WaterWired

Jeffrey Sachs Solves the Water Crisis

Well, maybe not. But the current issue (28 April 2008) of Newsweek features "Rivers Running Dry" and economist Jeffrey D. Sachs' latest book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. In the piece, Sachs, who is head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, offers some comments on the water crisis and some solutions.

I've not read his book yet. Yes, I will post a review when I finish it.

Wonder what William Easterly would think of it? For those of you who don't know, Sachs and Easterly go back and forth about the best way to "do development". Just Google "Easterly vs. Sachs". I will post on their kerfluffle shortly.

If the article is any indication of what Sachs thinks about water and the solutions we need, then it's nothing new for us Water Wonks. Yeah, things are bad and will probably get worse. But perhaps Sachs' book will convince others - politicians, "regular people", et al. - that action is needed. If it does that, then he's done us all a service.

One thing that the USA needs is a national water policy - not a plan, but a policy.  The American Water Resources Association (AWRA) has been calling for such a policy in its Water Dialogues. [Disclosure notice: I sit on the Board of the AWRA.]The USA muddles along, going from crisis to crisis.

Here is the first paragraph from Jeneen Interlandi's Newsweek article:

Remember last fall when the city of Atlanta was said to be just weeks away from running dry? It's getting warm in the Southeast again, and Lake Lanier, which supplies water to parts of three states (Georgia, Alabama and Florida) is still down 13 feet from where it should be this time of year. Part of the fault lies with the Army Corps of Engineers, which regulates the outflow from the lake down the Chattahoochee River and sent billions of gallons into the Atlantic to protect the endangered sturgeon population, based on a plan that had not been updated since 1989. It also lost an additional 22 billion gallons, owing to a broken gauge. But the bigger problem is the lack of a coherent policy for collecting, conserving and using fresh water there, or in much of the rest of the United States, or, for that matter, the world.

Here is a recent photo of Lake Lanier, courtesy of Don Mahin.

Here's an interesting snippet from the Newsweek article:

Economists and geologists have identified one culprit in the water-management problem, a mind-set they call "stationarity"—the belief that natural systems fluctuate within a narrow, predictable range, even over long periods. "Stationarity is dead," says Chris Milly, author of a recent Science paper on the issue—done in by population growth, climate change and economic development. But the effect of the stationarity fallacy has been to leave water policy in the hands of relatively shortsighted municipal and state authorities, while the federal government has been looking the other way. [emboldening mine]

That last sentence is pretty brutal. What is meant by "shortsighted"? The few municipal water managers I know in the West are not what I call "shortsighted". In fact, a number of Western municipal water utilities - Seattle and Portland come to mind - have joined to cope with climate change and its effect on water availability. I don't always agree with Pat Mulroy, but I would not accuse her of being shortsighted. Some states are incorporating climate change into their planning efforts. 

Here is a related article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Rep. John Linder (R-GA), one of the founders of the House Water Caucus.  He's trying to establish a National Water Commission.

One group we need to get on board is the business community. Not just the Warren Buffets and his ilk, but others as well - local/regional business leaders. If I tell some politician we need a national water policy, nothing will get done. If Buffet, Bill Gates, or Paul Otellini (Intel CEO) says that, you know the politicos will listen; the state and local politicians will respond to state/local business leaders as well as the national/international ones.

That's where we Water Wonks have failed, by not engaging the business community. Money talks - we all know that.

And business people know that they need water to make money. Sin agua, no hay dinero.

You go, Jeff!

"With great power comes great responsibility." -- Spiderman

Long Beach Water Gets Serious About Conservation

This is the current photo of the week from Brown and Caldwell's California Water News. It's a photo of a billboard that is a component of Long Beach Water's summer-long conservation campaign.

I am still partial to the ads for Denver Water's conservation campaign.

"An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship." -- Spanish proverb

NARA Project: Damning James Bay?

Yes, that's how I wanted to spell "damning".

Several weeks ago I posted an item on NARA - North American Recycling Alliance - a grand scheme that would harness the fresh water discharging into James Bay and ship 2,653 cms (cubic meters per second) to the Great Lakes via a tunnel for distribution to Canada and the USA.

The graphics I posted were those of Canadian Romain Audet, so if they flummox you don't ask me to explain them.

Audet makes the point that in addition to gaining revenue and hydroelectric power from the NARA Project, the Canadians could also extract support from the USA to its claim of Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic. This is becoming critical, what with global warming and the anticipated opening of a Northwest Passage shipping route and exploration for hydrocarbon and other resources.  That is an interesting trade both countries might be quite willing to make.

Gracious! WWMBS  - What would Maude Barlow say?

The key element of the NARA Project is the damming (red line) of the southern part of James Bay:

   

Here is a diagram of the dam:

The contour lines are bathymetric contours showing depths in meters. The total length of the dam is 231 km (144 miles). The amount of fill required for the dam is 845 million cubic meters. By contrast, the volume of concrete in Glen Canyon Dam is about 3.7 million cubic meters and that contained in Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest, is 39.3 million cubic meters. So we are talking about a big structure!

Here is the cross section of the tunnel from James Bay to Lake Superior:

 

And here is the 6m-diameter boring machine that will tunnel from James Bay to Lake Superior:

Audet makes an interesting statement:

The average daily inflow of 11,000 cubic meters per second of fresh water from 11 large rivers is lost [underlining his] to the ocean through James Bay.

He also says:

We capture water currently wasted as it washes into the Arctic Sea.

I provide these two quotes because of Audet's use of the words "lost" and "wasted". These words illustrate a viewpoint that was common not so long ago: that we viewed water solely from a "human use" vantage point. I f we are not "using" the water, then it's wasted. That is especially true for fresh water flowing into the ocean - it's wasted because we are not "harvesting" it to irrigate, drink, etc.

I remember listening to my hydrology professors at the University of Arizona in the 1970s talking about taking Columbia River water and piping it to the Southwest USA. This wuld not cause any problems in the Pacific Northwest because the fresh water was "wasted" flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

I thought such an atavistic view had disappeared. Apparently I was mistaken.

Stay tuned...

