Utah’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which Colorado River officials have used twice during the past two years to add water to the rapidly deteriorating river system, likely only has enough water left for two more emergency releases, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Last summer, Reclamation ordered the release of 125,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge to help keep Lake Powell from falling too low to produce power. Then, earlier this summer, Reclamation announced that it would release another 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge and hold back 480,000 acre-feet in Powell instead of releasing it to Lake Mead, as it would normally do.
Another 30,000 acre-feet was released from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir last summer, which along with Flaming Gorge, New Mexico’s Navajo, and Powell itself, was supposed to act as a critical savings account for the river system.
The Colorado River Basin, which is divided into two regions, includes seven states: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming make up the Upper Basin, while Arizona, California and Nevada comprise the Lower Basin. Lake Powell serves as the largest water bank for the Upper Basin, while Lake Mead holds water for the Lower Basin states.
Colorado River Basin. Credit: Chas Chamberlin
But as drought and climate change continue to sap the Colorado River, even the water in the Upper Basin’s high elevation storage ponds, namely Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo, isn’t enough to protect the larger system, and those kinds of releases can’t go on indefinitely, said Jim Prairie, a hydrologic engineer with Reclamation.
“We could release from Flaming Gorge maybe two more times,” Prairie said at a conference convened by the Colorado Water Congress last week.
And Blue Mesa and Navajo, now at less than 50% of capacity themselves, are considered too low to provide much, if any, additional relief.
It is analyses like these that prompted Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton in June to order the seven basin states to find ways to come up with 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water next year, to inject into the reservoirs to keep them full enough to generate hydropower and supply water.
That means determining which water users and states are going to cut back use.
Tensions are rising as the federal government and the states continue to fail in their efforts to develop a concrete plan that will cut water use enough to come up with that 2 million to 4 million acre-feet.
“If we failed at anything in the [drought contingency planning done in 2019] it is that our vision was insufficiently dark,” said Wayne Pullan, director of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Region.
As the freefall on the river continues, veteran federal hydrologists and engineers at Reclamation are scrambling to come up with new ways to forecast what is going to happen, using, among other tools, a stress test that is based on recent observed inflows, rather than models.
Hydrologists are also using data that excludes measurements from extremely wet years back in the 1980s, and focuses instead on the most recent dry periods.
Reclamation estimates that Powell will receive just 6.2 million acre-feet of water from the mountain snows in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico in 2022, using its new forecasting models. That is far below the 9.6 million acre-foot average, a figure based on a 30-year average that includes extremely wet periods.
Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Right now, Powell stands at 3,533 feet, just 8 feet above the top of a buffer pool that must be maintained to keep the reservoir’s power turbines operating. Lake Mead is similarly low, with an elevation of 1,043.42.
Reclamation expects the reservoirs’ levels to continue dropping next year as well. “This could be where our hydrologies are going to stay,” Prairie said.
But it isn’t only the one-year outlook that is so troubling, Prairie said. It is the wildly varying temperature scenarios, low soil moisture levels, and shrinking snowpacks that are making it difficult to determine the best methods for keeping the giant river system, and Powell and Mead, from crashing.
Ironically, 2022 is shaping up to be slightly wetter than 2021, when inflow was just 3.5 million acre-feet, well below the 6.2 million acre-feet expected for this year.
Urging water users to move quickly to find ways to deliver and keep more water in the system, Prairie said, “Even if we have a good year next year, it is not going to save us.”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The Carlsbad Desalination Plant in Southern California is the largest such plant in the Western Hemisphere, providing 50 million gallons of desalinated seawater per day. Reed Kaestner via Getty Images
Coastal urban centers around the world are urgently looking for new, sustainable water sources as their local supplies become less reliable. In the U.S., the issue is especially pressing in California, which is coping with a record-setting, multidecadal drought.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently released a US$8 billion plan for coping with a shrinking water supply. Along with water conservation, storage and recycling, it includes desalination of more seawater.
Ocean desalination, which turns salt water into fresh, clean water, has an intuitive appeal as a water supply strategy for coastal cities. The raw supply of salt water is virtually unlimited and reliable.
Nearly 97% of the water on Earth’s surface is in the oceans – but turning seawater into fresh water is costly and energy-intensive, and it can harm marine life.
