Future water trouble sets in for western river cities

When your neighbors are in trouble, chances are you’re in trouble too.

Look around southwest and mountain west America. Everywhere you’ll find major cities from Los Angeles to Denver, and Las Vegas to Phoenix worried sick about their water supply – as well they should be.

If the Colorado river continues to dry up and western drought becomes a perpetual hazard as current predictions have it, Las Vegas, Nevada will be facing a Katrina-like catastrophe, only this time it won’t be about flooding, but about running dry. Some 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water comes from the diminishing Colorado River.
Phoenix, Tucson, Denver and Los Angeles are in different boats, but their ponds are shrinking too.

And New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that comprise the “lower basin.” And that means in a crisis, upper basin states won’t get their water until lower basin states have their’s.

But when push comes to shove in really tough times, California gets its water first, trumping all other states.

Western water planners are painfully aware of what happened to Atlanta, Georgia during the 100-year drought that hit the region in late 2006 and 2008. Atlanta was caught off guard and unprepared when the drought, with the speed of a blitz, almost emptied Lake Lanier, Atlanta’s only water supply.

Atlanta got some of the rain and snow it needed, but its drought still hasn’t entirely lifted. It doesn’t look like ours will lift for a long, long time, if ever, with global warming.

What this means is that if the Colorado River, which supplies New Mexico with about 110,000 acre feet of water a year, and has been counted on to give Albuquerque about 70 percent of its drinking water, continues to dwindle, New Mexico might not get any of it, owing to its junior water rights status as a “upper basin” state.

While New Mexico state government has raised the alarm about drought and climate change, and the governor has created numerous committees of experts to survey the situation, water problems in the West don’t have a high priority in New Mexico’s popular consciousness. It’s so far out of the picture that water has hardly been mentioned in Albuquerque’s mayoral campaign, save for candidate Richard Romero questioning of the reliability of the city’s water supply.

Mayor Martin Chavez is to be commended for starting to use gray water on some city parks and sports fields. It would have been even better, of course, if this practice had begun decades ago.
But the mayor’s many assertions that Albuquerque doesn’t have to worry about water are not credible, given what any curious person can learn about the water crisis in the West.

The complications of water law, the sounds of lawyers in California, Arizona and Colorado strapping on their armor and sharpening their swords, ought to make every New Mexican jumpy and nervous.

We just don’t have the money to hold them off.

And New Mexico really doesn’t like the whole idea of senior water rights to begin with. In its own bailiwick, New Mexico legislators and water officials have basically refused to adjudicate water rights in the entire Middle Rio Grande Basin.

But our head-in-the-sand approach won’t work. Issues of priority are making a major mess of water rights across the West.

California, for instance, was given senior water rights in the Colorado Compact over the six other states that use the river. But in California itself, the Metropolitan Water District (MET), which supplies 60 percent of the water to 19 million people in the Los Angeles area, made its claims on the Colorado after the Colorado Compact divided up the water. As the Salt Lake Tribune put it, “That means the most populous part of California is last in line among its peers when water runs low.”

It’s already had to deal with that in 2003 when California had to curtail, somewhat, its Colorado usage. Los Angeles customers were the ones that took the hit.

But the MET isn’t alone. Most, if not all, municipalities in the West have junior rights, including Albuquerque and Rio Rancho. Some fear, when times get really tough, that cities will seek changes in the New Mexico Constitution which establishes the priority use water system, making beneficial use the criterion for senior rights, rather than rights based historical precedent,

Arizona’s drought, and the Colorado River’s dessication, is already squeezing Phoenix and Tucson, with their shallow and depleting aquifers. The Colorado supplies more than half the annual water used by both cities. The state is facing a potential shortage from the river in only two years.

Denver and the whole state of Colorado are in for hard times indeed. Because of their junior status in the upper basin, should shortages dictate all water going to California first, Colorado might be prevented from using its own water generated in its own mountains.

Denver, itself, is almost entirely dependent on the Colorado and its tributaries for water. Three quarters of the water in Colorado comes from rivers originating in the West Slope of the Rockies, but about three quarters of the people live on the East Slope in Denver and environs. Denver is fed its water through 17 trans-basin diversions moving river water from west to east.

New Mexico’s statewide drought plan issued a major report three years ago. The state’s Drought Task Force was created by former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson in 1996. In 2006, the unpredictability of weather conditions in a time of global warming came home to New Mexico. The first six months of the year were the driest in 112 years, while the last six months were the wettest in 112 years. Despite such fluctuations, the state is still drier than ever, and our increase in population “has dramatically increased the state’s vulnerability to drought,” according to the New Mexico Drought Plan update of 2006.

Who’s to say how prepared New Mexico might be for ten or twenty more years of drought and a loss of Colorado River water?

I am sure the state’s professional water community and the hundreds of volunteer water planning activists are struggling with such questions on a daily basis.

But severe or chronic, water shortages in our state are sure to mirror the troubles our neighbors are having. Let’s hope Albuquerque doesn’t get caught, one day, with a water crisis of the magnitude that faced Atlanta two years ago, and that is sure to confront arid southwestern Nevada and Las Vegas in our lifetime.