Time to start preparing for water rationing

What would happen in Albuquerque and Santa Fe if the Colorado River reservoirs went dry?

What would happen if the current ten year drought turned into a 25 year dessication? What kind of water rationing would it take to keep either city going? How many people would the cities lose? How many trees? How many businesses?

These are not doom and gloom musings. They are practical questions, and ones that no elected official in either city seems to be asking.

Severe drought caused by climate change is not something anyone wants to contemplate. But not trying to prepare for it is rather like refusing to prepare financially for old age.

There’s little doubt in my mind that somewhere down the road, in the not too distant future, we will have water rationing. And we could even see drastic curtailments of use.

Studies are showing that the Colorado River basin is accumulating less and less rain and snow. Some have concluded that Lake Mead and Lake Powell could be dry in a dozen years. Others predict 50 years or so.

Waterwired, a online water site, reports that a study by the University of Colorado “projects that all reservoirs along the Colorado River — which provide water for 27 million people in seven states —  could dry up by 2057 because of climate change and overuse.”

Given that huge populations in southern California and Arizona depend on the Colorado River, and that Albuquerque and Santa have recently started drinking river water from one of its tributaries, the San Juan River, water wars that New Mexico can’t win are looming on the horizon. And, as the pinch gets tighter in high population states, the legal battles for water could slip into New Mexico virtually right away.

Imagine the nightmare of lawsuits from California and Arizona contesting New Mexico’s right to its Colorado River water. The legal limbo of unadjudicated water rights in the Middle Rio Grande would add a very nasty fog to the legal chaos.

In the short term, the risk of drastic water loss in the Colorado “is relatively low… But after that, the risk escalates enormously. If you do nothing, and you have no policies in place, even drastic measures such as cutting people off will not help from staving off catastrophe,” a University of Colorado Researcher said.

Another study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Reclamation found “a one-in-two chance that overuse and warming could deplete reservoirs much sooner — by 2011.

Santa Fe and Las Vegas, New Mexico, have been rationing water in the summer for years. Their leadership and residents are somewhat prepared for what might be ahead. Albuquerque has never really had to think about rationing water, in public anyway, because of the backup of its fast depleting aquifer.

Water rationing in the Middle Rio Grande Valley would be unique and painful without plenty of lead time for residents to prepare. It would have nothing to do with business as usual, about paper water and Rube Goldberg schemes to pipe water from farmland aquifers to cities. That kind of water thinking is all about growth and keeping growing.

Water rationing, if it’s done properly with public participation and input, is about civility, shared responsibility, building a sensible and pragmatic future, and the healthy survival of immediate hardship.

The question is not about how to keep the present momentum going, but rather how to create a new momentum based on an equitable answer to this question: How are scarce, but vital, resources to be allocated fairly?

Aggressive efforts to continue traditional growth in both Albuquerque and Santa Fe, spurred on by the pains of recession and a very slow recovery, combined with drought and aggravated heat, will damage the cause of water conservation. And as fuel prices rise, as we know they will, food imported from around the country will get increasingly expensive. Local farmers and ranchers will have the financial incentive to evolve their small agribusinesses to compete with costly imported food. And that could well use more water too.

If you don’t plan ahead, you get blindsided in the future. Why not have city residents start thinking about water rationing now, and have them start helping to plan an intelligent rationing system that they would be willing to follow with a minimum of coercion?

If a conservation ethic doesn’t take hold, some nasty scenarios are possible. Leadership here could move to use Albuquerque’s aquifer as a lure to refugees forced from Phoenix, LA, Las Vegas, Nevada, and San Diego. We could see wrongheaded but enterprising local leadership touting drought as an opportunity to continue growing on the strength of ground water alone. We don’t know how long it would take for the aquifer to play out, but when it does Albuquerque would practically cease to exist.

And of course it’s not only the Colorado River we’re talking about. The Rio Grande’s watershed is in southern Colorado too and is impacted by climate change itself. Our river originates on the east side of the continental divide in the San Juan Range, while San Juan River originates west of the divide in the San Juan Mountains around Silverton.

Without a flourishing Rio Grande, our bosque dies, and the chances of local agriculture supplementing our food supply wither.

I can see Albuquerque facing swamp cooler restrictions, no outside watering laws, water police patrols, heavy fines for infractions and overuse, monitoring of all private wells, perhaps rationing of household use, and even every other day water use moratoriums.

The sooner we start preparing for what’s ahead, the sooner we begin to innovate humanely, create conservation systems that work without resorting to draconian schemes. It’s either that or hit the wall of water deprivation at full throttle and be a part of a hideous mess.