The L.A. River – when “wasted” water isn’t wasted

Posted by on

It seems like a no brainer.

Stop wasting that water! Put it to good use! But when we’re talking about things like lining irrigation canals (see for exmample the All-American Canal saga, pdf here) or cleaning up and re-using sewage, it’s critical to ask the question: If we don’t do this, where will that water end up?

Two city agencies are drafting a new proposal to purify treated sewage and refill the groundwater basin, where wells would pump it up, eventually leading to the taps of homes and businesses.

Right now that very same treated water that used to be sewage flows into the Los Angeles River from a Van Nuys plant. Under this new plan, much of it would instead be pumped into the ground, leaving the river’s water levels substantially lower.

“Maybe 60 years from now we won’t be kayaking on the river,” said Council for Watershed Health program director Mike Antos, who leads the Los Angeles Basin Water Augmentation Study.

“We’ll be mountain biking.”

That’s Mike Reicher in a smart story in the L.A. Daily News looking at the dilemma of sewage reuse in Los Angeles.

The value of steps like lining an irrigation canal or reusing sewage depends entirely on where the “wasted” water was ending up before we tried to fix whatever problem it is we think we’re fixing.

The U.S.-Mexico border as arbitrage

Posted by on

Los Algodones in the morning, looking south from entry gate, March 27, 2014

Los Algodones in the morning, looking south from entry gate, March 27, 2014

As you exit the pedestrian gate at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing at Algodones, you find dentistry, a pharmacy and cheap liquor.

In other words, the international line created a sharp gradient, over which money from Northside accordingly spilled; and Mexicans came from all over Southside to be nourished by that money.

– William T. Vollman, Imperial

Phoenix: population up, water use down

Posted by on

Phoenix is following a pattern I’ve frequently noted here – water conservation is, at least for now, outpacing population growth:

Research by Phoenix’s Water Service Department shows 1.5 million people lived in Phoenix in 2013, and about 375,000 homeowners had city water accounts. In 1998, about 1.2 million called Phoenix home, and 301,475 had water accounts. (Apartments and townhouses were not included in those numbers.)

Residential water use totaled 159 million gallons per day in 2013, down from 169 million in 1998, according to Gerard Silvani, a principal planner for the department.

That’s 25 percent population growth, 6 percent water use decline.

What is water?

Posted by on

We have revolutionized our concept of what western water is. It is no longer simply a commodity to be removed from a watercourse for use on farmland or in a factory. There is life and beauty in water. It is a valid use of water simply to allow it to remain in a stream or lake. In a sense, after first rejecting the riparian rule so resoundingly, we have reconsidered and have reached a deeply held consensus that there is undeniable merit in some aspects of riparianism: sufficient water absolutely must be available to meet a broad range of public environmental, recreational, ecological, and aesthetic needs.

– Charles Wilkinson, Western Water Law in Transition, 1985

In western water, what’s the right role for the feds?

Posted by on

After spending the day reading about the federal government’s, shall we say, persuasive role in assisting Imperial Valley farmers that it was in their best interests to figure out a way to share a bit of their water across San Gorgonio Pass with the city folk to their west, I this evening ran across this:

Reed Benson, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law in Albuquerque, said states need what he called a gorilla in the room, and federal money, to reach agreements.

“Federal money has been, and is today, important in addressing challenges with water resources where the deep pocket is needed,” Benson said. He cited the need for parties to cooperate and compromise on issues affecting water basins stretching across several states, questions about tribal water rights, and overarching concerns about water quality and quantity.

“Finally, climate change is going to make these issues all the more difficult and that much more challenging,” Benson said.

I’m not sure that’s quite the way the gorilla behaved in the Imperial Valley in the period from the 1980s to the early 2000s that led to the still unhappily lurching Quantification Settlement Agreement. At times it sounds a bit more like, “Nice valley ya got here, Imperial. Shame if something was to happen to it.” But the gorilla was relatively important.

In British rivers, pollution control seems to be working

Posted by on

Pollution control efforts seem to be working on Britain’s urban rivers:

Britain’s urban rivers are the cleanest they have been for more than two decades, a study has found.

More than 2,300 river sites in England and Wales were analysed between 1991 and 2011 by Cardiff University.

They examined the presence and spread of 78 organisms – including insects, snails and others – and claim many are making a comeback following decline.

The scientists say the improvements are largely due to reductions in pollution levels.

I learned of this via the always helpful Circle of Blue’s The Stream.

That thing I wrote about Lake Mead being the lowest ever turned out to be true

Posted by on

If I wanted to make mischief, I’d write a blog post pointing out that Lake Mead ended May at a historic low right after release of 105,392 acre feet of water for a historic environmental flow through the Colorado River Delta. I’d calculate how much higher Lake Mead would be if that 105,392 acre feet of water was still sitting in the big reservoir behind Hoover Dam, ready to serve the needs of Las Vegas or the farmers of the Imperial Valley. But that would be a sneaky, mean thing to do. It also would be misleading, and the reasons illustrate one of the central themes I’m arguing in the book I’m writing. You can’t look at any one piece of Colorado River management in isolation.