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the the same as to be right in doing it." -- G.K. Chesterton

TV Special on Las Vegas Water

Happy World Water Day!

For those of you in Las Vegas on 22-23 March 2008, you might tune to Channel 8, the CBS affiliate, for its special "Crossfire: Water, Power, and Politics". It will be broadcast at 9-10 PM, and also on 23 March on Channel 19 at 2:30 AM, 1:30 PM, and 10 PM.

Very apropos to World Water Day.

I'd like to see it, but I question how much can be done in just an hour. Here is a description of the show (story on Channel 8's WWW site; you can also view the show here in 7 segments):

On Saturday, there will be an Eyewitness News I-Team special titled "Crossfire: Water, Power, and Politics." This is an in-depth examination of how Las Vegas growth is going to affect vast areas of the American Southwest. Rural Nevada is facing two dramatic challenges, both of which are directly related to our community's relentless growth.

One proposal would siphon billions of gallons of water from environmentally-sensitive but politically weak rural counties. At the same time, plans are moving forward to build three, massive coal-fired power plants in the same areas. Most rural residents believe their land, their air and their way of life are threatened by both.

Las Vegas leaders say the economy of the entire state could collapse if the plans are thwarted. No matter which side is right, our state will never be the same. Every resident, every business, whether urban or rural, has a direct stake in the outcome.

The issues involved are the most important of our time; global warming, conservation, growth, sustainability, economic justice versus economic realities, how to plan for the future. The decisions made in the next few years will affect the lives of millions of people for the next century and beyond, so it's important to get it right.

The I-Team has been working on the story for more than five years. The program will include interviews with all sides -- elected officials in Las Vegas and the rural residents, environmentalists, scientists, ranchers, business owners, energy executives, water experts, Native Americans, proponents, opponents, and our political analyst Jon Ralston, who will help sort it all out.

An "in-depth examination" in just sixty minutes? I don't think so.

The WWW site has a number of useful links.

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

Canada's NARA Project Will Solve USA Water Problems

In January 2008 I posted an item about NAWAPA - the North American Water And Power Alliance, a grandiose scheme to bring Canadian water to the USA and generate some power as well. The idea was hatched in the 1950s and finally petered out in the 1970s.

Imagine, in the not-too-distant future, lush Kentucky bluegrass lawns in Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Denver, and Las Vegas - all with no guilt feelings. Fountains and verdant gardens gracing the Las Vegas Strip. Pat Mulroy of the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) halving water rates with a broad grin on her face. Georgia cheerfully donating Lake Lanier water to Alabama and Florida, and building a pipeline to supply Tennessee with all the H2O it needs.

You'd say, "What have you been smoking?" Or worse.

Well, looks like something similar to NAWAPA is in the works, again exporting water from the Great White North. So how does it work? Dam the southern half of James Bay (the southern extension of Hudson Bay), run the water through helical turbines, then dump it in the Great Lakes for distribution to the USA and Canada's prairie provinces. The scheme will provide Canada with hydroelectricity and almost $8B in revenue.

Sounds like a lot of money, but as you'll see, it is not.

Colleague Paul Godfrey of the University of Massachusetts sent me some slides prepared by Canadian Romain Audet that describe how all this will work. It's pretty awesome, eh? The McKenzie Brothers (both hosers!) would be proud.

Will it fly? Do cats fetch? All you need is lots of money and likely suspension of a large number of environmental and other regulations. But the scheme to dam James Bay has been around for quite some time.

Audet proposes capturing 2, 653 cms of the 11,000 cms (cubic meters per second) that runs off into James Bay by diking the southern part of the Bay and creating a huge freshwater lake. That 2,653 cms  is about 68 MAF (million acre-feet) per year.

   

The water would be conveyed to Lake Superior by a tunnel.

 

Some of that water would go west to Canada's prairie provinces  via a 1000 km canal that Audet pegs at a cost of $780M (seems kind of low to me). The canal will take almost 50% of the James Bay water - 1,263 cms (32 MAF/year) - to the prairies; some of this water - 600 cms or 15.4 MAF/y - will head south to the western USA.

Finally, we have the North American Recycling Alliance (NARA), which distributes the captured James Bay runoff to the eastern and western USA. Audet says NARA is a word derived from the Sanskrit word for "water".

 

Hmmm...Looks like Atlanta and Charlotte have their own diversions!

Here is a summary of the NARA diversions, in cms and MAF/year. Recall that the initial diversion from James Bay is 2,653 cms or 68 MAF/y, which is allocated as follows:

• Canadian Prairie Transfer Canal - 663 cms or 17 MAF/y
• Great Plains Canal (from Lake Michigan), as far south as Mexico  - 500  cms or 12.8 MAF/y
• From Lake Superior to the Western USA - 600 cms or 15.4 MAF/y
• From Lakes Erie/Ontario to as far as the Southeast USA - 137 cms or 3.5 MAF/y
• Great Plains Canal (from Lake Michigan) to the Midwest USA - 410 cms or 10.5 MAF/year
• Lake Michigan to south of Chicago - 30  cms or 0.8 MAF/y
• Total  -  2,340 cms or 60 MAF/y
• Addition of water to Great Lakes - 313 cms or 8 MAF/y
• The numbers in the last two bullets sum to 2,653 cms (68 MAF/y), the amount diverted from James Bay

The amount of water added to the Great Lakes annually - which hold a total of about 23,000 cubic kilometers or 18.7 BAF of water - is about 0.04% of the total. Since the total surface area of the lakes is about 60.2 million acres, the annual water level increase would be about 1.6 inches. 

My numbers are a bit off from what Audet presented - the total amount is the same - but the allocations may be different. But you get the picture - we are talking about moving a lot of water. The amount diverted to the western USA is slightly more than the mean annual flow of the Colorado River.

One thing  to remember is that Canada is to get about $8B/year from the US for water - a lot of water,  43 MAF per year according to the above table That is cheap!  About $186 per acre-foot!
The price of water varies across the country, but $186 per acre feet is unreal (sounds like cheap, government-subsidized ag water). I know of some places in the western USA where water rights have gone for more than $40,000 per acre-foot.