Nonetheless, current evidence shows that even in coastal cities, ocean desalination may not be the best or even among the best options to address water shortfalls. Here are the main issues that communities evaluating this option should consider.
Killing aquatic life
Scalable technologies for removing salt from water have improved steadily over the past few decades. This is especially true for treating brackish groundwater, which is less salty than seawater.
But desalination still can have major environmental impacts. Fish can be killed when they are trapped against screens that protect desalination plants’ intake valves, and small organisms such as bacteria and plankton can be sucked into the plants and killed when they pass through the treatment system. In May 2022, the California Coastal Commission unanimously rejected a proposed $1.4 billion ocean desalination plant in Huntington Beach, partly because of its potential effect on sea life.
Desalination plants discharge brine and wastewater, which can also kill nearby aquatic life if the process is not done properly. And generating the large quantity of energy that the plants consume has its own environmental impacts until it can be done carbon-free, which is still years off in most cases.
Unaffordable water from costly plants
Cost is another major hurdle. In most areas, the cost of ocean desalination is projected to remain considerably higher than the cost of feasible alternatives such as conservation for the next several decades – the timeline that utilities use when planning new investments. My colleagues and I found this in our research comparing water supply alternatives for Huntington Beach, even though we made favorable assumptions about ocean desalination costs.
Cost breakthroughs on major, market-ready technology in the near to medium term are unlikely. And desalination costs may increase in response to rising energy prices, which represent up to half the cost of removing salt from water.
Moreover, capital cost projections for desalination plants often greatly understate these facilities’ true cost. For example, the final cost ($1 billion) to build the ocean desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, which opened in late 2015, was four times higher than the original projection.
Our center has also explored whether piping in desalinated ocean water is a viable option for small, typically rural areas with public water systems or private wells that have run dry or are close to giving out. In diverse parts of California where this has happened, such as Porterville in the Central Valley and Montecito along the coast, the state is paying over $1 per gallon to truck in small supplies of bottled and vended water. That’s much higher than even the most expensive desalinated seawater.
As of Sept. 13, 2022, much of the U.S. West was in drought and projected to remain dry through at least the end of the year. U.S. Drought Monitor
In these cases, we have found that the relative economics and even the environmental impact may pencil out, but the politics and management of new pipelines do not. This is because water supply is typically governed locally, and many local areas beyond those benefiting would need to agree to a new pipeline from the coast.
More broadly, we find that proponents of these projects do not proactively pursue strategies that would make water access more equitable, such as designing utility rate structures that shield low-income households from higher costs, providing financial aid to small communities or consolidating water systems.
Better options: Conservation, reuse, storage and trading
In most places, several other supply options can and should be pursued in tandem before ocean desalination. All of these steps will provide more water at a lower cost.
The first and relatively cheapest way to address water shortages is by using less. Finding ways to get people to use less water could reduce existing demand by 30%-50% in many urban areas that have already begun conservation efforts.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power conservation specialist Damon Ayala inspects a sprinkler system operating in violation of a local water-saving ordinance, July 27, 2022. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Second, recycling or reusing treated wastewater is often less expensive than desalination. Technology and regulations in this area are advancing, and this is already making large investments in recycling possible in many arid regions.
Even cleaning up polluted local groundwater supplies and purchasing water from nearby agricultural users, although these are costly and politically difficult strategies, may be prudent to consider before ocean desalination.
The feasibility of desalination as a local supply option will hopefully change by midcentury as water scarcity problems mount because of climate change. For the medium term, however, ocean desalination is still likely to play a small role if it figures at all in holistic water strategies for coastal urban areas.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
PFAS chemicals seemed like a good idea at first. As Teflon, they made pots easier to clean starting in the 1940s. They made jackets waterproof and carpets stain-resistant. Food wrappers, firefighting foam, even makeup seemed better with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances.
Today, PFAS are pervasive in soil, dust and drinking water around the world. Studies suggest they’re in 98% of Americans’ bodies, where they’ve been associated with health problems including thyroid disease, liver damage and kidney and testicular cancer. There are now over 9,000 types of PFAS. They’re often referred to as “forever chemicals” because the same properties that make them so useful also ensure they don’t break down in nature.
Scientists are working on methods to capture these synthetic chemicals and destroy them, but it isn’t simple.
