BOULDER CITY, NEV. – I was standing at a pullout on the Arizona side of Hoover Dam late this afternoon, taking pictures of the big empty, when a Japanese family got out of their car and walked up to the edge. One of the men pointed down at the big empty, then made a broad gesture at the “bathtub ring”, the white mineral deposits on the opposite wall of black canyon that starkly mark the great emptiness of Lake Mead. He spoke words I understood despite not sharing a language. It was a version of the same comments I heard over and over this week as people came upon the great emptiness of Lake Mead.

I was shooting into the sun, so this picture doesn’t quite do it justice, but you get the idea. It’s the physical manifestation of a system that, to borrow the language of one of the people I talked to at length this week, is not in “equilibrium”. All you have to do is get out of your car and look down.

Melinda Harm Benson, part of my University of New Mexico water policy posse, has been teaching me about “resilience”, which as she carefully defines it means the ability of a system to absorb a shock and retain its basic functional characteristics. In a very helpful paper applying this line of thinking to the Rio Grande, Benson borrows this definitional language from Brian Walker and David Salt: “the capacity of a system to absorb a spectrum disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks—to have the same identity.”

What we are seeing in the great emptiness of Lake Mead is a disturbance – substantially less water than we’ve every had before in the system, with demands that are simultaneously as large as, if not larger than, anything seen before in the system.

But the definition of resilience I’m using here begs an important question: who gets to decide what functions are to be retained? What is in, and what is out?

When I say “the system,” I intend something that requires some care in definition. It includes not only the river, but the infrastructure we have built on top of it over the last century to move its water for uses elsewhere, and the society that we have built based on the availability of that water.

So I mean, for example, the alfalfa fields of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, and the befountained resort/casinos of the Las Vegas Strip. I mean Phoenix and Los Angeles as well, and farming in the lettuce and alfalfa belt of Imperial and Yuma, and maybe even the Salton Sea. (Really John, the Salton Sea too? Would you like fries with that and a large drink as well?) The water manager who introduced the word “equilibrium” into our conversation as a goal meant much the same thing – a system that is able to take care of all sectors of the human economy that depend on it (including recreation) while leaving water for the natural environment.

Can we have all of that?

I think the answer is “yes”, that each of the functions I’ve chosen to ascribe to include in the system can survive intact, with much the same relationships and feedbacks to the whole, but at some smaller scale. Every piece of the system must have the capability of getting by with less water – more so if we are going to include “the environment”, which in some areas we’ve already zeroed out. We need to get the institutional plumbing right in a way that backs away from our current precipice. New water sharing and distribution rules are needed that can offer more flexibility – more resilience to shocks.

This is not impossible. It is easy to imagine Las Vegas – currently consumptively using 124 gallons per person per day – going down to 100 and still retaining its same basic structure and function. It is easy to imagine Imperial Valley with 350,000 irrigated acres during dry years instead of 450,000, still retaining its same basic structure and function.

There are other conceivable approaches. We could decide that some pieces of the system are expendable. We’ve already largely done that with large segments of the natural environment, though the river’s managers now seem to be genuinely trying to find a way to undo some of that damage. We could solve the entire river’s water deficit in one stroke if we decided that it no longer makes sense to farm the Imperial Valley. I’m not advocating that, and I don’t think it’s needed, but there are those who think it’s inevitable.

If we set to squabbling rather than figuring out how to share, we also could crash-land the system in ways that I think are unacceptable – letting Lake Mead drop below Las Vegas’s water system intakes is the system’s most dramatic near term risk scenario, but one also can easily see a not too distant future in which Phoenix and Tucson see their Colorado River water slashed while California loses not a drop. I also don’t think that’s desirable or acceptable, but that’s a realistic scenario if we don’t get the rules fixed soon. In any of those scenarios, the system would no longer retain its basic function and structure.

It would be a failure of resilience, it would not be “equilibrium”, and it would make me sad.

Erika Moonin, the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s engineering project manager for construction of the agency’s new Lake Mead intakes, showed me a picture yesterday of water pouring over Hoover Dam’s spillways in 1983, the last time the reservoir spilled. When she was a youngster, her dad took her out to see the spectacle. Looking at it today, it’s hard to imagine. Current lake level is 137 feet below the 1983 peak.

I was trying to take pictures earlier this week that might illustrate the big empty. Here’s what the spillway looks like today:

* I didn’t actually see cobwebs. It’s literary license.
** It also “filled and spilled” in the late 1990s, but didn’t rise to the level of needing spillways, just moved excess water above and beyond downstream water users’s needs through the dam’s normal release system.

