Losing ground(water) in Albuquerque

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Losing groundwater in Albuquerque

At the eastern end of Sandia Road NW in Albuquerque is a ratty but important piece of Albuquerque’s water management history – City Well #2. Maintained now by the US Geological Survey, City #2 was installed in the late 1950s, a pivotal time in Albuquerque water management.

The community’s population was booming. To meet the new demand, the city’s water department was drilling groundwater wells all over town. Newly appointed State Engineer Steve Reynolds saw a problem, and was trying to put a lid on expanding groundwater depletions by requiring the city to offset any future impacts of pumping by retiring surface water rights.

Litigation shenanigans ensued.

City Well #2, with couch, photo by John Fleck, November 2020

Four groundwater wells were drilled in the summer of 1957 to begin monitoring what the heck was going on beneath the ground – a novel water management approach in the go-go years of the 1950s, when population all over the West was growing rapidly and communities were sinking groundwater wells with reckless abandon.

We’ve been monitoring the four wells – by Los Poblanos Open Space, in Los Duranes, by the tracks near downtown, and this one on Sandia NW – ever since, with the faithful USGS technicians making two measurements a year, early spring and late summer. It’s a wonderful dataset, telling a rich story.

When I first visited City #2 in the winter of 2020, it was flanked by a trash bin and an old discarded couch.

It also was beginning to show the effects of lower river flows.

The impact is largely indirect. When the Rio Grande is down, Albuquerque shuts down its San Juan-Chama diversions, pumping groundwater to meet municipal needs. We’ve been doing that for the last copuple of years, and you can see the impact in the graph above. After a steady rebound of more than a decade, our aquifer has begun dropping again. Whether this is an ominous sign of trouble ahead, or simply The Plan – use the aquifer as a drought reserve in times like this – is a point of debate. (I tend to come down on the side of the latter, notorious optimist that I am.)

Google streetview suggests the couch has since been removed, which I guess can be counted as progress.

 

Carpenter’s Last Stand for Complete State Sovereignty – 100 Years Ago at the Compact Negotiations

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The Colorado River before Hoover Dam

By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck

On Saturday, April 1st, 1922, at 9:00 AM in Denver’s iconic Brown Palace Hotel, Chairman Herbert Hoover opened the 9th meeting of the Colorado River Commission. The official meeting lasted only 30 minutes. The commission took only one action of consequence. It asked its members to submit to Executive Secretary Clarence Stetson “suggested forms of compact for the disposition and apportionment of the waters of the Colorado River and its tributaries.”  The commission would then consider these draft compacts at future meetings.

At 9:30 AM, the meeting ended, and the commissioners headed to the day’s main event, a public hearing at the Colorado State Capitol. The Denver hearing was the next to the last of a long series of public hearings and inspection tours that had begun back on March 15th in Phoenix. After Phoenix, the Commission visited the Boulder Canyon project site near Las Vegas and agricultural development in the Imperial Valley. It held three hearings in Los Angeles on March 21st and 22nd, then headed to the upper river where it held hearings in Salt Lake City and Grand Junction and inspected the federal Grand Valley Project.

Governors Join the Ruckus

The April 1 hearing was a big deal. Four of the basin state governors would join them; three from the upper river – Charles Maybe from Utah, Merritt Mecham from New Mexico, and Oliver Shoup from Colorado – and one from the lower river, Nevada’s Emmet Doyle.

In proposing the tour and public hearings, Hoover hoped to build both knowledge and social capital. While each of the commissioners was an expert in the water needs of their own states, there had never before been an effort to bring people together to think at the basin scale. Hoover wanted the commission to see and better understand the water issues facing the basin. He also hoped that during the two weeks the commission and their advisors were together they could get to know one another and engage in the candid discussions that could break the current impasse.  In particular, he wanted to soften up Colorado’s Delph Carpenter, to get him to back off of his insistence that water projects on the lower river never interfere with development on the upper river.  Hoover had asked New Mexico’s Steven Davis, a state supreme court justice, for help.

