The West's New Water Woes

Is it time to prepare for the water wars---again? ---BBB

The West's New Water Woes
By John Fleck
Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer

BOULDER HARBOR, NEV. — The driest 11-year stretch in recorded history on the Colorado River has left a muddy, smelly bog at Boulder Harbor on Lake Mead's western shore.

Mead is the West's first great reservoir, created when Hoover Dam in the 1930s plugged the Colorado River at Black Canyon in the harsh desert of the Arizona-Nevada borderlands.

Hoover Dam and Lake Mead are testaments to the American 20th century notion that we are a great nation capable of great things.

Today, Mead is a shadow of its former self. The water that filled once-busy Boulder Harbor marina is slowly disappearing, drained by enduring drought upstream and continued water use downstream.

The boats are long gone. What remains is a useless dock at the end of a forlorn concrete boat ramp.

As I stood alone at the harbor's edge last month, hundreds of American coots, ungainly black birds, picked for treats in the shrinking pool of muddy water.

One by one, harbors like Boulder, playgrounds for residents of nearby Las Vegas, Nev., have been abandoned, their boat moorings towed to deeper water in the shrinking lake.

Hoover Dam is 500 miles from Albuquerque, but what happens there matters here. The Colorado River is water lifeline to seven Western states, including New Mexico. The triumphalism that began with Hoover Dam now extends to a spider web of dams, tunnels and canals that delivers Colorado Basin water across the West, including now providing Albuquerque drinking water.

Since 2000, flow on the Colorado River has averaged 12 million acre-feet per year. An acre-foot (the ungainly measure Western water managers use to tally the liquid under their care) is enough to serve two or three average households for a year. Twelve million of them sounds like a lot. It would be, except that the allocation of the Colorado's water, and the society we've built based on it, presumes an average flow of 16.5 million acre-feet per year.

The reduction to 12 million acre-feet is not the result of our dams and ditches diverting the Colorado's water for human use. It's the amount of water before we start moving it around. After we've finished using it, there is none left. Today's Colorado rarely reaches the sea.

The week I was in Nevada chasing disappearing water, a Colorado scientist published a new paper suggesting that what I was seeing could be a harbinger of things more serious to come.

According to Aiguo Dai at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, air on a warming Earth sucks up more moisture, leaving streams and rivers drier.

With rising greenhouse gases linked to the warming, Dai argues that, globally, "human activities have contributed significantly to the recent drying trend."

The starkest part of Dai's new work is a new set of maps showing projected drying around the world as greenhouse gases continue to rise. In the western United States, Dai's work suggests normal conditions in the future are likely to look like our worst droughts of old.

On Sept. 30, 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke from atop Hoover Dam to a national radio audience during its dedication ceremony.

"We are here," he told them, "to see the creation of the largest artificial lake in the world — 115 miles long, holding enough water, for example, to cover the state of Connecticut to a depth of 10 feet."

At today's levels, Lake Mead spread over Connecticut would be more like 3 feet deep.

Mead passed an ominous milestone last month. Surpassing the worst drought on record, Mead is now the driest it has been since is was first filled in the 1930s.

Drought is only half of the story. While flows from upstream have dwindled, downstream use in the farms and cities of California, Arizona and Nevada has continued unchanged. This arguably can be viewed as a great success. The whole point of big reservoirs like Mead is to store water for use during a drought.

But the system is reaching a breaking point. If the lake's surface drops another 7-plus feet, Arizona and Nevada will begin to see their water curtailed.

How the shortage might affect New Mexico's share is uncertain. For the next few years, Mead's troubles are more of a problem for Lower Basin states than they are for us.

But Jennifer Pitt of the Environmental Defense Fund pointed out during a congressional hearing in April that the states in the Colorado's Upper Basin, including New Mexico, have not sorted out who gets what in the event the shortages get so bad the Lower Basin states issue a demand that we send them more water.

Standing at the dam watching history being made last month, I tried to explain to one of the tourists the historic significance of what he was seeing.

I told him the picture he had just snapped was a historic image — that Lake Mead had dropped to its lowest level since they built Hoover Dam in the 1930s. He looked puzzled.

Him: "Why's it so low?"

Me: "Drought upstream. Water use downstream."

Him: "It'll fill up someday."

One hopes.

Read more: ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: The West's New Water Woes http://www.abqjournal.com/upfront/162248336244upfront11-16-10.htm#ixzz15T1sA8j4
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