"Drought’s impact on Mississippi River causes disruptions in shipping and agriculture" PBS NewsHour 11/17/2022
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SUMMARY: Up and down the Mississippi River basin, below-average rainfall has constricted one of the country’s major economic thoroughfares. Some areas along the river are reporting their lowest water levels in decades and it could affect consumers across the country. William Brangham reports.
"Kenya’s worst drought in decades creates humanitarian crisis" PBS NewsHour 1/14/2022
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SUMMARY: The worst drought in decades is gripping eastern Africa -- parching landscapes, killing livestock and creating a humanitarian crisis. Driven by climate change, it's also leading to civil strife, as shepherding communities battle each other for scarce resources. Special correspondent Jack Hewson and producer Georgina Smith report from the Wajir province of northern Kenya.
"‘Nearly every acre’ in California has potential to burn, state fire official warns" PBS NewsHour 8/19/2021
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SUMMARY: Hot, dry conditions continue to fuel over a dozen wildfires in California, mostly in the state's northern quarter. Fire officials said they were seeing a "generational destruction of forests." Six of the seven largest fires on record in California have happened in 2020 or 2021, and at the current rate, fires this year are expected to burn more land than they did last year. Lisa Desjardins reports.
SUMMARY: The Middle East is facing a water crisis, and the divisions between Israel and Palestinians have only exacerbated the problem. But whereas Israel is a pioneer in desalination and produces much of its own water, in Gaza, Palestinians struggle with access to clean water due to an Israel-imposed blockade. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro has a two-part look at water equity in the Middle East.
SUMMARY: In the Gaza Strip, 97 percent of freshwater is unsuitable for human consumption, and raw sewage pours into the Mediterranean Sea. Facilities for desalinating and treating water function on only a limited basis, as Israel controls the flow of fuel and supplies into the region. But Israelis, too, could face consequences from contaminated water. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.
SUMMARY: Fearing the complete depletion of their water supply amid an extreme drought, officials in South Africa’s second most populous city have limited water consumption to 13 gallons per resident a day. Police are also fining people for watering their lawns or washing their cars. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Martin Seemungal reports on how people are adjusting.
SUMMARY: Factors like population growth, income inequality and climate change have exacerbated water related issues around the world. Abuse and depletion of the natural resource has led to instability and violence in places like Iran, Syria, and Bangladesh as well as crises in the U.S. Jay Famiglietti, NASA’s senior water scientist, joins Hari Sreenivasan from Los Angeles to discuss the global pattern.
SUMMARY: Many regions in East Africa are at risk of famine for the third time in 25 years. Twenty million people in the war-torn countries of Yemen, South Sudan, and Somalia, as well as drought-stricken neighbors like Ethiopia are at risk. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia, on the crisis and relief efforts.
SUMMARY: South Sudan was founded in 2011, and now it's on the edge of collapse. Forces allied to the president and vice president have been fighting along tribal lines. Murderous raids on civilian communities are a favored tactic, and UN peacekeepers have been criticized for not doing more to stop them. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: Countless numbers of people in South Sudan are on the run from government troops, targeted because of their tribe amid a brutal civil war. Communities hide in the wilderness to avoid violence, but there is nothing to eat, fueling a man-made famine as aid agencies struggle to reach people. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: Rape has become a tool of war in South Sudan, wielded against women of rival tribes. In partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports from a camp for people fleeing ethnic violence where most women are rape survivors and they don’t dare leave because they fear they will be violently assaulted.
SUMMARY: In Florida, a state of emergency is underway as more than 100 wildfires burn in and across all corners of the state. And since February, more than 7,000 acres have burned across the state, as Florida copes with rising temperatures and major drought. William Brangham sits down with Jim Karels, director of the Florida Forest Service, about how the state is combating the heat.
This story was co-published with The New York Times.
Wedged between Arizona and Utah, less than 20 miles up river from the Grand Canyon, a soaring concrete wall nearly the height of two football fields blocks the flow of the Colorado River. There, at Glen Canyon Dam, the river is turned back on itself, drowning more than 200 miles of plasma-red gorges and replacing the Colorado's free-spirited rapids with an immense lake of flat, still water called Lake Powell, the nation's second largest reserve.
When Glen Canyon Dam was built — in the middle of the last century — giant dams were championed as a silver bullet promising to elevate the American West above its greatest handicap — a perennial shortage of water. These monolithic wonders of engineering would bring wild rivers to heel, produce cheap, clean power, and stockpile water necessary to grow a thriving economy in the middle of the desert. And because they were often remotely located they were rarely questioned.
We built the Hoover Dam, creating Lake Mead, Glen Canyon Dam and more than 300 other dams and reservoirs at a cost of more than $100 billion. Such was the nation's enthusiasm for capturing its water that even the lower part of the Grand Canyon seemed, for a time, worth flooding. Two more towering walls of concrete were proposed there, and would have backed up water well into the nation's most famous national park.
But today, there are signs that the promise of the great dam has run its course.
Climate change is fundamentally altering the environment, making the West hotter and drier. There is less water to store, and few remaining good sites for new dams.
Many of the existing dams, meanwhile, have proven far less efficient — and less effective — than their champions had hoped. They have altered ecosystems and disrupted fisheries. They have left taxpayers saddled with debt.
And, in what is perhaps the most egregious failure for a system intended to conserve water, many of them lose hundreds of billions of gallons of precious water each year to evaporation and, sometimes, to leakage underground. These losses increasingly undercut the longstanding benefits of damming big rivers like the Colorado, and may now be making the West's water crisis worse.
In no place is this lesson more acute than at Glen Canyon.
And yet even as these consequences come into focus, four states on the Colorado River are developing plans to build new dams and river diversions in an effort to seize a larger share of dwindling water supplies for themselves before that water flows downstream.
The projects, coupled with perhaps the most severe water shortages the region has ever seen, have reignited a debate about whether 20th century solutions can address the challenges of an epochal 21st century drought, with a growing chorus of prominent former officials saying the plans fly in the face of a new climate reality.
“The Colorado River system is changing rapidly,” says Daniel Beard, a former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees all of the federal government's dams in the West. “We have a responsibility to reassess the fundamental precepts of how we have managed the river.”
That reassessment — Beard and others say — demands that even as new projects are debated, it's time to decommission one of the grandest dams of them all, Glen Canyon.
Glen Canyon Dam was erected as a political and environmental compromise, an evolution of the earliest water wars on the Colorado River.