The latest breakthrough, published Aug. 18, 2022, in the journal Science, shows how one class of PFAS can be broken down into mostly harmless components using sodium hydroxide, or lye, an inexpensive compound used in soap. It isn’t an immediate solution to this vast problem, but it offers new insight.
Biochemist A. Daniel Jones and soil scientist Hui Li work on PFAS solutions at the Michigan State University and explained the promising PFAS destruction techniques being tested today.
How do PFAS get from everyday products into water, soil and eventually humans?
There are two main exposure pathways for PFAS to get into humans – drinking water and food consumption.
PFAS can get into soil through land application of biosolids, that is, sludge from wastewater treatment, and can they leach out from landfills. If contaminated biosolids are applied to farm fields as fertilizer, PFAS can get into water and into crops and vegetables.
For example, livestock can consume PFAS through the crops they eat and water they drink. There have been cases reported in Michigan, Maine and New Mexico of elevated levels of PFAS in beef and in dairy cows. How big the potential risk is to humans is still largely unknown.
Scientists in our group at Michigan State University are working on materials added to soil that could prevent plants from taking up PFAS, but it would leave PFAS in the soil.
The problem is that these chemicals are everywhere, and there is no natural process in water or soil that breaks them down. Many consumer products are loaded with PFAS, including makeup, dental floss, guitar strings and ski wax.
How are remediation projects removing PFAS contamination now?
Methods exist for filtering them out of water. The chemicals will stick to activated carbon, for example. But these methods are expensive for large-scale projects, and you still have to get rid of the chemicals.
For example, near a former military base near Sacramento, California, there is a huge activated carbon tank that takes in about 1,500 gallons of contaminated groundwater per minute, filters it and then pumps it underground. That remediation project has cost over $3 million, but it prevents PFAS from moving into drinking water the community uses.
Filtering is just one step. Once PFAS is captured, then you have to dispose of PFAS-loaded activated carbons, and PFAS still moves around. If you bury contaminated materials in a landfill or elsewhere, PFAS will eventually leach out. That’s why finding ways to destroy it are essential.
What are the most promising methods scientists have found for breaking down PFAS?
The most common method of destroying PFAS is incineration, but most PFAS are remarkably resistant to being burned. That’s why they’re in firefighting foams.
PFAS have multiple fluorine atoms attached to a carbon atom, and the bond between carbon and fluorine is one of the strongest. Normally to burn something, you have to break the bond, but fluorine resists breaking off from carbon. Most PFAS will break down completely at incineration temperatures around 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,730 degrees Fahrenheit), but it’s energy intensive and suitable incinerators are scarce.
There are several other experimental techniques that are promising but haven’t been scaled up to treat large amounts of the chemicals.
A group at Battelle has developed supercritical water oxidation to destroy PFAS. High temperatures and pressures change the state of water, accelerating chemistry in a way that can destroy hazardous substances. However, scaling up remains a challenge.
Others are working withplasma reactors, which use water, electricity and argon gas to break down PFAS. They’re fast, but also not easy to scale up.
The method described in the new paper, led by scientists at Northwestern, is promising for what they’ve learned about how to break up PFAS. It won’t scale up to industrial treatment, and it uses dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, but these findings will guide future discoveries about what might work.
What are we likely to see in the future?
A lot will depend on what we learn about where humans’ PFAS exposure is primarily coming from.
If the exposure is mostly from drinking water, there are more methods with potential. It’s possible it could eventually be destroyed at the household level with electro-chemical methods, but there are also potential risks that remain to be understood, such as converting common substances such as chloride into more toxic byproducts.
The big challenge of remediation is making sure we don’t make the problem worse by releasing other gases or creating harmful chemicals. Humans have a long history of trying to solve problems and making things worse. Refrigerators are a great example. Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon, was the solution to replace toxic and flammable ammonia in refrigerators, but then it caused stratospheric ozone depletion. It was replaced with hydrofluorocarbons, which now contribute to climate change.
If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that we need to think through the full life cycle of products. How long do we really need chemicals to last?
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The Aspen Consolidated Sanitation District started collecting wastewater samples in December 2021. The district was the first one to send out samples in the valley. CREDIT: CURTIS WACKERLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Consistent, widespread testing of the community’s wastewater for COVID-19 has been long-awaited as traditional public health metrics have struggled to fully capture the spread of the virus in the community’s transient population. Now, sanitation districts throughout the valley are participating in a state-sponsored tracking program, but local public health officials are grappling with interpreting the relative highs and lows, and how they compare to the picture captured by other metrics.
