Mike Connor on Delta Pumping

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Mike Connor

Mike Connor, USBR Commissioner

Watching California’s water argument from afar, I can’t help but see what looks like a remarkable failure to develop a process for juggling competing interests in the management of a classic common pool resource.

From yesterday’s political theater drama House field hearing, here’s Mike Connor’s explanation of why it’s not a simple matter of just cranking up the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta pumps:

The Delta is home to people and wildlife reliant on a safe and dependable water supply. Urban areas like Alameda and Contra Costa County draw drinking water from the Delta, and agricultural water districts like the North, Central, and South Delta Water Agencies draw water for crops directly from the Delta. People also fish and recreate there. Commercial fisheries in the area are dependent on adequate water quality. Water quality is a significant factor in Reclamation’s state permits to export water, and for these reasons, water quality requirements for salinity and Delta outflow heavily govern operation of the export pumps, including, at times, restrictions on pumping.

For more on the success and failure of managing common pool resources (pdf).

River Beat: Estimated Storage in Mead, Powell

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Since apparently all the cool kids love data, here’s some of mine. This is total storage in Lake Mead (blue), Lake Powell (reddish) and combined (orangey), updated with the 2011 end-of-year numbers as estimated by the USBR’s latest 24-month study (pdf). Note that if the numbers hold up, this will be the second time since 1998 that Lake Mead has risen over the course of a year. Click to embiggen.

Lake Mead, Powell Storage

Lake Mead, Powell Storage

California Water Governance: Some Questions

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I’ve a chance to get out to California later this year and do some reporting on water issues, so I’ve been doing some reading, trying to get a better feel for where to focus my attention. This is in part driven by my belief that the West’s water issues have become inextricably linked, and to understand problems here in New Mexico I have to better understand the bigger picture.

With that in mind, I’ve a question for the California water wonks in the audience.

I’m currently making my way through the February PPIC report, which makes this point:

Most of the state’s (California’s) water management is highly decentralized, with many hundreds of local and regional agencies responsible for water supply, wastewater treatment, flood control, and related land use decisions. This system has many advantages but has often resulted in uncoordinated, fragmented water and land use decisions that contribute to chronic groundwater overdraft, impairment of watersheds by a wide range of pollutants, ineffective ecosystem management, and rapid development in poorly protected floodplains. Similar coordination failures among state and federal agencies have led to inefficiencies in reservoir operations, ecosystem management, and water marketing, among others.

It is easy to read through the coverage and literature and find a host of specific suggestions for dealing with California’s water problems:

  • more dams
  • ag conservation
  • markets
  • rip out all those damn LA lawns
  • peripheral canal
  • peripheral tunnel thingie
  • throw Westlands under the bus
  • throw the Imperial Irrigation District under the bus
  • throw those stupid bait fish under the bus
  • etc. (this list is in no way exhaustive)

What I’m baffled by is the institutional framework by which California will succeed or fail in sorting out the various choices. Where, in an institutional sense, does the conversation go on by which stakeholders come together to work these issues out?

In Arizona, for example, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District (which runs the Central Arizona Project) provides a framework by which most of the major players in the state’s water world sit down and talk about stuff. This doesn’t mean Arizona’s water problems are all unicorns and cheap beer, but it does provide a broad institutional framework. On a broader regional scale, the institutional structures around the Colorado River Compact provide such a framework. Again, no guarantee of success, but as a journalist it at least gives me a place to start.

What is California’s framework, if such a thing exists?

(Note that one potential answer may be “there is no institutional framework”, which is close to the conclusion I’ve come to regarding the similar set of questions here in New Mexico – sub/ad req. for that link.)

Water in the desert – low flows on the Rio Grande

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NM Drought Monitor

NM Drought Monitor

I’ve been spending a lot of my work days of late in a blow-by-blow rundown of the growing drought conditions in New Mexico:

An already dismal forecast for spring runoff in New Mexico’s rivers has gotten worse, after a dry, windy March sapped the state’s snowpack.

Spring and summer flow on the Rio Grande into Elephant Butte, the river’s largest water storage reservoir, is forecast to be just 33 percent of normal this year, federal forecasters said Wednesday afternoon. That is down from a forecast of 52 percent one month ago.

