Drought and Despair: “these enemies of mankind”

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Working on a book chapter about the genesis and importance of the Arizona v. California litigation over the Colorado River, I ran across this priceless little bit of business from 1944.

Harry Bashore, Commissioner, Bureau of Reclamation, 1943-1945, courtesy USBR

Harry Bashore, Commissioner, Bureau of Reclamation, 1943-1945, courtesy USBR

It is Harry Bashore, Comissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, testifying in Phoenix in July of that year, before the a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation, regarding the great work that lay ahead:

Since the time of Alexander the Great, men have complained that they could find no more lands to conquer. We of the Reclamation Service know that there are still lands of the great Southwest where our two weapons – water and power – can conquer drought and despair. And as these enemies of mankind are routed, we can build a greater Southwest with the help of those who will seek employment here in our public works.

See what he just did there?

Following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great! Reclamation rhetoric doesn’t get much better than that. But Bashore is doing so much more. The hearing is part of a clever little game going on between Reclamation and Arizona Sen. Carl Hayden, two arms of wester water’s “iron triangle“. Hayden had set this up the year before, with a measure pushed through a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Post-War Economic Planning and Policy. The need to transition the economy from war to peace, and to find jobs for returning warriors, was a political opportunity not to be missed. The rhetoric of victory over the Axis Powers became transformed to the rhetoric of victory of those twin enemies of all mankind, “drought and despair”.

The full testimony is here.

Annals of fucked up metaphors

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As a group of U.S. politicians prepared to vote on a measure intended to delay implementation of a federal effort to extend health care to uninsured Americans, one of them, a Republican Texas congressman named John Culberson, was quoted thus:

“I said, like 9/11, ‘let’s roll!’”

It is a reference to the words attributed to Todd Beamer, a passenger on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, as a group of passengers tried to overpower the hijackers and prevent the use of the aircraft in a suicide attack.

In discussing U.S. health care policy in a column back in 2009, I employed a different use of the 9/11 metaphor in an effort to help readers make sense of the 18,000 people who, according to an Institute of Medicine study, die each year in the United States because of a lack of health insurance:

I’ve struggled with ways of getting across 18,000 preventable deaths per year. It is a 9/11 attack every two months, year in and year out.

I’ve often found it useful to push metaphors to the breaking point. Thinking through their failure mode provides useful information. So I’d invite you, in considering Culberson’s words and mine, to think about who represents Al-Qaeda here – the people attempting to extend health care coverage to the uninsured, or the people attempting to stop them.

Or maybe we should all just stop with the 9/11 references.

 

On health care policy, a personal story

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I’m not watching C-Span today:

Consider this, published by a team of U.S. health care researchers in 2004: “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.”

That was five years ago. The quiet tragedy associated with a lack of health insurance has continued, the numbers growing in the half-decade since a team from the Institute of Medicine, our leading national health care think tank, published that statistic.

Perhaps 18,000 is too abstract to get your head around. To make this more concrete, let me introduce you to Virginia Heineman.

Severely asthmatic, chronically ill, and as a result chronically underemployed, Virginia — “Ginnie” to those of us who loved her — lived on society’s margins.

She was my wife Lissa’s beloved younger sister. She was one of 2002’s 18,000 unnecessary deaths.

 

Reduced releases from Lake Powell: no going back

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It rained kind of a lot in the intermountain west this month, which raises a fascinating question about the tools we use for Colorado River management, and the tendency of water managers and management institutions to base significant actions on median flow forecasts rather than managing with a flexibility that considers the probabilistic nature of the information forecasters are giving us.

Black Canyon during construction of Hoover Dam, courtesy USBR

Black Canyon during construction of Hoover Dam, courtesy USBR

In August, the Bureau of Reclamation announced that, for the first time ever it would curtail releases from Lake Powell on the Colorado River, reducing flows downstream through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead and thence to the fountains of Las Vegas and Phoenix and the alfalfa fields of the Imperial Valley. Now it’s rained a whole bunch, and Lake Powell has a lot more water in it than we expected – enough, under a more flexible policy, to erase the need for curtailment. But it appears there’s no going back. In water supply terms, the Upper Basin appears to be the winner in the execution of this forecast-policy-weather edge case.

In water volume, the difference between a full release and a curtailed release was marginal, but the symbolic and therefore political implications are huge.

The decision was based on a rigid, cookbook-like formula contained in the 2007 interim guidelines for operating Mead and Powell. Once a month, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation takes the information giving to the agency by NOAA’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center and updates its “24-Month Study“, which is basically a bunch of tables estimating inflows and reservoir levels for  12 Colorado River Basin reservoirs. Four times a year, in addition to the 24-Month Study, Reclamation also produces two additional reports, parallel “what if” sets of tables showing what would happen under the “wet” and “dry” ends of the probabilistic forecast issued by the CBRFC. But it’s important to note that, for purposes of the legally mandated interim guidelines, those wet and dry scenarios are not incorporated into the decision-making. The decisions are, by law, made based on the median forecast, without any flexibility to respond to what the forecasters might say about wet and dry.

