What does it mean for western water management when the federal government becomes an unreliable partner?

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I got a text message yesterday afternoon about this, which is nuts:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-Albuquerque District announced today that an unintended water release from Cochiti Dam may increase flood risk on the Rio Grande in the river channel, riverbanks, and floodway.

The cause of the unintended water release was a procedural error during routine maintenance.

Accidentally dumping 8,000 cubic feet per second into a river channel that hasn’t seen that much water since 1985 is a big deal. The gage data suggests the river level rose four feet basically instantaneously.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stuff the federal government does in water management in the United States that we used to be able to take for granted, like, for example safely operate the dams.

We all love to complain about the federal government’s water management work, but the complaints are based on narrow questions and presume a broad societal consensus that there’s a bunch of stuff the federal government can be reliably counted on to do while we argue over details. Reclamation and the Corps are gonna operate the dams, for example. The details we argue about are at important margins, but they’re at the margins, based on the presumption that the basic stuff will get done.

Like, for example, spending the money that Congress approved to help us manage shortages in the Colorado River Basin. Which money has now been yanked out from under us by the autocrats who think they know better, as Alex Hager reported yesterday.

HAGER: Colorado River user groups are being told that payments in exchange for their water are on pause for now. It’s unclear if those payments scheduled to arrive in coming months will actually show up.

BART FISHER: It’s unnerving to think that maybe come August 1, all of our plans will need to suddenly change.

HAGER: Water experts say these projects don’t seem to conflict with the Trump administration’s executive orders. Anne Castle helped manage water under presidents Biden and Obama.

ANNE CASTLE: These are not woke environmental programs. These are essential to continued ability to divert water…. Having this appropriated funding suddenly taken away undoes years and years of very careful collaboration among the states in the Colorado River Basin and threatens the sustainability of the entire system.

I have no idea what happened at Cochiti Dam yesterday, whether the person who made the “procedural error” was new because the old timer who knows how to run the dam took the early buyout and bailed. But I do know that is exactly the “what if” scenario I was gonna lay out in a blog post that’s been percolating in my head about this question of how we in the West go forward in water management when the federal government suddenly becomes an unreliable partner.

I am not saying this because complaining about the stunningly arrogant idiots crashing through the federal government right now is great clickbait. I’m tired of all the angry clickbait, frankly, which is why I hadn’t written the blog post until today.

My point here is a serious question, not a rhetorical one: What would it mean for us in Western water management if the federal government becomes an unreliable partner? What must we do to prepare? What does that even look like?

Spring

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Sandhill cranes feed in a farm field in the foreground, withs cows beyond them and cranes taking flight against a backdrop of mountains. The field in the foreground is green.

Sandhill cranes like to hang out with the cows sometimes. Photo by L. Heineman.

BERNARDO, NEW MEXICO – The juniper pollen has cranked up early this year, and the irrigators with groundwater pumps (legal or not, it’s hard to know) are firing them up, but the most telling sign of spring was the kettling sandhill cranes this morning.

The term comes from the boiling water in a kettle, as a flock of cranes spirals up in the thermals to conserve energy while they gain altitude for their northward migration. We’d gone down to the state Game and Fish land at Bernardo south of Albuquerque just because, packed lunches and drove down the Rio Grande Valley to look at stuff. We’d seen flocks of snow geese last week when we were driving down to Las Cruces, which triggered a return trip on a lazy family Wednesday.

We saw a few snow goose stragglers at the Bernardo wetland, but their fellows were mostly gone. I worry about stragglers. The cranes, though, were just packing up and heading out, a cacophony as they kettled over the refuge for the trip north.

When we first moved to Albuquerque, in the fall of 1990, we were at a state park along the Rio Grande north of town when we first heard them. I was looking out across the landscape for a turkey farm before I looked up and realized it was these vast flocks, hundreds (thousands?) of huge birds lazing down the flyway to their winter homes.

