US-Mexico Colorado River Deal

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U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Mexican Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada signed an agreement today that, for the first time, allows long-term storage of Mexican Colorado River water in U.S. reservoirs.

It’s an attempt to solve a short-term problem – the inability of Mexican users to take their full allotments because of damage to water distribution infrastructure caused by an April earthquake. Rather than lose the water (Mexico has no large storage facilities), the agreement allows 260,000 acre feet of water to be stored in Lake Mead between now and the end of 2013. When the canals are fixed, the Mexicans can then call for their water.

Morelos Dam

Morelos Dam, US-Mexico Border, April 2010

This is a win for folks in the United States, because the water would keep Lake Mead’s levels higher than they otherwise would be, reducing the risk of a shortage declaration should Mead’s levels drop below 1075 feet above sea level. (260,000 acre feet translates to something in the neighborhood of 3 feet.)

So both sides benefit. But the real importance of the agreement is less in the details, and more in the precedent it sets: it is the first trans-boundary water management agreement that allows Mexican water to be stored in the United States. As such, it will provide a learning experience for possible future arrangements that could be more far-reaching.

In their July 2005 “conservation before shortage” proposal, a group of NGO’s that included the Environmental Defense Fund proposed such trans-boundary agreements to create more flexibility for solving the Colorado’s water management problems.

One of the difficulties in crafting solutions to the Colorado’s growing sustainability problems is the limitation imposed by governmental boundaries – state and tribal lines, as well as the upper and lower basins within the United States, and the U.S.-Mexico border. Legal and political structures make it extraordinarily difficult to manage water across those boundaries – to conserve water in one jurisdiction, for example, that it might be used in another.

Within the lower basin, an approach called “intentionally created surplus” is one attempt to overcome some of these problems. For example, the Drop 2 Reservoir along the All-American Canal will save water in California. It is being funded in part by the Southern Nevada Water Authority in return for the ICS credits, which has the effect of conserving water in California for use in Nevada.

In their announcement today, Salazar and Elvira Quesada said broader negotiations will begin next month on “a comprehensive agreement on Colorado River water management issues, particularly in light of ongoing drought conditions and the prospect of continuing declines in reservoir levels.”

The Environmental Defense Fund’s Jennifer Pitt, one of the key authors of the 2005 proposal that suggested such trans-boundary collaborations, issued this statement today:

Given dire predictions of drought in this region, today’s agreement is a critical step in building the mutual trust and confidence we need to craft additional agreements that deliver a more sustainable water supply for our communities and for the environment.

Some notes on arcane details of the agreement:

  • Technically, the agreement doesn’t specify the reservoir, and it could be stored anywhere, but for all practical purposes, we can assume it’ll be in Mead.
  • Mexico will pay a 3 percent evaporation cost per year on the water stored.

River Beat: Storm Coming

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12/18/2010 QPF for western storm

Quantitative Precipitation Forecast Dec. 18-23

If you’re a western water manager, the corners of your smile must be crinkled up in delight at the latest Quantitative Precipitation Forecast from the National Weather Service. That’s some mighty big bulls-eyes you see on the map over the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River Basin.

Going into this, the snow pack in the basin above Lake Powell is at normal levels for this point in the year, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s summary of Snotel sites (that link takes a bit of time to load).

The storm comes on the heels of the annual Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas (Nev.), where Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said this:

As I speak to you today, the Colorado River is facing a record drought. The period between 2000 to 2010 has been the driest 11-year period in the 102-year historical record for the Colorado River Basin. Moreover, scientists who examined tree-ring data estimate that this period is one of the driest in the Basin in over 1,000 years.

And there are no clear signs of an end to this drought. The countless communities that rely on the river to sustain them are being forced to make tough choices at a time with few obvious solutions in sight.

Moreover, as we enter our second decade of drought conditions, another reality complicates the picture: climate change and its emerging challenges—challenges that we are only just beginning to understand– may dwarf in complexity the issues that the Basin States have faced so far. Some estimates have identified a risk of a 20-30 percent decline in available water supplies in this Basin due to climate change.

We’re in a La Niña year, and the Christmas Week Storm of ’10 is a reminder that the conventional wisdom about a year like this – dry in the southwest – can be a bit misleading. That really means southwest, and  the farther north you go, the less of an effect La Niña has.