Even Bob and Doug McKenzie recognize a rip-off when they see one! No amount of Molson's would get them to agree to that deal!

I'll talk more about this later. Think about it for a while.

"Human beings were invented by water to transport it uphill." -- Unknown

Paleohydrology: A Way Around Stationarity?

Late last month I posted about the concept of stationarity in hydrology and the fact that climate change is rendering this assumption quaint.

In response to that post, colleague Jane Rowan, President of the American Water Resources Association (AWRA), sent me a link to this 1991 USGS publication, Paleohydrology and its Value in Analyzing Floods and Droughts by Robert D. Jarrett. It is worth reading.

Here is what Jarrett said about the importance of paleohydrologic data:

Until recently, most planning related to water resources rarely has been able to consider long-term hydrologic variability or climatic change; thus, water- resources investigations and planning sometimes are hampered by inadequate and (or) erroneous hydrologic data (Jarrett, 1988). Short records that include large floods or extreme droughts also might cause significant uncertainty in the results of frequency analysis. Because of the small sample of large floods and extreme droughts in the short systematic streamflow record, conventional hydrologic analysis might not always provide the most accurate representation of the frequency of floods and droughts or long-term hydrologic variability. The use of paleohydrologic techniques provides one means of evaluating the hydrologic effects of long-term hydrologic variability and climatic change because it complements existing short- term systematic and historical records, provides information at ungaged locations, and helps decrease the uncertainty in hydrologic estimation. These improved estimates subsequently improve water-resources planning. One distinct advantage of using paleohydrologic data is that these data can be obtained without direct monitoring. Paleohydrologic information can be used in two directions (Baker, 1983)—first, modern hydro- logic data are used to create models of past hydrologic conditions, and second, paleohydrologic data can be used to calibrate and to evaluate modern hydrologic models, which in turn can be used to predict future climatic and hydrologic conditions.

Climatic change involves changes in the solar-energy regime of a given region that affect the hydrologic cycle. The adjustments of the hydrologic cycle to long-term variability and climatic change also are recorded in surficial sediment deposits and landforms. Variations in lake and ocean levels provide an indication of climatic variability, and ocean-bottom sediments have been analyzed to reconstruct temperatures for as much as about 100,000 years ago (Knighton, 1984). Examples of broad averages of long-term temperature variability and sea-level changes based on several types of paleohydrologic evidence are shown in figure 2. Data in these graphs reflect substantial variations in climate and indicate that the present state of the hydrologic cycle is transient, when considered in the context of millennia. Because climate affects water-resources availability, long-term data are needed to assess the effects of climatic change on water resources. Consequently, there is a need to better determine past streamflow to assess current values.

Recent advances have been made in dating techniques, in paleodischarge estimation, and in the determination of the recurrence interval of floods (Baker, 1987; Baker and others, 1988). Many techniques are available in the scientific disciplines of sedimentology, geomorphology, hydraulics, and botany to extend hydrologic records, and the paleohydrologic techniques expand on those techniques to analyze floods, droughts, and hydrologic variability.

Here is what Jarrett concluded:

Systematic hydrologic records, generally much less than 100 years long, rarely include infrequent and extraordinarily large floods and droughts, nor do these records reflect long-term hydrologic variability. Paleohydrology complements existing data, extends our hydrologic knowledge, and allows the reconstruction of long-term hydrologic records. The results of incorporating paleohydrologic data into conventional or new techniques are encouraging. The techniques and examples summarized here indicate how the use of paleohydrologic information and techniques can decrease the uncertainty in water-resources planning. They also indicate the value of paleohydrology in the evaluation of floods, droughts, and climatic and hydrologic variability. Paleohydrologic information also provides a means to assess the effects of potential climatic change on hydrology.

Although many paleohydrologic techniques are available, research can improve the understanding of physical processes of floods and droughts, paleohydrologic techniques, the understanding of climatic and hydrologic variability, and statistical procedures to better use historical and paleohydrologic data. The results of this research may reduce the uncertainty of hydrologic modeling, which in turn will decrease the uncertainty of water-supply estimates and flood estimates in water-resources planning.

Perhaps paleohydrology is a way around nonstationarity.

"Welcome to Jackson Hole, where men remain boys and women work three jobs." -- Ski Country's suggested slogan for Jackson Hole, WY, as reported in the 18 February 2008 High Country News

Trifecta: Las Vegas Water Hearings End, Gov Opposes 'Water Grab', MX Missile Wells

After two weeks, on 15 February 2008 the hearings ended on the Southern Nevada Water Authority's (SNWA) plan to pump more ground water from beneath rural Nevada. I've got more details in my 4 February 2008 post.

I'm behind on this because I was writing a proposal to NOAA, and then headed to Reno for a Great Basin Environmental Program Workshop, where I floated my idea to do a "thinking about the unthinkable" study about what would happen if the Southwest went dry.

You can imagine the reaction. Huh?

One thing I've noticed: people who oppose the SNWA's "water grab" usually report the pumpage figures in millions or billons of gallons per day or year, which results in huge numbers. Supporters of the SNWA  "water plan" typically report withdrawals in acre-feet per year, which produces much smaller numbers.  Doesn't 13 billion gallons per year sound like a lot more (and a lot worse!) than 40,000 acre-feet per year? They're both about the same amount. Go figure.

It's like calling the Yucca Mountain site a "nuclear waste disposal site" or  a "nuclear waste dump".

Okay, back to the SNWA water plan hearings.

Here is what the Lahontan Valley News said:

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — State hearings into a plan to pump billions of gallons of rural Nevada water to Las Vegas ended Friday with proponents saying they’re entitled to the water and opponents warning that the pumping could have a catastrophic impact.

State Engineer Tracy Taylor will review the testimony and voluminous paperwork submitted during two weeks of hearings and issue a ruling at a later date on the Southern Nevada Water Authority pumping plan. A final decision isn’t likely for several months.

Paul Taggart, attorney for SNWA which wants to draw more than 11.3 billion gallons of groundwater a year from Delamar, Dry Lake and Cave valleys, argued that the water authority met all requirements for the pumping and critics’ disaster scenarios are unfounded.

