Water Wars, Southeastern Style

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Speaking at a symposium in Las Vegas in April, former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Bob Johnson made a critical point about the differences between water problems on the Colorado River and the current struggles in the southeast over the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river basins.

Lake Lanier

Lake Lanier

The ACT-ACF fights made the Economist this week, in an article that plays on the amusement we westerners enjoy on watching this wet country water war:

For Americans from the parched western states, the notion of Alabama, Georgia and Florida battling over water must seem as daft as three fat people fighting for a grape at a lavish banquet.

Being a former head of Reclamation, Johnson knows Colorado River issues well, and in his talk he compared them to the interstate legal water wars now underway among Georgia, Alabama and Florida over water from the two river basins (battles in which had played a role as part of federal efforts to mediate).

The ACT and ACF basins have far more unallocated water to play with in sorting out the conflicts. “They’ve got 60 million acre feet of excess water,” he said. “On the Colorado River, we’ve got zero.”

But as a direct result of that lack of water on the Colorado, we’ve got a rich legal framework – the Law of the River – and accompanying personal and institutional relationships to go with it. “We have 80 years of fighting and working together,” Johnson said to the audience of Colorado River Basin water officials.

By comparison, in the wet climate of the southeast, water officials had few relationships with their colleagues in other states, and few institutional structures through which they could deal with problems when they arose, Johnson argued. In other words, they have plenty of water, but lack the tools they need to approach the problem of sharing. Because they’ve never had to think of it that way.

I’ve written in the past about how relatively modest, in historic terms, the Atlanta drought was. Modest drought, disastrous consequences. By comparison, we’re the 11th year of a drought on the Colorado River that is anything but modest – the worst such stretch on record. Yet, as I’ve written, no one has had their water cut off. In other words, our institutions seem to have worked.

Arizona’s Water Troubles

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I am the type of journalist who loves a juicy, seemingly intractable political/policy problem. That’s why I love writing about water. But as a New Mexico water writer, I confess to a certain amount of envy at my colleagues to the west. Sure, we’ve got some tough water problems in our state. But they are limited, I think, by our relative poverty. We haven’t come as close to testing the boundaries of available supplies as folks in Arizona and California.

That’s a circuitous way of getting to Shaun McKinnon’s post yesterday afternoon on the state of Arizona’s efforts to reconcile the state’s growth curves with its dwindling water supplies:

In the back pages of a new report about Prescott’s future water supplies, the Arizona Department of Water Resources warns, in unmistakably clear terms, that, under the agency’s current authorities, the state will fail to meet its sustainable water resource goals without changes in the way water is managed.

The conclusions are significant and should be required reading for policy makers at every level of government, from city councils on up to the Legislature. One phrase in particular is important: The current structure will not only result in unmet goals, it “may over time move us farther away.”

What I’d really love would be the chance to write about the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Now there’s a sweet story. Maybe I should start a blog about water or something. 🙂

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The FOIA’s in the Mail

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From the newspaper this morning a column (sub/ad req) on my frustration with the disconnect between the Obama administration’s soaring rhetoric about public information and transparency and the gritty reality faced by those in the trenches trying to get public information:

With the arrogance of a federal agency that has become accustomed to a lack of accountability for its breathtaking history of delays and cost overruns on big nuclear projects, the National Nuclear Security Administration refuses to release key documents that might answer these questions.

It is hard to know whether the agency is trying to cover up some serious problems that would be revealed by the documents, or whether it is simply a bureaucratic instinct (common at the agency) to circle the wagons to avoid embarrassment over its woeful nuclear project management record. Whichever it is, it clearly does not reflect the sweeping language of one of Barack Obama’s first executive orders when he took office in 2009: “A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.”

River Beat: The Flood of 1905

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I love this picture of what I can only assume are three rascals defying their mothers and swimming in the New River, in the Imperial Valley of Southern California in 1905.

New River, Imperial Valley, 1905

New River, Imperial Valley, 1905, Courtesy USGS

The New River, in the incarnation seen here, was formed when the Colorado River ate through a poorly built intake structure and chewed up the canals that were supposed to be carrying water to make what had been called the Colorado Desert, ambitiously renamed Imperial Valley, bloom with agricultural riches. The flooding was no doubt a disaster for these teenagers’ families, but they seem to be enjoying themselves.

Who Should Pay to Clean Up Our Messes?

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On the Public Record, the California water blogger, is his/her usual pithy self in response to a truly awful Sacramento Bee editorial about the cost of cleaning up its sewage. The problem is ammonia in Sacramento’s sewage, which causes havoc downstream. The Bee’s argument (really, I am not making this up) is that if people downstream want the pee cleaned out of their water, they’ll have to pay:

If beneficiaries of a possible peripheral canal want cleaner water for their big straw, they should be prepared to pay for it.

OTPR’s response:

If downstream people want to use our effluent, they can pay for (some of) cleaning it? Look, I know tail-enders get the shaft, but that’s an artifact of the physical world, not an admirable policy that we say out loud. What happened to “Leave No Trace” and “Clean up after yourselves.”?

My Education in Economics

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On my regular drive home, there’s a Red Roof Inn (and Suites!) by the freeway with a big sign advertising its price. It’s typically $49.99 (often $59.99 weekends) for a room. But during our annual Balloon Fiesta in October, when the town fills up with tourists, the price typically goes up to $89.99 or $99.99.

“Price gouging,” I used to mutter as I drove by.

Then I took some classes in economics and read a bunch.

Now during Balloon Fiesta, when the price goes up, I say to myself, “That makes sense.”

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Diversions, Consumptive Use and those Pesky Return flows

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Out here in the inland arid western United States, water management is complicated by the convoluted question of what happens to the water after we “use” it.