Jan - March 2011 Forecast

Jan - March 2011 Precipitation Forecast, courtesy CPC

It has been dry so far south of the Utah/Arizona and Colorado/New Mexico borders. Despite a nice storm yesterday across New Mexico, for example, most of the Snotel sites down here are still below average. Even with this latest storm, the San Juan river above Navajo Dam in northwest New Mexico is at just 58 percent of average. Above the Oso Diversion in southern Colorado, which shunts water off to the Azotea Tunnel and the San Juan-Chama Project (Albuquerque’s drinking water supply), snow pack is at 74 percent of normal.

But the great truth that John Wesley Powell first noticed – snow in the high Rockies feeding the great deserts of the southwest – may bail us out this year, if enough of the Colorado River Basin is above the La Niña line.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: My Fascination With Flood Control

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Most of my water journalism involves the supply side, but this week I indulged my fascination with the back end of the problem – moving it away from the places we don’t want it (sub/ad req):

The southwest valley is one of three large areas in the Albuquerque metro area where government agencies working on flood control problems continue to grapple with storm water risks.

The problems do not come from the Rio Grande itself, which is largely confined by levees and earthen banks through the metro area. While officials do have some concerns about risks in some areas from a massive river flood, they say the chances of such an event are small.

But areas of the valley floor outside the river levees have the opposite problem. Much of the area lies below the river itself in elevation. Rainfall, especially during summer thunderstorms, tends to pool in low areas because it has no place to go. Such flooding is much more common.

“So this was a drive-in restaurant in Hollywood”

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The seminal influences on my aesthetic/writerly self are an eclectic bunch, a function more than anything else of who I was at the time I read them (or listened to them, or stared at their art). But thinking this afternoon about the death of Captain Beefheart (who I count as an odd member of my happy troupe), I realized they all shared a certain irreverence that must be their common thread.

When I was a young 20-something imagining becoming a writer, I read the Norman Mailer canon with a depressive zest, trying hard to make him a seminal influence. That didn’t work out so well. Oh my god, what a pretentious dick. I went through Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright and Miles Davis phases, too, trying hard to understand the nature of the fundamental aesthetic and intellectual innovation they seemed to me to have in common. (Do you notice a “pretentious dick” thread here?)

But always, there were a bunch of writers lurking in the corner, cracking wise.

I’ve written before about Vonnegut, who arrived on the cusp of my own teenage wisecracking years. There’s Mark Twain, too, (the Ode to Stephen Dowling Botts never fails to crack me up). And the Pythons (the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch never fails to crack me up).

I’m not sure this hangs together in any entirely consistent way, because there was a whole noir influence as well, which is mostly not hilarious. But I always had the feeling that Raymond Chandler was winking as he wrote those richly bare-boned lines he put in Marlowe’s mouth.

Which somehow brings me to Don Van Vliet, whose death today brought me to ponder some of his wonderful turns of phrase, things that drew me to him in my 20s and which passed the survival-of-the-fittest test in my chaotic and easily distracted brain:

I could just make out Ace as he carried the tray and mouthed,
“You cheap son of a bitch”
as a straw fell out of a Coke, cartwheeled into the gutter.
So this was a drive-in restaurant in Hollywood,
So this was a drive-in restaurant in Hollywood,
So this was a drive-in restaurant in Hollywood.

It’s not like I devoted a lot of time to him, nothing like the effort I spent wrestling with Picasso and the dawn of the modern. But the influences that have mattered the most to me have always been easy that way.

California Water Tunnel Gains Support

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Sacramento Delta

Sacramento Delta, courtesy Greg Balzer

I must admit that when I first heard the idea of a tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California to carry water from the Sacramento River to users to the south, I thought it wacky, on purely engineering grounds. With no evidence or expertise, I thought the whole idea was just batshit crazy. But smarter minds than I seem to think otherwise, and the idea is gaining traction in California. From Bettina Boxall’s story in today’s LA Times:

State officials Wednesday recommended construction of a $13-billion tunnel system that would carry water under the troubled Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to southbound aqueducts, a project that would replumb a perpetual bottleneck in California’s vast water delivery network.

But Boxall’s story suggests that, even if it passes the not-batshit-crazy test on technical grounds, it faces serious risks of failing to meet the not-batshit-crazy test on political grounds. It doesn’t look, at least so far, as though it’s satisfying the myriad interests that will have to be satisfied for a compromise solution to the delta’s problems to stick:

Environmental groups assailed the planning report as “flawed, incomplete and disappointing.” And the largest irrigation district in California already pulled its support of the plan, suspecting that it would not restore its water supplies.

Western Water – the Persistent Roadblock

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The roadblock to solving western water problems:

[T]he understandable tendency of state, local, and federal interests to defer painful concessions in water resource allocation. Indecision persists as long as there is no absolute requirement that problems be solved.

