On Colorado River failure modes

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One of my new tricks when looking at western water problems is to pose the question: “What is the failure mode?”

It’s clear that on many scales, both temporal and geographic, we’ve got supply-demand imbalances. It’s easy to point that out and call the system unsustainable, to point out that we’re headed for a crash. But I’ve become serially curious about how the crashes will manifest themselves. If we stay on the present trajectory, who/what is the person/institution who will lose their water first?

In a piece over at the Lane Center earlier this month, I argued that the answer for the current drought on the Colorado River so far has been “no one”:

Such is water management on the Colorado River that, in the wake of the worst drought in a century of record-keeping, from 2000 to 2010, everyone in the seven western U.S. states and Mexico that depends on the Colorado River continued to get their full allotment.

I got a thoughtful email in response from Jennifer Pitt at the Environmental Defense Fund who pointed out why that’s not quite right (quoted with permission):

The real casualty of the decade of drought is the Colorado’s delta. While the LB states ate their way through storage, the delta remained dry, save for a couple of times that the Gila ran and a few small flows released when there were infrastructure problems elsewhere (eg after the earthquake). Significantly, the absence of any kind of substantial regular flows in the delta means the alluvial aquifer is drying out where it’s not recharged by irrigation. We’re losing habitat on the river.

Jennifer’s making a great point here that highlights the fact that the “failure mode”, as I’ve been defining it, most often starts with humans continuing to take a full allotment of water from the system in question, while the environment gets shorted. Here in the United States, that explains why so many water supply battles are fought as Endangered Species Act battles – because water for endangered species is the first place the trouble shows itself.

In this case, the Colorado Delta is in Mexico, so ESA doesn’t apply.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on the power of moving water

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The results of a couple of trips north last week into the flood zone in the canyons below the watersheds burned by the Las Conchas fire (sub/ad req):

In Cochiti Canyon, a New Mexico Environment Department team estimated the Aug. 21 flow that caused the first round of damage at Dixon’s at 12,000 cubic feet per second of water — more than 10 times the entire current flow of the Rio Grande.

After that flood, Ralph Ford-Schmid and his Environment Department colleagues installed a new temporary flow meter in Cochiti Canyon upstream from the orchard. They put it six feet up in a tree on an embankment that was another 10 feet above the canyon bottom. “We thought it was safe that high off the ground,” said Ford-Schmid.

It was not. It was battered by Monday’s flood pulse, and Ford-Schmid said a calculation of the height of the water the second day suggested 16,000 to 19,000 cubic feet per second.

Here’s why:

On a normal forested landscape, Meyer said, only 2 percent of the water that falls as rain flows off and downstream. Following a major fire, as much as 75 percent of the water can run off the landscape.

Once the water gains momentum, it can begin cutting little rivulets into the hillsides, “almost like the whole thing’s cat-scratched,” Meyer said.

As the running water picks up fine soil particles, it becomes more dense, which allows it to carve deeper and carry ever larger rocks and boulders, feeding on itself, creating a thick heavy slurry of flowing debris and gaining momentum as it goes. Jones’ photos of the second-day Cochiti flood show a wall of thick gray slurry plowing through the Dixon apple groves.

Water names in the West

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Stewarts, Goodwater AZ

Stewarts, Goodwater AZ

If you’ve driven the stretch of Interstate 40 across northern Arizona between Gallup and Holbrook, you’ve perhaps seen the signs for a place called Goodwater. If you’ve not, trust me – there’s not much good water around those parts. The story of human settlement in the region is the story of the struggle for good water, precisely because there is so little of it. Holbrook, the nearest town to Goodwater I could find with a long term weather record, averages 8 inches (20 cm) of precipitation a year.

Goodwater, I once wrote, “has always looked to me like one of the driest places on earth.”

Which is why Richard White’s description of Rock Springs, Wyoming, in Railroaded struck me:

Despite the town’s name, its water came in by tank cars.

Rock Springs gets about the same annual precip as Goodwater, near as I can tell.

Any other favorite watery names in the arid West?

 

On the relevance of paleoclimate studies

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As Irene prepares to drop by and visit our eastern neighbors, Kevin Anchukaitis points to this:

Evidence of historical landfalling hurricanes and prehistoric storms has been recovered from backbarrier environments in the New York City area. Overwash deposits correlate with landfalls of the most intense documented hurricanes in the area, including the hurricanes of 1893, 1821, 1788, and 1693 A.D.

A reminder of the societal relevance of paleoclimate studies.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Banana Peel Sticker War

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Banana Peel Sticker War

Banana Peel Sticker War (my old picture, circa 2005)

Now that I get to be an occasional columnist in the newspaper, it’s remarkable how much of the work that seems appropriate in that new (for me) form builds off of something that started here, as a simple riff. To the extent that I’m getting my legs beneath myself as a columnist, it’s pretty clear that the voice and approach has its roots in Inkstain’s founding principle:

We put the stuff on here we can’t figure out a way to get paid for.

This week’s case in point is The Great Banana Peel Sticker War:

I suppose that — the fact that it’s the only shade to be found — is what makes the log bench such contested space between the banana-peel affixer and his or her adversary.