Sometimes it’s used up. Sometimes we put it back, in a way that allows others to use it.

Largest Tributary on the Middle Rio Grande

Largest Tributary on the Middle Rio Grande

Regular Inkstain readers, all three of you, will recognize this theme from a riff a few weeks back on my visit to Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant. With some thematic tweaks, I turned it into a newspaper column (sub/ad req):

A groundbreaking last week at the sewage treatment plant illustrates the issue. Dignitaries did the traditional shovel-in-dirt ritual to ceremonially launch construction of a treatment plant that will add an extra level of cleaning to about 5 percent of the wastewater now going into the Rio Grande. Instead of sending it to the river, it will be pumped into a newly built network of pipes to irrigate parks on Albuquerque’s south side.

In other words, instead of returning it to the system, it will be consumptively used. We’ll be able to reduce our groundwater pumping or river diversions by a like amount, but it’s not like we’re getting free water here. In terms of the overall amount of water in the system, the net effect is essentially zero.

RIP Cliff Crawford

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I’ve got the sad honor today of writing an obituary for Cliff Crawford, the retired University of New Mexico biologist for whom the word “beloved” carries only a fraction of the baggage that it should.

Cliff Crawford

Courtesy Albuquerque Journal

Cliff’s the dean of the dean of the bosque biologists, a group who study and love the riparian strip along the Rio Grande through New Mexico’s midsection. His academic children – K-12, undergrads, graduate students – are thick in this town, reifying the cliche about one’s work living after.

More over at the work blog, and in tomorrow’s newspaper. Services tomorrow (Wed. 9/7), and I’m told Bosque School, which was integral in Cliff’s educational work, is pulling together an event in October to honor Cliff’s legacy.

Water in the Desert: Domingo Baca Canyon

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Domingo Baca spring, Sandia Mountains, September 2010

Domingo Baca spring, Sandia Mountains, September 2010

In search of the juniper titmouse and random desert wrens, I headed up the Domingo Baca trail in the foothills above Albuquerque this morning. As is the case with most of the little canyons on the west face of the Sandias, there’s a spring near the bottom of Domingo Baca Canyon. The tilt of the rock causes the water to pool behind a layer of granite and rise to the surface at basically the same strata in each canyon, near the base of the mountains. At least that’s what I think explains it. The little green patches are lovely and always popular, with hikers and with birds. (Apologies for the picture, as I only had a cell phone with me.)

Baca was an old sheepherder, or so the story goes, and you can still see what they say is the remains of his rock hut on one side of the canyon just downstream from the spring. There is no perennial water flowing out of the Sandias into the desert below, but up in these canyons the springs, feed by snowmelt, run year ’round. It’s where I’d put my cabin too if I was herding sheep.

There were some broad-tailed hummingbirds, presumably on their annual commute, stopping for a drink. Well, not so much “stopping” as flying frantically and acting confused by the bright reddish pink shirt of a woman who arrived at the spring the same time I did.

I saw a flock of juniper titmouses (titmice?) and the wonderful fall nut-burying behavior of the scrub jays. You can here the “tap tap tap” as they poke it into the dirt. But no wrens today, at least that I could find.

River Beat: The Charles H. Spencer

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Without pack animals and before fueled machinery, the ability of a human to carry food placed a fundamental constraint on economic integration across large distances. Over any significant distances, a human would have to eat all the food they could carry, leaving none left for trade. Trade of small, high value items could go on over larger distances, but large scale agricultural shipping just wasn’t economically viable.

I was thinking of that today when reading the tale of the Charles H. Spencer, a steamboat built for use in a mining operation on the Colorado River in 1912. The boat was named after the entrepreneur behind the project, an effort to extract gold from the rocks around Lee’s Ferry, on the Colorado River in the remote desert of northern Arizona.

The Charles H. Spencer

The wreck of the Charles H. Spencer, 1915, courtesy USGS

Spencer needed coal to run his mining equipment, so he arranged for the construction of a small steamboat and a barge to haul the material from place called Warm Creek, some 28 miles upriver. (As an aside, the construction of the barge seems to have been, uhh, subsidized by Coconino County, the local government. A fellow named Bill Switzer, the elected county treasurer, was also on Spencer’s payroll.)

The steamboat was quite a sensation, and people came from all around to see it. If you’ve been to the area, you will understand how remarkable that is, as “all around” is pretty much wide open space. Prospectors came down river from Glen Canyon mining sites, and folks came all the way up from Flagstaff, which is more than 100 miles away.

Sadly, the Charles H. Spencer’s working career was short. It made one trip down from Warm Creek, lashed to the barge full of coal. But it never completed the return trip. One history I found said it took more coal to power the boat than it could carry. P.T. Reilly’s encyclopedic Lee’s Ferry: From Mormon Crossing to National Park argues that the boat was simply not powerful enough.

Spencer’s mining operation folded soon after, but what is left of the wreck of the Charles H. Spencer can still be seen by visitors to the National Park Service site at Lee’s Ferry. The wreck is, as near as I can tell, the only Abandoned Shipwreck formally protected by the U.S. National Park Service in the state of Arizona.

note 1 – Reilly’s book is strange and wonderful and exhaustively complete. I highly recommend it for river buffs, though it’s one of those books of a certain type that are best sampled in discrete chunks over time and as need arises. I relied on it for most of the description above.

note 2 – I’m pretty sure Warm Creek is now submerged beneath Lake Powell. Meaning I guess that it no longer exists. Anyone know if that’s right?

note 3 – The picture above is identified in the USGS archives with the name E.C. LaRue, who did a lot of the early hydrologic studies of the Colorado River, though it’s not clear whether LaRue took it, or rather that it was taken by someone on one of his survey teams.