What does it take to win public acceptance of wastewater reuse?

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Q: What does it take to win public acceptance of direct potable reuse of wastewater?

A: “a daily lived experience with the effects of drought or water scarcity”

That’s one of the key findings from a new paper I coauthored with a team led by the University of New Mexico’s Caroline Scruggs, working with Water Resources Program graduate student Claudia Pratesi: Direct potable water reuse in five arid inland communities: an analysis of factors influencing public acceptance.

We were interested in better understanding the connection between the technocratic answers to the reuse question (Science says it’s safe!) and the sometime cultural response (Yuck!). Dr. Scruggs has been working on reuse for years. I jumped in because of my interest in the science-policy interface, and in particular in the governance piece – how do decision making structures influence the kind of decisions that get made in a situation like this. As is the case with stuff like this, Claudia did a lot of the heavy lifting as part of her masters project.

I loved doing this project in part because of the way it embodied the interdisciplinary work we do in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program – understanding the interface between the technical sciency parts of water management and the cultural and institutional pieces that are so important in getting stuff done.

How much might Utah’s Lake Powell pipeline cost?

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My Colorado River policy attention time is a finite resource, and I admit I’ve not paid terribly close attention to Utah’s Lake Powell Pipeline proposal. My reasoning has been that it’s likely so expensive relative to the water it would provide that, with the end of big federal subsidies, Utah’s eventually going to wake up and say, “Wait, what? We’ll have to pay how much?” Simply using less water is likely to be a lot cheaper, and the folks in Washington County clearly have that option available. My public policy attention triage strategy is essentially “Don’t waste a lot of time on this one, it’s likely to go away soon.”

I’ve been thinking that for a while. It hasn’t gone away.

Emma Penrod has an excellent piece in the latest High Country News exploring what she calls the “funding quagmire”, including some really helpful public journalism exposing previously hidden efforts to government project backers to try to make the project look as cheap as possible:

But as state and local officials wrangle over the specifics of who might eventually foot the bill, there’s still a chance that Washington County residents could avoid paying it. Under Utah’s Lake Powell Pipeline Development Act, it’s the state — not the county — that will end up doing so, should Washington County’s efforts to pay fall short.

Is that unfair? Washington County Water District Manager Thompson doesn’t think so. Growth in Salt Lake City was once made possible by large, expensive water projects funded by a nationwide tax base. If Utah writ large has to raise taxes to pay off multimillion-dollar budget deficits, then so be it, he says. In his mind, it’s Washington County’s turn.

A book arrived at my house yesterday by post

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The new book Science Be Dammed, with my old book Water is For Fighting Over

the siblings’ first meeting

My early review copy arrived yesterday, ahead of the “official” Nov. 26 publication of the new Eric Kuhn-John Fleck book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado. River. I’ve got but one – I talked to Eric this morning up in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, (in the Upper Basin) and he’s got a couple of boxes’ worth. Package tracking suggests my box with another 20 left Las Vegas, Nevada, last night (so currently beating their escape from the Lower Basin!).

So excited. Three years’ work with Eric, trying to tell a story that we think is so very important to understanding how we got to where we are in the Colorado River Basin, and how a better understanding can help us navigate the tough times to come. From the book’s closing chapter:

When E. C. LaRue wrote in 1916, before the Colorado River Compact, before Hoover Dam, before all the development that was to follow, that “the flow of the Colorado River and its tributaries is not sufficient to irrigate all the irrigable lands lying within the basin,” he prefaced his observation with a caveat. “More complete data,” he wrote, “would probably indicate a greater shortage in the water supply available” (emphasis added).

Each of those points has largely been lost to the history on which our modern operational understanding of the Colorado River Basin is based. The first, as we have seen in the stories of LaRue, Stabler, Sibert, Tipton, G. E. P. Smith, Stockton and Jacoby, and the modern climate change scientists is surely the most important. There is simply less water in the system than the edifice of laws and policies and infrastructure was premised upon. But LaRue’s second point may be the more important—the need for humility in the face of uncertainty, and the crucial need to design that humility and uncertainty into the institutions we build to use and manage the river.

We hope you enjoy it.

Metropolitan Southern California’s use of Colorado River water on track to be the lowest this year since the 1950s

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MWD 2019 water use forecast. Weird graph to read – it’s the forecast made at each point during the year. So back in January, the USBR was expecting MWD to take nearly 850kaf. That’s dropped to 551kaf.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s deliveries of Colorado River water this year are currently forecast at 550,518 acre feet, and depending on conditions over the two-and-a-half months of the year could drop as low as 506,000 acre feet, according to forecast data from the Bureau of Reclamation and what folks at MWD told me today.

That is the lowest draw on the river by coastal Southern California since the 1950s. Since 1964, MWD has taken, on average, more than a million acre feet of water per year from the Colorado River.

The reasons are twofold. First, a big Sierra snowpack (the fifth largest since 1950) meant a larger allocation via the California State Water Project – a 75 percent allocation (which is really bigger than it sounds – it’s a big allocation). Second, Met’s become much more nimble in conserving water and juggling the various supplies within its service territory.

I keep a dataset of the annual use by Met and other major Lower Colorado River Basin water users that goes back to 1964 (the year the Bureau began formally documenting use as part of the requirements of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Arizona v. California – the data’s here if you want to paw through it for yourself). 551kaf would be the lowest in that entire time period, so I wrote to a friend at Met asking them to dive into their older data. Previous low years:

  • 1958: 538kaf
  • 1956: 479kaf

So at the current official forecast of 550,518 acre feet, this would be Met’s lowest use since 1958. But with a current target within Met of 506kaf, this could be the lowest use of Colorado River water by metropolitan Southern California since 1956.

