Poverty, income inequality, and US water infrastructure

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Brett Walton wrote a smart piece about the relationship between poverty, income inequality, and decaying US water infrastructure:

Affordable water requires an all-in effort that cuts across the political spectrum, a mix of redirected spending priorities, tax policy, social programs, and engineering assessments at the local, state, and federal levels. The urgency, experts assert, will grow, as water systems enter the Replacement Era — to use American Water Works Association’s phrase — while a high-tech economy widens the distance between the well-compensated haves and the struggling have-nots.

 

Technology is easy, but it’s water policy that matters

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Brett Walton had a piece last week that suggested an appropriate damper for the US water community’s enthusiasm for the Obama administration’s recent Big Water Push:

The budget request drew praise from water experts, who, even with the small sum, were happy to see more recognition from the country’s leadership. But those same voices note that the most fruitful prospects for refashioning the country’s relationship with water are not technological. They are political: changing the laws, policies, and incentives that guide water use at the local, state, and federal levels. In other words, tinkering with the rules of the game, not just adding new pieces to the board.

“It makes sense to invest in research and technology,” Doug Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado, told Circle of Blue. “The key is that it needs to be balanced with policy changes. There’s nothing wrong with technology and research. But it’s the easy piece, I’m afraid.”

New evidence that a warming climate is already reducing Colorado River flows

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Connie Woodhouse at the University of Arizona and colleagues have a new paper presenting the most direct link yet between a greenhouse-warmed climate and reduced flows in the Colorado River.

Woodhouse et al

Comparison of hydroclimatic variables (Colorado River at Lees Ferry water year streamflow, October–April total precipitation, March–July average temperature, and prior November soil moisture) averaged for the years in each of six droughts in the upper Colorado River basin, percentile values with standard errors. Woodhouse et al

Modeling has for many years projected such an effect in the future, but the new Woodhouse et al. paper (Increasing influence of air temperature on upper Colorado River streamflow, GRL, I believe it is ungated) is the first direct published measurement I’m aware of suggesting that it is already underway:

An important finding revealed by this work is the clustering over the last two decades of anomalous years in which already low flows are lower than might be anticipated given cool season precipitation totals. Drought conditions have persisted over the past 15?years in the upper Colorado River basin, negating any substantive positive effect of a handful of wet years (2005, 2008, and 2011) within this interval of time. In most recent drought years, low flows have been further exacerbated by warm temperatures. (emphasis added)

Woodhouse and her colleagues looked at a range of influences in annual flow on the river, including how much precipitation fallows, soil moisture in the preceding season, and spring-summer temperatures. They found that the drought of the 21st century was actually the wettest of the droughts in the historic record, as measured by the amount of precipitation falling across the Upper Colorado River Basin. But the extraordinary temperatures (it has been by far the warmest drought) pushed down the river’s flow.

This is scientifically unsurprising. When it’s warmer, plants transpire more water, and evaporation is greater. But there’s some subtle statistical analysis in the new Woodhouse et al. paper that goes beyond this obvious point to tease out the relationship between precipitation, temperature, and antecedent soil moisture. (One of the surprises to me was the relatively small impact of soil moisture going into the winter. I’d have expected the effect to be larger.)

Worth noting: the forecast this year is for a warm spring.

A forecast for another dry year on the Rio Grande

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The March 1 forecast for the Rio Grande in New Mexico suggests we are heading into another dry year on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, with a median forecast of 80 percent of the 1981-2010 average flowing into Elephant Butte Reservoir. (source pdf)

Flow at Otowi, on the Rio Grande in New Mexico

Flow at Otowi, on the Rio Grande in New Mexico

That is close enough to average that there is a lot of room on the wet side of the probability distribution to yet have a wet year. But when I wrote that last sentence I chose “average” rather than “normal” with some care, because “normal” for the years since 2000 has been dry. The graph to the right is what is called the “Otowi Index Flow”, a measure of native Rio Grande water flowing past Otowi, the key measurement point in northern New Mexico for Rio Grande Compact compliance calculation. The horizontal line is the long term mean, going back to 1940. You can see that just two years since 2000 have been above that mean. If the March forecast holds, 2016 will be the eighth consecutive year below that mean. One expects high variability on this system, with a big gap between wet years and dry years.*

But eight consecutive dry years would be extraordinary. The previous longest runs were four consecutive dry years. Since 2000 inclusive, flows on the Rio Grande at Otowi have average 30 percent less than the 1940-1999 average.

