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March 16, 2010

Water Wars

In Utah, we have water on the brain. Any complaint about snow or rain is inevitably countered with, “We need the moisture.”

It’s a stoic sentiment born out of a century and a half of stubbornly forcing these arid lands to bloom. Now the desire for green is leading us to a crossroads where simmering century-old conflicts are ready to boil over.

Utahns use more water per person than all but three other states. As Utah grows, so does its need for water. And here in the arid West, water—more than anything—will define our future.

At the center of the West’s water struggle is the Colorado River—a bright blue strip running through the southeastern quadrant of Utah—and our share of the river, America’s most overtapped waterway. Seven states and Mexico have a stake in its flow.

Last April, the SCRIPPS Institute, which studies water and climate change issues, dropped a bombshell. Their study indicates that if even conservative climate change models are borne out, the increasing dryness and reduced snow pack will significantly reduce the Colorado’s flow, by 40 percent in 2025 and double that in 2050. This means that the already stressed system will be maxed out, and shortages will be severe and frequent.

“People have talked for at least 30 years about the Colorado being oversubscribed, but no one ever put a date on it or an amount. That’s what we’ve done,” says Scripps researcher Tim Barnett, who co-wrote the report.
The solution, says Barnett’s co-author David Pierce, is a wholesale re-evaluation of water resource management with an aggressive emphasis on conservation.

“We can avoid such big shortfalls if the river’s users agree on a way to reduce their average water use,” says Pierce. “If we could do that, the system could stay sustainable further into the future than we estimate currently, even if the climate changes.”

The story of water’s control in Utah begins with the Mormon pioneers, who harnessed a zealous work ethic and communal spirit to do what no single homesteader could do: create elaborate irrigation systems. Growing things, and thus survival in the West, is impossible in any meaningful way without such systems.

The Mormons were the first to succeed in this task, and essentially built the mold for western settlement. In areas without the close-knit and self-reliant community to create large waterworks, it fell to the federal government and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to adopt the Saints’ blueprint, and they did. Acting the part of the Lord God Almighty, the bureau redirected the Colorado’s flow and allocated its resources.

In the spring of 1869, John Wesley Powell’s Geographic Expedition put 10 men in four wooden boats onto the Green River in Wyoming. Three months and six days later, seven survivors emerged at the confluence of the Colorado and Virgin rivers, greeted by Mormon settlers sent by Brigham Young to watch for the expedition. Powell and his men had run what is still some of the most dangerous white water in the country and seen firsthand the wonders of the Colorado.

It was the first official exploration of the river that now, 140 years later, is easily described as the most overused waterway in the United States. A 1987 High Country News article memorably declared the Colorado as “more plumbing than river.”

And indeed it is. From its headwaters near Gramby, Colo., and the beginnings of its main tributaries, the Yampa and Green rivers, the Colorado is dotted with dams and diversions that allow western water managers to control its flow and its wealth. Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam are the largest valves on this massive waterworks, put in place to tame the river and enforce the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

The Colorado provides water for 30 million people, from Denver to Salt Lake City, Phoenix to Las Vegas, Los Angeles to San Diego and on to Mexico. It once naturally flowed all the way to the Sea of Cortez, but now it completes the trip only in extremely high-water years, a rarity since 2002.
Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam is the key valve where Utah, Colorado and Wyoming are concerned; it’s the gate that keeps the Upper Basin water in the Upper Basin. The Lower Basin’s allotment is sent downstream through controlled releases at the dam. Then it is held back once again by Hoover Dam in Lake Mead, outside of Las Vegas.

“Glen Canyon stops the Lower Basin states from stealing the Upper Basin states’ water,” says photographer and activist James Kay. “In the West, once you start taking water, it’s hard to get it back.”

