Talking about adaptation

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Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority:

[W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our energy habits and where we get our energy from and what kind of cars we drive and the overall carbon emissions, we’ve not had a substantive discussions on how we’re going to adapt.

This is a long-term problem. It’s not going to go away overnight and there are fundamental changes that are going to have to happen in this country. They affect land-use planning, they affect water-resource planning, they affect a lot of things that we just almost are … we can’t get our head around them, and we’re not having that conversation.

While the situation regarding mitigation seems to have changed a bit in the two years since she said that, has the situation changed with respect to adaptation?

One of America’s Great Ballfields

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Oscar Huber Ballpark, Madrid, NM, March 2011

Oscar Huber Ballpark, Madrid, NM, March 2011

Many years ago, as a young pup of a reporter, I was sent to Madrid, NM, on a quiet Saturday to chronicle an old-timers day in the old mining town-turned art colony.

Madrid’s community center sits next to the Oscar Huber Ballpark which, legend has it, was the first lighted baseball field west of the Mississippi. The legend has enough different versions – first in New Mexico? first in the entire US? – that I remain, in professional terms, a skeptic. As in, I’d never put it in the newspaper without a bit more investigation.

But whatever the roots of the story, it is a wonderful ballfield, carved into a hillside at the north end of town. The ballpark dates to the 1920s, and the Madrid Miners were apparently quite the home nine in their day. When I visited for old-timers day, I rounded up a couple of the guys who had played on the Miners and dragged them out to the infield to tell stories. The field was just dirt flecked with little bits of hard black coal – they hadn’t played ball there for years. But the old grandstands were still there, home to Madrid’s annual blues festival.

Lissa and I stopped by last weekend on our way up to Santa Fe to see the new grandstand they’ve just completed – a replica of the old.

Still lovely.

Something Else I Wrote Elsewhere: Supplementing the River

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Also from this morning’s paper, a story documenting Albuquerque’s 60th consecutive day without measurable precipitation. We’ve got an outside chance of breaking the streak this evening, and then again mid-week. But the forecasts are basically bleak.

But the real import was tucked in near the end of the story (sub/ad req):

Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation last week began releasing supplemental water currently in storage in Abiquiu Reservoir to ensure there is enough water in the Rio Grande to keep the river’s population of endangered Rio Grande silvery minnows alive.

Warm weather and a meager snowpack, along with early irrigation by farmers because of the dry weather, are driving the need for supplemental water for environmental flows, said Leann Towne, head of water operations for the bureau’s Albuquerque office. The bureau has water in storage at Abiquiu that was imported from the San Juan Basin via the San Juan-Chama Project and is available to supplement Rio Grande flows, to help the endangered fish. This is unusually early in the year to see the extra water needed, according to Towne.

Lissa and I were down at the river yesterday morning scouting out a nesting great-horned owl. Cute little fluffy white baby. Did I mention cute?

On the way back, we stuck our heads through a break in the bank to look at the river itself, which is remarkably low. A pair of killdeer were hanging out on sand flats in the middle of the river, calling. I don’t usually see them there. They tend to like shallow, slow water, which doesn’t usually describe the Rio Grande as the snowmelt rises this time of year. But the snowmelt isn’t rising.

This is a big deal – having to use imported Colorado Basin water this early in the year to keep the Rio Grande wet.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Moving Water, New Mexico Style

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From the Sunday Journal, a look at two proposals to pump and pipe water from rural New Mexico to the state’s rapidly developing Rio Grande corridor (sub/ad req):

Ray Pittman pulled his 1994 F-150 pickup to the top of a thinly wooded hill, a short walk from the water tank he built back in 1999 on his 1,300-acre ranch.

A mile down the hill, Pittman’s 540-foot-deep well pumps groundwater, pushing it up to the tank to provide for the cattle on this remote patch of central New Mexico landscape.

Pittman pointed to the west, to the vast plain that makes up the Augustin Plains Ranch. There, a commercial venture has proposed sinking 37 wells to pump up groundwater and pipe it to the Rio Grande Valley to supplement dwindling water supplies of central New Mexico’s farms and cities.

The Augustin Plains Ranch proposal would move 54,000 acre-feet per year of water to the Rio Grande Basin 50 miles away — enough water to meet the needs of a city the size of Albuquerque.

You can’t go there without remembering what happened in California a century ago:

The proposals inevitably raise the specter of the Owens Valley, the area in eastern California dried up early in the 20th century to bring water to Los Angeles. Taking that water “just devastated” the Owens Valley, D’Antonio noted, a problem that raises important issues about how such requests should be handled in New Mexico.

In economists’ terms, we have here an argument over whether the market (in this case several land owners’ desire to sell water to New Mexico’s cities) properly takes into account the externalities (the folks left behind, who argue their neighboring water supplies and community economies would be harmed).

River Beat: About that “Law of the River” thing…

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From today’s Deseret News, a sigh of relief for this year’s beneficent snowpack, which has has eliminated (for now) the possibility of a shortage declaration on the lower Colorado River:

If Lake Mead drops a little further, it would force a declaration of a shortage and a potential cascade of orders to cut water use. But a good winter snowpack seems to have saved the day, according to Malcolm Wilson, water resources chief of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

“It is highly, highly unlikely that we’ll see a shortage declared for the lower basin,” Wilson said. “It is a good year. It’s one of the better ones we’ve seen certainly in the last decade, and we’re looking to a really good inflow.”

That’s short run. Long run? Trouble, as climate change reduces flows in the river and we set agin t’ fightin’:

Many expect hard bargaining in the future over the river’s water supply. McCool thinks there are pluses and minuses for Utah: Extended drought might wipe out proposals for Lake Powell pipelines, but Utah farmers might get rich by selling water to Las Vegas.