* In statspeak, the “coefficient of variation”, the size of the standard deviation relative to the mean, is 54 percent, which is big. By comparison the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry has a coefficient of variation of 29 percent. The Mississippi at St. Louis is 34 percent.

The snow goose of Willow Beach

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WILLOW BEACH, ARIZ. – One of the things I miss about my newspaper life is the quiet pleasure of a cool dateline, dangling at the start of a story like a sparkle of anticipation. So grant me this one.

The snow goose of Willow Beach.

The snow goose of Willow Beach.

Willow Beach is a boat landing and picnic spot at the bottom of Black Canyon on the Colorado River, 13 river miles downstream from Hoover Dam. It’s not so much a river here as a narrow lake, “Lake Mohave”, which backs up behind Davis Dam. Mondays and Tuesdays are “no motor” days, so you can paddle upstream through Black Canyon toward the base of Hoover Dam without the noise.

Walking downstream from the boat ramp I came upon a snow goose, up out of the water, looking quite alone. You never see snow geese by themselves – they’re serious flockers. My bird book and a search of eBird reports suggests it’s not that common here. Its effort to flee my presence seemed pretty lackluster, so I suspect it was sick. Bird rarities can be great for list-keeping (it was my 100th Arizona life bird) but they’re always sad to me.

Willow Beach is a pretty spot, but strange. The water here is a rock solid 55 degrees, cold by desert standards, because the Hoover Dam power plant intakes are deep in Lake Mead. So what we have here is far from “natural”. It lacks the annual flood cycle you would have had before the dam was built, it’s slow and easy, and really cold. The coots and ring-billed gulls don’t seem troubled – hundreds of each. Nor did the dog jumping in and out of some guys’ canoe.

But this is a very different Black Canyon than the one Joseph Christmas Ives powered up in his steamboat in 1858.

Does Pasadena, Calif., need more water?

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Courtesy City of Pasadena

Courtesy City of Pasadena

Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, is in the hunt for more water:

A recycled water project started in 1993 moved forward Monday night as the Pasadena City Council approved the environmental review of a plan to funnel water from Glendale.

The $50 million project could take 20 years to complete, with a pipeline running from a proposed reservoir in Scholl Canyon in Glendale to one at Sheldon Reservoir near the Brookside Golf Course. It would increase Pasadena’s local water supply by about 10 percent, officials said.

Pasadena, part of one of the earliest California efforts to regulate groundwater pumping, gets more than half its water from Metropolitan Water District imports, water from Northern California via the State Water Project and the Colorado River. The rest coming from the local groundwater basins. It’s always been of interest to me because it’s where I started writing about water in the late 1980s, as a newspaper reporter for the Pasadena Star-News.

Pasadena, Calif., water use, 1980-2015

Pasadena, Calif., water use, 1980-2015

When Emily Green this morning linked to Jason Henry’s story on the new Pasadena water plan, it prompted me to pull the latest data on the community’s water use. The results are unsurprising. Like nearly every community I look at, water use is down.

Since we left 25 years ago, Pasadena’s population has risen 10 percent. Its total water use has declined 29 percent. Per capita use is down 35 percent. Water use in 2015 was by far the lowest in the 35 years for which I have data.

This graph represents total water use, the combination of local groundwater and imported supply from Met.

You can see the big drop in 2015, as Southern California water users respond to the drought-tinged regional conservation initiatives. But even before that, Pasadena was part of the overall trend toward reduced water use in the metropolitan western United States.

Everyone’s using less water.

Will Utah take more water from the Colorado River Basin?

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Sarah Tory at High Country News has a nice summary of one of those classic western water issues worth watching – the Lake Powell Pipeline proposal:

The project would pump 86,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Powell 140 miles across the desert through a 69-inch buried pipe and then 2,000 feet up and over the mountains into the Sand Hollow Reservoir, 13 miles west of St. George.