The tour was a big success. After visiting Boulder Canyon, the commission went south to the Imperial Valley.  What they saw clearly impressed them. The Imperial Valley, which before irrigation promoter Charles Rockwood renamed it for marketing purposes was referred to as the Colorado Desert, is a vast expanse of potentially irrigable land, much of it at an elevation below the Colorado River channel just to the east of the valley. While some maps do not include the Imperial Valley as a part of the Colorado River Basin, those familiar with the geology of the basin consider that silly. Like the Grand Canyon, the Imperial Valley owes its existence to the river. The valley lies at the very northern end of the Salton Trough, a geologic feature called a “rift” created by plate tectonics extending from the tip of Baja California to Palm Springs. Over the eons, as the rift was subsiding the valley floor, the Colorado River was filling it in with sediment. The valley is a part of the river’s delta.

The Foundations, and Challenges, of Imperial Valley Farming

Rockwood’s California Development Company first delivered water from the river via a route through Mexico to the valley in June 1901. In 1911 the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) was formed to buy the irrigation works from the Union Pacific Railroad which had taken over Rockwood’s bankrupt company and saved the valley from the floods of 1905-07 when the entire river diverted itself through the newly constructed canal into the Salton Sink – as it had countless times in the past. In 1922 when the commission arrived, there were over 20,000 settlers farming about 300,000 acres of land. The IID needed help from the Reclamation Service in two major ways; a supply canal that avoided Mexico, an “All-American Canal”, and an upstream reservoir to help control the floods that were still threatening the valley. The recently released Fall-Davis Report made a strong case for both.

On to Los Angeles

From the Imperial Valley the commission travelled to Los Angeles where it held three public hearings. The Los Angeles of 1922 was a rapidly growing city of over 600,000 in a county with a population of over a million. It had already exhausted its local water supply and was importing water via a 220-mile aqueduct from the east slopes of the Sierra Nevada. While local community leaders may have been coy about plans to import water from the river, they made it clear that they wanted and needed the hydroelectric power the Boulder Canyon Project would produce. In Los Angles, Arthur Powell Davis first suggested that the Commission abandon the idea of apportioning water among the states. Davis suggested instead a split between an upper and lower basin. Davis’s proposal would allow unrestricted development in the Upper Basin for 50 years. Projects built during this 50-year window would be senior to all Lower basin uses. After the 50-year window, new Upper Basin projects would be subject to the priorities of existing Lower Basin projects.

Carpenter and the Sticking Points

The combination of the tour and Davis’ proposal made an impression on Carpenter, but not the one Hoover and Davis were hoping for. Instead, what Carpenter saw in California caused him, and Utah’s R. E. Caldwell, to double down on their demands that any compact be based on the principle of non-interference by Lower Basin projects on the Upper Basin, subject only to a possible limit on exports out of the basin. The issue of trans-basin diversions had been a hot topic during many of the public hearings. While perhaps open to a limit, all four of the commissioners from the upper river, as well California’s McClure wanted to keep the option open for their states.

In a choreographed performance at the Colorado statehouse, New Mexico Governor Merritt Mechem told the Commission that New Mexico could not accept a limited period (50 years) for development, unless the limit was so far in the future that it was no limit at all. For all practical purposes, most of the Arthur Powell Davis Los Angeles proposal was now dead.

After the Denver hearing, the Commission had one last public hearing scheduled for Cheyenne the next day. After that, it might be a while before the Commission could meet again. Steven Davis let Hoover know that any efforts to soften Carpenter might now be in hands of the United States Supreme Court. What it decided in the pending Wyoming v. Colorado case over Colorado’s tiny Laramie River would be big news for the mighty Colorado – stay tuned.

Eric Kuhn on less water

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Eric Kuhn:

One hundred years ago, we had some flexibility because the river was not very well-used. Today, not a drop of the Colorado River reaches the Gulf of California, so we don’t have that luxury. The way I look at it is: we legally allocated water based on an assumption that this river system had about 20 million acre-feet. Today, we think it’s more like 13, and it might be less in the future with climate change. Predictions and models show that increasing temperatures are going to reduce flows to the Colorado River. The drama is not how much water we’re going to have in the future — we know it’s going to be less. The drama is how we’re going to decide who gets less water, and when.

