'The Water Haulers': Film About Navajo Water
Just after I posted about Matt Jenkins' excellent High Country News article on the Navajo Nation's effrots to get the water due them, colleague Leslie Kryder sent me this link to a film produced by Albuquerque's PBS station KNME, The Water Haulers. Here is a direct link to the film.
The film's $30,000 cost was split equally between the Navajo Nation and the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer (NMOSE). The latter used a grant from the Healey Foundation for its share.
The film begins with the plight of 70,000 Navajos, who have no access to water infrastructure. This is a good object lesson for us all, who think that it is only people outside the USA who do not have ready access to potable water.
The film intersperses the Navajos' story with clips from old, mid-2oth century "promotional" films 
about MAWGs (Middle-Aged White Guys) and OWGs (old white guys) building dams and pipelines, and housewives enjoying the fruits of their labors. I fully expected Beaver Cleaver to appear in one of the clips, decrying the bullying tactics of Eddie Haskell, and asking big brother Wally to extract some measure of revenge, all while drawing a refreshing glass of tap water.
Hey, wasn't Ward Cleaver an accountant for MWD? Naahhh...
Okay, back to Navajo water.
The flim focuses on the San Juan River basin and the recent out-of-court agreement between the Navajo Nation and New Mexico that gives the Nation 56% of the San Juan's water and calls for a 270-mile pipleline system to provide water to 60,000 tribal citizens.
Here is a publication about the San Juan River basin's water issues by Joe Leeper, a Navajo Nation water engineer who is quoted in the film.
The San Juan River is one of the world's premier fly-fishing streams - just a few miles downstream of Navajo Dam, which releases cool bottom-water from its reservoir. It is also the second-largest tributary to the Colorado River and also provides over 1,000,000 tons of salt per year.
The fly in the ointment: money (duhhh....). The agreement needs about $800M from the Feds to make it work. It's unclear that this will be forthcoming, but New Mexico's two senators, Jeff Bingaman (D) and Pete Domenici (R) are both powerful and in favor of this settlement. I would not bet against it.
"The waterworks men have the answers to the problem. With your help they can put their plans to work to provide plenty of water for tomorrow." -- quote from one of the clips in The Water Haulers
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