No, it’s not a mirage

Utah’s most visible example of man’s rearrangement of nature is Lake Powell. Driving through the red rock mounds that line Utah Highway 89 toward Page, Arizona, it appears on the horizon as an eye-rubbing mirage of blue water amid the burnt-umber cliffs. The water level has been trending down, uncovering lost portions of Glen Canyon, which was flooded to create Powell. And water managers from Denver to San Diego are watching it carefully.

Kay spent five years using a pontoon boat and kayak to explore and document the natural wonders thought lost when the dam was built in the ’60s and now revealed by the reservoir’s dramatically lowered water levels.

“I never thought I’d see places like the Cathedral in the Desert,” he says. “But as the water kept dropping, I got to see and photograph the Cathedral. If there is one iconic symbol of what’s happened to the Colorado, that is it.”

Kay is among a vocal group of eco-activists who lament the loss of Glen Canyon to the reservoir and question the logic of keeping two massive half-full reservoirs, Mead and Powell, in a desert. In their dreams, Powell would be drained and Glen Canyon restored.

“The water stored together would equal just one of those reservoirs, but you’ve got two large surfaces evaporating into the desert air,” Kay says. “You’ve got twice as much evaporation. Water managers have to decide if they want to keep two half-full reservoirs and keep losing all that water into the air.”

Upstream vs. Downstream

But for now, water managers like Don Ostler, the Upper Basin Colorado River Commission director, are more concerned with ensuring the terms of the 1922 Colorado Compact than indulging nostalgia over the lost Glen Canyon.

You might say that Ostler is a half-full kind of water manager. His faith lies in the Compact, an agreement that has created something of a forced detente among the states in the Upper and Lower basins. Opening the Compact for renegotiation would mean any of the states could end up with a smaller allotment of Colorado River water, and that could be worse than the current situation. It would also take an act of Congress and an army of lawyers.

“No good would come out of opening the Compact,” Ostler says. “The water would go where the political clout is and that wouldn’t be a good thing. And we don’t think it would even be legal. Certainly there would be so many lawsuits that the use of the Colorado River would be tied up in courts for decades. Everything would be frozen in legal conflict.”

From a hydrological perspective, though, the Upper Basin holds all the cards. After all, the water comes from up here, and while the Lower Basin states have cashed in all of their allotment of river water (and then some), Utah and its Upper Basin comrades still have water to put into play.

Here’s the gist, Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix: You have all the water you were promised. If you’re running out, you’re going to have to figure it out. What goes into the river on your side of Lees Ferry is all you’re going to get—even though the lower states will use all of the 7.5 million acre feet released from the Upper Basin, plus an additional 1 million acre-feet from lower basin runoff and tributaries.

“Whether we were duped or not when we signed the 1922 Compact, we guarantee the Lower Basin 7.5 million acre feet, and we have to deliver that water downstream,” says Utah Division of Water Resources Director Dennis Strong.

“The upstream water is what we’ve got, even though the division is based on a record that was wetter than normal. It just happened that way. Those downstream areas were using more water and were more developed. We get a little less, and they get a little more. But regardless, we are going to honor those agreements.”

But this very human situation (more and more thirsty people) has been exacerbated by prolonged drought. Since 2000, only two years have seen an average amount of water in the Colorado system. The result: right now, Lake Powell is at 60 percent of its capacity and Mead is at less than half.

This year, Ostler is anticipating 105 percent of the average amount will flow down the river into Powell, thanks to heavy snow and rain late last spring. The Lower Basin states will get the water that has been promised from Powell, but because they are overusing the water, Mead’s level will continue to drop.

“With a normal release (of water) from Powell, Lake Mead is going down,” Ostler says. “It shouldn’t be going down, and that’s a bad situation.”

There is, however, a spirit of cooperation. The states recently modified the Compact to address this situation. Now a new rule is in place: If Mead is high, Powell reduces the amount of water it sends downstream. If Powell is high and Mead is low, then Powell will increase the flow. The Lower Basin states know that they will have to plan for shortages in the near future—preferable to waiting for the Big One, as it were, which would cause economic and social upheaval.

