Hoover Dam and the bathtub ring

Water is at the core of a compelling human drama. Or perhaps dramas (plural). Yet the core issues, where the drama lies, are maddeningly difficult to, if I may share a personal journalist neologism, “storyize”. Cynthia Barnett, my favorite water writer, explains in the Los Angeles Times:

But we can’t see dried-out aquifers the way we could see black Dust Bowl storms in the 1930s or water pollution in the early 1970s. So we still pump with abandon to do things like soak the turf grass that covers 63,240 square miles of the nation. We flush toilets with this same fresh, potable water, after treating it at great expense to meet government standards for drinking.

We fill the fridge with beef, the shopping bags with cotton T’s, the gas tank with corn-made ethanol — all with little inkling of how we’re draining to extinction the Ogallala aquifer that irrigates a quarter of the nation’s agricultural harvest.

So Cynthia, as we all inevitably do, makes the pilgrimage to Lake Mead, and points out the “bathtub ring”:

Lake Mead is different. It’s one of the few places in the United States where the illusion of water abundance is being exposed for what it is: a beautiful bubble doomed to pop, just like other great national illusions — the unending bull market, say, or upward-only housing prices.

For 12 years, the nation’s largest reservoir has dropped steadily to reveal a calcium-carbonate bathtub ring, evidence of human folly and nature’s frailty — the over-allocation of the Colorado River and the drought still battering so much of the United States.

The problem, she found on her visit to Hoover Dam, is the tales we tell ourselves. I struggled with this a couple of years ago on my own similar pilgrimage:

We are sufficiently buffered by affluence that almost no one I talked to today had any inkling of what was going on. Just another tourist Sunday on Hoover Dam. The best I got was from one the folks in this picture, who were on a Sunday drive at one of the Lake Mead overlooks. One of them, a Las Vegas resident, knew the lake was way low, and said the solution was simple – somebody needs to have the political courage to make them release more water from Lake Powell, upstream.

I decided against explaining the Colorado River Compact, and the complex reservoir equalization rules in the 2007 shortage sharing agreement, that upper basin states are using less than their share of the river anyway, that Powell is low too, that it’s not that easy. But ultimately, I guess that’s what I have to figure out how to explain.

Consider this a call for better storytelling. Cynthia’s LA Times piece is a good place to start.

Kudos to Chris Austin, who was out ahead of everyone else earlier this week in laying out the details of the pending US-Mexico Colorado River water deal. I encourage you to head over to Chris’s blog for more on the deal, which was first presented last Monday to the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the first step in a rollout that’s now happening all across the seven US states that share the Colorado. Since Chris’s piece, some of the news types have jumped in, though Chris’s piece is the best explanation of what’s going on.

I’ll know a lot more next week, when New Mexico gets its briefing at a meeting of the state’s Interstate Stream Commission. But in brief, this has the potential to be an extremely important deal because of the way it extends the Colorado River’s complex accounting system across the US-Mexico border, in the process addressing one of the major unsettled package of questions regarding Colorado River management.

The underlying problem the negotiators have been trying to address is how to equitably share shortages between the United States and Mexico. The US-Mexico treaty of 1944 (pdf) calls for reduction of Mexico’s share of the river in the case of “extraordinary drought”:

In the event of extraordinary drought or serious accident to the irrigation system in the United States, thereby making it difficult for the United States to deliver the guaranteed quantity of 1,5000,000 acre-feet (1,850,234,000 cubic meters) a year, the water allotted to Mexico under subparagraph (a) of this Article will be reduced in the same proportion as consumptive uses in the United States are reduced.

But how “extraordinary drought” might be defined, and the details of how the shortage sharing contemplated in the treaty might be implemented, was left as an exercise for future generations. It’s taken a bit longer than I imagine anyone expected to get back to to it. Beyond the shortage/surplus management issue, the deal also appears to address a couple of major steps forward in trans-boundary river management, including the creation of a framework for Mexico’s storage of water in US reservoirs, and some management tweaks that seem aimed at providing environmental flows in the de-watered Colorado River delta.

For background on the outstanding issues, I recommend Jason Robinson’s “Respective Obligations of the Upper and Lower Basins Regarding the Delivery of Water to Mexico: A Review of Key Legal Issues” (pdf), a white paper produced with the University of Colorado School of Law Colorado River group.

Bruce Finley in the Denver Post tallies up another western city cutting municipal water use, demonstrating that, for city water users, this is a tractable problem:

Water-saving efforts already have dropped metro Denver residents’ overall average daily usage to 85 gallons, down from 104 gallons in 2001.

Only one city better than Denver in Finley’s review of residential water use:

Albuquerque at 70 gallons a day.

Note that Finley’s talking here about withdrawals, and doesn’t get into the extent to which a portion of cities’ indoor water is reused after treatment, with the exception of a nod toward the way Las Vegas handles its wastewater.