“Since April, we’ve seen a disconnect between our incidence rates, our positivity and our wastewater measurements,” Pitkin County epidemiologist Carly Senst told county commissioners July 26. “The wastewater is showing much higher prevalence than what we’re seeing come through.”
Wastewater testing can detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, as people infected with COVID can shed RNA — the genetic material from the virus — in their feces long before they show symptoms or get tested. This metric can help local public health departments better understand the spread of the virus in their communities, which has become more challenging with people increasingly using at-home tests, and especially in a tourism-oriented community such as Aspen where traditional metrics have often fallen short. Incidence rate, for example, counts cases among only county residents, who may comprise just a slice of the total daily population including workers and visitors.
But wastewater data can be challenging for local public health departments to evaluate because it is a new and imperfect tool and has its share of shortcomings.
“We are still in the process of collecting data to determine if we can be more specific with the relationship between wastewater levels and our incidence rate,” Senst said.
CREDIT: INFOGRAPHIC COURTESY OF THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION This infographic from the C.D.C explains how the wastewater monitoring program works.
A statewide window into wastewater
Pitkin County has been sending wastewater samples to a Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) lab in Denver since December, when the Aspen Consolidated Sanitation District (ACSD) became the first wastewater treatment facility in the valley to participate in the state’s COVID-19 Wastewater Monitoring Project. The project, launched in August 2020, is a collaboration between Colorado State University and CDPHE. It now incorporates data from 55 wastewater utilities across the state, including Aspen, Snowmass Village, Basalt and Glenwood Springs. (Carbondale doesn’t participate in the state’s program but sends samples to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
Besides knowing whether the virus is present, wastewater data has proven useful in informing public health departments quickly of when new variants are circulating in the community, according to Senst. The omicron subvariant BA.5 was first detected in the Snowmass’ sewage May 16, and it has since been found in Aspen’s wastewater since May 30, Glenwood Springs since June 6 and Basalt since July 11.
A CDPHE courier comes twice a week to each of the four participating utilities in the valley to collect the samples and bring them to a lab in Denver. That lab then analyzes the samples and reports the data on the CDPHE wastewater dashboard typically within four business days from when the state lab receives the samples, according to state officials. Courier times can vary across the state and analysis can take longer, which may result in reporting delays.
A CDPHE courier comes twice a week to each of the four participating utilities in the valley to collect the samples and bring them to a lab in Denver where samples are analyzed.CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF NATHAN NELSON/ACSD
Relative heights of peaks leave officials scratching their heads
This data shows that about 2.8 million copies of the virus were detected per liter at the Aspen treatment plant Jan. 6 — the highest detection level recorded at the Aspen facility since the monitoring program started.
This coincides with the highest case counts recorded locally as COVID spiked in Aspen with the omicron wave during late December and early January. According to CDPHE’s data, an average of 121 new cases per day (based on the three previous days) were reported in Aspen on Jan. 5 within the sanitation district’s boundaries, which extend roughly from the airport to Smuggler Mountain. This dropped slightly to 117 new cases on Jan. 6. Pitkin County’s seven-day incidence rate at the time was about 3,000 per 100,000 — the highest rate the county has ever recorded.
Senst noted that Aspen has a relatively small community with a large transient population of tourists and the commuting workforce. “So spikes don’t always mean that there is a higher incidence rate among the community (although it could),” she wrote. “It could also mean that there was a large event that brought a lot of people into the Aspen area.”
Glenwood Springs also saw its highest case counts of the pandemic during the winter omicron surge, according to incidence-rate data based on new infections among the resident population. The number of daily cases spiked to its highest level in the sewershed — the community area served by a wastewater-collection system — with about 70-72 cases Jan. 5 and 6, based on the average of the three previous days. The number of virus copies in the Glenwood Springs wastewater system also climbed, to a high of 300,000 copies per liter — well short of the concentration experienced by Aspen during its concurrent peak.
More recently, the sanitation district in Glenwood reached its record level, with 481,000 copies per liter July 28, while the number of reported new cases was low, hovering around a three-day average of 10 cases in mid-July.
