On water and storytelling

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Hoover Dam and the bathtub ring

Hoover Dam and the bathtub ring

Water is at the core of a compelling human drama. Or perhaps dramas (plural). Yet the core issues, where the drama lies, are maddeningly difficult to, if I may share a personal journalist neologism, “storyize”. Cynthia Barnett, my favorite water writer, explains in the Los Angeles Times:

But we can’t see dried-out aquifers the way we could see black Dust Bowl storms in the 1930s or water pollution in the early 1970s. So we still pump with abandon to do things like soak the turf grass that covers 63,240 square miles of the nation. We flush toilets with this same fresh, potable water, after treating it at great expense to meet government standards for drinking.

We fill the fridge with beef, the shopping bags with cotton T’s, the gas tank with corn-made ethanol — all with little inkling of how we’re draining to extinction the Ogallala aquifer that irrigates a quarter of the nation’s agricultural harvest.

So Cynthia, as we all inevitably do, makes the pilgrimage to Lake Mead, and points out the “bathtub ring”:

Lake Mead is different. It’s one of the few places in the United States where the illusion of water abundance is being exposed for what it is: a beautiful bubble doomed to pop, just like other great national illusions — the unending bull market, say, or upward-only housing prices.

For 12 years, the nation’s largest reservoir has dropped steadily to reveal a calcium-carbonate bathtub ring, evidence of human folly and nature’s frailty — the over-allocation of the Colorado River and the drought still battering so much of the United States.

The problem, she found on her visit to Hoover Dam, is the tales we tell ourselves. I struggled with this a couple of years ago on my own similar pilgrimage:

We are sufficiently buffered by affluence that almost no one I talked to today had any inkling of what was going on. Just another tourist Sunday on Hoover Dam. The best I got was from one the folks in this picture, who were on a Sunday drive at one of the Lake Mead overlooks. One of them, a Las Vegas resident, knew the lake was way low, and said the solution was simple – somebody needs to have the political courage to make them release more water from Lake Powell, upstream.

I decided against explaining the Colorado River Compact, and the complex reservoir equalization rules in the 2007 shortage sharing agreement, that upper basin states are using less than their share of the river anyway, that Powell is low too, that it’s not that easy. But ultimately, I guess that’s what I have to figure out how to explain.

Consider this a call for better storytelling. Cynthia’s LA Times piece is a good place to start.

US-Mexico Colorado River Deal

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Kudos to Chris Austin, who was out ahead of everyone else earlier this week in laying out the details of the pending US-Mexico Colorado River water deal. I encourage you to head over to Chris’s blog for more on the deal, which was first presented last Monday to the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the first step in a rollout that’s now happening all across the seven US states that share the Colorado. Since Chris’s piece, some of the news types have jumped in, though Chris’s piece is the best explanation of what’s going on.

I’ll know a lot more next week, when New Mexico gets its briefing at a meeting of the state’s Interstate Stream Commission. But in brief, this has the potential to be an extremely important deal because of the way it extends the Colorado River’s complex accounting system across the US-Mexico border, in the process addressing one of the major unsettled package of questions regarding Colorado River management.

The underlying problem the negotiators have been trying to address is how to equitably share shortages between the United States and Mexico. The US-Mexico treaty of 1944 (pdf) calls for reduction of Mexico’s share of the river in the case of “extraordinary drought”:

In the event of extraordinary drought or serious accident to the irrigation system in the United States, thereby making it difficult for the United States to deliver the guaranteed quantity of 1,5000,000 acre-feet (1,850,234,000 cubic meters) a year, the water allotted to Mexico under subparagraph (a) of this Article will be reduced in the same proportion as consumptive uses in the United States are reduced.

But how “extraordinary drought” might be defined, and the details of how the shortage sharing contemplated in the treaty might be implemented, was left as an exercise for future generations. It’s taken a bit longer than I imagine anyone expected to get back to to it. Beyond the shortage/surplus management issue, the deal also appears to address a couple of major steps forward in trans-boundary river management, including the creation of a framework for Mexico’s storage of water in US reservoirs, and some management tweaks that seem aimed at providing environmental flows in the de-watered Colorado River delta.

For background on the outstanding issues, I recommend Jason Robinson’s “Respective Obligations of the Upper and Lower Basins Regarding the Delivery of Water to Mexico: A Review of Key Legal Issues” (pdf), a white paper produced with the University of Colorado School of Law Colorado River group.

 

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Engineering nature at the Bosque del Apache

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From the morning paper, a look at the wet bits and the dry bits at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge during a drought, and the challenge of mimicking nature:

Some years, like this one, drought comes to the refuge in a way that matches what we would have seen in a drought year a century ago. The beloved “boardwalk pond” at the refuge’s south end, home to cormorants and pelicans, was nothing but cracked mud when Mize took Brose and I on a tour last week. There was so little water in the ditch feeding pond this year that it finally just dried up, Mize said.