Colorado River "pulse flow" reaches the sea. Image courtesy of Sonoran Institute/NASA

Colorado River “pulse flow” reaches the sea. Image courtesy of Sonoran Institute/NASA

Yes, Lake Mead ended May at elevation 1,087.45 feet above sea level (or maybe 1,087.46?) the lowest end-of-May level since 1937, when the reservoir was first being filled. (The USBR web site is having problems, I’ll try to come back and add links later, sorry.)

Yes, that’s lower than it would have been had the Minute 319 environment pulse flow not been carried out this year.

But there’s more to the story.

In mid-May, the USBR released its annual “Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report,” a tome of tiny print that explains why it would be sneaky and mean to write such a blog post as I described above. On page 24, the report points out that since 2010, Mexico has stored 294,067 acre feet of water in Lake Mead, including 126,812 acre feet of “deferred delivery” water during calendar year 2013. Colloquially, they call this “earthquake water” – water stored initially under an agreement in the fall of 2010 that for the first time allowed Mexico to store water in Lake Mead for later use. The proximate cause was a spring 2010 earthquake that damaged water delivery infrastructure in the Mexicali Valley. The resulting agreements for the first time allowed Mexican Colorado River water to be stored in a U.S. reservoir. Big breakthrough.

The 105,392 acre feet used for the pulse flow is part of that 294,067. Without “earthquake water”, Mead would be even emptier.

But it’s an even richer story than that. Minute 319 and the environmental pulse flow made for some great photo ops, but there is much more being done. The water use report documents a number of steps taken by U.S. water agencies to buffer Lake Mead’s contents through “Intentionally Created Surplus,” a mechanism established in 2007 that allows water agencies storage credit for water conservation steps they take back home that allow them to reduce the amount of water they need to divert. The accounting shows more than a million acre feet of ICS water in Mead right now. Without a closer look at the accounting, I wouldn’t swear that that is real wet water in Lake Mead, but some portion of it clearly is.

For Southern California right now, this is crucial. The Metropolitan Water District ended 2013 with 474,063 acre feet of ICS water, some of which it plans to draw down in 2014 to make up for shortfalls in in-state water deliveries because of California’s epic drought.

Will this be enough? I don’t know, that’s why I’m writing a book. But it’s not nothing.

The bottom line: LAKE MEAD AT HISTORIC LOW is cheap and successful clickbait, and it would be easy to point to the recently completed environmental pulse flow and arch my eyebrow at such a use of precious water at a time when the Colorado River system is on the edge. But that would be sneaky and mean and misleading.

Monthly weather report, May 2014

Posted by on
satellite-derived soil moisture estimates, based on NASA GRACE data, courtesy National Drought Mitigation Center

satellite-derived soil moisture estimates, based on NASA GRACE data, courtesy National Drought Mitigation Center

 

Poking in the garden this morning, I’d never have guessed without actual rain gauge data that we just finished a wet month. It’s really dry out there. But drought is a funny thing, eh? 0.55 inches (1.4 cm) of rain at our house in May was the first above-average month since November. My total now stands at 2.91 inches (7.4 cm) for the water, year (the period beginning last Oct. 1). That is 59 percent of the mean for my house (per PRISM data). The soil’s just always dry at this time of year in New Mexico, I guess.

I live right in that area of white pixels in the north-central part of the state in the map above, which is an experimental attempt at using satellite data from NASA’s GRACE to estimate moisture at various depths – and at various levels of importance to measuring drought. Here’s the root zone map, a variable of interest to the plants in my garden:

root zone moisture

satellite-derived root zone moisture estimates, based on NASA GRACE data, courtesy National Drought Mitigation Center

But here’s why drought’s a very difficult thing to write about in the newspaper. It’s one word – “drought” – but a range of phenomena, depending on how you use water. Let’s say you depend, not on soil moisture in the root zone, but on groundwater:

groundwater

satellite-derived root zone moisture estimates, based on NASA GRACE data, courtesy National Drought Mitigation Center

Yowza.

That looks like a nice place for a dam!

Posted by on

Black Canyon on the Colorado River, from the 1871 Wheeler survey, courtesy USGS. This is the area eventually chosen some years later for what was called Boulder or Hoover Dam:

Black Canyon of the Colorado River, looking below from Camp 7 in Nevada. Photo by T.H. O'Sullivan.U.S. Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian (Wheeler Survey, 1871 Expedition).

Black Canyon of the Colorado River, looking below from Camp 7 in Nevada. Photo by T.H. O’Sullivan.U.S. Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian (Wheeler Survey, 1871 Expedition).

Has desal drought-proofed Israel?

Posted by on

Another example of reasons to be optimistic about our water future?

With just half its normal precip last winter, Israel is in what might properly be characterized as a meteorological drought this year. But not to worry, according to this AP report:

Tenne said the country has managed to close its water gap through a mixture of conservation efforts, advances that allow nearly 90 percent of wastewater to be recycled for agricultural use and, in recent years, the construction of desalination plants.

Since 2005, Israel has opened four desalination plants, with a fifth set to go online later this year. Roughly 35 percent of Israel’s drinking-quality water now comes from desalination. That number is expected to exceed 40 percent by next year and hit 70 percent in 2050.