Either way, that’s before I was born.

 

 

From “The Great Mistake” to “Science Be Dammed”

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William L. Sibert

William L. Sibert

When I was wrestling six years ago with a path through what became my book Water Is For Fighting Over, I collected material about what I came to call “the great mistake” – the overallocation of the Colorado River’s water. One of my favorite stories surrounded William Sibert:

It is quite probable that the compact attempts to apportion more water than the actual average undepleted flow of the river.

That’s circa 1928, before Congress ratified the Colorado River Compact and approved the construction of Hoover Dam, in a technical review of the project requested by Congress.

I set the topic aside back in 2013 in part because of the technical complexity of the early water math. I frankly had a hard time with the analytical framework (which period of record? which gauges? what upstream depletions? and on….), and the task of writing sensibly about something I couldn’t fully grasp myself was daunting.

Thanks to Eric Kuhn, who’d been thinking along the same lines and who had the analytical chops to make sense of what Sibert and others at the time were saying, we’ve had a chance to take another crack at “the great mistake”.

There in the pages of the Sibert board’s report was a clear message. The nineteenth-century droughts … meant the Colorado River had less water than the boosters had imagined when they crafted the 1922 Colorado River Compact and the federal legislation now before the Congress to ratify the compact and launch construction of what would become the Hoover Dam. The report’s math was inescapable. Once reservoir evaporation and water for Mexico were taken into consideration, any realistic effort to estimate the river’s flow left too little water to meet the allocations carved out in the 1922 compact and about to be ratified by Congress in federal statute.

That’s from “The Sibert Report: A Lost Opportunity”, Chapter 6 of our new book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, out next month from the University of Arizona Press.

Sibert’s story is an important one that has been largely lost to history, relegated to footnotes or ignored entirely. A retired Army officer and engineer, he headed a panel chartered by Congress in 1928 to review the feasibility of the project about to be launched:

A board of engineers would be tasked with advising federal decision-makers on “matter affecting the safety, the economic and engineering feasibility, and adequacy of the proposed structure and incidental works” to be built on the Colorado River.

Critics of what would become Hoover Dam hoped to scuttle it on technical grounds – could they really build a dam that big? But Sibert, to his credit, took his charge of “economic feasibility” seriously. Would there be enough water to generate the electricity to pay for the project? That required him to take up the underlying question – does the Colorado River really have enough water to honor the allocations in the legislation Congress was about to approve?

His answer, quoted above, was “no”.

Water nerds in the audience will love Eric’s dissection of Sibert’s analysis of the river’s flows. (Buy our book!) More importantly, I hope water nerds in the audience will I hope appreciate Sibert’s probabilistic approach to water management:

Rather than picking one number, the board suggested the planning consider a range, with flows available for future depletion ranging from 10 million acre-feet during drought periods as long as 15–20 years, to high flows over similar time periods of 14.5 million acre-feet, with a long-term average somewhere in the middle.

As we explain in the book, there was too much momentum in Congress and the nation, and Sibert’s careful analysis was ignored. We live today with the consequences.

 

a dinosaur, in the fog

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a dinosaur sculpture in the fog

a dinosaur in the fog, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Priorities.

Thrashing in a pile of work – a university program report that’s overdue, a book review (also overdue), two papers I’m writing with colleagues, a presentation for new grant funders to prepare, and a class to teach – I had plans for just a quick early morning bike ride this morning. But as my bike trail dropped down to Albuquerque’s valley floor, I saw the fog.

I have lived longer in Albuquerque than Southern California, the land of my birth. But Southern California came first. And so on those rare days when we have fog in Albuquerque, I am wistful, reminded of the magic of the fogs of my childhood. It encloses you gently, the fog, erasing things, telling you there are things you’ve no need to see, or know.

I headed out across the river, watching the Rio Grande disappear in the mist. Down back roads and dirt paths I’ve ridden a dozen times in daylight I became delightfully lost, more than once. My glasses fogged and I let them, the fog doing double work. As I dropped back down from the west mesa, toward the river again, the sun came close to burning through the fog, so I looked for the places it remained thickest and rode toward them.

When I was a teenager in the suburbs east of Los Angeles, we would drive to Chino, our valley’s low spot, when it still had dairies, was the place most likely to have fog. There was a story whispered from older brothers and sisters about the mystery of “the green mist”, and we weren’t quite what it was or why we were looking for it.

Just fog, I guess, but in retrospect that is probably enough.

Rio Grande in the fog, Albuqueruqe, New Mexico, October 2019

Rio Grande in the fog, Albuqueruqe, New Mexico, October 2019

Albuquerque’s water use continues to decline

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The decoupling between water use and economic and population growth continues in Albuquerque, where we’ve cut per capita water use by more than half since the mid-1990s:

Albuquerque endured a hot, dry summer this year. Temperatures are still above average, and the monsoon season never made a big splash. But that hasn’t stopped the city from conserving water.

At its board meeting Wednesday, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority said customers, through Sept. 9, have used 812 million fewer gallons in 2019 compared with this same time last year. That equates to about 4 fewer gallons per person per day.

Not some magic bean thing going on here. The decoupling we’re seeing across the West, as water use declines even as populations grow, has become the norm. Here’s the aquifer beneath my house, rising:

USGS Del Sol Divider