For nearly a decade, the pipeline has provoked intense debate, pitting two visions of water management against each other. On one side are those who think the project is not only an outdated solution to water needs, but unnecessary. On the other are those who believe the pipeline is an essential part of addressing southwestern Utah’s future growth.

I’ve been thinking of this as one of the West’s “zombie projects”, relics of a past approach to water management that won’t move forward because of the reality of its enormous cost relative to the amount of water it would provide, and the steady reductions in per capita water use pretty much everywhere. But it keeps inching forward. I could be wrong about zombies.

The Sacramento Delta-Colorado River farming nexus

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I was talking the other day about California’s struggle to solve its Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta problems with a friend who grows food with Colorado River water in California’s southeastern desert. The delta’s more than five hundred miles and three or four watersheds away as the crow flies from his farm. Why such a keen interest?

Courtesy California Department of Water Resources

Courtesy California Department of Water Resources

Here’s the map. My friend’s farm is near the Colorado River in the appropriately colored brown blob down in the bottom right corner. The Sacramento Delta is in the green bit in the center left, near the coast.

The problem lies in the political geography of California water. The Los Angeles-San Diego metro area (the lower green coastal blob on the map) gets large supplies of imported water from both places – the Sacramento Delta and the Colorado River. To the extent that supplies from one of those two places become smaller or less reliable, it places enormous pressure on Southern California to trade that problem off against increased supply and/or reliability from the other. (Both variables, supply size and reliability, are crucial.)

The Sacramento Delta is a mess, both in the plain English sense of the word (“a state of affairs that is confused or full of difficulties”)  and in the more subtle framework of Berkeley policy scholar Emery Roe in which policy messes are things not to be cleaned up so much as managed. The Sacramento Delta mess involves a plumbing system that needs to pump vast quantities of water through an ad hoc network of old sloughs and channels ill-suited to the task, completely rejiggering the natural and human environment in a way that creates all sorts of reliability problems along conflicting dimensions – distant human water needs, local human water needs, environmental water needs, local and distant cultural values and needs. Building the big plumbing systems of the 20th century has created interconnections across social and governance boundaries that our 21st century institutions remain poorly equipped to handle.

AroundDeltaWaterGo

One proposed solution is to build ginormous tunnels beneath the damn thing, bypassing the water. California keeps changing the name of this project – it was once a Peripheral Canal rather than a tunnel system, it was the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, I tried to name it Peripheral Thingie but failed, it’s now California WaterFix, my favorite new name is OtPR’s AroundDeltaWaterGo. More importantly, California keeps not quite deciding to build it, but also not deciding to not build it.

Water behind Imperial Dam is currently headed for desert farms. But will L.A. need it? photo by John Fleck

Water behind Imperial Dam is currently headed for desert farms. But will L.A. need it? photo by John Fleck

I am agnostic about whether AroundDeltaWaterGo is a good idea or not. I haven’t spent the time to form an informed opinion (do jump into the comments and explain what an idiot I am for not seeing the obvious merits of your argument for/against). But sitting out here in the Colorado River Basin I am acutely aware of the regional implications of how California handles this mess.

Jeff Kightlinger, head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, has been on a public tear lately arguing the merits of the tunnel scheme:

California WaterFix proposes to build three new intakes in the northern Delta that are outside of the typical migrating range of adult delta smelt. The intakes since January could have been capturing as much as 9,000 cubic feet per second of supplies in addition to what we have been diverting from the existing south Delta facilities.

How much water are we talking about? Every day we cannot capture 9,000 cfs in supplies because we don’t have California WaterFix on line, the lost supply is roughly six times the daily demands of the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco combined.

To the extent that Met can’t grab that water from Northern California, it increases the pressure to look elsewhere. And my farmer friend and his neighbors in the agricultural communities of the deserts of southeastern California – the Imperial Irrigation District, Bard, the Palo Verde Irrigation District – are that “elsewhere”. The ag districts have Colorado River water rights, and Met has an aqueduct that could bring some of that water to the vast metro areas of the coast.

Met right now looks like it has to play a zero sum game. I can see why a farmer in California’s eastern deserts might have some enthusiasm for construction of giant tunnels 500 miles away that will bring him zero water.