its hit coming out of the starting gate. Its allocation of 300,000 acre feet, which goes to Vegas, is basically a rounding error if you’re rounding total Colorado River flow to the nearest million acre feet. Don’t look at Nevada for sacrifice (and even if you did, as I mentioned, sacrificing Nevada completely is just a rounding error on the Colorado River balance sheet).

Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico

Under the Colorado River Compact, the four states of the Upper Basin are entitled to use 7.5 million acre feet of water per year. When they signed the deal in 1922, they knew it would be a long time before they would grow into their entitlements, but it was water in the bank to support future growth. In 2012, they only used 4.6 million acre feet, which is pretty typical. The Upper Basin states have clearly done their share.

This isn’t cheap sophistry. Each of the above arguments is a reasonably held, legitimate view. It’s most on display this week in the development of Colorado’s water plan:

Colorado wants to ensure its farms, wildlife and rapidly growing cities have enough water in the decades to come. It’s pledging to provide downstream states every gallon they’re legally entitled to, but not a drop more.

“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,” said James Eklund, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

The governance boundary problem

There’s a core issue here that involves the boundaries we draw around our Colorado River water problems. Doug Kenney and his colleagues in the new Colorado River Research Group captured this nicely in one of their first white papers, on “Repairing the Colorado River’s Broken Water Budget” (pdf). Each state, operating within what it thinks are the legal boundaries around its “share” of the Colorado River, has put down on paper a menu of future water options that are wildly unrealistic given the hydrologic reality. There is less wet water in the river than paper water embodied in each user group’s lawyers’ arguments.

Is that realistic? “[I]t’s not, and those water managers that look at the numbers through a basin-wide lens know this,” Kenney and colleagues wrote. But while the Colorado River’s problems have to be solved at a basin scale, much of the water use decision making that matters happens at the state and local level, where the basin wide problems are less visible.

I see this in New Mexico water politics all the time, where there is an expectation that a full firm yield of 96,200 acre feet of water per year through the San Juan-Chama diversion project is our compact-given right. Our sacrifices have been to cleverly live within that allocation, maximizing its beneficial use. The notion that the Colorado Basin as a whole is over-allocated, and that we might have to take a haircut along with everyone else, is simply not part of the discussion.

The hopeful part

To be clear, there are a lot of people up and down the governance ladder, from federal and state to local levels, who aren’t talking this way. Matt Jenkins’ excellent High Country News article today about the Pilot Drought Response Actions program highlights a great example. Here you’ve got a bunch of lower basin water managers trying to find a way to route around this problem, building a couple of different types of institutional widgets to reduce water use locally, but in the context of a basin wide effort.

The PDRA (PDRAP?) attempts to overcome the problem Eklund is referring to (If I conserve, won’t it just end up in California?) by matching conservation commitments. The big metro water agencies in each of the lower basin states agrees to take a haircut and leave the saved water in Lake Mead. Arizona, which is clearly the state with the most to lose, pledges 345,000 acre feet by 2017 (the Central Arizona Project is the actor here); Southern California (Met) pledges 300,000 af; Vegas (Southern Nevada Water Authority) pledges 45,000 af and the Bureau of Reclamation agrees to throw in another 50,000 af. The water stays in Lake Mead, to prop up levels and forestall the risk of shortage.

Matt’s story suggests Arizona’s already nailed down a portion of its savings, in the form of ag agency commitments. This is hopeful stuff.