What if Pearl Harbor happened and we didn’t do anything about it?
For the Colorado River, Pearl Harbor is happening now, and Colorado, for one, is saying "Not my problem."
A 22-year-long drought has dropped water levels in reservoirs along the lifeblood of the West to record lows, prompting the federal Bureau of Land Reclamation in June to demand an emergency plan for massive usage cutbacks from the seven states along the river.
Dozens of experts interviewed for a seven-part series on the river the Gazette is publishing say that the disappearing water means 40 million people along the basin will have to fundamentally change their way of life.
Already, chronic shortages are happening all along the river and many ranchers and farmers have taken land out of production for a lack of water. Glen Canyon Dam has come perilously close to not producing electricity, rivers have been periodically closed to fishers, and in a first for the country, Las Vegas has outlawed lawns.
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In the near future, cities like Denver and Colorado Springs will receive less water from the river; electricity and grocery bills will go up because of the impact on hydroelectric generation and dried-out farmland; and there will be less fishing, boating and rafting — and that means fewer tourists.
“This is Pearl Harbor for the Colorado River system,” said James Eklund, a water lawyer who served as Colorado’s lead negotiator and signatory on the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan and as director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “It doesn’t do any good to describe the turrets as the planes bomb us.”
“The challenges we are seeing today are unlike anything we have seen in our history,” U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton said during a recent Senate hearing on Western drought.
The Bureau only gave the seven states 60 days to come up with a plan to conserve between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet of water next year. An acre-foot equals about a football field of water, 1 foot deep, and is enough for four average-sized houses to get by for one year. Four million football fields of water is bigger than Colorado’s entire allotment from the river right now.
The deadline is Aug. 15.
But Colorado already told the bureau to pound sand, planning no cuts. Instead, Colorado officials insist that other states should do all the cutting. In a letter sent to the bureau last week, the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming argue that because Lower Basin states use twice as much water and are already taking more than their fair share while Upper Basin states take less than theirs, the cuts should all be borne by California, Arizona and Nevada.
"I think that at this point, we stand ready to hear what the Lower Basin has in mind," Amy Ostdiek, a section chief with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, told our reporter Marianne Goodland.
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The problem is, if all the states can’t agree on a plan by Aug. 15, the federal government likely will step in and make arbitrary cuts themselves.
And they have powerful levers. Just this year, the bureau announced for the first time ever it would use its emergency power to hold back water from Lake Powell that normally goes to the Lower Basin states.
Threat of federal action could drain more water from Colorado reservoirs such as Blue Mesa and Navajo, which already have been ordered to send water to Lake Powell. For the second year in a row, docks at Blue Mesa have been ordered closed in case more water needs to be sent downstream. Federal orders also could affect the amount of water available for ski areas to make snow and send Colorado's rural economies into a tailspin.
Some experts think Colorado’s not-my-problem approach is shortsighted.
“Actions are not matching the rhetoric in Colorado,” Eklund said. “We don’t see that vision in the headwaters state. We’re finally at the place we’ve been warned about.”
If this becomes a faceoff between having safe drinking water in big cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas and water for farms in Colorado, agriculture will be sacrificed, he added.
Upper Basin states did open the door to some solutions beyond cuts in their letter this week, including better measuring and monitoring; demand management, which is the controversial practice of paying farmers and ranchers to take land out of production so they use less water; and developing something called a “Drought Response Operations Plan.” But these are fly swats when heavy artillery is required.
And we have yet to hear any proposals from Lower Basin states.
Eklund believes we need big, visionary plans for water management, not a pointing of fingers or a tweaking of the dials at this point.
We need a “fundamental realignment of the system.”
What are the solutions that Colorado should be collaboratively discussing with all the members of the Colorado River Compact?
The Gazette's series on the river will be exploring what those solutions are in depth in the coming weeks.
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Here’s a brief preview of what Colorado could and should be seriously negotiating with all seven states right now:
• Actively pursuing more storage options, such as injecting water into the massive underground Denver aquifer and storing it there during wet years, a solution Eklund calls “low-hanging fruit.” Withdrawals then could be made from the aquifer during dry years.
• Implementing and expanding interstate water conservation programs, which could include urban water audits in the future.
• Making farming and ranching more efficient through innovative irrigation strategies, rotational fallowing, and more crop shifting.
• Drilling or restoring wells to use more groundwater in basin states.
• Treating more wastewater and gray water for potable use.
• Helping pay for desalinization in Lower Basin states so that they use less river water and more ocean water and brackish inland water.
• Improving growth management and energy efficiency in cities and states that rely on Colorado River water.
• Opening the Colorado River Compact back up and renegotiating the amounts each state gets.
Some of these ideas, like the last three, are controversial and not very palatable to any of the states.
But neither is doing nothing, which is where we stand now.
Doing nothing means this is all likely to end up in a massive lawsuit. Or the 100-year truce engineered by the compact could fall apart completely.
Or how about a nice little water war?
It's going to be a lot harder to say "not my problem" if we start to have rolling blackouts along the Front Range if electricity that comes our way from Glen Canyon Dam stops coming. Or builders stop building houses because of a lack of water for new subdivisions.
If those kinds of things start to happen soon, I can hear voters telling our governor loud and clear this fall that, yes, in fact, it is your problem.
It's everyone's problem.