Although the late July number was the highest level of copies the county has seen since January, when Glenwood Springs started sending samples, Garfield County public health specialist Carrie Godes said she didn’t think they could accurately say what caused that spike.
Garfield County epidemiologist Mason Hohstadt agreed with Senst that it’s still early in the process to draw any conclusions, but he also noticed a disconnect between the dropping number of reported positive tests and the recent spike in copies of virus in Glenwood Springs’ wastewater samples.
Wastewater measurements are only a guiding tool to know where we’re standing with the virus. “We are using it as a way of being able to give people information at this point, especially going into the third year (of the pandemic),” Hohstadt said.
The four participating valley treatment plants all recorded high levels of virus copies about mid-July. Aspen and Snowmass recorded more than 1 million copies, Glenwood Springs was just shy of 500,000 copies, while Basalt spiked to 2.8 million copies per liter, or as much as Aspen during January’s omicron tsunami.
“We can’t always pin down why these types of peaks in the wastewater surveillance data occur, but the theory is that there was a higher level of disease burden during that ‘peak,’” Senst wrote in an email. “Was it from tourism or another source? We are not able to tell.”
Although an increase in COVID presence in wastewater may not be surprising as more tourists are coming into town and variants such as BA.5, which allows reinfections, keep spreading, the data collection is still new and requires more time for local public health to make heads or tails.
Since early this month, Glenwood Springs’ number of copies has ranged from about 20,000 to about 60,000. Aspen’s recent number of copies has varied between 301,000 and 386,000 so far this month, while between 242,000 and 305,000 copies have been detected in Snowmass Village’s sewershed.
In Basalt, a week after the 2.8 million peak in mid-July, wastewater data dropped to 371,000 copies on July 21.
Senst added that the data being collected now will help them better understand the peaks and valleys in future trends. “The more data we have, the better picture we are able to see,” she said.
The Aspen Consolidated Sanitation District recorded over one million copies of the virus per liter in mid July, but local public health officials are grappling with questions on what causes these spikes as they learn to interpret the new data.CREDIT: LAURINE LASSALLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Limitations of sampling the valley’s transient population
Wastewater measurement is only a snapshot of the presence of the virus in wastewater. One data point doesn’t necessarily indicate a trend as does a seven-day incidence rate.
The valley’s transient population remains an obstacle to determine disease burden on the community. When the lab publishes data after analyzing samples, a new wave of tourists may have already arrived and those who were in the valley the week before may have already left.
CDPHE officials confirmed that tourism and other factors may impact single spikes in smaller communities. “For example, a special event or a tour bus depositing waste into the sewershed can impact a sample. We’ll get occasional spikes, and this is why we recommend looking at trends rather than single data points,” state officials said.
Wastewater data is best used in combination with other metrics, including case numbers and incidence rate.
It is also worth noting that any residences or buildings with their own sewer system will not be recorded into the data, because wastewater measurements include only flow being processed through a participating municipal treatment facility.
Wastewater samples are not collected daily, the Pitkin County’s COVID update said Aug. 2. CDPHE may sometimes face delays in sample collection or data reporting, which can affect the ability of local public health departments to interpret accurate information from the wastewater monitoring program. “It takes a few weeks for everything to be processed, and sometimes the ‘peak’ has already passed by the time we get the data,” Senst wrote.
Even though Aspen wastewater treatment was the first in the valley to be part of the state’s program, facility manager Nathan Nelson wishes it had happened before people were vaccinated and boosted. “By the time they actually started testing in Aspen, very few people seemed to care.”
A more burdensome process for smaller sanitation districts
Although the wastewater collection process hasn’t impacted the operations of larger sanitation districts such as Aspen or Glenwood Springs, the task has been more time consuming for smaller districts with limited personnel such as Basalt, which has been collecting samples since May.
If a facility has only one operator, that person may get busy and may not be present for the sample collection and has to cancel the pickup, resulting in no sample being sent to the lab. Smaller districts sometimes struggle to keep up with the sampling frequency and find entering information both on paper and online redundant and time consuming for staffers.
CDPHE officials said twice-a-week sampling is necessary to establish a trend and has always been a requirement of the program. The state is also working on modernizing their systems and transitioning to an online-only sample submission form. In the meantime, utilities still have to submit both a paper and an online form.
