Where the Water Goes

Life and Death Along the Colorado River
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About the Author
New Yorker staff writer David Owen also wrote Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability and The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

Summary
The Colorado River

Today, the Colorado River and its tributaries irrigate six million acres of farmland, provide power for two hydroelectric plants and support recreational activities worth $26 billion a year. The water quenches the thirst of 36 million people in Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona; and San Diego and Los Angeles, California.

The West “would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation.” (Theodore Roosevelt, 1901)

Ranchers and farmers in the mid-1800s pushed westward in part because they believed that “rain follows the plow.” A related claim suggested that trains and telegraph lines prompted rainstorms. Settlers who believed such claims were sorely disappointed when the arid West couldn’t support their farms. However, if you disregard the lack of water, deserts are ideal for agriculture. Farmers need not fear frost, hail and violent storms. Consistent weather permits stable farm employment and precise planting and harvest dates. Before man-made dams tamed the Colorado River in the 1930s, its course shifted around Southern California and Southwestern Arizona, depositing silt and flattening the land for farming.

“Reclamation”

President Theodore Roosevelt made a case for water reclamation in his first State of the Union address in 1901. The Laguna Diversion Dam, built in 1909, was the first to disrupt the Colorado’s flow. An extensive system of reservoirs, canals, aqueducts, and other water projects followed. Crews working under horrific conditions completed the Hoover Dam in 1936. The Colorado River Water Storage Project, approved in 1956, led to the creation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These projects brought water to the desert, creating skirmishes over rights to that water and concern for the environment.

“The Colorado River is both friend and foe. It has the power to sustain life and ruin lives, to create opportunity and destroy prosperity.” (sign at Hoover Dam)

In 1922, after heated debate, the Colorado River Compact divided water between two “imaginary basins.” The “upper basin” would receive half, providing for Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. The “lower basin” would receive the other half for Nevada, Arizona and thirsty California. Hydrologists estimated the Colorado’s average flow at 17 million acre-feet per year. In terms of volume, an acre-foot of water covers an acre of land to a one-foot depth and meets the annual water needs of between one and three typical families. Projected yearly flow sprang from the rainfall levels of the early part of the 20th century. Tree-ring analysis suggests those decades were the wettest years since the 1400s. These original optimistic estimates resulted in chronic over-allocation of Colorado River water. The US Bureau of Reclamation now expects a deficit of about three million acre-feet by 2060.

“The Law of the River is kind of like the British constitution… It’s whatever the people who have really been hanging around it

a long time think it is.” (Phoenix lawyer Grady Gammage Jr.)

Water Law

Riparian law governs water usage in England and on the US East Coast; it states that property owners bordering a water source have an equal claim to the water. In contrast, water law in the Western US hinges on the concept of “prior appropriation,” dating back to the California gold rush. Prior appropriation means that when a property makes “beneficial use” of water, that property has a claim to its original amount of water regardless of future claims, drought or other extenuating circumstances. Under prior appropriation, people parcel out water according to original filing dates, “and senior rights holders are under no obligation to share.”

The “Law of the River”

The law of the river lives in the heart of the “Water Buffalos” – “old-school Western water experts” who’ve long been immersed in the West’s water rights culture. When suggesting, for example, that Los Angeles can’t invoke its prior claim to water to desiccate Phoenix, a water buffalo might explain, “that would violate the law of the river.”

“Theoretical rights to the Colorado’s flow, known to water lawyers as ‘paper water,’greatly exceed its actual flow, known as ‘wet water’.”

Water law in the West remains a convoluted political nightmare. Multiple competing parties file viable claims for the courts to adjudicate, making any change difficult. Under prior appropriation, ranchers, farmers, miners and other commercial concerns have priority. For example, one part of the Crystal River dried up recently because an irrigator made full use of his priority claim.

The concept of “instream-flow water rights” suggests that the river has a claim to its own water in order to protect ecosystems, but this concept was invented in 1973. For now, The Colorado Water Conservation Board acquires early, high-priority water rights by buying or leasing land from willing sellers who hold early claims. Organizations called Recreational In-Channel Diversions (RICDs) claim “beneficial use” for kayakers, houseboats, jet skis and other recreational activities. RICDs suffer from having lower priority than other uses because they weren’t acknowledged as a beneficial use when miners, ranchers and farmers originally divvied up the river’s water. One hundred years ago, fracking, mining, airborne toxins, dead animals and disappearing wetlands weren’t a consideration, nor do modern economists focus on them now.

“Prior appropriation, allocating a variable resource by fixed amounts, turning states into competing antagonists, basing laws on discredited science – it all seems absurd.”

A Paradox

City dwellers tend to hurt the environment less than their country-dwelling, nature-loving counterparts, the people who encroach on wild spaces. Those who seemingly live environmentally friendly, off-grid lifestyles depend on the products, food and services produced by the grid. Green behaviors, like driving electric cars and buying organic vegetables, can have unforeseen side effects – in this case, devastation caused by mining lithium for batteries and using more water and land.

Prior-appropriation “transformed water from a shared common resource into private property.” (Robert Glennon, “Water Follies”)

Cities mass people together and use natural resources efficiently, making “sparsely inhabited wild places possible.” Western cities follow water conservation plans, but any gains from those policies are lost as further urban sprawl encroaches on any saved water. Agriculture consumes about 80% of the water from the Colorado’s drainage basin.

The Salton Sea

In 1905, the California Development Company attempted to bypass a silt-clogged waterway near the California–Mexico border. Subsequent flooding created the Salton Sea. The sea was a popular tourist destination, but it’s become a growing environmental hazard. Leftover irrigation water deposited salt and harmful agricultural substances in the sea for years. Its only “outlet” is evaporation, so harmful chemicals grow more concentrated as water levels sink. The wind lifts dangerous substances from the dry seabed toward the 650,000 people who live within the sea’s “air shed.” Resultant diminished air quality, ecological damage, decimated fish and birds, and loss of property and recreational value may cost $70 billion over the next 30 years.