In 1922 seven states — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming — signed a compact agreement dividing the Colorado between them, and, later, with Mexico. The northern states agreed to send an annual quota of water downstream to California, Nevada and Arizona, and the dam building began. But the faster those states grew the more water they used, and by mid-century Colorado, Wyoming and the rest of the upper basin feared it was only a matter of time before the south laid claim to the entire river. The northern states sought their own mega-dam — one which could give them control over the flow of the river and provide a gate through which they could mete out exactly how much of it was sent downstream. Their political jockeying in Congress eventually won the promise that the federal government would build more dams in the north too.
In 1956 the Colorado River Storage Project Act paved the way for the construction of four more large power-generating dams in the upper basin of the Colorado River. In its planning, the federal Bureau of Reclamation had zeroed in on a dam site on a tributary in northwestern Colorado called the Green River. But the reservoir it proposed to create would submerge a tract of treasured, fossil-laden parkland called Dinosaur National Monument. Environmentalists, led by legendary Sierra Club executive director David Brower in one of the nation's early epic conservation battles, fought passionately to preserve the monument.
All sides agreed instead to proceed at a remote spot in southern Utah called Glen Canyon, in a region far from highways, about 200 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Glen Canyon Dam would help normalize the erratic flows of the Colorado, and flood a no-man's land of barren sandstone domes and inaccessible dendritic canyons — transforming them into a surreal oasis called Lake Powell.
Damming rivers this way is as old as civilization itself, stretching back some 8,000 years to the foothills of Mesopotamia. From the start, the idea was to stem the risk of devastating floods by creating a catchment for the unpredictable torrents that rattle down from upstream. Once a river was restrained, its domesticated waters could be guided through ditches and canals to irrigate land for agriculture, and to use the force of gravity to power its delivery over great distances. For desert regions that got little rain, but watch seasonal snowmelt sluice by during the spring rush, dams became a way to capture that water and hold it until the time of year it was needed most.
With time, dams were developed especially for their ability to generate power. And since force is not just a function of the amount of water flowing, but of the mass of water held behind the dam, the dams grew broader. In 1942 the Bureau of Reclamation completed the low-slung Grand Coulee Dam, a butchy mass of concrete more massive than the Pyramid at Giza, stretching for nearly a mile across Washington's Columbia River. It is still today the single largest hydropower producer in the country.
Glen Canyon Dam is of a different sort — a tall, elegant, sweeping structure engineered in an arch bowing against the pressure of the water, enabling a relatively thin sheet of concrete to withstand unfathomable forces behind it. Arch dams like these were perfectly suited for the Colorado's narrow chasms, and Glen Canyon — like the Hoover Dam — created a reservoir so deep that the sheer height of the water behind it promised to generate enormous currents of power. By all measures, its completion was a feat.
But it took 17 years for the reservoir to fill, and just 19 years after that, it began a steady decline. Today its potential has been severely undercut by its own inefficiencies. Thanks to the steady overuse of the Colorado River system — which provides water to one in eight Americans and supports one seventh of the nation's crops — Lake Powell has been drained to less than half of its capacity as less water has flowed into it than has been routinely taken out. That relative puddle is no longer capable of generating the amount of power the dam's builders originally planned, and so the power has become more expensive for the government to deliver, with the burden increasingly falling on the nation's taxpayers. Since the dam's power sales are relied on to pay for the operations of other smaller dams and reservoirs used for irrigation in the West, as Glen Canyon financially crumbles, so might the system that depends on it.
But it's not just the reservoir's overuse that is causing it to drain, it's the very site and concept chosen for Lake Powell itself, the reservoir loses an extraordinary amount of its precious water. When a dam is built in the desert, its water is spread over a wide area under hot sun and wind, leading to massive evaporation. More than 160 billion gallons of water evaporate off of Lake Powell's surface every year, enough to lower the reservoir by four inches each month. Another 120 billion gallons are believed to leak out of the bottom of the canyon into fissures in the earth, — a loss that if tallied up over the life of the dam amounts to more than a year's flow of the entire Colorado River. According to the environmental group Colorado Riverkeeper, if the lost water were sold, it would generate some $350 million each year.
Cumulatively these debits, Beard says, amount to “the largest loss of water on the Colorado River,” — an amount equal to six percent of its total flow and enough to supply some nine million people each year.
Not every dam site shares Glen Canyon's problems. Each dam serves a unique purpose — whether it's power generation or water storage — and every region has different needs.
But Glen Canyon is far from the only project to fall out of favor — major projects are being decommissioned or reevaluated across the country. In some places there isn't enough water to justify the environmental and economic costs of blocking a river. In others the dams have turned out to block the flow of sediment, stop fish migration, or threaten endangered species in ways that weren't anticipated in the middle of the last century.
The Hoover Dam's Lake Mead, which Wednesday fell to its lowest level ever, 145 feet below capacity, also loses hundreds of billions of gallons of water to evaporation and is just 37 percent full. The reservoir behind Arizona's Coolidge Dam, one of the first major projects in Western water development and one of Arizona's largest reservoirs, is virtually empty.
And dams are coming down. Six Western dams were deconstructed in 2015 alone. Just last month California and Oregon agreed to dismantle four more power-generating dams on the Klamath River, having realized that the facilities were crippling native salmon fisheries, which also have enormous economic value. “This is a good exercise of humankind correcting some of the mistakes that it's made in the past,” California Gov. Jerry Brown said when announcing the plan. And in early May a federal judge in Oregon ruled that — because of extensive ecological damage — the system of dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers “cries out for a major overhaul.”
Still, on the Colorado, today's water managers refute the notion that it's time for a change.
Glen Canyon Dam may be past its prime, says Michael Connor, the deputy secretary of the Interior and a former Commissioner of Reclamation, but its not past its usefulness. Though he calls the amount of water lost to evaporation and leakage “incredibly significant,” Connor credits Glen Canyon with numbing the pain of the recent drought. “Look at the last 15 years,” he says. “It's the lowest inflow in history and there's been no shortages on the Colorado River and that's because of Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell and Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.”
There is also a political tide to be reckoned with; the delicate peace struck between the seven competing states and Mexico — and the fear that they'd never again be able to reach an agreement the likes of which they all signed in 1922. “Getting rid of Lake Powell… it would basically make the compact stand on its head,” said Bronson Mack, a spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas, pointing to the role that Lake Powell plays in guaranteeing the northern states have enough water to deliver to Nevada and the south each year. “We've always said cracking open the compact is going to land seven states in decades of litigation, so there has not been an appetite for it.”
Decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam, however, could offer a solution that politicians cannot afford to ignore — a cheap, immediate, and significant new source of water where it is most desperately needed.