The testing process doesn’t cost anything to the districts, because it’s fully covered by CDPHE, which has received and budgeted approximately $9.4 million in federal funds to support COVID wastewater surveillance testing from January 2021 through at least July 2023, state officials said.
CDPHE also shares its data with the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System. Colorado has been actively participating in the NWSS since January 2021, and the Carbondale Wastewater Department has been sending samples twice a week directly to the CDC since June 20.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
John McClow, left, moderates a panel on the Colorado River at the Colorado Water Congress summer conference in Steamboat Springs Thursday. From left: Becky Mitchell, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and commissioner of the Upper Colorado River Commission; Gene Shawcroft, Colorado River Commission of Utah; Tom Buschatzke, director, Arizona Department of Water Resources. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — Water managers in recent weeks have put forth plans for conservation aimed at addressing the water-scarcity crisis on the Colorado River. But the proposals, which are vague and voluntary and lack goals with numbers, will probably do little to get additional water into the nation’s two largest reservoirs with the urgency officials say is needed.
In June, federal officials said the seven Colorado River basin states had to conserve an additional 2 million to 4 million acre-feet and threatened to take unilateral action if the states didn’t come up with a plan within 60 days.
But the deadline came and went without a basinwide deal or drastic action by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, except to implement the next round of cuts already agreed to by the states in the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. As of Friday, there was still no plan from the lower basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — on which upper basin water managers say the bulk of the responsibility to conserve rests.
Golfers take shots on the green lawns of the City Park Golf Course in central Denver on Sept. 28 2020. Denver Water has signed an MOU to the Bureau of Reclamation committing to reducing water use.CREDIT: LINDSAY FENDT / ASPEN JOURNALISM
Cities say they will reduce
On Wednesday, a group of seven municipal water providers — Aurora Water, Denver Water, Pueblo Water, Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, Colorado Springs Utilities, Southern Nevada Water Authority and Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — sent a letter and memorandum of understanding to the Bureau of Reclamation pledging to be part of the solution by reducing their water consumption. They committed to expand water-efficiency programs and reduce nonfunctional turf grass by 30%.
The move was praised by environmental conservation group Western Resource Advocates as a good first step.
But the MOU does not include a specific amount of water savings from the municipalities. And although some urban water providers in the basin have been using less water in recent years even as their populations grow, it’s unclear if the new commitments will result in them diverting less from the Colorado River.
“They weren’t able to put numbers, they weren’t able to put dates, we don’t know how much they can actually save, but I’m glad they are saying we want to be part of the solution,” said John Berggren, a water policy analyst with WRA.
Berggren said any success of the measures will depend on the scale.
“If all these providers really scaled up their programs … with millions of dollars and dozens of staff, in a year or two, we could see fairly decent savings,” he said.
Even if the municipalities do conserve water, the amount of water they command is relatively small. Agriculture uses about 80% of the Colorado River’s allocation; in the state of Colorado, it’s roughly 86%.
This photo from December 2021 shows the famous “bathtub ring” at Lake Mead due to declining water levels. The lower basin states are planning to save water in the reservoir through the 500 + Plan.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
5-point Plan
James Eklund, a water attorney and former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, who was one of the architects of the Drought Contingency Plan, said water managers, including himself, have failed at getting more water into the system. He addressed a panel of experts at the biannual gathering of the Colorado Water Congress in Steamboat Springs on Thursday.
“If you turned off all the municipalities, you wouldn’t have the water necessary to solve this problem, so we have to deal with agriculture,” Eklund said.
Eklund also took aim at the upper basin states’ 5 Point Plan. The plan was the Upper Colorado River Commission’s response to the feds’ 2 million- to 4 million-acre-foot challenge and includes a plan to restart a program that would pay irrigators to temporarily leave more water in the river. Known as the System Conservation Pilot Program, it ran from 2014 to 2018. It’s still unclear how much funding the program would receive this time around or how soon Lake Powell could see a boost from it.
“Our 5 Point Plan doesn’t get it done in my opinion,” Eklund said.
CWCB director and panelist Becky Mitchell addressed the criticism that plans for restarting the SCPP don’t come with a specific amount of water or other details.
“Since this is a voluntary program, we cannot commit to any specific amount,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for us to say what we can do in a program that is voluntary, especially when we don’t know exactly the money that’s going to be attached to it, where exactly it would come from, when we can get it, when we can get it out the door. But it’s also dependent on what’s happening with hydrology and our snowpack and what’s available.”
