Colorado River Water Crisis Going From Bad to Worse
Headlines about finding bodies in Lake Mead outside Las Vegas have been fascinating and amusing folks, but the water situation in the Western US is going from critical to desperate.
The Colorado River’s decline has drained three-quarters of the water from the nation’s largest reservoirs, and falling closer than ever to levels where hydroelectric dams can’t generate power and millions of people lose access to drinking water and irrigation supplies across seven states.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared that the Lower Colorado River Basin has reached what’s called a “Tier 2” shortage, requiring cuts in water use that will diminish what Arizona gets by 21 percent, Nevada by 8 percent and the country of Mexico by 7 percent.
“The system is approaching a tipping point, and without action we cannot protect the system,” M. Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said during a news conference Tuesday. “Protecting the system means protecting the people of the American West.”
The urgency of this moment comes as little surprise for Western water managers who divvy up the river’s dwindling supplies, but policymakers in the region remain torn on what to do. The Biden administration told these states in June that they need to find a way to reduce water use by 2 to 4 million acre-feet — up to a third of the river’s annual average flow — or the federal government will make cuts for them. The deadline for that deal passed Monday, as negotiators continue to scramble to reach a voluntary agreement.
The root of the problem is an ongoing, 23-year drought, the worst stretch for the region in more than a millennium. Snowpack in the mountains that feed the 1,450-mile river have been steadily diminishing as the climate warms. Ever-drier soils absorb runoff before it can reach reservoirs, and more frequent extreme heat hastens evaporation.
In searching for a solution, state officials say they are seeking to balance both short-term needs to save Lakes Mead and Powell from dropping to levels where water can no longer generate power or flow through its dams, and also set themselves up for a longer-term agreement where everyone will have to find ways to use less water because climate change has made the West hotter and drier.
“What we’re facing here is that continued drawdown at Powell and Mead starts to affect people’s physical ability to get water,” said Deven Upadhyay, assistant general manager and chief operating officer of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a major urban water provider that gets a quarter of its supply from the Colorado River.
“It’s not like we can argue over this forever, and then the reservoir goes dry and you don’t have access to water, and at that point you’re not negotiating anything,” he said. “That is a powerful driver that is very different about these discussions now.”
I can guarantee that none of the desert southwestern cities affected by this will voluntarily give up water. Nor will they deny building permits because of this.Report
Nor should they. As I understand it the use of water for drinking and residential purposes (but not landscaping use) is one of the most valuable uses of water both in terms of morality and in terms of what people are willing to pay via taxes or market rates. Farmers simply can’t compete with that, it’s not even close. If we stopped growing strawberries and alfalfa in the deserts the cities would have no serious difficulty obtaining water for human consumption. The thing about strawberries and other agricultural crops is they can be imported from elsewhere in a way that drinking water can’t.Report
Take a look at satellite images along I-8 in southern AZ and note how much Ag is happening, in the desert. Those aren’t cactus farms growing prickly pears, they are growing lettuce.Report
Indeed. I specifically mention alfalfa because it’s grown mainly to pack into shipping containers back to China (to be fed to animals there) and it’s a very water greedy crop.Report
Its really a testament to the modern industrialized administrative state that we are in a thousand-year drought and practically no one notices.
In ancient times, even just a century or so ago, people were much more immediately connected to the source of their food and water, and knew immediately when it was time to ration or curtail their use. In Europe, they are finding “drought stones” in the Elbe, used by ancient people to forecast famine.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/drought-rhine-hunger-stones-river-b2145964.html
But thanks to industrialization and modern water management, for most of us the drought is just an abstraction that we hear about from time to time.
Meanwhile, I turn on my tap and fresh clean water flows endlessly, so cheap it isn’t worth metering.
There isn’t a villain here or an easy suggestion because our entire modern world is premised on things like cheap energy and water, premises which are no longer true. But it is also premised on disconnecting people from the sources of our resources so everything just sort of appears by magic and when any of those things are withheld, like during the pandemic, it appears arbitrary and irrational.Report
Meanwhile, I turn on my tap and fresh clean water flows endlessly, so cheap it isn’t worth metering.
LADWP doesn’t meter water?
Granted, 50 years ago Fort Collins, CO (where I live) didn’t meter water because the amount the city diverted from the agricultural supply was insignificant. That’s no longer true and every city tap is metered. My individual townhouse isn’t, but the group of 45 townhouses has a single metered tap and the cost of water is buried in the HOA fee.Report
Only in recent decades have they slowly started to encourage and then require submetering of tenant water.
For anyone who lives in a building more than 20 years old, chances are you will never see a water bill.
My grandparents who grew up in a sod hut on the prairie were the last generation to be so intimately aware of their resources. Their children of the WWII generation, and all the ones after that, have never known a world of scarce resources and that is going to be a very hard mindset to change.
Even now, even among those who have a sincere commitment to environmental causes, it is seen as sort of charity, an altruism we do for other people instead of self-preservation.Report
Bicycled across Fort Collins, CO this morning, and back. The river’s up; the creeks that feed the river are up; all the ponds and little reservoirs are full to the brim; everything that should be burned brown by this season is green and lush. The monsoon has been strong this year. According to the local paper, the NWS has declared 37 flash flood warnings in our county so far. Last week on the Drought Monitor map the main monsoon track was pretty clear. The drought’s not broken there, but significantly less severe than areas east or west of the track. Forecasts say AZ and the Four Corners region get hit again Thursday through Sunday, then my neck of the woods Sunday through Tuesday.
In its supply report this week, Denver Water’s reservoir system is 90% full, compared to the historical median of 94% for this point in the water year.Report
It’s not just in the western US, but across the world we need to rethink how we do Ag as water supplies dwindle. I don’t think anyone has the stomach for the kind of infrastructure costs that are necessary to reduce losses to the current system, and desal will keep being too expensive for a long time, without some kind of tech breakthrough.
Indoor farming with tight environmental controls is (IMHO) affordable and do-able with current tech.Report
Until inside vertical farming gets to where it produces two (or sometimes three) large scale vegetable crops per year, I don’t worry about the lettuce farms in the desert. 160,000 acres of desert cotton does. As does the diversions in my upper basin state to grow corn to feed the ethanol factories.Report
Ethanol subsidies continue to be in my top four of absolutely terrible policy ideas.Report