The idea is this: Since two of the nation's largest reservoirs — just more than 300 miles apart — depend on the same dwindling water source but are each less than half full, they should be combined into one. Lake Mead would be deeper, and its evaporative losses would increase. But the surface area of Lake Powell would be dramatically reduced, and the evaporated water from there would be saved. Furthermore, moving the water out of Glen Canyon would move it from a valley that leaks like a sieve, into one that is watertight. The ongoing losses in Mead — according to proponents of the plan — would be more than offset by the immense savings at Lake Powell.
In all, according to Tom Myers, a hydrologist who was commissioned to research the implications of the plan for the Glen Canyon Institute, an environmental group advocating for combining the two reservoirs, about 179 billion gallons of water would be saved each year — more than enough to supply the population of the city of Los Angeles.
The argument has logical weight because both reservoirs have been struggling to remain half full, and may not ever refill. Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego gave Lake Mead a 50 percent chance of running dry by 2021. The federal Bureau of Reclamation itself forecasts that the amount of water runoff will decrease another 9 percent by 2050 in the Colorado River basin, as temperatures increase. And last year a group of academic researchers declared that the Colorado River basin — already in its 16th year of drought, may be headed toward the worst water crisis in 1,000 years.
Meanwhile the Bureau predicts that demand will continue to increase on the river so much that by 2060 the region will run short by a trillion gallons each year.
“They all show a huge deficit and they all show the reservoirs will likely never fill again,” said Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute. “So let's rethink the game plan here.”
According to the proposal the Glen Canyon Dam itself would not be removed. Rather, its gates would be opened, and the water behind it allowed to pass through, restoring the natural flows through into the Grand Canyon just below it, draining the Lake Powell reservoir, and allowing the legendarily scenic landscape of Glen Canyon to be resurrected.
The water would not be lost. It would simply flow down through the Grand Canyon and be recaptured behind the Hoover Dam in Lake Mead.
“To me it is a no brainer,” said David Wegner, who studied Glen Canyon as a scientist with the Department of Interior for more than 20 years, and later advised the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources on management of Western water issues. “You've got very few options.”
According to Balken, the process could unfold in stages, and it wouldn't take much. For a while, the water from the lake would simply drain through the dam, as if the plug were pulled from a giant bathtub. The lake levels — already nearly 100 feet below their peak now — would be allowed to drop another 100 feet, until they reach the intakes for the dam's generators. One option would be to maintain the lake levels there, allowing minimal power production. Just that incremental shift would allow vast tracts of land now submerged to be restored.
A second stage of drawdown could lower the levels further, to a set of release pipes about 200 feet above the foot of the dam. The dam's power plant would be shut down, saving tens of millions of dollars in operating costs. It would also dramatically alter water flows through the Grand Canyon, and would have to be carefully coordinated with water levels in Lake Mead, downriver. For the Colorado to be truly restored to its natural riverbed, a third stage, in which bypass tunnels would have to be drilled to allow the water to circumvent the concrete footing of the dam, would have to be pursued.
But proponents of the plan — which they call “fill Mead first” — say the lake may not need to be completely drained. Every vertical foot the waters drop reveals whole stretches of long-drowned desert wilderness. Much of the Glen Canyon valley has already been resurrected, as the lake levels have receded, and several of Powell's recreational boat launches now hang above the shoreline, dry.
As the waters fall further, broad swaths of river pinned between vertical canyon walls would be transformed into remote wilderness valleys, their floors once again inviting to explore on horseback or on foot. Dozens of archaeological sites, their walls covered in petroglyphs, would be revealed. For a while parts of these lands would be covered in a heavy silt, the result of decades of fine mud settling at the bottom of the lake. But vegetation would quickly root in the fertile soils, and heavy storms would flush the mud out the bottom of the canyon, scouring the sandstone clean. Eventually, perhaps after a few decades, even the white watermarks painted across the sides of the valley — telltale signs of the manmade flood — would begin to disappear.
As the silt gets washed downstream, a cloudy stew would course through the Grand Canyon, temporarily disrupting the gentle ecology of that part of the river. But that silt has been sorely missed, and it would soon settle, restoring beaches long ago deprived of sediment. The flow of the river through the Grand Canyon would once again be defined mainly by the amount of precipitation gathered by the mountains upstream. Four native endangered species of fish would presumably thrive in their restored waters.
Restoring the land of Glen Canyon this way has long been the campaign of ardent environmentalists. Brower — who mounted an intense effort to save Glen Canyon almost as soon as he'd agreed to allow it to be drowned — called the reservoir his greatest regret, and the Glen Canyon Dam has been a potent symbol of the desecration of wild places ever since. Now the shortages on the river, and the promise that climate change are certain to make them worse, have breathed new, pragmatic life into their arguments.
Whether the “Fill Mead First” argument pencils out for its benefit to the water supply depends on whether Myers' assumptions about the amount of water that leaks out of the bottom of Lake Powell are accurate. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has long said that water that seeps into the ground eventually returns to the river. Myers studied the fault patterns in the rock bed, and the direction of groundwater flow, and concluded that much of the water seeps away never to come back — an amount that adds up to about 124 billion gallons each year. His research was published in the Journal of The American Water Resources Association in 2013.
Still, the river's water managers believe his models are flawed. “We don't agree with the fundamental assumptions that this water is being lost permanently,” said Colby Pellegrino, the Colorado River Programs Manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Pellegrino's office ran its own numbers to see if combining the reservoirs would save water, and said the math worked out as a wash.
“This is an attempt to find a water supply rationale which supports their recreational focus and narrow view of what the river should look like,” she said.
From a viewpoint above Glen Canyon Dam, a placid lake stretches in one direction, and a tangle of electrical wires in the other. The dam's power station is a nest of infrastructure locked behind a razor wire fence at the top of a vertiginous cliff, and it's capable of sending 1,320 megawatts of electric power shooting out across the moon-like landscape of southern Utah, toward millions of homes.
Glen Canyon Dam's staunchest defenders say its power output is clean, affordable, and vital. Moreover, they say those who think climate change has doomed the traditional ways of managing the Colorado's water underestimate the political complexities of doing away with the power dams generate.
“The questions that are being asked are very legitimate questions,” Connor says. “But you've got to have some political support… and that just doesn't exist.”
The government relies on Glen Canyon Dam to produce power — and not only to produce it, but to sell it, in order to repay the U.S. Treasury for a big chunk of the cost of Glen Canyon's construction and infrastructure upgrades, and to fund water conservation initiatives across Western states.