To my look of concern, Mize responded with a wildlife manager’s calm equanimity: “Healthy wetlands are fluctuating wetlands,” he explained. “Drought is a natural occurrence. Our landscape evolved with drought.”

To the south, Mize showed us how refuge crews had cleared out unnatural thick stands of cattail that had choked one of the refuge’s ponds, taking advantage of drought to bring the system back to a more “natural” state. The pond is in an old river channel that in some years would have dried in drought, and in other years been ripped clear by spring floods. A consistent water supply has, in the past, given the pond a spectacular stand of cattails – lovely, but requiring human intervention to get “nature” back on an even keel.

Hence the dried-up pond and ripped-out cattails. “This is what Mother Nature would have done,” Mize said.

 

Transborder conflict on the Mekong

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I’m generally sympathetic to the notion that transboundary water conflicts are overrated, and that they often provide a framework for cooperation. Except when they don’t (from this week’s Economist):

The decision by Laos to push ahead with the giant Xayaburi dam makes it the first of what could prove to be a cascade of 11 proposed dams on the lower Mekong. Because the decision fails to take account of the consequences for downstream countries, it has raised tensions with neighbours. Having long pretended otherwise, the Lao government recently asserted that construction was forging ahead, and indeed was on schedule. That prompted a warning from the president of Vietnam, Truong Tan Sang, that “tensions over water resources are not only threatening economic growth in many countries, but also presenting a source of conflict”.

The core of the conflict is the freshwater fishery, one of the world’s largest, on which the Economist reports 65 million poor folk depend for protein.

Beetle kill, watersheds and water quality

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When beetles kill trees, it changes water chemistry for the folks downstream of the hammered watersheds. And not in a good way (DBP is “disinfection by-products”, study area is in Colorado):

Results demonstrate higher total organic carbon concentrations along with significantly more DBPs at water-treatment facilities using mountain-pine-beetle-infested source waters when contrasted with those using water from control watersheds. In addition to this differentiation between watersheds, DBP concentrations demonstrated an increase within mountain pine beetle watersheds related to the degree of infestation. Disproportionate DBP increases and seasonal decoupling of peak DBP and total organic carbon concentrations further suggest that the total organic carbon composition is being altered in these systems.

Mikkelson et al., Water-quality impacts from climate-induced forest die-off, Nature Climate Change (2012) doi:10.1038/nclimate1724

Denver water use dropping

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Bruce Finley in the Denver Post tallies up another western city cutting municipal water use, demonstrating that, for city water users, this is a tractable problem:

Water-saving efforts already have dropped metro Denver residents’ overall average daily usage to 85 gallons, down from 104 gallons in 2001.

Only one city better than Denver in Finley’s review of residential water use:

Albuquerque at 70 gallons a day.

Note that Finley’s talking here about withdrawals, and doesn’t get into the extent to which a portion of cities’ indoor water is reused after treatment, with the exception of a nod toward the way Las Vegas handles its wastewater.

CSFC Index: an NM economic data puzzle

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Cheap Shit From China

Cheap Shit From China

The folks on the Inkstain Economics Desk point to an intriguing puzzle, in the form of 22 shipping containers out behind the neighborhood MegaWalMart this morning.

We’ve long used the Cheap Shit From China index (CSFC) here at Inkstain as a crude but useful economic barometer. The premise is this: WalMart has better data than just about anyone else on aggregated consumer behavior. They also operate their entire system on incredibly tight margins. In the case of the neighborhood MegaWalMart, that includes minimal back end storage space. A number of years ago, I the Inkstain Economics Desk noticed while out on a bike ride while doing their routine data collection that during the holiday shopping season, inventory was spilling out the back of the MegaWalMart, stored temporarily in big shipping containers. So in a sort of random, half-assed fashion, I the rigorous fashion they’re known for, our analysts began counting shipping containers, using it as a visible index of the things WalMart is forecasting about our aggregated economic behavior.

Here’s the problem.

We know New Mexico’s economy is sucking wind, its economic recovery, by one measure, lagging behind every other state in the nation. Yet the CFSC Index stands at 22, an unusually high number for this time of year.

I can see two possibilities. One is that WalMart knows something the Philadelphia Fed doesn’t, and that the CSFC Index could be viewed as a promising leading indicator. The second, which seems more likely, is that the CSFC Index has broken down, perhaps because WalMart is simply leaving empty containers sitting out there because there’s no real demand for them anywhere else. Maybe they’re just sitting there empty. Evidence in support of this is the fact that the containers this morning looked kinda rusty and unused.

I’ve directed the Inkstain economic analysts to go on more bike rides begin updating the data more frequently.