Simeon Herskovits, attorney for the Great Basin Water Network which opposes the plan, countered that SNWA tried to hide evidence that the pumping may harm existing water users and the environment in rural Nevada because there’s not enough water in the valleys for long-term
exportation.

The article concluded:

The project is backed by casino executives, developers, union representatives and others who point to water conservation efforts in the Las Vegas area and who warn of an economic downturn affecting the entire state unless the city has enough water to keep growing.

The valleys are all in central Lincoln County, which initially opposed the plan but reached an agreement with the water authority on which groundwater basins can developed. The agreement also allows for use of SNWA’s pipeline, for a price, by the county.

The agency hopes to begin delivering rural groundwater to Las Vegas by 2015. Its eventual goal is to import enough water to serve more than 230,000 homes, in addition to about 400,000 households already getting its water. Cost of its 200-mile-long pipeline project has been estimated at anywhere from $2 billion to $3.5 billion.

It is interesting to note that Lincoln County is on board. But not Gov. Jim Gibbons, trained as a geologist. Check out this story by Phoebe Sweet from the 21 February 2008 edition of the Las Vegas Sun:

Gov. Jim Gibbons is again saying he opposes Southern Nevada’s plan to get water from rural Nevada.

On Tuesday [19 February 2008], Gibbons told the Fallon Rotary Club that the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which has proposed a multibillion-dollar pipeline to eastern Nevada to supply Las Vegas with a backup source of drinking water, should instead build a desalination plant in California and trade that plant’s water for some of California’s allocation of the Colorado River, according to the Lahontan Valley News.

During his nearly 45-minute speech Tuesday, which focused mostly on the state budget crisis, Gibbons pitched the desalination proposal as “a better plan than what Clark County has,” according to reporter Christy Lattin.

On Wednesday Melissa Subbotin, a spokeswoman for the governor, confirmed that Gibbons “wants to bring water to Southern Nevada without taking it straight from Northern Nevada.”

Subbotin said the governor has made no formal proposal of an alternative to the pipeline, but thinks Southern Nevada could meet its water needs “utilizing water from the Colorado River and a desalination plant.”

Okay. The article concluded:

Last February, during a closed-door meeting with environmentalists, Gibbons questioned the need for the pipeline. Scot Rutledge, executive director of the Nevada Conservation League, told the Sun Gibbons prefaced his statement with: “The Southern Nevada Water Authority is not going to like what I’m about to say.”

A week later, an aide for the governor said Gibbons’ comments were only theoretical and had been misinterpreted. Steve Robinson, who was deputy chief of staff and natural resources adviser to the governor at the time, said: “He knows the reality is that the pipeline is the way Southern Nevada is going to have to go to get water.”

And speaking of desal, check out this piece in the 17 February 2008 Nevada Appeal (Carson City) by general contractor Fred Kessler. He wants to run pipelines to northern and southern Nevada from Pacific Coast desal plants.

Later this year, once we elect the next occupant of the White House, we may finally make some progress upon the primary national security issue facing the United States —global climate change — which the Bush administration has been neglecting.

Here in Nevada, the effects of global climate change to date have been both noticeable and costly, but not yet catastrophic. These effects will, however, increase over time and grow in severity. What is obvious, is that precipitation will diminish, and evaporation will increase. The current condition of Lake Mead and Walker Lake are ominous predictors of what Nevada can expect its future water supply to look like.

In populated areas the groundwater supply is rapidly diminishing, as evidenced by dropping water tables, which is good for the well-drilling industry, but bad for municipal water districts, home owners, farmers, ranchers, etc. We all know that there is no more precious commodity than potable water for the people of Nevada. Not gold, not silver, not tourism. If we are to survive as a population, we all must have sustainable reliable potable water supplies, or be blown away by the winds of global climate change.

Given the impending effects of global climate change, the time has come to plan for Nevada’s future water needs, which will be substantial given the past three decade’s population growth. In Roman times when emperors did not have to run for re-election it was much easier to finance, design and construct large-scale public works projects than it is today, when politicians are more concerned with short-term political gain than long-term societal goals affecting future generations.

What is needed is an independent public water authority with a nine-member board to take charge of the situation. The governor, Assembly and Senate should each appoint a single member, and three members should be elected at-large from Southern Nevada and three members from Northern Nevada. This will ensure both equal representation and accountability to all of the people of Nevada. Once constituted, the independent public water authority should be relatively immune from political interference and be able to focus upon long-term intergenerational solutions to Nevada’s future water needs.

The water authority will have to begin the process of raising capital from (1) federal funds, (2) state funds and (3) private capital markets through the sale of public bonds for design, acquisition of land and right-of-way, and construction of public water works projects. The water authority should be a wholesaler of potable water selling to local municipal and private water districts, charging and collecting user fees for the water that they provide. These fees will be the revenue source from which to pay bond holders. The water authority bonds will range from 30 to 50 years in term depending upon financing requirements. User fees also will pay for ongoing operations, maintenance and administrative costs.

The water authority will need to develop vast uninterruptible supplies of drinking water to feed the growing Nevada population. The closest supply to both Northern and Southern Nevada of raw material from which to process potable water is of course the Pacific Ocean. Desalinization plants on the Pacific coast, cross-country pipelines and pumping stations across California and Nevada can produce a steady supply of potable water that is limited only by the maximum flow rate of the system. A northern leg running from the Pacific along the I-80 corridor to service the northwestern Nevada counties, and a southern leg running from the Pacific coast across California to service Clark County will provide potable water to Nevada’s main population centers.

These north and south water authority systems must have at least a 200-year design life with provisions for future technological upgrades as they become available. Luckily, the technology for sea water desalinization has improved dramatically over the past three decades and has now reached a level of efficiency that makes it cost effective to use. There are a number of new desalinization plants around the globe producing potable water.

Moving large quantities of processed water up and over mountain ranges will require substantial quantities of electricity to power the pumps. However, there are recently developed magnetic levitation motors that use substantially less power to perform the same amount of work. As an example of technological innovation these “Mag-Lev” motors use magnetic fields to suspend motor shafts in space creating “frictionless” bearings thereby reducing energy usage. Additionally, the incorporation of wind and solar power generating equipment into the overall design should help mitigate power costs. On down hill slopes, hydroelectric turbines could be used to produce electric power as well.