From the start, Glen Canyon was conceived as a giant hydroelectric generating plant, one so large its planners boasted that the sale of its power would not only pay for the dam's construction, but finance smaller dams across the West. Today Glen Canyon is the largest facility run by the Western Area Power Administration, the federal energy agency that sells wholesale, federally generated hydropower onto the Western electrical grid.
The dam's power reaches 3.2 million customers from California to New Mexico, according to a recent analysis commissioned by the Glen Canyon Institute. And while much of the power is resold at retail rates, its greatest dependents are Native American tribes and the U.S. Department of Defense — which are accustomed to getting their power wholesale, at a government-subsidized price that Glen Canyon Institute's consultants calculated was a little more than one third market rates.
Were Glen Canyon to stop operating, its defenders say, those who rely on its power would face astronomical price hikes — or perhaps lose their access to electrical entirely.
That may eventually happen, however, whether the river's managers agree to dismantle Glen Canyon or not.
The lower the lake level drops, the less power the dam can generate, and the less power WAPA has to sell. Researchers in the northern Colorado River basin states have even begun considering when Lake Powell's lake levels might reach “dead pool,” or the level at which the turbines can no longer produce any power at all.
Already, the lake's levels have dropped more than 90 feet since 1999. If they drop another 100 feet or so, the dam's turbines begin sucking air. Glen Canyon has been generating at roughly 43 percent of its capacity. Some experts predict in the future that nest of wires will convey, on average, about 600 megawatts of power.
That has left WAPA — and the Department of Interior — in a bind. The agency has long-term contracts to deliver power, and it can't simply come up short. When there's not enough water WAPA has to purchase the power it can't make itself in order to meet its obligations. WAPA spent $62 million on extra power to fulfill its contracts in its fiscal 2014, and, after managing its water to bring the water levels in Lake Powell back up, $22 million for its 2015 operations, the vast majority of which was to make up for shortfalls at Glen Canyon.
The shortfalls — like falling dominoes — could eventually leave the region's broader dam and water infrastructure system in the lurch, as smaller dams and reservoirs that rely on money from Glen Canyon's power sales may have to do without.
For example the Dolores Water Conservancy District, a small utility in southern Colorado which operates the McPhee Dam, recently used $7 million in power-revenues from the Colorado River Storage Project to pay for pump upgrades at its facilities. If Glen Canyon Dam wasn't generating power, that upgrade might never have happened. “Without the basin power funds the viability of our project becomes a lot more challenging,” says the district's general manager, Mike Preston. “I don't know how we would do it frankly.”
Meanwhile nature is weaning the West off its power subsidies all on its own. As WAPA's costs increase, the economic benefit of the dam has already decreased. If production drops further, the conservation programs paid for by the dam's slush fund will go unfunded.
Power consultants hired by the Glen Canyon Institute to analyze the impact of shutting down the dam found that western power consumers have already reduced their reliance on Glen Canyon power, and that power constitutes less than one percent of western supply. There are end users that rely on Glen Canyon for all of their power — the Navajo Tribe, and the U.S. Department of Energy's labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico — and these few groups would expect large cost increases as their subsidies disappear. But the vast majority of residential consumers would see their bills jump nominally, by just eight cents per month, should Glen Canyon shut down.
Still — as the Glen Canyon Institute report points out — if Lake Mead and Lake Powell were combined, that worst-case blow would likely be blunted. With the added mass of water behind the Hoover Dam — another federal hydropower facility — generators there would produce more power than they do now, and that surplus, according to the Glen Canyon Institute, could replace about 17 percent of what Glen Canyon produces today.
The amount of water in Lake Powell, of course, depends on the amount of water that flows into it. But even as the region scrambles to save its reservoir — and its river — projects are being planned which would take large additional amounts of water out of the Colorado before it can even fill Powell or fuel the Glen Canyon Dam.
Colorado is planning to build a new reservoir at a place called Windy Gap, and to more than triple the capacity of its Gross Reservoir by raising the height of the dam there. Wyoming is considering an expansion of its Fontenelle Dam on the Green River. Utah just filed an application to build a 140-mile pipeline to divert water out of Lake Powell. The planned new projects would divert another 83 billion gallons of water away from Glen Canyon Dam each year
Downriver, New Mexico is preparing to spend close to one billion dollars to build a new dam and reservoir on the Gila River — a river mostly spoken for. The project promises to capture water only in years when there is so much extra that Arizona right-holders downstream can't use it all, and to do so despite science which forecasts the Gila will have less and less water in the future. Furthermore, like Lake Powell, the reservoir site in New Mexico also promises to leak, so much so that builders now want to line the entire reservoir valley with rubber before it's filled, an undertaking that will cost more than construction of the dam itself.
“Every supplier in the basin is trying to build anything they can to get as much water as they can,” said Gary Wockner, the executive director of the environmental organization Save the Colorado, “trying to get the last legally allowed drop that they can before the red flag goes up.”
That every drop of water on the Colorado counts is undisputed. Last month the lower basin states announced they were close to a historic, and difficult, agreement to voluntarily cede a small share of their water, just to keep the reservoirs functioning. An ambitious, multi-million effort to buy even small amounts of water off of Colorado farmers and send it to fill Lake Powell has, after two years, failed to garner more than a few million gallons. It appears that stakeholders are ready to do whatever it takes, including re-envisioning the use of dams.
“I think it's questionable whether you can build a lot more reservoirs in hot, arid environments,” the Interior department's Connor told ProPublica.
Still, the proposal to “Fill Mead First” appears to be a step too far.
Ultimately the decision to drain Lake Powell — or perhaps to forgo any of the other new dam and water projects now in the works on the river — comes down to a question of whether the seven states and Mexico that share the Colorado river really need the water badly enough.
When they do, abandoning parochial concerns about how the river is supposed to work, and changing the status quo, however uncomfortable or complicated, will begin to seem worth it.
"There's just a lot that's built on this scheme of management and the existence of Glen Canyon Dam,” said Jim Lochhead, the chief executive of Denver's water utility and a former Colorado state negotiator on Colorado River matters. Lochhead says the change would likely require an act of Congress, plus an agreement between seven state legislatures and a revised treaty with Mexico, and a multi-year federal environmental impact analysis.
“A half a million acre feet sounds like a lot of water,” he said, referring to the amount that would be saved by combining the Powell and Mead reservoirs, “but I don't think it's significant enough, frankly, to justify going through all of that.”