Clearing the institutional logjam to allow (some small amount of) NM Rio Grande storage in 2022

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Ok, the logjam isn’t cleared yet, but we can see how the clearing will happen.

Also, it’s not really Rio Grande storage, it’s the Rio Chama. But it’s a tributary to the Rio Grande. Headline writer’s prerogative.

The deal is that El Vado Reservoir on the Chama, where central New Mexico stores its irrigation water, is about to undergo repairs. Abiquiu Reservoir, just downstream, has been discussed for a while as an alternative storage site. But it’s a Corps of Engineers dam, with different rules for whose water can be stored there, when, and for what purposes.

The instititutional chit-chatting about this has been going on for a while, but we’ve been growing nail-bitingly close to May, when the work on El Vado is set to begin.

Happy to report that we now have a draft National Envirornmental Policy Act analysis from the Corps which seems to have arrived in time for the actual storage of water to begin on time.

Comments being accepted through April 4.

Brad Udall on the Drying of the Colorado River Basin

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The Drying of the Colorado River Basin, slide from Brad Udall

The only lever we currently control is the demand lever.

– Brad Udall, Stegner Colorado River Symposium, March 18, 2022

Colorado State University climate researcher Brad Udall poked again last week at a question he’s been thinking and speaking about for the past year – the knock-on effects of summer warming in the Colorado River Basin.

Precipitation declines in late spring and summer, combined with summer warming, are leaving us with dry soils as we head into the winters that follow. Which means less runoff in the basin.

His talk included a graph of new modeling being done by a group of Colorado River researchers. Under a continuation of the hydrology we’ve had for the past two decades, the total storage of Lake Mead and Lake Powell bumps along at basically empty for the foreseeable future.

And Brad, a scientist whose work more than most straddles the scientific and policy worlds, shared his “biggest fear” – that it’s easier for basin managers to let the system crash than to make the hard choices needed to avoid that crash.

Colorado River Compact at 100; Lake Powell at 3,524.42

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The Colorado River has dangerous currents. Moab, March 2022, photo by John Fleck

The most interesting news at this week’s University of Utah Stegner Symposium on the Colorado River Compact, past and future may be the news that we didn’t hear.

It was an amazing gathering, bringing together pointy headed academics like me with most of the basin management leadership team from tribes, state and local agencies, and the federal government. The crisis situation on the river made for some pointed conversations.

The news we did hear was stark:

  • Colorado River Basin water users are currently consuming 14-15 million acre feet of water from a river that for the 21st century has averaged 12.3 million acre feet. Several water users suggested a need to be ready for that to continue to drop – 11maf? 9?
  • Reclamation is scrambling to figure out how to safely move water through Glen Canyon Dam as Lake Powell dips below the safety threshold elevation of 3,525 feet above sea level, creeping toward “minimum power pool” – lowest since filling in the 1960s.
  • Summer drying is making it harder for snowpack the following winter to make it to headwaters rivers.
  • Declining river flows have us staring down a fundamental conflict, rooted in the century-old Colorado River Compact, about how much water upstream users are required to pass downstream past Glen Canyon Dam each year.
  • Unresolved Native American water rights – some rights that exist on paper but aren’t being used, some not yet even quantified – have us on a collision course with fundamental legal and moral questions about equity as non-Indian users risk crashing the system while Native Communities have not yet had the chance to use water to which they have long been entitleld.

The news we didn’t hear – Las Vegas is not at risk of losing its water supply

Here’s what we didn’t hear: Las Vegas, Nevada, is not at risk of losing its water supply as Lake Mead’s levels drop toward Vegas’s intake pipes.