I confess I’ve had my suspicions who’s responsible — a bike trail regular I’ve seen sitting in the shade eating a banana on many occasions. I won’t reveal any identifying details (is there a statute of limitations on banana peel stickery?), but I even once pointed to the stickers in amusement and asked if s/he was responsible. The answer was “no,” and who am I to question?

Recently, a tagger hit the bench, which seems like bad karma. But the lines of spray paint are now cheerily decorated with banana peel stickers. For now, no one seems to be scraping them off.

Roots here, but all buffed up with some actual reading reports and calling people and gathering the history of my beloved bike trail – riff turned journalism. Oddly, now I sometimes get paid for this sort of thing. How did that happen?

California Flooding in a Warming World

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Jay Lund and colleagues have modeled a range of possible impacts of climate change on flood flows in California. From a nice summary on the UC Davis California WaterBlog:

Warming generally worsened flood inflows into reservoirs.  Even with less precipitation, warmer conditions often increased flood inflows to reservoirs.  When more precipitation fell as rain, rather than snow, and more existing snowpack melted, flood volumes increased.  This was particularly true for historical storms that were “cold”, where much of the precipitation was held as snowpack.  Warm storms, which historically produced less snow, were less affected by warming.

But the research suggests adaptations in reservoir operating rules can be relatively effective in dealing with the problem:

Reservoirs with flood operating rules that respond to the wetness of their watersheds seemed to adapt well to changes in climate, even fairly severe changes in temperature and precipitation. This was true for Shasta and Oroville Reservoirs, whose existing flood operation rules vary with moisture conditions upstream. This shows that existing reservoirs may have considerable ability to accommodate flooding effects of climate warming.

 

 

Water in the desert: blackwater edition

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A river is not just in one place. It extends in time up and down its watershed.

Last night, Daniel Porter at the Albuquerque National Weather Service office sent out an alert of possible flooding on Peralta Canyon, which enters the Rio Grande about 40 miles north of Albuquerque. Its watershed was burned in the Las Conchas fire:

Daniel Porter's tweet, 8:30 p.m. 8/20/2011

Daniel Porter's tweet, 8:30 p.m. 8/19/2011

Much of the Las Conchas burn area is north of Cochiti Dam, a flood control structure that has been trapping the soot and ash from burn scar thunderstorms. But Peralta is downstream from the dam. This morning I took a bike ride to see the river. Here’s what it looked like from the bike bridge next to Interstate 40, in the middle of Albuquerque. Hard to see, but the water is a grayish black:

Blackwater, Rio Grande, Aug. 20 2011

Blackwater, Rio Grande, Aug. 20 2011

For comparison, here’s the normal reddish brown of the Rio Grande:

Brownwater, Rio Grande

Brownwater, Rio Grande

On borrowing and the richness of language

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One of the things I love about language is its staggering combinatorial possibilities. I revel in a Google game – picking a seemingly ordinary phrase and doing a search to see how many times it has appeared in the vast body of language indexed by the search engine. It is amazing how relatively few times even the most compact phrases have appeared.

It was with that in mind that I read Emily Green’s piece today in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the similarities between her epic Las Vegas Sun series Quenching Las Vegas’ Thirst and the discussion of Vegas water in Alex Prud’homme’s The Ripple Effect. Emily quotes two passages, first hers and then Prud’homme’s.

Green:

Las Vegas lies at the intersection of three deserts. To the west is the Mojave, to the south the Sonoran, and to the north the Great Basin.

Prud’homme:

Las Vegas sits at the intersection of three deserts. To the south is the Sonoran, to the west is the Mojave, and to the north lies the Great Basin.

Savor that simple four-word phrase: “intersection of three deserts”. In the entire corpus indexed by Google, that phrase appears to have been written only three times – once by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy to describe three Australian deserts, once in 2008 by Emily Green to describe Las Vegas, and once by Alex Prud’homme in his new book – also to describe Las Vegas.

Sadly for Emily, Prud’homme’s book is the first Google hit.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: water policy and the endangered species act

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New Mexico’s in the midst of a tense and interesting discussion about the Rio Grande silvery minnow, the Endangered Species Act and managing the Rio Grande. I’ve got a post up over at the work blog going meta on the underlying issues – why I think ESA discussions have become our proxy discussions for big water policy issues (sub/ad req):

Why is this such a big deal? Hint: It’s not really about a fish. Or, more precisely, it’s about much more than a fish. If you believe those who argue that we’re overusing water in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and headed for a crash, it’s likely that the problem will first show up in the river itself, as we take out too much surface and groundwater and leave the Rio Grande dry. The first specific legal/regulatory manifestation of that problem will be a lack of water to meet Endangered Species Act requirements for the Rio Grande silver minnow. The minnow has been described as a “canary in a coal mine” for a crashing ecosystem. But it’s also a canary for our water supply problems. So we see here a jockeying over the question of who’s responsible for the problems of the fish that mirrors broader jockeying over who’s responsible for the region’s water problems.

I’ve thought this for a while, but the work I’ve been doing on Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta issues has really helped clarify my thinking by giving me a second case study where the issues are playing out in much the same way.

But are there other case studies of water policy/ESA management on western rivers where it’s not playing out this way? What are the counter examples?