SUMMARY: The tropical island of Puerto Rico has been scrambling for a precious resource: clean, fresh water. Puerto Ricans have faced the worst drought in more than 20 years and the most stringent water rationing ever imposed. Special correspondent Chris Bury reports.
CHRIS BURY (NewsHour): The remnants of Hurricane Danny and Tropical Storm Erika that drenched Puerto Rico in late summer were, in fact, a great relief for this tropical island 3,500 square miles surrounded by the blue Caribbean.
In a new era of greatly reduced rainfall and extended dry spells, the most precious commodity these days is water, clean, fresh water. But for nearly five months in the summer and early fall, the most populous parts of the country depended on 1,600 gallon tanks of water like this. At one point, more than 100 of these tanks helped Puerto Ricans cope with the worst drought in more than 20 years.
Near San Juan, Juliana Chiclana was filling up water jugs for a household that includes eight grandchildren.
JULIANA CHICLANA, Puerto Rican Resident (through interpreter): One is emotionally affected by the drought itself, which, at least for me, I have never experienced a drought this big.
CHRIS BURY: In this town, the tap water was on for 24 hours, then off for 72 hours. And so families had to load up with enough to get through three days without tap water at home.
JULIANA CHICLANA (through interpreter): In a way, I’m grateful that it’s three, because they had announced that it was going to be five days.
CHRIS BURY: The rationing, in force from mid-May until September, was the most stringent ever imposed. Just outside San Juan, the Torres family lived for months with those restrictions.
SUMMARY: Across California, after years of punishing drought, reservoirs that normally fill canals and make crops bloom are greatly depleted or even empty. Some say that getting more water into storage by building more dams is key. But dams also create problems for native fish, and some see them as a waste of money that may not provide sufficient supply. Special correspondent Spencer Michels reports.
SPENCER MICHELS (NewsHour): It may be the sign of a hopeful farmer, a biplane spreading fertilizer on a dry field in California’s Central Valley. There’s no irrigation in this part of the valley, so, for now, rain is the only way these crops will grow, and there hasn’t been much of that for the last four years.
And the reservoirs, like Folsom Lake near Sacramento, that normally fill the canals and make the crops bloom, are depleted. Folsom is just 17 percent full.
TIM QUINN, Executive Director, Association of California Water Agencies: It’s flat-out empty because of this drought.
SPENCER MICHELS: Tim Quinn is executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies.
And what’s the solution to this, build another reservoir?
TIM QUINN: Well, if we’d had more water going into storage, we could still have more left than we have got today.
SPENCER MICHELS: And that’s important, says Quinn, not just to Californians.
TIM QUINN: We’re a big part of this economy. And we provide food to the nation and to the world.
SPENCER MICHELS: Quinn and many in state government want a comprehensive solution, including conservation.
TIM QUINN: We do need to build more dams, but we also need to connect them with more underground storage.
SPENCER MICHELS: But building new dams goes against a recent trend in some states, including Washington, of actually demolishing dams, mostly for environmental reasons like protecting fish and restoring wildlife habitat.
These days in California, the mood is quite different. Since the gold rush, building dams and canals has been California’s answer to unpredictable rain and snowfall. To get the water from where it falls in the mountains hundreds of miles away to the dry farms and populated areas, Californians have constructed more than 1,400 dams, including Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River.
In 1968, the state dedicated Oroville Dam, tallest dam in the country, and sent water south to farms and cities. For many farmers and those whose livelihoods are tied to farming, the success of those dams is a key to what needs to happen now.
STEPHEN FEE (NewsHour): On the shores of Lake Baikal, in Russian Siberia, unusually warm temperatures and dry conditions made for dangerous wildfire conditions this summer.
At least 1,500 square miles of forest burned until the flames died down in the past few weeks, leaving scorched earth and tree stumps where a once-lush forest stood.
Ecologists say the fires here could have a long-lasting impact on the delicate ecosystem around the lake, which is home to an estimated 20 percent of the world’s fresh, unfrozen water.
EKATERINA UDEREVSKAYA, ECOLOGIST RUSSIAN: Since the forests are being destroyed, groundwater gets lost. Drought starts, the springs that are still flowing dry out. It lowers the level of Baikal, which was already lower than critical.
STEPHEN FEE: The lake is one of the most bio-diverse regions in the world, home to 570 types of plants and more than 1,300 animal species, some of which are endangered.
Volunteers are now trying to plant one million new trees to restore the landscape.
IRINA VOLODCHENKO, VOLUNTEER COORDINATOR: Any citizen, any resident can come to the nursery, collect a sapling and plant it in a plot of ground. Anyone can join this action which allows you to express your concern about the common problem.
STEPHEN FEE: Even a million new trees won’t replace all the greenery lost, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. but volunteers say it’s a start.
IGOR FILIMONOV, VOLUNTEER: It’s just that we’re thinking of our future, of the future of our children for the kind of country we will live in and the air we will breathe.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now to our weekly feature, Brief But Spectacular.
Tonight, we hear from Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles.
With California in the midst of a severe drought, the state imposed mandatory water restrictions earlier this year. Last week, the mayor’s office announced that, for the month of July, Los Angeles saved even more water than the state asked them to, using two million fewer gallons.
ERIC GARCETTI (D), Mayor of Los Angeles: The droughts in Los Angeles and in California are here to stay. So, we have got to make it a little bit more exciting, make it a little more sexy.
Ah, water. We see so much water misused, wasted, thrown out to the ocean, or bad decisions made that take up more water than we need to sustain life. The 'Save the Drop' campaign in Los Angeles is all about mindfulness. It’s about being conscious of our behavior and our use.
I’m half-Mexican, half-Jewish, so it’s going to be a combination of intelligent forward-looking action and old-fashioned guilt. Drought shaming is when you go to your next-door neighbor and say, you know, you have never been on that grass in your front lawn. Why don’t you get rid of it?
I would say, if you have a lawn you are using, great. Keep it. Water less frequently, but keep it. But 90 percent of lawns, maybe even more, go completely unoccupied.
We’re being very innovative here in Los Angeles with water, with the plentiful water we actually still have, switching out our turf and paying people to do that, to have better plans that use less water, and then recycling water. About 60 percent of our daily use of water, equivalent of that, gets treated through our sewage treatment plants to a standard you could basically drink. But then we wash it out to the ocean, instead of putting it back into the land here.
We’re not just planning for the next two years to get through the immediacy of the drought. But we have got a 10-year and a 20-year plan to wean ourselves off of water that we import.
This is a nonpartisan issue. Water doesn’t care what your party registration is. It just cares that you are wasting it. I hope to leave behind a legacy in which we reengineer Los Angeles once again, but in a way to live more sustainably with the water we already have.