Here’s my obligatory picture of Lake Mead’s bathtub ring, as seen this afternoon from Hoover Dam:

The surface elevation this afternoon was 1,088.97 feet above sea level, the lowest it’s been at this time of year since 1956. It has dropped 20 feet since this time a year ago, which is among the biggest one-year drops in history.

The reason for the big one-year drop has interesting policy implications.

One of the innovations in the 2007 shortage sharing agreement among the federal government and the seven basin states was the creation of “Intentionally Created Surplus” water management widget, a tool to free Lower Colorado River Basin water users from the tyranny of “use it or lose it”. Its purpose, according to the decision document that created it (pdf), was to “minimize the likelihood and severity of potential future shortages” by allowing water users to bank unused water in Lake Mead:

ICS may be created through projects that create water system efficiency or extraordinary conservation or tributary conservation or the importation of nonColorado River System water into the Mainstream. ICS is consistent with the concept that entities may take actions to augment storage of water in the lower Colorado River Basin.

The 2007 agreement anticipated use of things like fallowing, desalination and canal lining to create ICS credits.

One of the big ICS users has been the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which by the end of 2012 had banked 489,389 acre feet of ICS credits in Lake Mead. But with drought hitting California and Met in a big way, in 2013 the agency began taking its banked water out, withdrawing 93,858 acre feet in 2013 and another 331,965 of ICS water in 2014.

This is a smart water management tool, allowing MWD to build some resilience by saving water now in order to consume it later. But it offers zero overall net basin water conservation over longer time frames – water conserved in one year is simply used in a later year. ICS simply moves water in time. That 331,965 acre feet Met took out last year above and beyond its normal allocation is five feet of elevation it put in in previous years and withdrew in 2014.

ICS is a cool tool, but the only thing that will keep Lake Mead from dropping is a new class of policy tool that would allow conserved water to stay in the reservoir for good.

 

 

PARKER STRIP – In 2005, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the 16 concessionaires leasing BLM land along this strip of the Colorado River reported more than 4 million “visitor days”, people like these motorboaters enjoying a warm (but not hot) late winter day on the river.

That’s a mobile home and RV park called Echo Lodge Resort on the far bank, the California side, that reported 609,577 of those visitor days. These pockets of land along the river have the feel of the Southern California beach communities of my youth, shacks wedged into every buildable chunk of land within striking distance of the water.

It’s early in the season – still too cool to water ski, I’m told, but that will come. This is the stretch of the Colorado that Philip Fradkin, writing with despair, described nearly four decades ago as “charnel river“:

It is the river as theater, where each of the 125,000 weekend visitors compressed into the fourteen miles, and huddled as close as possible to the cool water, can act. To be a protagonist, rather than part of the supporting cast, one needs a sleek water-ski boat in the shape of a tapered arrowhead and powered by a jumble of chrome.

As I drove the Parker Strip Saturday, I was thinking about a conversation with a member of my braintrust who complained about a central dilemma – the way we stumble forward in our water policy discussions amid “half-told stories about the value of water”.

By the time the Colorado River gets here, it has become, in Fradkin’s words, a “river no more”. At this point, downstream from Parker Dam, Los Angeles and central Arizona have already taken their cut. The water flowing past Echo Lodge is being carefully meted out largely for farmers in the river valley to the south, and in the Imperial and Coachella valleys, and Mexicali.

The precision with which water is quantified here is exquisite, with releases from Parker Dam just upstream measured to an accuracy of less than one half of one percent – 20,818 acre feet released Feb. 21, the day I drove the Parker Strip. Every drop is tagged in the riverine accounting system.

Fradkin comes from a world – it’s the entire premise of one of the best of the Colorado River books
– in which the river has value for its own sake. He deplores, without feeling a need for argument, the water-skiing-and-beer culture and the river-turned-irrigation system on which it depends.

Those 4 million visitors likely disagree.

There’s no one right answer here, no one “right” value of water. We have a diverse society, with people valuing water different ways. On this trip I’ve  visited the Colorado River Indian Tribes, where some of the oldest, most senior Colorado River water rights are irrigating 58,000 acres of the most beautiful alfalfa fields you’ll ever see, lush and green and growing food for livestock that we then mostly turn into food for people. I also spent time in Phoenix, where a culture of imported water and fountains combines with a delicate water policy dance around both embracing and denying the problems posed by scarcity. I was there for meetings with folks working deeply and carefully on the scarcity side of things, but then there’s the fountain at Fountain Hills, which sends a very different message.

When I shared a picture of the fountain, one of my tweeps responded with a friendly welcome to Phoenix followed by “#recycledwater”. Which is true, but only complicates things with yet another half-told story. It’s a pretty cool fountain, but some people in Phoenix are recycling their treated sewage by putting it back into the aquifer for future use.