Was a time when the Las Vegas intake system was vulnerable as Lake Mead’s elevation dropped toward elevation 1,050. But years of planning and an expenditure of some $1.5b have the Southern Nevada community equipped with new intakes deeper in the reservoir, and a new pumping plant that is now scheduled to be flipped on for the first time later this spring as Lake Mead’s elevations drop toward elevation 1,060.

Turning on those pumps, designed to keep the water flowing to Las Vegas at the sort of elevations we’re now seeing, is a huge milestone, reflecting a community that took low probability/high consequence risk seriously and invested heavily in mitigation.

The low probability event is happening, the high consequences are not.

With Reclamation’s current “most probable” forecast showing Mead headed toward 1,035 in 2023, with a clear possibility of dropping into the 1,020s over the next 18 months, it’s fascinating to think about what the basin conversation would be like right now if the Southern Nevada Water Authority hadn’t built its “third straw”.

A few notes below on discussions that attracted my attention over the two-plus days of symposium sessions and the critical conversations in hallways, at dinners, and in hotel bars.

The integrity of Glen Canyon Dam

Assistant Secretary Tanya Trujillo was blunt about the risks as Lake Powell continues to drop. Under normal operating conditions, water is released through penstocks that drive turbines to generate electricity. But somewhere around elevation 3,490 (or maybe higher?), that becomes infeasible, first because of the risk to the turbines if air gets entrained in the inflows and second because at some point it’s physically impossible to get water out throught that door.

At that point, Reclamation is left with Glen Canyon Dam’s low elevation bypass tubes. Their use poses, in Tanya’s words, many operational uncertainties. Aside from testing and early filling days when the dam was built in the 1960s, they’ve only been used briefly during flooding in the 1980s, and during the relatively short-term high-flow experiments as part of the Glen Canyon Dam LTEMP.

Tanya continued to emphasize Reclamation’s statutory obligation to protect the integrity of the dam, something she also did in her public remarks at the December CRWUA meeting – the Colorado River Water Users Association. She said Reclamation may need to reduce annual flows from Glen Canyon Dam to protect the infrastructure.

That’s a big deal. In hallway conversations and side meetings, there was apparently significant conversation among state and federal officials about how all that might happen.

How small a Colorado River should we prepare for? 11maf? 9maf?

Southern Nevada Water Authority’s John Entsminger described how his agency’s long run planning includes a worst-case “what if” of an 11 million acre foot river. Recall that it’s been a 12.3maf river in the 21st century, which has been enough to drain the reservoirs. This would be worse. At 11 maf, Entsminger said, his agency’s modeling shows Mead bumping round 900 feet in elevation, while Powell is basically empty.

“The future of the Colorado River is pain,” Entsminger said. “Anyone who tells you anything different is selling something.”

Andy Mueller, from western Colorado’s Colorado River Water Conservation District saw Entsminger’s 11maf bet and raised (lowered?) him another 2 million acre feet, saying we need a plan in place to deal with the possibility of a 9 million acre foot Colorado River.

You shouldn’t see this as a disagreement between Andy and John. You should see this as a disagreement between the two of them and a bunch of other people in the basin. Last year’s Getches-Wilkinson Center conference in Boulder, for example, included a noteworthy exchange between Entsminger and New Mexico’s then-State Engineer John D’Antonio in which Entsmber suggested the need to prepare for an 11 million acre foot river and D’Antonio’s suggest that 13-14 maf is a more realistic planning baseline.

Consider what we might do with an 11 million acre foot river (never mind 9!). This is a world, under current operating rules, with likely cutbacks in the Upper Basin, a frequently dry Central Arizona Project canal, and difficult contestation over what the river’s operating rules really mean in a world far different from the one the Compact’s drafters thought they were in a century ago.

A quip from Arizona Tom Buschatzke suggests how hard these conversastions will be. “I won’t say I agree to 11,” Tom said in one of the many moments of remarkable frankness we saw over the two days of the symposium, “or I might get arrested when I get off the plane in Phoenix.”

Equities – tribal water

It is noteworthy that the symposium, one of the most important events during this year’s Colorado River Compact centennial, was co-sponsored by the Water and Tribes Intiative, an effort to expand the basin’s water management discourse.