Can’t do that sort of thing, a Utah-Vegas transfer, under the existing river laws. But who’s to say that’s not one of the reasonable models for a recasting of the rules?

Shasta Dam

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Shasta Dam

Shasta Dam

Our friend Alison, who is a shopper of profound skill, scored this Shasta Dam tourist plate on a recent expedition.

Built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation between 1938 and 1945, Shasta is part of the first post-Hoover Dam generation, a concrete arch structure capable of storing more than 4.5 million acre feet of water.

Located on the Sacramento River north of Redding, Calif., it is part of the Central Valley Project. It works in tandem with the smaller Keswick Dam, located just downstream, which re-regulates flow from the more erratic up-and-down releases associated with Shasta’s power plant (such a two-dam configuration is not uncommon).

Thanks to California’s bodacious snowpack, Shasta currently holds 4 million acre feet of water, 6 percent above average for the beginning of April.

references

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Year on the Rio Grande

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From Thursday’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a look at what is increasingly looking to be a very dry year on the Rio Grande, which has become entangled in a Byzantine governance issue involving allocation and distribution of Lower Rio Grande water:

In recent years, dry conditions have made managing the river more difficult. Eight out of the past 10 years have seen below-average flows at the Otowi river gauging station between Santa Fe and Los Alamos.

Sharing water south of Elephant Butte, among farmers in southern New Mexico and Texas, was a major topic of discussion at Wednesday’s meeting.

Because of a new agreement between El Paso and Las Cruces-area irrigators for division of Rio Grande water, most of this year’s water coming out of Elephant Butte reservoir is flowing past New Mexico farmers for use in Texas.

New Mexico irrigators agreed to the deal in an effort to head off interstate litigation with Texas in a dispute over the effects of New Mexico groundwater pumping on Rio Grande flows.

State officials object to the deal. D’Antonio told members of the Compact Commission on Wednesday the agreement, which has resulted in an increase of water going to Texas farmers while New Mexico farmers’ share decreases, was “demonstrably lopsided and not sustainable.”

 

Rio Grande at Otowi

Rio Grande at Otowi source: New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission

The latest numbers from the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission show how remarkably dry the ’00’s have been. This is what’s called the “Otowi Index Flow”, which is the natural flow past the Otowi gauge in north-central New Mexico, as used for calculating Rio Grande Compact accounting. (It doesn’t count water added to the system from the Colorado Basin via the San Juan-Chama project. It’s also not a true “natural flow” estimate, because it doesn’t make any effort to adjust for water removed for irrigation upstream, in Colorado and Northern New Mexico. So not perfect, but the best we’ve got. Click on it to see it larger.)

A couple of key points here. First, note that the sustained drought of the 1950s is worse than what we’ve seen so for in the ’00’s. But also note that a lot of New Mexico’s population growth occurred subsequent to the 1950s drought, during a period that was unusually wet. Fourteen of the years in the 1980s and ’90s were wetter than the long term average.

During that time, New Mexico’s population grew by 40 percent. Including me.

River Beat: Rethinking the Law of the River

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John McChesney, former NPR guy now at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, has jumped into the Law of the River discussion with a look at Doug Kenney’s work on rethinking the Law of the River:

Kenney doesn’t believe the law of the river needs to be tossed out, but he says it should be revised. Kenney stresses that the 11-year drought is not the most important problem on the river; the game changer, he says, is that demand now exceeds the river’s supply, and climate change will likely to make matters worse.

McChesney’s interest is very much focused on the effect the basin’s water problems will have on rural communities. From another post:

What you don’t often hear in these discussions is any concern about what happens to agriculture and rural life as these transfers become more common. Bruce Finley of the Denver Post took a look at that issue here. His piece focuses on the Front Range in Colorado where “about 400,000 acres in Colorado dried up between 2000 and 2005, according to U.S. Geological Survey data…

And Colorado natural resources planners anticipate losing another 500,000 to 700,000 acres of irrigated cropland by 2050.” Several small towns in the area have practically disappeared. Finley quotes Pat O’Toole, president of the Colorado-based Family Farm Alliance: “Denver’s going to double, and so is India and China and everybody else. What are we going to do to feed people if we keep taking agricultural land out of production?”

I look forward to him joining the conversation. (Disclosure: I’ve been discussing these issues with John and his colleagues, and hope to get out to Stanford later this year to continue the conversation in person.)

(see here for some stuff I wrote earlier this year on Kenney’s analysis)

River Beat: Yuma Plant Completes Pilot Run

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Yuma Desalting Plant Outfall

Yuma Desalting Plant Outfall

The US Bureau of Reclamation announced today that they’ve completed the pilot run of their Yuma Desalting Plant, cleaning up 30,000 acre feet of really crappy ag drain water. (“Crappy ag drain water” – my words, not theirs).

From Joyce Lobeck in the Yuma Sun (and seldom was their a more appropriately named newspaper):

Undertaken because of the 11-year drought in the Southwest, the pilot run started on May 5, 2010, to test the viability of the plant to augment Colorado River water supplies. In collaboration with The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Central Arizona Water Conservation District and Southern Nevada Water Authority, Reclamation operated the plant to gather cost and performance data needed to consider potential future operation of it.

In return for their funding support, the water agencies received credits in proportion to the water produced during the pilot run and each of their funding contributions.

The plant recycled 30,000 acre-feet of irrigation return flow water that was returned to the Colorado River.

As I’ve written before, the put-your-money-where-your-water-needs-are aspect of the YDP project are a great measure of who’s the most desperate for water from the Colorado River:

MWD is paying 80 percent of the cost. CAP and SNWA are each kicking in 10 percent. That willingness to pay on the part of MWD tells me something about who needs water the most in the near term.

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