Hopefully, sufficient quantities of potable water can be delivered to municipal water districts to allow them to stop pumping from local aquifers. This will allow the aquifers to recharge themselves over time from either natural means and/or the collection of storm water that can be injected down recharging wells.

The cost of these water authority desalination plants and pipeline systems will be many billions. It will take more than one decade to raise the capital, acquire plant sites and right-of-way, design the systems and construct them. This will truly be an intergenerational effort on a grand scale and, given that Nevada currently has two U.S. Senators sitting on the Senate Appropriations Committee, now is the time to get the ball rolling while we still have their clout in Washington.

The Romans were smart enough to figure out how to effectively solve the water supply issues of their day. Hopefully, Nevadans will rise to the occasion as well.

The man's a big thinker.

And remember the old MX missile plan from the 1970s? The USA was going to put land-based ICBMs on "racetracks" in desert valleys so that the Soviets would have a hard time targeting them. Well, MX is back, but in not quite the same way. This story from the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports on SNWA's use of data from 40 MX wells drilled in rural Nevada. What goes around, comes around.

Do you realize that Pat Mulroy has not been mentioned once in this post?

"There have always been people who have wanted to put things here that other people won't put up with in other places." -- Louis Benezet, rural Nevada resident

Georgia-Tennessee Border War for Water Access

The 20 February 2008 NBC Nightly News had a feature on the Georgia-Tennessee "border war" for access to the Tennessee River. Here is the video clip (you will have to watch a 30-second commerical).

Colleague Aaron Wolf sent me this story from the 17 February 2008 issue of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The accompanying picture is from the story.

The article reports that some Tennesseans are sympathetic to Georgia's argument and its drought-stricken plight. Here's one:

"It's not necessarily our water," said Kate McBryar. "I don't see why Georgia can't use our water if they are having a drought. Why not help our countrymen?"

I suspect most of her fellow Tennesseans might not be so generous towards Georgia, and Atlanta, the "Las Vegas" of Southeastern water.

"I was pretty much just having fun. I didn't expect anything to come from it." surveyor Bart Crattie, commenting on the 1818 surveying error he pointed out.

Watermeisters Dispute Scripps Colorado River Study: Are Their Heads in the Sand or the Clouds?

Here's my special Happy Valentine's Day - Good News post. Smile, things could be worse.

The Scripps report that was the subject of one of yesterday's posts is already generating blowback from water officials. Should we be surprised?

The story in the New York Times on the Scripps report also included some comments from various water officials. Below is Gig Conaughton's story from the 13 February 2008 North County Times (San Diego and Riverside Counties). Brown and Caldwell's California Water News alerted me to this article.

Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the massive Colorado River reservoirs that help keep Southern California wet, could run dry by 2021, according to a report released Tuesday by two Scripps Institute of Oceanography researchers.

Their dire predictions were immediately challenged by federal and local water officials.

Researchers Tim Barnett and David Pierce said there was a 50-50 chance that the reservoirs will be dry by 2021 --- but that they were not predicting that would actually happen.

Instead, Barnett said, the report predicted only that the chance the lakes will run dry by 2021 could be reduced to a coin flip -- one chance in two -- because people were using too much of the Colorado River's water and global warming was eating away the southwest United State's "normal" precipitation.

Officials from the federal Bureau of Reclamation that manages the Colorado River and its reservoirs immediately challenged the report.

The agency's regional director, Terrence Fulp [Note: Fulp is area manager of the Bureau of Reclamation's Boulder Canyon Operations Office], said the agency's own studies predicted that Mead and Powell would be a little less than half full in 2021 -- levels that would provide enough water to supply California, Nevada and Arizona for two years even if the river stopped flowing.

Meanwhile, water officials in Los Angeles and San Diego County said the public should not panic over the Scripps report. They said agencies were already working to cut water use.

They also said the Colorado River was poised to end its current eight-year drought.

"Right now we're sitting on the best snowpack in 11 years -- 128 percent of normal," said Roger Patterson, assistant manager of the Metropolitan Water District, Southern California's main water supplier and the agency that built the Colorado River aqueduct.

However, Barnett, a geophysicist, said the Scripps study looked past today's conditions and into the long-term reliability of the Colorado River, which has been the key water supply of the populations and economies of Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.

Barnett said federal statistics show that California and other states are currently taking 1 million acre-feet of water a year more out of the Colorado River than the river's flows provide.

That, he said, eats into Mead and Powell's storage. An acre-foot is enough water to sustain two households for a single year. Barnett said there was 13 million acre-feet of water in Powell and Mead as of July 2007, and that if people continued to overuse the river by 1 million acre feet a year, the reservoirs would be empty in 13 years -- 2021.

Barnett said that if Mead and Powell ran dry, it would cut hydroelectric production important to the entire West, and make the Colorado River's supplies "highly unstable" because they would be based on year-to-year flows, not stored supplies. Barnett said the Scripps report relied on a Princeton study, which relied in turn on more than a dozen climate studies that showed global warming would decrease rain and snowfall runoff in the Southwest by 10 percent to 30 percent in the next half-century. He said that even if people cut their water use, global warming-caused reductions of runoff would eventually make the river an unstable supply.

"You have to wonder if the civilization we've built in the desert Southwest is sustainable in the future," Barnett said.

Patterson, however, said the Scripps study was based on the idea of a continual decline and did not consider that the Colorado River's flows would rebound, despite global warming.

He said the current snowpack could mean that there would be 3.5 million more acre-feet in the river -- even after California and other states take their allocations in 2008 -- more than reversing the 1 million acre-foot a year deficit in the Scripps study.

"If we have back-to-back years like that, we're back in a surplus condition," Patterson said, meaning that Powell and Mead would be largely restocked.

Patterson and Ken Weinberg, the water resources manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, said that water agencies were taking steps to cut water use.

"No one is planning to continue to use the river the same way they have been historically," Weinberg said.

He said an illustration of that effort came in December, when California, Arizona and Nevada agreed to a drought allocation plan that would call for states to voluntarily take less water from the river if levels in Mead and Powell got too low. The plan was the first such emergency-rationing strategy in the river's history.