The impact on our First People of our nation’s colonial history is profound. How to come to terms, in the area of water management, with that impact becomes an increasingly urgent question as the river shrinks. We have tribes with:

  • legal rights to water now being put to use
  • legal rights to water on paper that are not yet being put to wet water use
  • unquantified rights

(see here from the Water and Tribes Initiative for more details)

We heard lots of positive discussion at the symposium about the recognition of this question, with tribal leaders (most notably Daryl Vigil from Jicarilla in New Mexico) and their representatives (especially Margaret Vick and Jay Weiner, two of the most prominent tribal attorneys, who play crucial briding roles between tribes and the water management law and policy plumbing). The question is how that talk translates into substantive roles for the basin’s 30 tribal sovereigns.

One key thing to watch: We’ve seen tribes playing an increasingly important role in the use of their currently used apportionments in helping solve basin problems. Will the discussions expand to compensation to tribes for the forebearance of the use of water not currently being put to use?

The tribal equity questions are far broader, but this question of whether compensation for forebearance is on or off the table is a test worth watching.

Equities – Upper Basin

My pal and coauthor Eric Kuhn gave an entirely too short presentation (I know because he shared the draft white paper version of the background with a bunch of us before the meeting) on the Upper Basin-Lower Basin equity issues embedded in a Compact that seems to set fixed deliver obligations at Lee Ferry regardless of what the climate is doing.

That fixed obligation would seem to place most of the climate change burden on the Upper Basin – no matter how much the river shrinks, we have to send 7.5 million acre feet per year (or, depending on one’s interpretation of unresolved legal questions, 8.25 maf) downstream.

Conversations about relaxing that Lee Ferry delivery obligation will be among the most difficult in coming years, but Eric argues it’s the only way to resolve this fundamental equity problem embedded in the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

“We need to manage the river we have today,” he said, “not the one we thought we had a hundred years ago.”

What are we thinking about when we think about Colorado River water management?

In light of today’s dire situation on the Colorado River, it’s interesting to return to the basic conceptual structure of the “2007 Interim Guidelines” – the rulebook for today’s river management.

The heart of the “interim Guidelines”

They include this crazy table. (There exist more graphically neato versions, but I think it’s worth going to the source.)

It defines a complex nested set of “if this then that” rules for determining how much water is released from Lake Powell each year. All the “ifs” refer to the elevation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two giant reservoirs at the heart of the system. We are currently operating in the “Lower Elevation Balancing Tier”, which creates all kinds of crazy incentives. If the Upper Basin puts more water into Powell, some of that will end up being released to Mead under the rules. If the Lower Basin foregoes some water use to prop up Mead, under the rules that could trigger smaller releases from Powell.

This reflects a basic paradigm in Colorado River management – decisions made on the basis not of flow in the river but rather on the basis of water in the reservoirs.

This is because those reservoirs – the water they store, really – have been for nearly a century central to the project of building a hydraulic empire that is the West we all know and love. As one of my other pals and coauthors, Anne Castle, noted, they’ve been enormously valuable in helping with that task.

But that was then. Now?

“They don’t do us much good,” Anne said, “when they’re empty.”

This is why Southern Nevada’s construction of the third straw looks so smart in 2022. Down to a nearly empty Lake Mead, Las Vegas will still be able to get water.

 

 

3,525

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Colorado River, Potash Boat Ramp (downstream from Moab), March 15, 2022. Photo by John Fleck

I’d just turned my bike onto the old potash mine road out of Moab, down the Colorado River, this morning when a friend texted me a picture of a digital readout on a wall that I presume to be deep in the bowels of Glen Canyon Dam:

WATER LEVEL 525

The “3” goes without saying, I guess? The elevation of the Colorado River at the base of Glen Canyon Dam is 3,132 feet above sea level, so the elevation of Lake Powell is always in the 3,000s.

So 3,525 it is.