The steep decline came after a March that combined a near complete lack of precipitation with warm, dry winds that blew away some of the snow before it had a chance to melt, said Ed Polasko at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque office.

They’re working hard down south to dig a pilot channel simply to make sure the Rio Grande can reach Elephant Butte Reservoir – it has a tendency to plug itself up down there. We’ll get a better idea of the detailed flow forecast next week when the Bureau of Reclamation releases its Rio Grande operating plan, but it’s looking like the river through Albuquerque may only get up to 2,000 cubic feet per second during this year’s runoff peak.

Bosque overbanking, June 2005

Bosque overbanking, June 2005

That’s not much water.

I was reminded of that this morning, going through some old photos of the river in 2005. Our “bosque”, the ribbon of riparian woodlands that flanks the middle Rio Grande through north-central New Mexico, is a lovely place, but it’s an ecosystem on the edge. In its more natural state, before we built dams to store water for human use and to prevent flooding, along with levees and other engineered structures to channelize the water and move it efficiently toward downstream rivers, the Rio Grande would hop its banks in a good spring runoff and wander the valley floor. The result would have been a rich, meandering riparian ecosystem, with clumps of trees and grassy meadows and meandering patches of wetlands.

Most of the cottonwoods you see there now, I’m told, date to the last big flood, back in 1941, which seeded a big cohort of cottonwoods.

This picture was taken during 2005, when a big snowpack gave us a runoff peak north of 6,000 cfs in June. The 6,000-7,000 cfs level is pretty much the limit because of the built environment, especially a railroad bridge south of Socorro at San Marcial. (The Army Corps of Engineers uses the big flood control dam at Cochiti to cut manage the flow peak.) It takes more than that to get water up out of the river channel and back into the woods along much of the river, but there are places where the channel is shallow enough that you get scenes like this, and it’s delightful.

This year, not so much.

 

 

River Beat: Equalization

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From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month Colorado River operations plan (pdf):

The April 24-Month Study with an annual release volume from Glen Canyon Dam of 8.23 maf projects a Lake Powell end of water year elevation of 3,662.63 feet. Based on this projected condition and consistent with the provision in Section 6.B.3 of the Interim Guidelines, a shift in Glen Canyon Dam operations to being governed by the Equalization Tier will occur for the remainder of water year 2011. The April 24-Month Study projects a Lake Powell annual release volume of 11.56 maf; however, the projected annual release will be updated each month throughout the remainder of the water year to reflect changing hydrology in order to achieve the operation specified by the Equalization Tier.

Translated: extra water transferred from the Colorado River’s Upper Basin to the Lower Basin this year, a result of a good snowpack in the Rockies. The current forecast calls for Lake Mead to finish the year 21 feet above last year’s elevation.

Rainwater Harvesting, Arizona Style

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Chris Brooks has a post on proposed legislation in Arizona that would have created incentives for large-scale rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge. The idea was to give people water rights to the resulting water stored in the aquifer.

As Chris notes, there are a couple of problems. First, some of the rainwater you harvest and store underground would have otherwise drained to a river. Where downstream users have water rights. This the classic conundrum that dogs our discussions of the issue here in New Mexico. It’s not free water, and just because it runs off of your city doesn’t mean it’s being “wasted”.

Chris raises a second, much more nuanced and interesting issue:

Looking at the original legislation, it seemed pretty silly to me that you would go to the expense of harvesting rainwater just to put it in the ground, then pump water back out of the ground to provide to customers. Seems a lot simpler to just spend that money buying rain barrels for people they could use to harvest their own water to then use in place of potable water. In theory, that would permit water providers in the area to reduce their pumpage, thereby cutting into the amount of the overdraft. But it doesn’t really work out that way. Having decisions made by thousands of individual homeowners is not how water providers like to manage their water supplies (although to some extent it is kind of like that now). And having current customers reduce usage doesn’t mean that water will stay in the ground, it will just be used somewhere else or at some other time. This also doesn’t create more renewable water that satisfies the requirements of state law, so it can’t help areas that need renewable water to keep growing.

In the end, the legislation went nowhere. Instead, they formed a commission to study the issue!