I’m Mayor Eric Garcetti. And this is my 'Brief But Spectacular' take on California and our relationship with water.
California’s urban water agencies — including most in San Diego County — comfortably beat the state’s conservation mandate for July, collectively reducing use by an average of 31.3 percent compared with two years ago.
Added to June’s performance, the agencies have cumulatively reduced water consumption by 29.5 percent, the State Water Resources Control Board said Thursday. The governor’s threshold is an average statewide savings of 25 percent.
By exceeding the conservation order for both months since it took effect, the districts together have built a buffer of sorts in case they slip in later months.
Gov. Jerry Brown imposed the mandate, which will last until at least February, as an emergency measure in response to the state’s ongoing drought. Each water agency, including major cities such as San Diego that operate their own water system, was given a conservation goal— from 8 percent to 36 percent.
Water agencies are expected to meet their mandates both monthly and cumulatively. Districts that fall short in a particular month are expected to make up the deficit in later months so their total conservation over the emergency period meets their assigned target.
Four districts in San Diego County missed their marks, according to cumulative totals for June and July released by the state.
The Rainbow Municipal Water District fell short of its 36 percent mandate by 8.4 percentage points. The Fallbrook Public Utility District failed to meet its 36 percent benchmark by 7.6 percentage points, while the San Dieguito Water District lagged its 28 percent mandate by 5.8 percentage points. And the Carlsbad Municipal Water District fell short of its 28 percent goal by 1.2 percentage points.
But the Rincon del Diablo Municipal Water District, which in June fell 2.2 percentage points short of its 32 percent mandate, more than made up the deficit with better conservation in July. The agency surpassed its cumulative June-July target by 1.4 percentage points.
The best performer in this county, California American Water’s San Diego District, blew past its 8 percent mandate by a cumulative total of 22 percentage points.
Conservation performance in August could be more difficult because it has been a mostly dry and hot month, compared with July’s ample rainfall in certain parts of the state.
Water experts also caution that people shouldn’t rely on the possibility of the atmospheric phenomenon El Niño providing major relief from the drought or even ending it.
Only the strongest El Niños bring abundant precipitation and snowfall to the Sierra mountains in Northern California, the source of water for the state’s biggest reservoirs. Average El Niños tend to channel rain mostly toward Southern California, which doesn’t help nearly as much in battling a prolonged drought.
But so far, residents have been meeting the conservation challenge.
“Californians’ response to the severity of the drought this summer is now in high gear and shows that they get that we are in the drought of our lives,” Felicia Marcus, chair of the state water board, said in a statement Thursday. “This isn’t your mother’s drought or your grandmother’s drought, this is the drought of the century.”
Praise for customers
The number of water agencies that met or surpassed their state conservation target increased from 265 in June to 290 in July. Only four districts, out of a total of 402, missed their state-imposed mandate by more than 15 percent last month.
“I’m surprised but gratified that people are getting it,” said Rita Schmidt Sudman, an adviser to the Sacramento- based nonprofit Water Education Foundation.
Sudman and other water experts were interviewed for this story during the annual conference of the Urban Water Institute, which is taking place this week in San Diego.
David Drake, a director of the Rincon del Diablo district, said the conservation success shows what Californians are capable of doing when they’re motivated.
“What’s also striking is what it says about how much water we waste,” he said. “How many leaks do we have? In my home and my mom’s home, I detected five leaks this year. ... And on top of that, what can we do to reduce the normal use of water?”
Jack Hoagland, board president of the Rancho California Water District in southwest Riverside County, praised the consumer commitment but said the mandate was unnecessary.
“It’s a great response from customers throughout the state to the governor’s unreasonable request,” he said.
As with officials for water agencies in San Diego County, Hoagland said the conservation order is inflexible and doesn’t take into account local circumstances, such as various projects undertaken to create a more stable water supply.
“Our customers have been extremely cooperative and have invested a lot of their time and effort and money in changing out front yards and just being very reasonable,” Hoagland said.
Greater enforcement
On the state’s end, enforcement is ramping up after an initial educational period.
The state water board said it contacted water districts that did not meet their required conservation targets, with many told to give information about their conservation programs and what steps they are taking to increase conservation.
The board said that for July, it gave 37,170 formal warnings for water waste among 323 suppliers. In June, it gave 36,302 formal warnings.
The board said it also issued 15,845 penalties among 79 suppliers last month, compared with 8,876 penalties issued in June among 54 suppliers.
SUMMARY: High temperatures, unpredictable winds and extremely dry conditions caused by the relentless drought have made managing this summer's blazes particularly challenging and unpredictable in California. The NewsHour's Cat Wise reports from Lake County, one of the state's hardest hit areas.
WOMAN: Is there a fire by you? Someone just called one in. And they said they’re seeing flames and black smoke.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): Rancher Lonne Sloan is keeping a close eye on the horizon these days. For the past week, Sloan and her husband, Larry, have been on the front lines of wildfires raging across California. Their 340-acre ranch, near the town of Lower Lake, went up in flames last Wednesday during one of the state’s biggest fires so far this year called the Rocky Fire.
WOMAN: This was our equipment shed. And the fire started over the hill.
CAT WISE: The Sloans, who managed to save their home with the help of nearby fire crews, estimate they lost about $150,000 worth of equipment, most of it uninsured.
WOMAN: And this was my horse trailer that is melted. I compete professionally in parades.
CAT WISE: Their property, like so many in the area, is now a moonscape totally devoid of any vegetation, a sign of the intensity of the blaze that went through here.
The Rocky Fire began July 29 and burned nearly 70,000 acres and 43 homes. It’s now almost fully contained. But on Sunday, a new wildfire, called the Jerusalem Fire, broke out nearby and quickly began spreading. It’s now about 30 percent contained, and has burned more than 20,000 acres.
The fires are burning in hilly terrain with heavy brush known as chaparral. High temperatures, unpredictable winds, and extremely dry conditions in the area have been a bad mix for firefighters.
Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water
High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles.
But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much of this stream is diverted into dirt ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio Creek Valley. Standing astride one of those ditches one day last fall, Bill Ketterhagen dug his boot soles against the concrete edge of a 5-foot-wide dam. He spun a steel wheel and opened a gate that allowed water to pour into his fields of hay crops.
Ketterhagen, 39, manages a 750-acre ranch outside the town of Gunnison, Colorado, for its out-of-state owners, mostly growing a mixture of Meadow Foxtail, Timothy, wheat grasses and some alfalfa. The grasses, knee-high with bursts of clover flowers and flat, slender leaves, are cut, baled and shipped to feedlots where they fatten cattle soon to be slaughtered for beef.