"We didn't expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there'd be more time." -- Tim P. Barnett

Lakes Mead and Powell, 2021: Anyone Need Cat Sand?

This must be double-whammy day: two uplifting posts.

The folks from Scripps are at it again. Tim Barnett and David Pierce report that there is a 50% chance that both Lakes Mead and Powell, the huge reservoirs on the Colorado River, could go dry by 2021.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the story, and here is the Scripps press release (the source of the accompanying picture and map).

From the press release:

There is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead, a key source of water for millions of people in the southwestern United States, will be dry by 2021 if climate changes as expected and future water usage is not curtailed, according to a pair of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

Without Lake Mead and neighboring Lake Powell, the Colorado River system has no buffer to sustain the population of the Southwest through an unusually dry year, or worse, a sustained drought. In such an event, water deliveries would become highly unstable and variable, said research marine physicist Tim Barnett and climate scientist David Pierce.

Lake Mead supplies Las Vegas, and Lake Powell holds water so the Upper Basin states (UT, WY, CO, NM) can meet their Colorado River Compact obligations to the Lower Basin States (NV, CA, AZ), plus the amount obligated to Mexico under international treaty. Lakes Mead and Powell hold a combined 50 million acre-feet (give or take) at full pool, a condition not seen by either one in some years.  As USA human-made lakes/reservoirs, they rank one and two, respectively, in terms of the maximum volume of water stored.

From the CSM article:

"We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it is coming at us," notes Tim Barnett, a research physicist at Scripps who led the effort. By "dry," the team means that water levels fall so low behind the Hoover and Glenn Canyon Dams that the water fails to reach the gravity-fed intakes that guide it through turbines or out through spillways. In addition, the report estimates that the lakes stand a 50 percent chance of falling to the lowest levels required to generate electricity by 2017.

Last week, Dr. Barnett published additional work in the journal Science attributing 60 percent of the reduction in snowpack, rising temperatures, and reduced river flows over the past 50 years to global warming. [ See my 4 January 2008 post]

The article continues:

The latest work "not only shows that climate change is a real problem. It also shows it has direct implications for humans – and not just in the third world," says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, Calif. The institute focuses on links between sustainable development and global security issues. "Even without climate change, we're taking too much water from the Colorado. So it's no surprise that if we continue to take too much, the reservoirs will go dry."

The message is not lost on water planners, adds Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson. After years when discussions of climate change and water sat on the back burner, regional water managers are "beginning to get on the same page" regarding adaptation to global warming, she says. "At least they're asking the questions that need to be asked."

Barnett and Pierce's work has been accepted for publication in the journal Water Resources Research, published by the American Geophysical Union, arguably the world' premier journal in the field. At the end of the Scripps press release, there are instructions for downloading a pre-publication copy of the paper, "When will Lake Mead go dry?". You can also download a copy by clicking here.

I'll repeat my request: is anyone planning for the potential chaos that could result when the Southwest "goes dry"? I contacted the National Science Foundation (NSF) a couple of weeks ago about its interest in accepting a proposal to fund such a study. No reply yet.

Happy trails! Unload those cat-sand futures.

"If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague." -- Jerry Seinfeld

Current Water Policies: Are We SOL?

Justice Talking, the excellent show produced by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, recently presented a show on "Are Current Water Policies Leaving Us High and Dry?".

I know, you're thinking, oh gees, another "talking head" show about the water crisis. Yeah, it is, but you hear some different perspectives and host Margot Adler does a very good job. Here's what the WWW site's blurb says:

An unprecedented drought throughout the nation's Southeast has forced some of the region's largest cities to declare water emergencies. Western states have been dealing with similar water shortages for a much longer time. But what can policy-makers do when increasing populations, development and global warming place undue strains on an area's water supply, especially when current law is antiquated, complicated and varies from state to state? Tune in to this week's Justice Talking for a look at whether current water policies ought to be flushed down the drain.

Guests include National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Director ROGER PULWARTY; Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) General Manager PAT MULROY; Pacific Institute President PETER GLEICK; California Farm Bureau Federation (CFBF) attorney CHRIS SCHEURING; Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) Executive Director KIERÁN SUCKLING; and MARTIN CHÁVEZ, mayor of Albuquerque (ABQ), New Mexico.

Hey, my old buddy Mayor Marty is there, talking about infrastructure woes! Plus you'll hear some of the SOPs - Same Old Persons - Peter Gleick (Same Old Peter) and Pat Mulroy (Same Old Pat). Actually the piece with Gleick and Mulroy is very well done. They are interviewed together (she's on the phone) and it's a nice repartee (some might say, 'he said, she said') without devolving into acrimony.

The 50-minute show talks about the Atlanta-ACF water crisis, water and climate change, the Southwest (especially Las Vegas), water and development, ESA issues, agriculture, infrastructure needs, and closes with an essay on bottled water.

Pulwarty gives a nice discussion on water and drought, and correctly points out that the Southeastern drought has not been conclusively linked to global warming, whereas the Southwest drought has. Adler and Pulwarty briefly address the issue of migration from the Southwest to the Great Lakes region. Pulwarty states that the Great Lakes hold 20% of the world's fresh water and 95% of the US's. Oh, no, Roger!

It's worth your while to listen to this show, and you can even download an MP3 version.

Enjoy, or not! Canadians: no gloating!

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them." -- Isaac Asimov

Solution to Georgia's Water Woes: Annex Part of Tennessee

You've know doubt read by now that Georgia has lost its dispute with Alabama and Florida about water withdrawals from Lake Sidney Lanier (see these New York Times and Environment News Service articles). A federal appellate-court panel ruled that the state can not withdraw as much water as it wanted to from the reservoir. So Atlanta must look elsewhere for more drinking water, or better conserve what they have.

The picture of Buford Dam on Lake Sidney Lanier is from the Environment News Service article, courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

It is unclear whether Georgia will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Looks like the "lovey-dovey" relationship among Alabama, Florida, and Georgia (see my earlier post) may be on hold for a while.