These guidelines set decisions related to interstate water allocation and reservoir operations to the median forecasted inflow volumes. Unfortunately this approach does not consider the range represented by the forecast distribution, which leads to large uncertainties when a forecast distribution straddles important threshold values.

That’s from “River Forecast Application for Water Management: Oil and Water?“, an interesting new paper by the CBRFC’s Kevin Werner and colleagues looking at how forecast information is used by the water management community.

The operating guidelines also lock in a decision in August, based on median forecasts of the system’s behavior at the end of December:

The August 24-Month Study projections of the January 1 system storage and reservoir  water surface elevations, for the following Water Year, shall be used to determine the applicable operational tier for the coordinated operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead as specified in the table below. (emphasis added)

This is one of those edge cases, ” “straddl(ing) important threshold values,” that Werner was talking about. In August, the median forecast’s projected level of Lake Powell was straddling the crucial elevation level of 3,575 feet come Jan. 1. If it’s above, that mark, the guidelines call for a full release from Powell in 2013-14. If it’s below, curtailment happens. The August 24-Month Study (pdf) found that, with a full release, Lake Powell would be 1′ 4″ below the crucial 3,575 foot elevation level. So curtailment it is.

As I read the Interim Guidelines (and please, Bureau people and others in the audience, correct me if I’m getting this wrong) the “shall” in the guidelines means that we’ve made our decision based on the August 24-Month Study, and there’s no going back now.

Even though, as a result of what one of my water management friends has dubbed “the September to Remember,” Lake Powell is now five feet higher than the median forecast on which the curtailment decision was based. That would seem to put us safely above 3,575, meaning a policy that didn’t lock us into a decision each August might mean a bigger release this year.

To be fair, even the forecast at the high end of the CBRFC’s probabilistic range (pdf) wouldn’t have put us above 3,575 come Jan. 1. This storm was an outlier. So maybe I’ve just wasted a lot of your time on an argument that’s too clever by half. But it’s an interesting exercise for looking at the gaps between forecast, weather and policy.

 

 

Federally subsidized California farm water

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I loved this boldly written line in Bettina Boxall’s Los Angeles Times story last Sunday on the question of who will pay, and how much, for a proposed multi-billion dollar pair of water supply tunnels beneath the Sacramento Delta:

Much of California agriculture is accustomed to vast amounts of cheap, federally subsidized water in the form of deliveries from the Central Valley Project, the nation’s largest water supply program.

No need for backup or detail, right? We all know that’s true. But should you be curious about the details, here’s some grist for the mill, via the Department of Interior’s Office of Inspector General earlier this year (pdf):

We found that USBR’s water ratesetting policies do not ensure that an appropriate share of capital costs and prior-year funding deficits are repaid annually. Water deliveries to the CVP contractors have been highly variable from year to year. When actual water deliveries are less than projected deliveries, revenues are insufficient to recover the Federal investment in the project. When actual water deliveries exceed projected deliveries, however, existing contract provisions stipulate that excess revenues collected by USBR must be refunded to the contractors. As a result, USBR has not demonstrated steady progress toward recovery of Federal investments in the CVP.

Ansel Adams cheated?

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Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, by Ansel Adams

Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, by Ansel Adams

Arrayed on the left-hand hillside of the Alabama Hills were the large letters LP spelled out in white-washed rocks that stood for Lone Pine. Driving through the town, you can still see the letters, which are refurbished by locals in a ritual familiar to many communities in the Western states. Ansel Adams was so disturbed by what he considered to be an ugly scar in the landscape that he spot-toned out the letters in his prints with a small brush, and in the 1970s finally had them eliminated from the negative itself by his assistant.

– William Fox, Camera Obscura: A photographic history of the LA Aqueduct, in Boom

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the flood that wasn’t

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There’s a newsroom joke that “we don’t write about planes that don’t crash,” but I think it’s important to think carefully about societal systems that succeed, because lessons learned matter:

The flood pulse was impressive. But it is instructive to look at how much larger it would have been if not for a pair of flood control dams built in the second half of the 20th century to protect us from our habit of building our cities in flood plains. On Sept. 13, they were two dams in the right places at the right time.

Importantly, one of the lessons is that there are always tradeoffs. Flood control success did not come without cost:

Authorized by Congress in 1960 and completed in the mid-’70s, Cochiti is one of the largest and arguably the most controversial dam in New Mexico. Its completion drowned farmlands, summer homes and culturally significant sites at Cochiti Pueblo, and seepage beneath the dam waterlogged remaining pueblo farmlands downstream. In addition, the way it altered the Rio Grande’s flows has caused lasting environmental problems downstream, depriving the riverside ecosystem of natural floods.

But on Sept. 13, it did the job we gave it when we built it, which was to protect the Middle Rio Grande Valley from flooding.