To my left as I stopped to read the text message, the Colorado River flowed serenely downstream, headed into a gap in the red-rock cliffs, with little apparent care for the affairs of humans.

I’m taking a leisurely few days on my way to Salt Lake City for this week’s Stegner Center symposium on the centennial of the Colorado River Compact, with some extra days for long bike rides on the way up – Sunday on the San Juan through the northeastern edge of the Navajo Nation, today in Moab on the Colorado, and tomorrow a bit of time along the Green – the Colorado River’s three great strands.

I didn’t plan to be in Moab, where the Colorado River enters the Canyon Country of Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam, on the day Powell dropped through the arbitrarily magic level of elevation 3,525. You can’t plan stuff like that.

From a young age, all I ever really wanted to do was write about this river. I think I must have been a teenager when, on one of our annual summer car camping expeditions (early 1970s?) my parents bought me Michael Collier’s book An Introduction to Grand Canyon Geology. And I remember not just being interested in the geology, and the Grand Canyon, and the river, but in Collier.

Books are written by people, and I wanted to be one of those people.

Potash Road was a delight, 40-ish miles of out-and-back flat road with an up-canyon tailwind for the ride home. It was in the 30s when I started, but by afternoon I’d peeled the layers down to shorts – first shorts ride of 2022. I took my new bike, which is not really a new bike so much as the latest remodeling job on one of my old bikes done by my friends at Two Wheel Drive.

built for leisure

The new bike is built for leisure, and can handle a bit of dirt.

When the states of the Colorado River Basin were developing their Drought Contingency Plan, they set elevation 3,525 as a soft line, to leave a buffer above the critical elevation of 3,490, which is where Glen Canyon Dam’s power generating gizmos start to get wonky. Even that isn’t a firm line,  as Luke Runyon points out.

Cavitation.

Uncharted territory.

In 2019, I wrote a bit of business that’s getting a fresh burst of traffic as Lake Powell enters the great unknown. At the time I wrote it, Lake Powell’s elevation had stabilized after the big crash of the early 21st century, but people were worried:

It certainly would be correct, and is important to note, that a repeat of the drought of the early ’00s would be disastrous. Absent changes in management, it would lead us to dead pool. It is important to have policies in place that are ready for that.

We are, in fact, now in the third year of a “repeat of the drought of the early ’00s”, and beyond the Hail Mary of sending a bunch of water downstream from Flaming Gorge, I don’t see the policies in place that are ready for that.

On my languid bike ride down Potash Road today, I stopped at a particularly memorable pullout to have one of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (the “new bike” has panniers, the better to carry large quantities of food, in addition to stashing peeled layers of clothing). The river was low, exposing a sandbar across the way, backed up by a thicket of tamarisk, backed up by what I presume to have been an old Pleistocene bench – ancient deposits of sands and gravels (forgive me, Jack, if I’m mucking up the geomorphological story, I love to say “Pleistocene bench”).

It was a reminder that the river is operating on different time scales than we are, a point I remember Collier’s book making to teenage John in a way that has stuck to this day.

Getting Acquainted with the Colorado River Basin: 100 years ago in compact negotiations

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Looking down stream towards Boulder Canyon. Photo by E.C. Kolb – 1923. Courtesy USGS

By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck

The Colorado Commissions’ 8th Meeting
Wednesday, March 15th, 1922, Phoenix, Arizona

After a six-week break from the disappointing series of negotiating meetings that ended on January 31st  in Washington, D.C., the commissioners from the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states and the federal government reconvened for the group’s 8th meeting on March 15th, in Phoenix, Arizona at the Federal Building. The commission’s goal for the Phoenix meeting was not to return to the stalled negotiations. Instead, at Hoover’s recommendation, the commissioners and their advisors planned to visit the Colorado River Basin to learn about the basin, hold a series of public meetings, and tour the proposed Boulder Canyon Dam site and the Imperial Valley.