The cranes are a success story. Near extinction in the 1930s because of human stuff (habitat loss, hunting), the birds are back , hanging out on wildlife refuges, game refuges (they’re popular with hunters) and farms. Check out Lissa’s picture above of the cranes hanging out with the cows at a dairy farm outside Los Lunas. They number now in the tens of thousands now in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley each winter.

2025 is gonna be tough on New Mexico’s Rio Grande

Eight sandhill cranes against a blue sky with whispy clouds.

Heading to a cooler, wetter place. Photo by L. Heineman

This winter has been dry in the headwaters, and the latest forecast calls for just half of normal flows on the Rio Grande entering New Mexico’s “Middle Valley,” where the cranes and I live. The forecast models, peering out into the middle of March look warm and dry. Beyond that we live in lovestruck hope, but wise planning suggests we should prepare for our hearts to be broken. The cranes are smart enough to head to summer homes in a cooler, wetter place, but we’re stuck here.

It’s too early to do much more than arm-wave about the impact of the low runoff, but this is a blog, so arm-waving is the point. I expect short deliveries to irrigators this year, and I would not be surprised if Albuquerque once again has to switch over to groundwater pumping to keep the taps flowing – my taps – through the heat of summer.

We’ll be fine. We’re used to this. Irrigators will troop down to the irrigation district board meeting the second Monday of each month to complain about not getting water to grow stuff, but there’s a sad resignation to the ritual. We live in a desert. Water is a blessing when it comes, but the reality of desert living requires a stoicism of stubborn acceptance.

The fate of the cranes – from the brink of extinction to the huge kettling flocks we saw this morning at Bernardo – gives me hope, or at least animates my stoic acceptance.

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A legal guide for climate scientists to safeguard their on line communications

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With the new administration’s shithousery team now pounding on NOAA’s door, a useful resource from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund:

Emails sent to and from scientists are increasingly subject to scrutiny through a variety of means, including aggressive open records requests, subpoenas, and even hacking. The prevalence of social media, blogs, and other digital platforms and forums have also made scientists vulnerable to new kinds of harassment and attacks.

Shithousery and California’s Success Reservoir

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Black and white photo of an outhouse with snow on the ground and trees in the background.

Shithouse, Spencer Iowa, 1936. Photo by Lee Russell, FSA photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public goods are underprovided, and easily lost if we aren’t careful.

There’s a tactic in football (what we Americans refer to as “soccer”) called “shithousery.” It’s a style of norm-breaking behavior – constant stoppages, niggling fouls, feigning injury – that completely disrupts the flow of the game. It can involve bending or breaking rules, and one of its main goals is to disorient the opponent, piss them off, trigger them. Purists hate it, but it often works.

This may be a good framework for thinking about what the new leadership in our nation’s capital did last week at Kaweah and Success reservoirs in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, dumping a bunch water into a river for a photo/tweet-op. Lois Henry at SJV Water has the goods on the specifics, which defy explanation other than these people are fucking idiots and we just handed them the keys to the bus in which we all must ride. (One of my young internet-native friends suggested that I experiment with shitposting, how’m’I doing? Not my strong suit.)

My water policy community friends and I have been pretty focused in the last few weeks on the language of executive orders, running through how the rules work, where the federal authorities are, how the ESA “god squad” actually functions and might be employed, stuff like that. “Keep your eyes on the process,” I wrote last week.

But is that maybe the wrong frame? Is this shithousery? I was going to write “just” shithousery, but as my trans friends and family will attest, there is real harm here.

Tyler Cowen this morning offered a helpful hypothesis:

Flood the zone.  That is how you have an impact in an internet-intensive, attention-at-a-premium world.

Cohen is making an argument that goes beyond the shithousery itself to the shithousery’s goal of moving policy by moving culture. It is not about each specific crazy thing on offer, it’s shithousery aimed at changing the entire game. His post is worth a read.

Clearly the rules don’t matter to these people, which is a bit of a setback to someone who has spent long years trying to master them. But shithousery has earned an enduring place in the beautiful game for a reason.

