From Prescott, Michael Kodas helped the Newshour audience this evening understand the complex interplay of climate change, a century of fire suppression and rapid growth at the wildland-urban interface:
Watch Hotter Temps, Drought, Development Drive Fire Problems on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
From the morning paper, Day 1 (Day N?) of my Rio Grande death watch:
JARALES – There’s a great line about New Mexico’s central river, often attributed to Will Rogers: “The Rio Grande is the only river I ever saw that needed irrigation.”
Whether Rogers said it or not (and there is some question), it is no longer a joke.
“We’re irrigating the Rio Grande,” water manager David Gensler said as he watched a small flow off the Sabinal canal in southern Valencia County, where workers have cleared an old ditch and diverted a bit of the precious liquid into the otherwise largely dry bed of the Rio Grande.
Smart Jay Lund piece on the shortcomings of old-school environmentalism in the new world:
Classical environmentalism is mostly about stopping new harmful human influences, not reversing the harmful effects of past changes or shaping a more environmentally friendly future. Environmentalism has not substantially reversed the widespread urban and agricultural destruction of wetlands or freed rivers from the concrete and rock that straightened their course.
A new environmentalism is needed that can redirect and reconcile human activities to better support and even expand habitat for native species. Rather than insist on blocking human use to protect nature – a largely quixotic quest now – environmental reconciliation works in and with unavoidably human habitats.
The folks at the University of Colorado’s Colorado River Governance Initiative have a clever idea to keep the Upper Basin states from getting screwed by climate change. Their new Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap white paper (pdf) offers a solution path for one of the stickiest problems in future Colorado Basin water management under climate change.
Lee’s Ferry
In short, it’s a bargain under which the two basins would share a huge risk at the intersection of climate change and legal uncertainty over interpreting the Law of the River.
The sticky problem is Article III(d) of the 1922 Colorado River Compact (pdf):
The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years reckoned in continuing progressive series beginning with the first day of October next succeeding the ratification of this compact.
Translated, that means the Upper Basin states might have to deliver 7.5 million acre feet of water each year at Lee’s Ferry. With a river twice that size, the compact’s authors presumed, there would be plenty of water for the upper basin states (New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming) to use their half and just pass the rest of the water on down for California, Nevada and Arizona. But there’s a central unresolved legal question, as the CRGI folks wrote in a white paper last year (pdf):
[T]he prevailing interpretation has been that the Upper Basin has the obligation to deliver 75 million-acre feet every ten years (an average of 7.5 million acre-feet/year) downstream to the Lower Basin, and if this leaves insufficient water for the Upper Basin to consume the 7.5 million acre-feet promised in Article III(a), then the Upper Basin must bear that shortage in its entirety. However, a counter interpretation more favorable to the Upper Basin is that they do not have a delivery obligation, but rather an “obligation not to deplete” the flow of the river below an average of 7.5 million acre-feet/year based on the language used in Article III(d) of the Compact.
Not surprisingly, you can pretty much guess the legal interpretation a lawyer will offer based on which basin they’re from. Lower Basin attorneys say, “Yup, gotta deliver 7.5, no matter what.” Upper Basin attorneys say, “No, if the river’s low because of a changing climate, rather than our depletions, we’re off the hook.”
This disagreement is a huge deal because under the former interpretation, if as expected climate change reduces the flow in the river, the Upper Basin takes the entire squeeze.
The thing is, water managers hate uncertainty. And no one’s lawyers, Upper or Lower Basin, can guarantee which way a judge would rule if they threw the dice and went to court. The downside risk is enormous.
The CRGI folks call their idea the “Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap.” The idea is that Upper Basin states agree to cap their total depletions at some level below the 7.5 million acre feet allotted to them under the compact (which they’re not using right now anyway). In return for holding their consumption line there, the Lower Basin agrees not to make a “compact call” if deliveries at Lee’s Ferry drop below 7.5 maf:
Establishing the value of the “cap” and the release objective are points to be negotiated; but the principle is to establish these numbers in advance of a crisis and without a need to litigate the omissions and ambiguities that exist in the Compact and related elements of the Law of the River.
There’s precedent for this sort of approach in the 2007 shortage sharing agreement, which doesn’t supplant the Law of the River but is rather, in the words of the CRGI folks, “an operational regime placed on top of this foundation.”
It’s the kind of solution space I was thinking of in my “What Seven States Can Agree To Do” piece last year, though I’m not smart enough to come up with the specifics. The Law of the River is malleable if all the parties can come to agreement on the bends it needs.
I take my rainfall measurements at 7 a.m., so June’s over for me. I’m happy to report that our 0.14 inch (36 cm) of rain puts us over an inch for the Oct-now “water year”! We’re planning a fireworks celebration for later this evening, out by the dry brush in the far back corner of the yard.*
Our 1.14 inches (2.9 cm) for the first nine months of the water year are 24 percent of the long term mean. The last month with above average precipitation here was April 2012.