Paul L. Bloom, Law of the River: A Critique of an Extraordinary Legal System, in New Courses for the Colorado River: Major Issues for the Next Century.

Climate Change and Southwest Drought – Is It Happening Now?

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Does it matter whether the current southwestern US drought is caused by anthropogenic climate change? Or, to be slightly more precise, in what ways does it or does it not matter? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Las Vegas Wash

Las Vegas Wash: perpetual water in the desert, courtesy Las Vegas, Nevada, urban sewage treatment systems. October 2010

The question arises anew in the context of the package of climate change and drought papers in PNAS this week. One of the most interesting of the bunch is by Richard Seager and Gabriel Vecchi, looking at greenhouse warming and the climate now and in the future here in the southwest.

Drawing on the IPCC AR4 model runs, Seager and Vecchi repeat a well-made point – that the poleward expansion of the planet’s arid regions is a well-understood feature of expected greenhouse climate change, and that we here in the southwest are likely to be swept up:

Among the 24 models participating in AR4, the broad agreement that SWNA (southwestern North America) will dry in the current century arises because subtropical drying and expansion are fundamental features of a warming climate. Indeed, it occurs even in idealized global atmosphere models with no surface inhomogeneities whatsoever when the opacity to longwave radiation is increased.

So is that what we already see happening? Has the shift to a new greenhouse-induced drier normal already begun?

The problem in answering that question, they argue, is that natural variability on interannual to decadal scales is large, as a result of the influence of large scale sea surface temperature patterns , and teasing out the climate change signal from that natural variability is not yet possible:

Due to the presence of large amplitude decadal variations of presumed natural origin, observations to date cannot confirm that this transition to a drier climate is already underway.

In answer to my own introductory question, I would argue that, for purposes of societal response to the drought over the 21st century here in the southwest, it does not matter. The steps we need to take as a society to adapt to a greenhouse-forced change in climate are largely the same as those we need to take to adjust to our longstanding misunderstanding of the range and depth of natural variability. Either way, we’re forced to make decisions in the face of fundamental and irreducible uncertainty with a big downside risk of a lot less water. Societal systems robust to decadal-scale droughts of the type seen in the tree ring record will also be robust to greenhouse-induced climate change.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Navajo Settlement

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From the morning paper, a look at money for the a Navajo Nation water project in the Indian water rights settlement bill the president signed last week:

A century of federal investment in dams and canals was built to serve cities and farms — “a long tradition in water politics in which states receive federal largess to help them solve local water problems,” in the words of University of Utah political scientist Dan McCool.

But the nation’s federally subsidized water development projects over the last century frequently bypassed Indian Country.

Over the 20th century, the United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions ruled that Indians were legally entitled to some of the highest priority water rights, enough to irrigate agricultural lands on their reservations, essentially first in line for scarce water ahead of the non-Indian farm and cities that came later.

But, as McCool documented in his book “Commanding the Waters,” native communities lacked political clout, and non-Indians ended up with the majority of the west’s water development money.

Indians were left behind. “They were just left without any means to use their water supply,” said Mike Connor, head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Cadillac Desert Revisited

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Update: The papers are all on line here, and seem to be freely available.

It stands as a cliché in western water circles to say that John Wesley Powell was right. But yeah, he pretty much was.

“Powell’s conclusion in 1876,” John Sabo and his colleagues write this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “was that water scarcity would place limits on the growth of a new civilization in the region.”

Las Vegas's "third straw"

Construction site of the Southern Nevada Water Authority's new Lake Mead intake, being built so Las Vegas can still get water as the reservoir drops. Taken October 2010

The Sabo piece is part of a fascinating package of PNAS papers organized by Glen MacDonald from UCLA assembling the latest science on water, climate and the arid west.

It’s an incredible array, touching on the paleo record, ecosystem issues, water supply questions, attribution of current drought and projection of future conditions. I’ve got a short piece trying to hit a few high points in tomorrow’s newspaper, but it was an absolutely maddening journalistic exercise because the range assembled by MacDonald is so topic rich.

I’d like to take some more time and space here to explore the package in more detail over the next however many days this takes, starting with the most clever paper of the bunch, by a team led by Sabo from Arizona State University: Reclaiming freshwater sustainability in the Cadillac Desert (Note: as of this writing, the papers don’t seem to be up on the PNAS site, though the embargo is off. As that changes, I’ll come back and add links.)

Continue reading ‘Cadillac Desert Revisited’ »