Learning about the basin

One might think that all the commissioners were experts on the Colorado River Basin, but the reality was that only one of the commissioners, Arizona’s Norviel, lived and worked in the basin. The remainder were highly skilled professionals, but their knowledge of the Colorado River Basin was primarily limited to the states they represented. The Colorado River Basin of the early 1920s was a vast expanse of primarily rural Native American and settler communities. There were few improved roads. Transportation was primarily by railroad, and even that was limited to a few east-west corridors. Communication was by telegraph and mail. While residential electric and telephone services were being rapidly installed in the larger urban centers adjacent to the basin, like Denver and Salt Lake City, and a few of the larger communities within the basin, like Phoenix, it would be decades before these basic services were commonly available for most of the basin.

Mining and agriculture were the primary drivers of the basin’s economy. Of the two, agriculture was much more stable. Arthur Powell Davis’ Reclamation Service was already a major development force.  The Service brought with it the federal government’s financial and technical resources necessary to build large scale projects that the local communities could not hope to build with their own resources. These projects, like the Yuma and Salt River Projects in Arizona and the Uncompahgre and Grand Valley Projects in Western Colorado, provided reliable water supplies to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of mostly desert lands. The projects also brought new problems to the basin. Their success led to a desire by communities and promoters throughout the basin for Reclamation to build more. Further, the existing and proposed projects were large enough to have a major impact on the flow of the river. Without a compact among basin states, legal and political conflicts over which projects got the river’s waters and federal dollars were guaranteed.

First stop: Phoenix

The commissioners’ first stop was Phoenix. Today it is the 5th largest city in the United States with a population of 1.61 million – 4.5 million if you include the greater Phoenix metro area of Maricopa County. In 1920 Phoenix’s population was just 48,000 – 90,000 in Maricopa County as a whole. In 1922, Phoenix’s Valley of the Sun was dominated by irrigated agriculture. Today, while many are surprised at the scope of the region’s remaining agriculture, irrigated acreage has long been in decline, with much of that farming replaced by a sprawling metropolis.

The commission held four public hearing sessions and a business meeting where it discussed logistics and a letter from the Federal Power Commission requesting guidance on how to proceed with an application by a private individual to build a power dam at Diamond Creek in what is now the Grand Canyon. That proposed power plant – the Girand Project – highlighted the frictions within the basin. The project, which had been pending before the Power Commission for several years, had broad support from Arizona’s mining community and political leaders but was opposed by the other states and Davis. The upper river states were opposed because it could create a legal call on the river impacting upstream development. Davis and California were opposed because it could interfere with the development of the Boulder Canyon Project. The commission failed to reach a consensus on a response.

The commission held four lively public in Phoenix meetings over three days. Among the presenters were two strong-willed individuals who would have a major impact on the river’s future: irrigation promoter George Maxwell and Los Angeles Water and Power boss William Mulholland.

Maxwell’s Arizona vision

George Maxwell, picture courtesy Arizona State Library

Maxwell was promoting what was referred to as the Arizona Highline Canal, a project that would divert large amounts of water (perhaps 8 million acre-feet per year) from the river in the Western Grand Canyon, then convey it through 450 miles of pumping plants, tunnels, and canals to Central Arizona where it would irrigate 2.5 million acres of new lands. Maxwell sparred with Davis and the commission members, most of whom considered his project unfeasible. Maxwell feared that the commission would agree to a compact that would leave Arizona with too little water. Further, he opposed the construction of a large storage reservoir at Boulder Canyon. Instead, he supported a large reservoir in Glen Canyon coupled with a power/diversion dam near Diamond Creek and a flood control reservoir at Bullhead (now Davis Dam). Although Maxwell had little success in influencing the compact negotiators, his dream to move water from the mainstem to Central Arizona ultimately became today’s Central Arizona Project.