“If they want to keep growing, they will require more water,” Ostler says. “The status quo is not sustainable. You have stress now, but how are they going to deal with future growth? It’s clear that growth cannot be supported unless they find ways to augment the supply of the river.”

That conflict has emerged most forcefully on the Utah-Nevada border directly east of Fillmore, in Millard County. If there is no more water to be had from the Colorado, where will the Lower Basin find it?

Conservation efforts are far more advanced in the Lower Basin, especially when compared to Utah. California and Mexico are aggressively working on improved desalination methods so they can get water from the Pacific Ocean.

Land-locked Nevada, mainly the sparkling ville of Las Vegas, has its eyes fixed on an underground aquifer to the north, part of which crosses that Utah-Nevada border east of Fillmore. Meanwhile, state water managers would like to see the equally parched and growing metropolis of St. George on the wet end of a new straw running across the southern border of Utah and Arizona from Lake Powell.

Let the Games Begin

As far back as 1995, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has floated a plan to build a pipeline from the Great Basin Aquifer, a wet patch sitting between America’s two driest states (Nevada and Utah are first and second in least annual rainfall stats). The punishing drought—that is yet to abate—had them dusting off the plans by 2004.

The pipeline will run from a vast area surrounding the base of eastern Nevada’s only snowcapped peak, Mt. Wheeler, an area that includes the Snake Valley, which crosses the border into Utah.

Dueling studies of the aquifer’s drawdown have been presented in Nevada and Utah, and also in Washington, D.C., where a quid pro quo between Utah’s Sen. Bob Bennett and Nevada’s Sen. Harry Reid came into play. Reid would support the proposed pipeline from Lake Powell to Washington County; Bennett would back the pipeline from the Great Basin Aquifer to Las Vegas.

But the deal, laid out in fairly innocuous land-use bills, has culminated in a standoff. Nevada expected Utah to blink. But it didn’t. Bennett attached a clause to one of Reid’s bills in 2004, requiring Utah’s sign-off on any attempted tap of the shared aquifer.

For the ranchers and longtime residents on both sides of the border, this project raises ghosts from the Owens Valley in California, the most infamous water grab in the history of how the West was won. Once a verdant valley, thriving via agriculture at the turn of the last century, Owens Lake was redirected through backdoor politics, outright lies and theft to provide the water for Los Angeles. The Owens Valley turned into an asthma-exacerbating dust bowl, and the tale of its decline was immortalized in the film Chinatown.

“There are some people on both sides who don’t want to come to a settlement,” says Utah State Engineer Ken Jones, whose job is to administer water rights throughout the state. “But they’re not going to go away. I’m thinking if we don’t come to agreement we won’t be able to protect our needs. This is a very controversial decision; it’s going to take a 
lot of people’s involvement and buy-in.”

Last April, the Nevada state engineer’s office requested a two-year extension to present its findings and models on tapping the aquifer for public comment. The hearing on sucking water from the Great Basin aquifer has been postponed to 2011.

But while the 300-mile pipeline from Snake Valley to the fountains of the Bellagio has stalled, plans continue in earnest on a pipeline to draw water from Powell to Washington County.

Dennis Strong, Utah’s Director of Water Resources, doesn’t concern himself, at least in front of this reporter, with the question of whether St. George, and surrounding Washington County, should or shouldn’t tap this water. His mandate, from the State of Utah, is to figure out a way to make it happen. And from his view, it makes sense.

Utah has the Colorado River water. The pipeline will deliver 100,000 acre-feet of water to the people and golf courses that have opted to enjoy the mild winters and endure the brutal summers in Utah’s Dixie. Those 100,000 acre-feet are among the last big chunks of Utah’s rights on the Colorado River. The first drop of water will hit Washinton County, optimistically, by 2020.

“The governor’s office of planning and budget says more than 600,000 people will be living in the St. George area by 2050,” Strong says. “That’s the number we’re dealing with. We’ve got about 150,000 there now. We are charged with meeting the water needs for that growth.”

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