October-June precip, Heineman-Fleck house, Albuquerque NM
* This is a joke. There is evidence of a dramatic spike in the number of people burning stuff down around July 4.
We’ve seen a lot of news media attention in New Mexico’s drought of 2013 to the little village of Magdalena, where the wells earlier this month went dry. Small towns are especially vulnerable in drought. But as I dug into the data the last few weeks, I realized that journalistically swooping down on the town that ran out may be missing something:
[L]ike Sherlock Holmes’ curious case of the dog that did not bark in the night, a key part of the story of the drought of 2013 in rural New Mexico may be the communities that have not been in the news, because they have not run out of water.
While solid numbers are hard to come by, some in the state’s water management community say they believe there are fewer small community water problems in 2013 than in the last major drought, of 2002-03. With the severity of the current drought, water tables all across New Mexico are dropping. But many communities threatened by drought last time around have upgraded their systems, making them more resilient.
After a similar drought ten years ago, the state did an analysis of the towns that went dry:
The 2005 report found that such infrastructure neglect was a common denominator in the communities that lost their water during the 2002-03 drought. “Almost all of these ‘emergencies’ were in fact due to a chronic lack of adequate management, maintenance, and system planning,” the report concluded. The communities where water systems failed “were not robust enough to handle the stress of drought conditions,” the report found.
One of my gazillion water book ideas was “The Last Concrete”. It was going to be about the end of big water infrastructure in the West. Except there’s no way to know when the last one happens, because there are a bunch of lingering projects that probably won’t ever get built, but that don’t ever quite get killed.
I’ve assumed the proposal to raise Shasta Dam in California is one of those. Or not:
In February of 2012, the Bureau of Reclamation released a Draft Feasibility Study that determined the project was both technically and environmentally feasible, as well as economically justified; the study determined that raising the dam 18.5 feet would cost just over $1 billion dollars and would produce from $18 to $63 million in net economic benefits per year.
More from Maven on the release of the project National Environmental Policy Act draft studies.
Marble Canyon, 1923, USGS
From the 1923 US Geological Survey’s Birdseye Expedition of the Grand Canyon. The full caption:
Sheer walls in Marble Canyon. The rate at which this canyon burrows its way into the earth never fails to astonish the traveler entering it for the first time. Twenty miles below its head, the walls are 2,000 feet above the river, nine-tenths being due to the rise of the plateau and one-tenth to the descent of the stream. Colorado River Survey of 1923 (Birdseye).
Picture courtesy of the USGS digital photo archive of the Birdseye Expedition. More on the expedition in Damming Grand Canyon: The 1923 USGS Colorado River Expedition
William L. Sibert, who warned us that there was less water in the Colorado River than we thought
With “Chasing Water” and “Moving Water” taken, the current working title for my Colorado River book-in-progress is “The Great Mistake.” It doesn’t have enough action verbiness for the final cut, but it seems to nicely frame one of my central themes – that the folks who built the elaborate plumbing system in the Colorado River Basin were mistaken about how much water they had to work with.
The problem: the 1922 Colorado River Compact allocated a fixed amount – 7.5 million acre feet for the four states in the Upper Basin, 7.5 million acre feet for the three states in the lower basin, with a vague wave of the hand to the idea that Mexico also ought to get some water. With the Mexican share later quantified at 1.5maf, we’ve got a locked-in allocation of 16.5 million acre feet. But we now know there’s not, on average, that much water in the river.
I’m intrigued by the people who, back when the plans were being laid out, warned about the problem. My latest example is the Colorado River Board on the Boulder Dam Project, which submitted a report to Congress in 1928. Led by a retired military engineer named William Luther Sibert, the board concluded that there was probably a million acre feet per year less water in the Colorado River than folks thought:
It is quite probable that the compact attempts to apportion more water than the actual average undepleted flow of the river.
The Sibert Board’s proposed solution seems to have been to screw Mexico:
It is of much economic importance that an agreement limiting the amount of water assignable to Mexico should be made prior to the completion of the Boulder Dam project.
(Quotes from a 1929 Bureau of Reclamation summary of Sibert’s report.)
The problem, as the late Norris Hundley explained in his invaluable Water and the West
Go figure.
As we speak, there’s this screamin’ deal on ebay:
This well known resort area is located in Southern California at the western end of Imperial County. Popular activities at the Salton Sea State Recreation Area include boating, water-skiing, fishing, jet-skiing, hiking, birdwatching, and sailboarding. It is estimated that over 1 million visitors spend time at the Salton Sea each year. Salton City and the surrounding communities saw a large influx of building and development over the last 7 years or so. A new casino, commercial center and tract homes were some of many projects.
Five acres. “The parcel has an existing easement for a road and has some very nice views.” Current high bid $810. Here’s a picture:
Desert Paradise
