Water
war bubbling up between California and Arizona
Once
upon a time, California and Arizona went to war over water.
The
year was 1934, and Arizona was convinced that the construction of
Parker Dam on the lower Colorado River was merely a plot to enable
California to steal its water rights. Its governor, Benjamin Moeur,
dispatched a squad of National Guardsmen up the river to secure the
eastern bank from the decks of the ferryboat Julia B. — derisively
dubbed "Arizona's navy"
by a Times war correspondent assigned to cover the skirmish. After
the federal government imposed a truce, the guardsmen returned home
as "conquering heroes."
The
next water war between California and Arizona won't be such an
amusing little affair. And it's coming soon.
Nineteenth-century
water law is meeting 20th-century infrastructure and 21st century
climate change, and it leads to a nonsensical outcome.
-
Bradley Udall, a senior fellow at the University of Colorado Law
School
The
issue still is the Colorado River. Overconsumption and climate change
have placed the river in long-term decline. It's never provided the
bounty that was expected in 1922, when the initial allocations among
the seven states of the Colorado River basin were penciled out as
part of the landmark Colorado River Compact, which enabled Hoover Dam
to be built, and the shortfall is growing.
The
signs of decline are impossible to miss. One is the wide white
bathtub ring around Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam,
showing the difference between its maximum level and today's. Lake
Mead is currently at 40% of capacity, according to the latest figures
from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam. At
1084.63 feet on Wednesday, it's a couple of feet above its lowest
water level since it began filling in 1935.
But
the rules governing appropriations from the river are unforgiving and
don't provide for much shared sacrifice among the states, or among
farmers and city dwellers.
The
developing crisis can't be caricatured as farmers versus fish, as it
is by Central Valley growers irked at environmental diversions of
water into the region's streams. It can't be addressed by building
more dams, because reservoirs can't be filled with water that doesn't
come. And it can't be
addressed by technological solutions such as desalination, which can
provide only marginal supplies of fresh water, and then only at
enormous expense.
Nor
can a few wet years alleviate the need for long-term solutions. "We
had a solid year this year, which takes a bit of the panic out,"
says Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California, which serves 19 million residents
and gets about half of its water supply from the Colorado. But
because "demand outstrips supply, we expect a long-term decline.
And possibly because the crisis has been developing slowly, we're
nowhere near a solution."
What
will be necessary is a fundamental reconsideration of 100 years of
water-appropriation practices and patterns. Farmers, whose claims on
Colorado river water are senior to all others, may have to give up,
or sell off, some of their rights. Strict legal provisions that would
turn whole swaths of the inhabited Southwest back into desert to
slake the thirst of California cities will have to be reconsidered.
"Nineteenth
century water law is meeting 20th century infrastructure and 21st
century climate change," says Bradley Udall, a senior fellow at
the University of Colorado Law School, "and it leads to a
nonsensical outcome."
If
the Western drought continues, Arizona would have to bear almost the
entire brunt of water shortages before California gives up a drop of
its appropriation from the river. Few observers of Western water
affairs believe that's politically practical, but few have offered
practical alternatives.
A
quick history lesson: The Colorado Compact, reached by six of the
seven basin states in 1922 under then-Commerce Secretary Herbert
Hoover, aimed to replace the tangle of state water allocation laws
with a single legal regime in order to get the dam built. (Arizona
finally signed the deal in 1944.) But the compact was based on a
fraud — an estimate of river flows that Hoover and the states'
negotiators almost certainly knew was wildly optimistic.
Many
times, the compact has been revised and supplemented to meet changing
conditions. In 1968, Congress authorized construction of the Central
Arizona Project, a massive aqueduct serving Phoenix and Tucson, by
passing the Colorado River Basin Project Act. Arizona agreed to be
last in line for water from the Colorado if a serious drought struck.
The
bill's drafters probably never thought supplies would become so
tight. But the bill from nearly a century of overuse is on the verge
of coming due. During the last 50 years, according to figures from
the Reclamation Bureau, the population served by the river has grown
from 12 million to 30 million. Over that period, the average flow on
the river has fallen from 15.5 million acre-feet to as low as 12
million. (An acre-foot serves two households a year.)
The
river's apparent abundance has encouraged exceptionally wasteful
usage. For example, thirsty forage crops such as alfalfa and pasture
land account for as much as half the irrigated acreage in California,
according to a
report last year by the Pacific Institute. And as my
colleague David Pierson reported recently, much of the harvest is
shipped to China.
The
Pacific Institute finds that stingier but still effective irrigation
practices could save nearly 1 million acre-feet a year throughout the
Colorado basin, and replacing alfalfa with cotton and wheat would
save 250,000 acre-feet. But plainly, a trade pattern that effectively
exports the West's scarce water to China isn't sustainable.
Other
old assumptions will also have be discarded. One crucial need is to
keep Lake Mead's water level well above 1,000 feet, the point at
which it is unable to deliver water to Las Vegas and its ability to
generate hydroelectricity is compromised. That task would be
considerably eased by draining Lake Powell, the reservoir behind Glen
Canyon Dam, upstream of the Grand Canyon.
That
proposal has been pushed by the Glen Canyon Institute, a Salt Lake
City-based environmental group, but faces hurdles in Utah, Wyoming,
Colorado and New Mexico, where residents fear that draining Lake
Powell will only allow California, Arizona and Nevada to deprive them
of their legal right to the river's flow.
The
political resistance to shutting down Lake Powell is intense, though
in time it may be trumped by the sheer scale of the water crisis.
"We've gone from seeming to be the lunatic fringe to being taken
seriously," says M. Lea Rudee, a board member of the Glen Canyon
Institute.
Another
assumption being challenged is the primacy of agriculture's claim on
water. The solution is to buy farmers out, trading cash for their
water rights to keep supplies flowing to urban areas. The MWD is
working to develop a plan to pay growers to fallow their land to
raise the water level of Lake Mead. "But we really don't know
what the response will be to a cash offer to take land out of
production," Kightlinger says.
What
is certain is that the solutions will be complicated and contentious.
The last major effort to settle legal rights on the Colorado River
involved a sheaf of interstate and interagency pacts known
collectively as the Quantification Settlement Agreement. The QSA was
reached in 2003 and then litigated for the next 11 years. Last month
a federal appeals court upheld the QSA against an environmental
challenge, but that may not be the last word — a petition for
rehearing is in the works, and a challenge in California state court
is still alive.But they these efforts still don't provide a framework
for the future. "The arrangements in place right now are
politically untenable," Udall says. But what can be done when
the solutions are, too?
Water
is a Human Right: Detroit Residents Seek U.N. Intervention as City
Shuts Off Taps to Thousands.
Posts