“No one can say authoritatively how much water truly exists to be divided, beyond the very short term: It’s not a fixed, unvarying amount.”

“Consumptive vs. Non-Consumptive”

In some cases, as in the Salton Sea, inefficient water use maintains wetlands. This is an issue in the debates about consumptive versus non-consumptive water. When a farmer flood-irrigates a field rather than using a sprinkler system, only about 50% of the water ends up going toward the crop. The portion of water that evaporates and the portion the crops absorb both get “consumed” – even though the evaporated water returns to the water cycle to become usable rain water somewhere else. A significant portion of the water from flood-irrigation returns to the ditch system and irrigates other fields or sometimes even returns to the river itself, which makes the returning water “non-consumed.”

Normal water level “fluctuations will be exacerbated by climate change, whose most alarming likely effects include declining precipitation in the mountains that feed the river.”

Farmers’ use of water-efficient irrigation systems increases “consumed” water. Farmers who use sprinklers hold the rights to the same amount of water, so they generally use gains in irrigation efficiency to produce more crops. This leaves less water for the river and the water cycle. Wetlands near water-efficient farms can disappear when farmers switch from flood-irrigation to sprinkler systems.

Flushing a toilet or letting a faucet run are non-consumptive uses, because that water gets treated and reused. Watering a lawn is almost purely consumptive. All the water evaporates, or the grass absorbs it. When cities impose a threshold on water use, people often respond by installing water-efficient appliances, which reduces their non-consumptive use. Because these appliances save water, households might increase consumptive water use by watering lawns or washing cars. Reduced wastewater causes problems for sewage treatment plants designed to function with greater volumes of water.

“The comforts of modern life have been fabricated…from the products of… mines.”

City Vegetation

Even watering the lawn might be less consumptive than maintaining nearby trees. Sixteen hundred feet of Bermuda grass demands the same water needed to maintain one oak tree. Southern California’s orange and palm trees aren’t native to the region and require irrigation. Yet, removing this vegetation would be a disaster, because vegetation helps lessen cities’ “urban heat-island” effect. Vegetation also helps Las Vegas alleviate its dust problems. The answer isn’t to remove all landscaping that requires irrigation, but to implement xeriscaping, which provides ground coverage with single-root vegetation.

“Traditional economists tend to undervalue goods that are hard to pin a price on, like air quality, water quality and the future of civilization – those pesky ‘externalities’.”

“Wet Water” and “Paper Water”

Two types of water run in the Colorado. Wet water is what you use to wash your face. Paper water is what lawyers argue about in the West. Hundreds of sheets of paper water flutter invisibly around each acre-foot of wet water. Due to overestimates of annual flow in the 1920s, claims grab every drop of the Colorado before it materializes as snow-pack in Northern mountains.
Water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead are dropping. If Lake Mead dips lower than 1,075 feet above sea level, the federal government will step in with emergency water reductions.

In recent years, California, Nevada, and other affected states have thus decided to take less than their allocation to avoid federal involvement or interference. Many beneficiaries of the current water laws want to keep the status quo because they distrust the government. Fear of a shared enemy encourages cooperation among competing parties. The water those states currently use is available only because of massive federally funded projects from the past that made moving and storing water possible in the first place. A shortage declaration seems inevitable.

“Tinkering with even small elements in the river’s vast network of beneficiaries can upset dozens of others.”

Potential Solutions

The possible solutions to the Western states’ water issues include:

•    Pipeline – President Donald Trump has suggested building a pipeline to channel water from the damp Northwest to the dry Southwest. The cost would be exorbitant, and the existing water infrastructure needs work. A more plausible arrangement would be to divert water from the Great Lakes into the Missouri River, sequentially diverting some to Kansas, then some to Colorado, and so on. But this would take cooperation among entities with competing interests.

“Wild landscapes are less often ruined by people who despise wild landscapes than by people who love them, or think they do.”

•    Desalination – Desalination is already underway in many places, including Florida and Dubai. It’s expensive because it requires filtering seawater and then forcing it into reverse osmosis. Even if desalination plants run on clean energy, they could devastate the environment by encouraging people to build in otherwise uninhabitable areas.

•    Cloud seeding – Ice crystals form when planes spew silver iodide into the atmosphere, and that can increase precipitation by 5% to 15%. Cloud seeding is economical and could mitigate some of the effects of climate change by causing rainfall. Nobody knows if widespread use of silver iodide will cause unforeseen problems.

•    Irrigation Reductions – Limiting irrigation is a difficult issue. People need food, and leaving fields fallow damages irrigation systems and devastates local economies.

•    Moderating modern preferences – When restaurants and consumers demand gourmet vegetables of a specific size, shape and color, growers reject imperfect food and farming demands more land.

“Minute 319 shows that traditional antagonists are capable of negotiating complex agreements in which all parties acquire something they want. The usual tool for peacefully solving conflicts like this is money – in this case, probably lots of it.”

A Sample of Legal Cooperation: Minute Order 319

Water advocates with competing interests in the upper and lower basin states as well as Mexico have shown themselves capable of cooperation. The Minute 319 water agreement of 2012 – a type of judicial document – helped the environment and earned the support of various contending parties. Former US assistant secretary of the interior Bennett W. Raley organized a 2004 Grand Canyon river trip that included water buffalos, federal officials, state and urban water managers, journalists, and environmentalists. Meetings led to at least one solution – Minute 319 – that worked for everyone.