Thickly built, wearing overalls and a four-day beard, Ketterhagen has a degree in biology and natural resource management and once worked in a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He knows his fields could thrive with much smaller amounts of water — he’s seen them do so in dry years — but the property owners he works for have the legal right to take a large supply, and he applies the water generously.
“When we have it, we’ll use it,” he said. “You’ll open your head gate all the way and take as much as you can — whether you need it or not.”
Ketterhagen feels he has little choice. A vestige of 139-year-old water law pushes ranchers to use as much water as they possibly can, even during a drought. “Use it or lose it” clauses, as they are known, are common in state laws throughout the Colorado River basin and give the farmers, ranchers and governments holding water rights a powerful incentive to use more water than they need. Under the provisions of these measures, people who use less water than they are legally entitled to risk seeing their allotment slashed.
There are few starker examples of how man’s missteps and policies are contributing to the water shortage currently afflicting the western United States. In a series of reports, ProPublica is examining how decisions on water management and growth have exacerbated more than a decade of drought, bringing the West to the point of crisis. The Colorado River is the most important source of water for nearly 40 million people across California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, and supports some 15 percent of the nation’s food crops.
But the river is in trouble, and water laws are one significant cause. Legal water rights and state allocations have been issued for more water than the river, in an average year, can provide. Meanwhile its annual flow has been steadily decreasing as the climate changes and drought grips the region. And so, for more than a decade, states and the federal government have tried to wring more supply out of the Colorado and spread it further, in part by persuading the farmers and ranchers who use the vast majority of the river’s water and have the largest water rights to conserve it.
But in many ways it’s the vast body of often-antiquated law governing western water rights, officials acknowledge, that actively undermines conservation, making waste — or at least heavy use — entirely rational.
“Water is money,” said Eugene Backhaus, a state resource conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which works to help ranchers use water more efficiently. “The way the current water law structure is, if they don’t use it for the assigned use, they could lose the water right.”
Adding to the problems, the states linked by reliance on the Colorado govern their water resources separately and have not standardized their water laws. While states have made incremental adjustments to those laws, they have not recast them to address the new needs of a region undergoing vast changes. Some rules force ranchers to dry up entire streams, others ignore the ecological value of maintaining a healthy river. The common element of all these laws is the blunt ethos of the West: Water exists mainly in order to get used up, even if that means deepening the problems of neighboring states.
Ketterhagen understands that the ranch he runs sits atop a system under enormous stress and that he’s wasting water in a region that desperately needs it. But he also understands Colorado water law — rights are precious, and sometimes more valuable even than the land to which they are attached.
Throughout the long, hot summer, Ketterhagen let water course through his fields, irrigating his pastures and vitalizing the gravelly soil beneath. Last spring, the water flowed over the grass’s roots, drowning them, and climbed past the first leaves of the sprouting plants until it stood calf-deep.
“She’s my gauge,” Ketterhagen said, pointing at Gilli, his black and white Aussie heeler mix, who bounded around the field. “When I see a little bit of spray kicking up behind her, it’s just right.”
The body of law governing how water is distributed in the West was shaped by the gold rush.
As people were lured to settle vast, uninhabited and arid parts of the country, they staked their claims to land and water only to face fierce competition upstream as rivers were diverted to sluice for treasure. Courts decreed that water would be saved for the first to use it. Since most property was far from streams and there was little rain, officials then gave settlers formal rights to take water out of rivers and move it across dry land where it could be used to mine minerals or turn rocky fields into farms.
As western territories became states, those states institutionalized the rules — sometimes in their state constitutions — first locking in water rights for those who were already there and then issuing more to those who requested them, on a first-come-first-served basis. For irrigation, shares were apportioned according to crude 19th-century notions of how much water was needed to get 40 acres of dry soil to produce a crop. In times of drought, those with the oldest, or most senior, rights to water would get it first; those with the newest rights would have to wait at the back of the line.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the seven states whose territory was touched by the Colorado River and its tributaries began to compete for access to the source of that water. Herbert Hoover, then the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, led negotiations in which the states agreed on an estimate of the amount of water in the river. The rights to most of the flow were split between states in the upper and lower basins. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico got half, while Arizona, California and Nevada got the rest. This was, in part, to keep California — already the most populous and industrious of western states — from taking it all. Each state continued to govern the rights to water distributed within its borders.
But even in that first 1922 compact, more water was divvied up on paper than would actually run through the river. Officials, it turned out, had estimated the Colorado’s average flow after a period of unusually wet conditions, calculating that 18 million acre-feet flowed through the river each year, and dividing up some 15 million acre-feet, or 4.8 trillion gallons of water, between the states. Within two decades they began to understand their folly: During many years as little as 12 million acre-feet flowed, and under normal conditions the river would rarely yield close to the amount of water expected. And yet the states piled on more obligations, bringing the amount of water parceled out even higher. In 1944, for instance, Congress signed a treaty promising an additional 1.5 million acre-feet to Mexico, where the Colorado River naturally ends.
Today, 15 years into an epochal drought, 16.5 million acre-feet of water have been allocated, while the river, during the recent drought, has been flowing at a rate of around 12.4 million acre-feet each year.
Still, aside from a 2007 temporary pact to divide the pain of river shortages between them, officials in the seven states have never renegotiated the original river compact or fundamentally changed the foundations of water law that lead to overuse. The result is a set of codified principles designed for a different era and divorced from today’s environmental realities.
The term “water law” in the Colorado River basin has come to refer to a monstrous volume of federal statutes and agreements, court precedents and state laws and regulations that can differ from place to place and have changed incrementally over the years but are structured by the interstate agreements to divide the river. Most of those state laws share the basic principle that the first people to arrive in the West should hold the most senior rights to its water.
The notion of “first in time, first in right” has persisted even as the need for water has exploded in urban areas that sprang up long after most water rights were distributed and therefore rank lowest in priority.
Today, 15 years into an epochal drought, western states continue to operate as if there is more water flowing in the Colorado River than there actually is.
SUMMARY: The almond, America’s most popular nut and California's most lucrative agriculture export, is also a water guzzler. It takes approximately a gallon of water to grow a single almond. While prices are at record highs due to global demand, the Golden State is also in the middle of a historic drought, which is hurting farmers and residents. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): In California, Governor Jerry Brown called this week for ramping up fines for residents and businesses who waste water.
But in this fourth year of the drought, many are asking about the role of some agriculture and farming.
