In response to reader feedback, here’s my depressing graph of current Lake Mead storage, adapted to be readable on your mobile phone. Yes, there are people now who prefer their bad news on the go!
Lake Mead storage, large type edition
More background here.
It’s one of those milestones that’s an entirely arbitrary result of the units we use to measure, but it’s probably nevertheless worth marking: for the first time since it was filled in the 1930s, Lake Mead ended the “water year” below 10 million acre feet of storage.
The finally elevation at midnight last Wednesday, Sept. 30, was 1,078.1 feet above sea level at the big Colorado River reservoir, which holds water for use in Nevada, Arizona, California, Sonora, and Baja. That translates to an estimated 9.854 million acre feet in storage, down from 10.121 maf a year ago. That is 38 percent of capacity.
Total storage in Mead and Lake Powell, the reservoir upstream of the Grand Canyon that holds most of the rest of the Colorado River Basin’s stored water, ended the water year at 22.187 maf, down from 22.407 maf a year ago.
Mead, Powell storage
A few notes on this….
As Central Arizona Project board president Lisa Atkins noted this week, a combination of a wet late spring and summer and efforts by lower basin water uses to conserve and leave water in Lake Mead has postponed a “shortage” declaration until at least 2017 and possible later. More on that here.
The crazy accounting system used to manage the river measures some things on a “water year” basis (Oct. 1 – Sept. 30) and some things on a calendar year basis, so we won’t have final water use accounting until the end of the year, but the latest forecast numbers published this morning (pdf) project water users in California, Arizona, and Nevada will collectively use 7.165 million acre feet of their 7.5 million acre feet 2015 allotment. If this holds, that would be the lowest water use for the three states since 2005 and 17 percent below “peak Lower Basin Colorado River water use” in 2002.
Today’s federal drought monitor for New Mexico passed an important milestone. For the first time since November 2010, more than half the state is completely free of any drought or “abnormally dry” designation:
drought monitor
Harold Ickes delivering Boulder Dam dedication, Sept. 30, 1935, courtesy USBR
From his Sept. 30, 1935 speech dedicating what was then called “Boulder Dam,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes:
I venture to hope that this dam, with its great storage of health and wealth and happiness for thousands of people, will stand as a definite opening of a new era with respect to the natural resources of America; an era of conservation, which means the prudent use of all our natural resources for the greatest good of the greatest number of our people; an era that will recognize the principle that the riches of forest and mine and water were not bestowed by God to be ruthlessly exploited in order to enhance the wealth of a small group of rugged individualists, but were beneficently given to us as an endowment to be carefully used for the benefit of all the people. On no other theory would the Federal Government be justified in so generously opening the doors of its treasure house for the building of this and other similar projects that will turn large sections of this breathtaking Western country into rich homesteads where a happy and contented people will find it possible to live those comfortable and worthwhile lives that we covet for every man, woman and child in these United States.
I love this. It was such a hopeful time. Listen to the audio here.
Brandon Loomis, in an excellent recent piece on the problems of the Salton Sea, quoted a resident along the troubled inland California lake who thinks the answer to its decline is straightforward:
Rod Jeffries, a 64-year-old urban refugee from San Francisco, is confident the state will act….
His favored solution is to pipe seawater from the gulf, since the water is already so salty.
This idea has lingered for generations, but it’s a really terrible idea. The reason the Salton Sea is so salty is because the water flowing in currently, from Imperial and Coachella ag runoff has only a modest amount of salt, but evaporation leaves all that salt behind. If you add ocean water, which is much saltier than the current ag inflow, the evaporation would make the sea way saltier. So you’d have to not only pump salt water in from the ocean, but also pump salty water back out from the Salton Sea. The amount of water involved, and therefore the energy and infrastructure costs, are staggering. Michael Cohen at the Pacific Institute has put together a helpful video that explains all this:
Cohen has posted more useful info on the problems with “sea to sea” schemes here.
At the end of a marvelous twitter soliloquy on Hegel, Locke, Dewey, and the implications of last night’s meeting on sex education in Vegas schools, Las Vegas Sun politics editor Scott Lucas concluded with this:
Anyways, I'm just a journalist, the fuck do I know?
— Scott Lucas (@ScottLucasNV) September 30, 2015
Havin’ that carved on my tombstone.
Water year 2014-15 is ending with low flows again on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico. (We’ve only had one year since 2000 with above-average flows.)
