Cadillac Desert Revisited

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Update: The papers are all on line here, and seem to be freely available.

It stands as a cliché in western water circles to say that John Wesley Powell was right. But yeah, he pretty much was.

“Powell’s conclusion in 1876,” John Sabo and his colleagues write this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “was that water scarcity would place limits on the growth of a new civilization in the region.”

Las Vegas's "third straw"

Construction site of the Southern Nevada Water Authority's new Lake Mead intake, being built so Las Vegas can still get water as the reservoir drops. Taken October 2010

The Sabo piece is part of a fascinating package of PNAS papers organized by Glen MacDonald from UCLA assembling the latest science on water, climate and the arid west.

It’s an incredible array, touching on the paleo record, ecosystem issues, water supply questions, attribution of current drought and projection of future conditions. I’ve got a short piece trying to hit a few high points in tomorrow’s newspaper, but it was an absolutely maddening journalistic exercise because the range assembled by MacDonald is so topic rich.

I’d like to take some more time and space here to explore the package in more detail over the next however many days this takes, starting with the most clever paper of the bunch, by a team led by Sabo from Arizona State University: Reclaiming freshwater sustainability in the Cadillac Desert (Note: as of this writing, the papers don’t seem to be up on the PNAS site, though the embargo is off. As that changes, I’ll come back and add links.)

Continue reading ‘Cadillac Desert Revisited’ »

River Beat Weekly Report: What’s 169,000 Acre Feet Among Friends?

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A month of warm, dry weather left Lakes Mead and Powell with 24.8 million acre feet of water at the end of November, 169,000 acre feet less than had been forecast a month earlier.

Lake Las Vegas

Lake Las Vegas, October 2010

The crux of the Colorado River Compact lies in Article III (d):

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.

With Glen Canyon Dam to regulate flow, that translates to 7.5 million acre feet per year delivered past Lee’s Ferry from Upper to Lower Basin. Add in the Upper Basin’s share of water for Mexico, and you have an average annual release of 8.23maf.

If things are “good” (a relative term in the arid western United States), there might be a little bit of extra water, which looks like it might be the case this year. The complex of reservoir operating rules call for “balancing”, using a Byzantine set of formulas. This year, the rules suggest a likely release of 9 million acre feet – an extra 730,000 acre feet above and beyond the Lower Basin’s Compact-guaranteed share.

And yet if you look at the latest “24-month study”, the monthly Bureau of Reclamation reservoir operating forecast, you’ll see that Lake Mead, despite getting a shot of bonus water, is forecast to drop another 7 feet in elevation in the 2010-11 water year.

Lower Basin Budget

Lower Basin Budget, Courtesy Paul Miller, USBR

Here is a reminder of why:

Unless the Upper Basin states deliver additional water above and beyond that guaranteed under the Colorado River Compact, Lake Mead will keep declining unless and until Lower Basin states reduce their consumption.

With numbers like that, 60,000 acre feet seems chump change. That’s the shortfall in Lake Powell at the end of November, with reservoir levels 6 inches below the month-ago forecast:

The November 24-Month Study projected that Lake Powell would end November at an elevation of 3630.85 feet above sea level. The elevation of Lake Powell at the end of the day on November 30, 2010 was 3630.31 feet above sea level. This 0.54 foot difference is equivalent to about 60,000 acre-feet of storage in Lake Powell.

Lake Mead ended the month with a surface elevation of 1081.94, down from a month-ago forecast of 1083.25. That translates to 109,000 acre feet less water.

References:

Who Was “Winters”?

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Lake Sherburne, Montana, on the Milk River

Working today on a piece for the newspaper on Indian water rights, I followed a trail of Google crumbs trying to figure out who was the “Winters” in what’s called “the Winters doctrine”.

The doctrine is a pillar of U.S. water law, which grows out of a 1908 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case known as “Winters V. United States“. It essentially says that Indian water rights are based on the date the reservations were formed, which means they’re entitled to some of the best, most senior water rights in the region. (updated based on Chris’s comment regarding the details of the Winters decision)

The case originated on the Milk River in Montana in the early 1900s, in a legal battle between folks on the Fort Belknap Reservation and non-Indian irrigators upstream. The argument was that the non-Indians were depleting the river, leaving the Indians without the water they needed.

It’s an often-told tale, but I’d never seen a narrative that explains who the named plaintiff was.

A little Googling led me to Indian Reserved Water Rights, a history of the Winters case and the resulting legal issues. The author, John Shurts, says that the great western water historian Norris Hundley actually tracked down “Winters” in old Census records, and found that he name was really “Henry Winter” (no “s”), though even in life he was improperly tagged with that extra letter.

The best bit is this piece of trivia Shurts tracked down from the Jan. 17, 1906 edition of the Milk River Valley News:

Foreclosure proceedings have been instituted in Choteau county to recover about $27,000 from Henry Winters and wife. Winters has left the country, it is said, as a result of disclosures regarding his scheme to kill Stock Inspector Hall and Judge Tattan.

Ah, the Wild West.

On Windmills and Domestic Wells

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windmill

Windmill, cc C.K. Hartman

The windmill, using wind to pump water from the ground, is an iconic image of the American west. But the question of the cumulative effect of a bunch of little wells – these days often out behind tract homes powered by electricity rather than the wind – has become one of the central arguments in western water law and policy.