One of the chief targets is one of the state’s most popular exports. Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, went to see for himself. Part of our ongoing reporting “Making Sense” which airs every Thursday on the NewsHour.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): The almond. Revered in some cultures, reviled recently in ours.
Because of almonds, there’s no water.
JOHN AND KEN RADIO SHOW: The almond farmers are using more water than all the people in LA and San Francisco combined.
PAUL SOLMAN: The John and Ken Show, in Southern California, claims to be the country’s most listened to local talk radio program.
JOHN AND KEN RADIO SHOW: Half the almonds they’re shipping to China! And this is why we’re getting water meters and we’re getting lectured and scolded and we gotta take shorter showers and we can’t water our lawns. This is BS!
PAUL SOLMAN: It was Mother Jones magazine which first reported the stunning statistic: It takes over a gallon of water to grow just one almond.
The press has piled on since, portraying almonds as water wasters in the midst of near-epic drought. And it’s not just the almond, but every nut in the orchard.
SUMMARY: Could the technology used in Israel that successfully turned the country's water shortage into a surplus be implemented in California to ease the state's drought? KQED Public Media reporter Daniel Potter joins Alison Stewart via Skype from San Francisco to discuss.
ALISON STEWART, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Keeping Israel’s successful plan in mind, we wondered if or how Israel’s water technology, especially its use of desalination, could be put to use in drought-stricken California.
For more about that now, we are joined now from San Francisco by Daniel Potter. He is a reporter for KQED Science.
So, Daniel, it’s sort of obvious. People look and think, well, California’s is obviously right next to the Pacific Ocean. Why isn’t desalination a bigger part of the conversation about the drought? Why isn’t it?
DANIEL POTTER, KQED: I think the short answer is because desalination is a really — setting up a desalination plant is a very long-term process. It requires a lot of permitting and a huge amount of investment. So, setting up a desalination plant, a lot of people I have talked to have said there is a good chance that plant would not be finished until long after the drought ended.
ALISON STEWART: Are there desalination plant working, in progress in California? I know there are a couple that are in the process of being constructed, correct?
DANIEL POTTER: There are a few tiny ones that already exist and that are desalinating presently. The biggest one is in Carlsbad. It’s set to come on line probably this fall, and when it’s ready it will produce something like 7 percent of the water for San Diego County. That project is on the order of something like $900 million or maybe $1 billion.
SUMMARY: Over the past few years in Israel, the country's water shortage has become a surplus. Through a combination of conservation, reuse and desalination, the country now has more water than it needs. And that could translate to political progress for the country in the Middle East, one of the most water-stressed regions in the world. NewsHour's Martin Fletcher reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): New statewide curbs on water use are taking effect in California this week as it grapples with a major drought. The entire state is suffering from a severe dry spell, and the latest data show nearly 60 percent is experiencing exceptional drought.
As the debate about conservation moves to underground water, scientists and politicians are trying to remedy the situation with research and new rules.
NewsHour special correspondent Spencer Michels reports.
SPENCER MICHELS (NewsHour): In normal years, this outcropping is an island surrounded by water that flows downhill from Yosemite National Park. But this year, the island is gone, and Don Pedro Lake, in California’s Central Valley, is an ugly bathtub with an expanding ring around it. Most major California’s reservoirs are less than half-full.
Rainfall has been sparse, and economists say the state, which produces nearly half the nation’s fruits and vegetables, faces a drop of $2.2 billion in agricultural revenue, and the loss of 17,000 farm-related jobs because of the drought.
Some crops, 5 percent of the total, have not been planted or removed because there isn’t enough water.
Felicia Marcus heads the state agency responsible for dealing with the shortage.
FELICIA MARCUS, Chair, California State Water Resources Control Board: This is the most serious drought that we have had, not just in our own generation, but in our grandparents’ generation. It’s going to have a much greater impact because we have millions more people, much more farmland, agricultural production dependent on it, and more endangered fish and wildlife that don’t have the resilience they once did.
A new study by NASA and University of California, Irvine, scientists finds more than 75 percent of the water loss in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin since late 2004 came from underground resources. The extent of groundwater loss may pose a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought.
This study is the first to quantify the amount that groundwater contributes to the water needs of western states. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water management agency, the basin has been suffering from prolonged, severe drought since 2000 and has experienced the driest 14-year period in the last hundred years.
The research team used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission to track changes in the mass of the Colorado River Basin, which are related to changes in water amount on and below the surface. Monthly measurements in the change in water mass from December 2004 to November 2013 revealed the basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet (65 cubic kilometers) of freshwater. That's almost double the volume of the nation's largest reservoir, Nevada's Lake Mead. More than three-quarters of the total -- about 41 million acre feet (50 cubic kilometers) -- was from groundwater.
"We don't know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don't know when we're going to run out," said Stephanie Castle, a water resources specialist at the University of California, Irvine, and the study's lead author. "This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking."
Water above ground in the basin's rivers and lakes is managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and its losses are documented. Pumping from underground aquifers is regulated by individual states and is often not well documented.
"There's only one way to put together a very large-area study like this, and that is with satellites," said senior author Jay Famiglietti, senior water cycle scientist at JPL on leave from UC Irvine, where he is an Earth system science professor. "There's just not enough information available from well data to put together a consistent, basin-wide picture."
Famiglietti said GRACE is like having a giant scale in the sky. Within a given region, the change in mass due to rising or falling water reserves influences the strength of the local gravitational attraction. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE reveals how much a region's water storage changes over time.
The Colorado River is the only major river in the southwest part of the United States. Its basin supplies water to about 40 million people in seven states, and irrigates roughly four million acres of farmland.
"The Colorado River Basin is the water lifeline of the western United States," said Famiglietti. "With Lake Mead at its lowest level ever, we wanted to explore whether the basin, like most other regions around the world, was relying on groundwater to make up for the limited surface-water supply. We found a surprisingly high and long-term reliance on groundwater to bridge the gap between supply and demand."
Famiglietti noted that the rapid depletion rate will compound the problem of short supply by leading to further declines in streamflow in the Colorado River.
"Combined with declining snowpack and population growth, this will likely threaten the long-term ability of the basin to meet its water allocation commitments to the seven basin states and to Mexico," Famiglietti said.
The study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which posted the manuscript online July 24. Coauthors included other scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado. The research was funded by NASA and the University of California.
For more information on NASA's GRACE satellite mission, see: NASA Grace and University of Texas Grace
GRACE is a joint mission with the German Aerospace Center and the German Research Center for Geosciences, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. JPL developed the GRACE spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.
