Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?”

My answer:

We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow of rivers, and we’re likely to see more and more examples where infrastructure we’ve come to depend on no longer functions the way we planned or intended.

We seem to be living through a grand convergence of aging water infrastructure failure on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande this year.

We’ve talked in this space before about El Vado – built in the 1930s, unusable today. But it is only one example among many right now. If we are frank in recognizing that the main Rio Grande channel is a human artifact, dug in its current place and form in the 1950s, the list right now is long. The Flood Control Acts of 1948 (Public Law 80-858) and 1950 (Public Law 81-516) established the Middle Rio Grande Project and assigned the Bureau of Reclamation the job of performing Rio Grande channel maintenance.

The channel is infrastructure.

And it’s not just human water use that has optimized around the infrastructure. I was very careful in my comment to Jake – “entire human and natural communities” have optimized around the temporal and spatial flow of a century of altered river systems. When we taught together in the UNM Water Resources Program, my friend and collaborator Benjamin Jones spent significant time on the concept of “coupled human and natural systems”. This is that.

Here’s my current list, feel free to add your favorites in the comments.

Rio Chama downstream from Abiquiu

The Army Corps of Engineers has had to curtail releases out of Abiquiu Dam on the Rio Chama because sediment has plugged the river. That means decreased flows downstream. They’re working like crazy to dig a pilot channel. It is not yet working.

Corrales Siphon

The Corrales Siphon, built (like El Vado) in the 1930s as part of the early Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District works is (like El Vado) broken. The district has installed temporary pumps, but with the reduced flows out of the Chama, there’s not enough water in the Rio Grande to feed the pumps, which means irrigators in Corrales have no water.

Lower San Acacia Reach

The Rio Grande’s Lower San Acacia reach, heavily altered by channel reconstruction and management from the 1950s onward, is – I believe the technical term is “a fucking mess”. It’s increasingly difficult to get water through this reach to users downstream who depend on it. Lots more on this situation here.

Low Flow Leak

The Low Flow Conveyance Channel (Yay 1950s engineering!) sprang a kinda big leak the early 1990s. It’s still leaking, much to the delight of endangered willow flycatchers – to the human water users not so much.