From the NYT story:

Though the fast-growing Atlanta area relies on the reservoir, the other states have argued that Georgia has done little water planning over the decades and has not tied growth and development to water resources.

On Wednesday, Gov. Sonny Perdue is scheduled to sign into law Georgia’s first comprehensive water management plan, which was hastily approved by both houses of the General Assembly last month in the opening days of the 2008 legislative session. Environmental groups have already criticized the plan as ineffectual in the face of a record drought, which could threaten the drinking water for four million people.

What? Not tied growth and development to water resources? Are those folks daft?

But these Easterners are proving themselves adept at water wars. Want more water? Just annex part of another state!

Here's a story by Ben Smith from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A couple of state lawmakers want to annex a piece of Tennessee to get more water for Georgia.

State Sen. David Shafer (R-Duluth) and state Rep. Harry Geisinger (R-Roswell) on Wednesday introduced companion resolutions to stake a claim on a one-mile stretch of disputed land that they say rightfully belongs to Georgia.

If Georgia were to take that land, the state's new border would stretch beyond the south bank of the Tennessee River, one of the largest tributaries in the Southeast.

Georgia was shortchanged of the land because of a "flawed survey conducted in 1818 and never accepted by the state of Georgia," Shafer said.

"A misplaced survey marker is just that and nothing more," he said. "A state boundary can only be changed by the legislatures of the states, with the consent of Congress. It cannot be changed by a mathematician with a faulty compass or a skittish surveying party afraid of the Indians."

Nobody need be alarmed that such resolutions might be a prelude to a second, much smaller, War Between the States.

They merely call for the creation of two panels to investigate Georgia's possible legal claims to land on the other side of the Tennessee and North Carolina borders.

See what Tennessee thinks of all this - read the article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Chattanooga is on the Tennessee River, just across the border from Georgia. One Tennessee lawmaker, House Majority Leader Gary Odom (D-Nashville) quipped "I think we need to have our militia down there."

Note added 15 February 2008: Here is an article from the 15 February 2008 edition of the Christian Science Monitor. The accompanying map is from the article.

"What's the best thing to come out of Alabama? Interstate 85. What's the second-best thing? Interstate 20. " -- Georgia joke

Western Drought Effects: What Happens in Vegas Won't Stay in Vegas

Okay, now that we've got the Klamath Basin straightened out ( a feeble attempt at humor), let us cast our eyes southward and see what's happening in the Colorado River Basin and other places in the western USA.

Uh-oh.

The current (February 2008) National Geographic has an excellent but pessimistic article by Robert Kunzig on the 'Drying of the West'.

The picture below, by Vincent Laforet from the article, should give you an idea of what it's about - more fires, more bark beetles, loss of biological diversity, less water, Dust Bowl conditions by mid-century, and...more people.

The article begins by asking:

The American West was won by water management. What happens when there's no water left to manage?

That is the 64-euro question these days, and I'm still not sure anyone is planning for it. If  Dust Bowl conditions afflict the Southwest, the dislocation they cause could make the 1930s Dust Bowl seem like a leisurely Sunday drive.

Yet more people keep coming - the Las Vegas area is still growing each month by about 5,000 people. At that rate, they'll need a lot more than one 60,000 home subdivision outside Kingman, AZ.

Aquafornia has a wonderful post about how Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has aided Las Vegas' runaway growth. Here's part of the article from Conde Nast Portfolio (click to read the entire article):

In a city running out of water, massive housing projects rise in clouds of dust on the outer reaches of the Las Vegas Valley like stucco ramparts built by some demented desert king. Just over the hills to the east, Lake Mead, which is on the Colorado River, the area’s main water source, is literally drying up. Runaway population growth and a historic drought have rendered the nation’s largest reservoir a virtual drainage ditch, down to a skeletal 48 percent of capacity. Yet construction in Las Vegas continues unabated. The city’s latest megaproject is a master-planned “sustainable community” of 16,000 homes—anchored by a high-rise “neighborhood” casino—to be built about 15 miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip, at the gateway to beloved Mount Charleston, part of the region’s only national forest.

The method to this head-in-the-sand madness has its roots in faraway Washington, D.C., in a plan quietly aided by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. (View slideshow.) In 2004, with the water level at Lake Mead plummeting and panic setting in that Las Vegas might actually need to curtail its blistering growth, Nevada’s senior senator helped to push through a reprieve. He co-sponsored a law granting the Southern Nevada Water Authority a free right-of-way on federal land to pipe groundwater into Las Vegas from central Nevada, hundreds of miles away. The $3 billion plumbing plan would tap the Great Basin aquifer, a vast underground sink that runs from Death Valley, in California, across central Nevada and into western Utah. Think Muammar Qaddafi and his Great Man-Made River Project in the Libyan Sahara, or Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the 1974 film based on what happened when a similarly thirsty Los Angeles turned California’s Owens Valley into a dust bowl a century ago. As the Great Basin’s groundwater is drained, desert springs and seeps will dry up, endemic plants and wildlife will die off, and farms and ranches will wither away, according to several scientists who have studied the plan. Eventually, the aquifer, which took millennia to fill, will run out, like other Nevada mother lodes mined into oblivion. What then for Las Vegas, whose civic boosters won’t accept that the driest desert in North America isn’t the best place for another million people in addition to the nearly 2 million already there?

Lost Wages better hope that Harry's still around in the Senate when they run out of water.

"When extreme drought conditions hit, what happens in Vegas won't stay in Vegas."

Effects of Long-Term Drought and Poor Water Quality on Politicians' Brains

A colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless, suggested that one of our journals have a theme issue with the aforementioned title. He proposed a lead article documenting the case of Oklahoma. The Sooner the better (ha ha).