Lissa and I walked out to the Rio Grande in Bernalillo County’s far South Valley this afternoon. The water was low. Low is normal for this time of year, but the river’s lower than that (234 cubic feet per second at the Albuquerque gauge, with a median this time of year around 380). A flock of Canada geese was squatting on the sand bars (just pixels in this picture, but I know they’re there) and the water was low enough that the musty smell of Albuquerque’s sewage outfall, which is just a couple of miles up river from here. It’s not an awful smell, just a reminder amid the idyllic nature shot that this remains an urban, working river:
Rio Grande at Valle do Oro, Sept. 27, 2015. By John Fleck
The “water year” ends Wednesday, and this is one of my favorite times along our river. The last cutting of alfalfa is still out on the fields east of the river (did I mention it’s a working river?), but the ditches will soon be shut down, the cottonwoods are showing their first glimmers of autumn yellow, and the river itself is a quiet thing.
Alfalfa, the Rio Grande as working river
After an abysmal start, with a warm, dry winter and a lousy snowpack, the water year turned around with big rains starting in May. They didn’t make up for the deficit, but they helped water managers glue together a decent season, delaying the annual drought year struggle to keep water in the river for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow until September. The farmers and the affluent valley dwellers who get an agricultural tax exemption for their horse pasture got the water they needed. Albuquerque got the water it needed for municipal supply (and preliminary estimates suggest our per capita use this year will be down another 4 percent in 2015, meaning water use in my city continues to drop faster than population is growing, yay us).
But my preliminary calculations based on USGS data put the water year flow past the Central Avenue Bridge in Albuquerque at 608,000 acre feet, will below the long term average (1974 to the present in this case) of 893,000 acre feet. Only once since 2000 – in 2008 – has the flow past the Central Avenue gauge been above average.
Elephant Butte Reservoir, the next reservoir to the south of this point and the Rio Grande’s largest, shows it. The Butte remains abysmally empty, at just 8 percent of capacity.
Data source: USGS
From an interesting Sammy Roth interview with former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar:
Q: In Southern California, water managers often say they don’t have to worry about losing access to Colorado River water, because of the state’s “senior” water rights. During an extreme shortage, they believe, Arizona and Nevada would lose much of their river water before California loses a drop. Do you think that’s how an extreme shortage would actually play out?
A: I think California has to worry a lot about, because it has a major dependence on the Colorado River. It has to be one of the cardinal concerns of the state of California.
Salazar, who as Interior Secretary used to serve as the “watermaster” on the Lower Colorado and therefore presumably has some understanding of the legal nuances, doesn’t say how California might come to no longer enjoy those senior rights.
We’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
The century just ended will be recognized as the time when America’s water resources were attacked with all of the sophistication and power that one would expect of an economic and technological superpower. Unruly rivers were straightened and channelized , massive levees and dikes were thrown in the way of encroaching water, cheap electricity was wrung from falling water, harbors were carved from shallow inlets, locks and dams turned wild rivers into barge canals, salmon were butchered in turbines on their way down rivers – and are proving inconveniently resistant to lessons to teach them to climb ladders on their return journey , wetlands were drained to grow crops we probably did not need, and yes the “desert was made to bloom as the rose.” The nation grew rich as a few well-situated entrepreneurs prospered. The rivers were to foster commerce, and federal water policy was the single-minded pursuit of that goal with the nation’s taxpayers putting up the money.
Was this history a mistake? Of course not. To insist otherwise would be Whigish. Young nations have different needs from mature ones, and America is, alas like some of us, no longer young. Now it is time to re-direct the purpose of the rivers. Dams and dynamite now conjure a very different image than in the early years of the century. But what dynamite helped to create, dynamite can help to undo. Is this transition in water policy fair to those whose lives and livelihood are inextricably bound up with the shifting purpose of the rivers? There is no easy answer to that. A civilized nation cushions the inevitable transitions for those caught in the vise of shifting priorities and purposes. Perhaps Water War II will concern the nature and scope of policies to alleviate the social and economic harm of the new purpose of the rivers. How will the Axis and the Allies align themselves this time? (emphasis added)
Bromley, Daniel W. “Program evaluation and the purpose of rivers.” Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education 116, no. 1 (2011): 3. (pdf)
In which Sarah Tory interviews me for High Country News about stuff:
When John Fleck began covering water (among other things) in 1995 for New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal, he assumed he’d be writing stories about dried out wells and cracked mud. After all, as a Los Angeles native who grew up in a suburb that had replaced an irrigated citrus orchard, he’d grown up reading books like A River No More, by Philip Fradkin, and Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, essential reading for water nerds.
As a journalist, he went looking for the kinds of stories these authors promised: stories of “conflict, crisis, and doom.” But he found a very different narrative and after nearly 30 years spent covering some of the most pressing water issues in the West, Fleck is now writing a book, which is due to be published by Island Press next year. He recently spoke to HCN about the dilemma water journalists face these days— and why the West’s water problems aren’t as bad as we think.