Clarity on withdrawal versus consumption, San Diego style

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Regarding my discussion yesterday of the fact that not all water conservation measures are created equal, here’s a nice treatment of the subject by Deborah Brennan at U-T San Diego:

“It’s one of the simplest, most common sense things you can do to save money and restore the ecosystem, especially in San Diego where we have chronic drought,” said Candace Vanderhoff, chief executive of RainThanks & Greywater, and the installer of Murphree’s system. “By retaining the water on the site instead of sending it out to the ocean, we’re able to create more green spaces.”

The key bit here is that “sending it out to the ocean” line. Makes clear where the effluent goes – that San Diego’s clothes washer drain water is being discharged to the ocean, rather than being returned to the system for reuse somewhere else downstream. San Diego’s at the end of the downstream. Kudos.

Water: the withdrawal/consumption confusion

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I’d like to sketch out a personal project – something I think needs doing. And, given that this blog’s modest audience includes some other folks who are, like me, involved in public communication on water issues, maybe it’ll serve as a prod for others.

There is an important confusion in public discussions over two very different meanings of mean water “use”.

The first is the water we take out of the system to do something with – a pump stuck down in the groundwater, a canal diverting water from a river, etc. In water wonkery, that’s called a “withdrawal”.

Once withdrawn, some of that water then gets “used up” completely. The water I put on my garden evaporates or transpires from the leaves of the lovely little desert willow. That water has been “consumed”. But some of the withdrawn water, I put back via a toilet flush that makes its way through the Albuquerque sewer plant, gets cleaned up, and is put back in the river. Six miles south of the sewage treatment plant, an agricultural diversion dam grabs that water and diverts it for “use” by downstream farmers.

If you then follow that water downstream, there’s a “lather, rinse, repeat” discussion to be had as farmers apply water to their fields, some is lost to evapotranspiration, some ends up as tail water in ditches that return to the river, some soaks down into the aquifer. Some of the water withdrawn for power plant cooling evaporates – is “consumed”. Some is returned, warmed, to the river.

When you see numbers thrown around, like “power plant cooling represents 49 percent of water use in the United States”, or “Albuquerque residents use 150 gallons of water per person per day”, you’re most often seeing “withdrawal” numbers. And for some purposes, those are important numbers. As Charles Fishman noted in a twitter discussion this morning, power plants are competing with other users sometimes for the water. Warmed water returned from the power plants, or the stuff that makes it to our sewage outfalls, harms ecosystems. There are times when the withdrawal number matters a great deal.

But there also are discussions in which the consumption number is more important.

Let’s use water conservation here in Albuquerque as an example. For a city built in the desert, we probably “use” too much water. So we need to reduce that. Consider two paths to conservation – the low flow toilet and ripping out a patch of lawn – which might generate an equal reduction in the amount of water the local utility needs to deliver to my house each day. Ripping out the lawn reduces the amount of water lost to evapotranspiration. Switching out my toilet may reduce a like amount of water withdrawn from the aquifer or river, but also reduces the amount of water returned to the river via the sewage treatment plant. With the lawn, I’ve reduced my water “use” by both measures – withdrawal and consumption. With the toilet, I’ve primarily reduced my withdrawals.

The discussions quickly spin into complications – system losses in both the lawn and toilet case, embedded water use at the power plant to pump the toilet water to my house, water quality in the river from the treatment of my toilet water. All important discussions. But the whole thing remains entirely too murky if we’re not clear about which sense of “use” we’re talking about when we try to reduce our water use.

Consider some other examples:

  • The distinction between sewage plants that return their water to a river ecosystem, the ocean, a water source (Lake Mead, for example) or that are turned onto a golf course.
  • Putting gray water on your yard versus sending it to the sewage plant. And do I simply reduce my use of non-gray water? Or do I treat the gray water as bonus water and dump more total water on my yard?
  • Irrigation efficiency improvements that reduce withdrawals but increase crop efficiency, increasing evapotranspiration and yields but reducing ag return flows.
  • Groundwater pumping that depletes aquifers but adds surface flows to a river via sewage plant outfalls.
  • Interbasin transfers that remove water completely from one basin while adding it to another, creating enormous entanglements between the question of “withdrawal” and “use”.

For the serious water wonks, this is complex but comfortable stuff. But when the discussion moves into the public arena, lack of clarity in what we mean by “use” can be extremely confusing, and risks bad policy.

To be clear: there are still important reasons for the low-flow toilet, or making power plant cooling more efficient. But not all reductions in water “use” are the same. We need more clarity in this discussion.

Are Phoenix and Las Vegas in “the west”?

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At the 2010 census, about 70 percent of the population of Nevada lived in the greater Las Vegas metro area. The comparable Phoenix/Arizona percentage is something on the order of 68 percent.

“The west” as a conceptual framework for thinking about those lands beyond the hundredth meridian has some utility. But rather than probing John Wesley Powell’s notions of life in this arid land or Frederick Jackson Turner’s ideas about the frontier, maybe the salient reference point today is the Case-Shiller Home Price Index:

Case-Shiller Home Price Index

Case-Shiller Home Price Index