Effects of Long -Term Drought and Poor Water Quality on Politicians' Brains: Oklahoma, a Case Study

Abstract

Long-term water shortages and use of dubiously-sourced waters have had devastating impacts on the electorate and subsequently on their elected officials. Oklahoma is a tragic case. For a state with the proud political history that gave America Carl Albert, David Boren,  and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (born in Tulsa), who served honorably in elected office; Will Rogers and Dan Rowan to make fun of politicians when they got out of hand; and James Garner, Dennis Weaver, and Chuck Norris who time and time again reminded us on the screen that even if we don't have good politicians we have good cops; it has surely fallen on hard times. Today, Oklahomans everywhere must hang their heads that they hold the distinction of having simultaneously sent to represent them in the Senate of the United States two of the biggest whacko dingbat idjits (technical terms) ever to disgrace the halls of Congress: Jim "My brain is affected by global warming" Inhofe and Tom "Rachel Carson causes malaria" Coburn. They also gave America Mike "I used to run horse shows before I ran FEMA (into the ground)" Brown. No one state could produce that much idiocy and send it off to Washington at once without some outside explanatory variable -- and that is bad water!

“The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly,' meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood-sucking parasites'.” -- Larry Hardiman

Colorado Basin States 'Play Nice', Reach Historic Accord

Well, a while ago I was chastising the seven Colorado Basin states - CA, NM, NV, AZ, WY, UT, and CO - for "not playing nice". Looks like they have been "playing nice" after all, as they have reached a new agreement on the Colorado River that not only alter the way the river is managed during drought but also ensure California's water supply and Las Vegas' drinking water as well.

The agreement will dictate how reduced water supplies will be allocated should the present drought continue. Check out this little drought update from the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA):

Download SNWA_drought_update2011_2007.pdf

Check out Michael Gardner's story in the San Diego Union-Tribune and Edward Lawrence's story on Las Vegas TV station KLAS. I used both sources in writing this post.

The agreement, ten years in the making, prescribes that if Lake Mead, now at 48% of capacity after 8 years' drought, continues to shrink, Arizona and Nevada will absorb cuts first, which likely will not occur before 2010. California won't get cut till the lake falls to 16% of capacity, a level never reached since the lake first filled.

Lake Powell, the other big reservoir on the Lower Colorado, is also about 48% of capacity. The two reservoirs have a maximum combined capacity of about 50,000,000 acre-feet.

Lake Powell levels are managed to benefit the Upper Basin states - WY, CO, NM, UT - whereas Lake Mead's are managed for the Lower Basin states - CA, NV, and AZ. The new agreement permits changes in those operating rules.

Las Vegas will get additional water, enough for 210,000 more homes.  To get this concession from the other six states, SNWA will construct a reservoir near the USA-Mexico border at a cost of up to $200M. The reservoir will capture unused Colorado River water.

There are some unresolved issues, which are not minor: 1) Mexico; and 2) maintaining environmental flows. Dealing with Mexico is the purview of the U.S. State Department.  The Mexicans have protested some California water moves, such as the lining of the All-American Canal (click here, too). With regard to (2), the agreement left open the possibility for storing environmental water in Lake Mead.

Will all this work? It's a Band-aid. Read this article by Sarah Bates Van de Wetering that appeared in Headwaters News.

It is apropos that the agreement will be signed at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. The Dairy Queen in Kingman would have been a better venue.

Hey, now we can build that 60,000-home subdivision near Kingman after all!

"There is nothing worse than having sight and no vision." -- Helen Keller

Jim Thebaut's New Film: 'The American Southwest: Are We Running Dry?'

Jim Thebaut, president of the non-profit The Chronicles Group and the man who made the landmark film Running Dry about the world humanitarian water crisis, is back behind the camera.

Until about two weeks ago I had not encountered Jim for about two years, after having seen his film and met him at the Third World Water Forum (3WWF) in Kyoto, Japan, in March 2003.  The film so impressed me that I invited him to the University of New Mexico, my former institution, to show the film and meet with the university and local communities. Both he and the film were huge successes.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw Jim sitting in the breakfast room st the Embassy Suites Hotel in Albuquerque, NM, during the AWRA meeting. He told me he was in New Mexico waiting for the film crew for his new water documentary, The American Southwest: Are We Running Dry? Below is a copy of the press release.

Download southwest_press_release_14_nov_2007.pdf

Grants to support the flim have been made by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), American States Water Company (ASWC), as well as other organizations. Vegas PBS will present the film, which will debut in Fall 2008 on Western PBS stations followed by live in-studio simulcast town hall meetings.

Jim's skills as a filmmaker will be welcomed to depict a complicated problem, one that affects us all, not just the USA Southwest. My hope is that, given the sponsors, this will not be more of the "SOS" but a critical look at what needs to be done and what might happen if no substantive changes are effected. Jim assured me that this will be the case - it will be a solutions-based approach. 

I hope to see discussions of:

• coordination of land use planning and water planning (both quality and quantity);
• regional approaches, even those involving parts of different states (e.g., NW Arizona and Southern Nevada) ; and
• what will happen if the Southwest is in fact in the midst of a "megadrought" period (c. 40-50 years), i.e., a view of the apocalypse and how we will cope with it.

See my 21 July 2007 post, "The Struggle to Secure Water in the Southwest USA".

But if anyone can present the real story, it's Jim Thebaut. I'll anxiously await The American Southwest: Are We Running Dry?

"Civilization exists by hydrological consent, subject to change without notice" -- my apologies to Will Durant (his original quote had "geological")

"The greatest national folly we could commit would be to exhaust the Treasury trying to make over the West in the image of Illinois."  -- Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb, Harper's magazine, May 1957, as reported by Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986 (p. 5)

Presidential Candidates: A Word Drought When It Comes to Water

Cynthia Barnett, author of Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., sent me this Associated Press (AP) article about the presidential candidates' lack of verbiage on water issues.

If you get the chance, be sure to ask them about their vision for a national water policy.

***************

Candidates Spare Few Words for Water

By JOHN FLESHER (Associated Press)

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — When it comes to water, the 2008
presidential candidates are remarkably parched for words.

They are well aware that there are few faster ways for a candidate to
get into political trouble than to wade into the sensitive subject of
the water shortages afflicting large areas of the nation. That's
especially true when it comes to proposals for regional water sharing.
Water-rich regions such as the Great Lakes states have long been wary
that water-scarce, but politically robust regions like the Sun Belt
will try to siphon off their precious resource.

Such competing regional interests are laden with political
implications. The handful of states leading off the presidential
nominating contests in January tentatively inc