Here in New Mexico, we’ve long recognized in the law the connection between surface and ground water – the idea groundwater pumping eventually creates a great sucking in the surface water supply. But our state court of appeals recently ruled that domestic wells are OK, that regulations essentially exempting them from water rights regimes did not violate our state constitution’s doctrine of prior appropriation.

Montana was late to legally recognize the groundwater-surface water connection, and as Laura Lundquist writes, the domestic well exemption is a huge issue:

It wasn’t until 2006 that Montana acknowledged the connection between surface and groundwater. The state Supreme Court ruled in Montana Trout Unlimited v. DNRC that the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation was wrong to permit new large wells in a river basin where people were already banned from making new surface water claims .

The ruling acknowledged for the first time in Montana that taking water from below the ground is the same as taking it from above.

The ruling applies to closed basins: areas where the state must confirm the total amount of water already claimed before the state Legislature will allow any new claims to be filed. Such is the case in the Bitterroot River basin where no new surface rights are available and getting a groundwater right isn’t impossible but now it is a lot more difficult.

But small domestic wells are exempt from water rights requirements so new small wells are allowed even in closed basins where water is at a premium. Developers take advantage of that.

Didion on Water

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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

When I was visiting Hoover Dam in October, the folks who were showing me the stilling wells inside the dam took me on a side trip out onto the walkway outside the power plants at the bottom of the dam.

We stood for a long time watching the water boil up into the dam’s tailrace, where the Colorado River renews its trip downstream after its quiet impoundment in Lake Mead and its frenetic trip through the dam’s penstocks and enormous generators.

It was mesmerizing.

I was reminded of that visit today via OTPR’s link to a Joan Didion essay on water:

I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand — the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped before — and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.

Desal’s California Stumbles

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Desalination of seawater along the coasts is the west’s water supply backstop, the reason we won’t in the worst case scenarios abandon southwestern cities. The water is very expensive as compared to the current system of dams, canals, pipes and pumps, but it’s cheaper that bailing out of the region entirely.

So what does this LA Times story about desal’s California troubles suggest?

[D]esalination has been lagging in California, where water woes are especially dire, industry and government officials say. They blame the slow progress on a disorganized local industry, litigious environmentalists and a thorny approvals process.

I would humbly offer a simpler suggestion: that we haven’t reached the pain point yet, at which desal suddenly looks more appealing than increasingly dire alternatives.

River Beat: Weekly Good News Report

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Chris Brooks notes the good news:

Lake Mead is finally beginning to climb.

At this writing, its surface elevation is at 1082.30, after dropping below 1082 during the last week of November. And DG points us to some other good news.

That’s snow pack as of Friday in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Those of us down in New Mexico, dependent on the San Juan and Rio Grande, are sucking wind, as you can see. But much of the basin looks dandy! (And a huge thanks to DG. I’m always looking for good at-a-glance graphics for tracking snow pack. Consider that one bookmarked and shared.)

Lake Powell finished November with 14.9 million acre feet of water, slightly lower (60kaf) than the projection in the most recent 24-month study and 200kaf lower than in the August 24-month study, which is the one used for planning purposes.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Nuke Costs Rising

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From the morning paper (sub/ad req) a look at the rising  costs (four to seven-fold) and long delays (being generous, nine years) facing a proposed plutonium lab at Los Alamos:

Among the most vocal critics of the agency’s nuclear project management are a cadre of retired nuclear weapons experts.

“This is mismanagement,” said Bob Peurifoy, who retired as a vice president at Sandia National Laboratories in 1991 after 39 years helping in the nuclear weapons complex. Peurifoy had a hand in the development of five of the eight nuclear weapons in the current U.S. arsenal.

“They’ve fallen down the rabbit hole,” Peurifoy said in an interview. “It’s madness. They don’t understand accountability to the taxpayer.”

The story includes a history of other nuclear weapon program projects with a similar history. Here are two:

• National Ignition Facility, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Original estimate: $1.1 billion
Final cost: $3.5 billion
Original estimated completion: 2002
Completion: 2009
• Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrotest Facility, Los Alamos
Original estimate: $30 million
Final cost: more than $300 million
Original estimated completion: 1990
Completion: 2009

La Niña

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Residents of the arid southwestern US like to think we’re the ones who know drought. But drought’s a relative thing – not how dry it is in absolute terms, but in comparison to what you’re used to.

Take New Orleans, for example, which received 2.75 inches in rain in November. Here in Albuquerque, that would be a record-setting November. But in New Orleans, it’s jut half of normal. Albuquerque, meanwhile, had essentially no rain in November. But Louisiana is in drought, while New Mexico isn’t. It’s all relative.

Drought Monitor

Drought Monitor

River Beat: Growing Bathtub Ring

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Lake Mead, October 2010

Lake Mead, October 2010

To Emily Green’s monthly dirge to document as well as accompany the declining levels of Lake Mead, I would add this: Mead’s end-of-October surface elevation, 1081.94 feet above sea level, was 1.31 feet below the level forecast just a month ago.

Recall that 1075 is the trigger level for the first lower basin shortage declaration, and that, with a foot here and a foot there, pretty soon we’re talking about real water.