Mulholland’s California head fake

Mulholland, architect of the 220-mile-long Los Angeles Aqueduct, which moves water from the eastern Sierras to Los Angeles, chose to meet with the commission in Arizona rather than in his native Los Angeles. In a message aimed at the Arizonans as much as the commissioners, he testified that his city was not interested in water from the river. Rather, it needed the hydroelectric power of a Boulder Canyon project and was more than willing to pay for it. It may have been a head fake. In 1924, under Mulholland’s leadership, Los Angeles formalized its plans to build a new aqueduct from the Colorado River and in 1927 he helped form the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the entity that built and operates the Colorado River Aqueduct. In 1931 Metropolitan and Los Angeles became the two largest purchasers of Hoover Dam power.

On to Las Vegas and Boulder Canyon

Las Vegas, NV, station in the 1920s. Photo courtesy UNLV Libraries

On Friday afternoon, March 17th, the Colorado River Commission members, and their advisors packed their bags for an overnight trip to the small community of Las Vegas, Nevada to tour the Boulder Canyon Project site. Today the Las Vegas area has a population of 2.3 million. In 1922, with a population of only 2,300, it was so small that Nevada’s Commissioner Scrugham didn’t believe it was necessary for the commission to hold a public hearing.

On Saturday, March 18th, the commission toured the Boulder and Black Canyon dam sites, then set off on another overnight journey to see the Imperial Valley.

thoughts on UNM’s Water Resources Program and the importance of interdiscliplinarity

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The Rhythm of Water, a 2013 mural by Eric J. Garcia and a ton of other folks, Atrisco (Albuquerque), New Mexico

tl;dr – We’ve got a bunch of really interesting interdisciplinary work underway at the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program. If you know someone finishing their undergraduate work or early in their career, interested in water work beyond the solely sciency/engineering paths, send them our way!

longer

water as art, art as water

It’s weird, but now that I’m no longer the director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, I actually have more time to think about the academic and intellectual task of water management.

And, for a variety of reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about the task of interdisciplinarity in water management.

The biggest reason is a pretty intense ongoing conversation with one of our students who’s just finishing up their degree, and who has started working for a very progressive water agency that understands that the task of managing water extends far beyond the physical science and technical questions involved.

In my transition to work at the Utton Center, a natural resource group at the UNM School of Law, I’m continuing to work with a bunch of Water Resources Program students, and I’ll still be teaching the fall introductory course with my colleague and collaborator Bob Berrens.

My new life, shorn of administrative responsibilities, gives me more time to think about this stuff, and engage in the deeper conversations with our students that are the most treasured part of the gig. Bob and I seem to have inadvertently assembled a critical mass of really talented students helping us think about the core question we pose in our fall course:

There’s less water. What do we do?

This is not solely, or even primarily, a technical question.

In an interview earlier this month in Vox, geographer Edward Carr said this:

There are going to be certain situations we can’t just throw money at or build infrastructure for. We’re going to have to make decisions about what we want to preserve and what we’re willing to give away, what’s essential to us, and what do we keep? That’s a social choice and that’s a political choice. Our political systems, the way that we interact with each other, and the way that we identify problems and solutions — all of that becomes central to how we will function in the face of climate change.

The stuff our students are working on now is super exciting:

  • Tax policy (who knew tax policy had such important implications for how we use irrigation water in New Mexico? Stay tuned, much more on this soon….)
  • The benefits and costs and implications of water use transfers from rural irrigation to municipal use
  • The environmental and cultural implications of land fallowing – whether because of transfers, or because the water just ain’t there
  • Some unexpected agricultural crop-shifting responses to climate change
  • The community and cultural value of non-commercial irrigation (and the risks to these values posed by climate change)
  • A re-evaluation of ecosystem goods and services of the Rio Grande and the irrigation systems around the river here in central New Mexico

Some of this is funded through UNM’s participation in the South Central Climate Adaptation Center, some of it’s now supported through my work at Utton, and some of it’s just the stuff that we do as part of the degree-granting process.

Underpinning all of this is a recognition that “water management” is not solely a technical question, to be left to engineers and physical scientists, and is why I so treasure the interdisciplinary nature of the Water Resources Program.

If you know some bright young person interested in an interdisciplinary perspective on water management, encourage them to contact me. I’m no longer the director, but I can talk about the stuff our group is working on, and connect them with the current program leadership.