Terrain vague

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Brown farm field bisected by ditch and service road with old brick building on the right.

The old Schartzman packing plant

Unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative.

-Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague”

In his essay “Terrain Vague,” the architectural and social critic Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió points us to the liminal spaces in our cities, between the places where we busily do city things. They are the leftover bits, the abandoned bits, places of both promise and decay.

He’s drawing from the French and playing with textures of meaning in the word “vague”- from the German “woge” – movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation; and “vacant,” from the Latin “vacuus,” meaning empty, unoccupied, free, available; and then “vague,” from the Latin vagus, meaning indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, uncertain.

Fence in the foreground with a junkyard pile rising behind it and mountains in the distance.

junkyards, to recycle the results

Sunday’s ride on the new bike took us down the Barr canal through Albuquerque’s south valley, east of the river. It once was the meat packing district, when a city needed a meat packing district. The evolution of the modern city has replaced stockyards with petroleum tank farms to fuel a modern city, and junkyards to recycle the results.

But there remain these fragments. The brick building in the picture is the old meat packing plant, storied home of a World War II German prisoner of war camp. (They seem to have been well treated, a historian describes “big jars of mustard” for their sandwiches, no one tried to escape.) The farmland to the left in the picture is still planted in alfalfa, kept in production thanks to our agricultural tax break. Weirdly, taxes would go up if it was just left vacant.

The new bike is well suited for exploring Albuquerque’s terrain vague, its primary purpose.

Encrypted

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No particular reason, but I had some time yesterday and asked a young tech friend for help dusting off my Signal account, which I hadn’t used in a while. Should you also be interested – again, no particular reason, just feeling geeky on a late winter day – here’s some info to help you on this journey:

As a federal civilian with some technical know-how, I wanted to share with my fellow colleagues the importance of moving to Signal for messages instead of using other tools like iMessage. There are a few simple reasons why, so we’ll outline them here, and explain how we can all make the switch together. This is a good, concrete step we can all take to keep each other safe.

 

I’m good, thanks for asking.

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A silver-grey bicycle sitting on the sidewalk in front of a bike shop.

New bike day. Meet the Space Ghost.

I got a couple of alarmed emails from friends after the last cryptic blog post, the one about how I can’t be broken.

The post was aimed at a couple friends who I knew would get the reference. I forget that other people read this too, sorry. Your emails of concern made me feel loved, so that’s good.

Love’s good right now.

Context from this IFHT song. It’s a punk rock ear worm (thanks, R!) about a guy whose life is falling apart, but then he gets a new bike:

It’s new bike day and I can’t be broken
It’s new bike day and I get to ride
I might be broke and alone but there’s rubber and chrome
On new bike day and I feel alive
The world may be on fire, but I got a new bike today. Zack and Will and the crew at Two Wheel Drive stayed late to finish building it up for me because they knew I really wanted to ride it tomorrow. They get it.
N+1. I can’t be broken.

 

Keeping eyes on process

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Allen Best gives us a good first pass in his niche (the Big Pivot) on the on-the-ground impact of the attempted freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funds on rural electricity in Colorado:

Electrical cooperatives in Colorado have been promised well more than a billion dollars in federal aid through the New ERA program.

The carve-out in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was intended to help electrical cooperatives, who mostly serve rural America, make the energy transition from coal to less-polluting sources. Colorado-based Tri-State Generation and Transmission lobbied hard for the New ERA (Empowering Rural America) funding and will be a major beneficiary. It is in line to get $670 million.

Will the money eventually arrive? Donald Trump in his first days as president ordered a freeze on distribution of funds.

There’s a lot of noise right now, some of it intentionally sown chaos to distract, some of it intentionally created chaos to cause substantive change, and some of it gross incompetence. It’s difficult to tell the three apart, but we need to keep our eyes on the substantive process. That’s what I need from my journalism right now.