Water levels were low at this marina on Lake Mead in December 2021. Some entities are pulling out of a voluntary agreement to leave up to 500,000 acre-feet in the reservoir.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
What has been done so far?
Last year, the Bureau of Reclamation made the unilateral decision to release water from upper basin reservoirs, including Blue Mesa in Gunnison County, in order to prop up Lake Powell and preserve the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. Reclamation also implemented a Tier 1 shortage under the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan, which lays out which lower basin entities will take cuts at which trigger elevations. Arizona bore the brunt of that with a 512,000-acre-foot reduction.
This year, as part of the Drought Response Operations Agreement, the Bureau of Reclamation is releasing more water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir and holding back water in Lake Powell, which together will boost the reservoir by nearly 1 million acre-feet.
But it’s still not enough.
On Thursday, Jim Prairie, an engineer and modeling expert with the Bureau of Reclamation, presented an analysis of water volumes needed for protecting the 3,525-foot elevation at Lake Powell and 1,020 at Lake Mead. Dropping below these levels could threaten hydropower production.
“As we start to drop below those, we are going to lose some of the buffering protection those major reservoirs provide,” Prairie said. “If 2023’s inflow is like 2022, the 11th driest year, we would still need an additional 2.5 million acre-feet on average to stay above those two buffers.”
On Aug. 16, the Bureau of Reclamation implemented the Tier 2A cuts under the DCP, which means more reductions for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico. California, which uses the biggest share of the Colorado River, will begin taking cuts in the next tier, when Lake Mead’s elevation drops below 1,045 feet, which could happen next year.
Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona Department of Water Resources and a panelist at Thursday’s Water Congress session, said the Colorado River needs leadership from state water managers, but also the federal government.
“We have to stop playing this game of chicken it seems we are in right now,” he said.
So far, it seems the only way to guarantee more water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is when the federal government forces it to happen. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton seemed to issue an ultimatum to the states in June, but when the states failed to reach a deal, there was no swift or strong action from the feds, except to implement the already-agreed-upon next round of cuts. Federal officials have also said they will study the feasibility of passing water through Glen Canyon Dam if levels drop below the hydropower intakes.
There are signs another much-celebrated but voluntary program known as the 500+ Plan, announced in December and designed as a way for lower basin water users to keep water in Lake Mead, is faltering. In Arizona, the Gila River Indian Community and the city of Tucson have said they will not leave part of their allocations of Colorado River water in Lake Mead after all, even though they previously agreed to do so.
Natalie DeRoock, senior public information officer for the city of Tucson, said city council members there voted 6-1 this week to order the city’s full 141,191 acre-feet of water in 2023 after it became clear that other stakeholders were not going to step up to give a little when it comes to Colorado River water.
Berggren said we are starting to see voluntary collaboration start to break down and that it might be time for federal intervention.
“Historically, the threat of the federal heavy hand has been enough to get the voluntary things to happen in this basin, and we have seen that not work this time,” Berggren said. “I think this is a time for strong federal leadership, and I would love to see Reclamation exert its authority and demand what has to happen to keep the system from crashing.”
Editor’s note: After publication of this story, Denver Water spokesperson Todd Hartman sent the following statement in response to the question of whether the pledge would result in less diversion from the Colorado River: “We believe these commitments, when realized, will have the effect of stretching our own water supply further, reducing diversions from the Colorado River. How much, if any, of this water ultimately makes it to Lake Powell depends on decisions and actions outside of our control. For Lake Powell to benefit meaningfully, we need collective action of all water users.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Two Gunnison River water districts in the headwaters of the Colorado River system are embarking on a $700,000 drought planning effort, aided by hundreds of thousands of dollars in new funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The Montrose-based Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, one of the largest suppliers of agricultural water in the Upper Colorado River Basin, will spend $400,000 to develop an action plan for dealing with the ongoing and future droughts, with $200,000 in federal funds, and matching funds from local sources.
The Gunnison-based Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District will spend $300,000 for a similar program, with $140,000 in federal funds, and another $166,000 from local partners, according to its application. The Upper Gunnison district is responsible for delivering agriculture water, but also serves the city of Gunnison and the town of Crested Butte as well as the ski area.
Reclamation granted this funding through its WaterSMART program. On Aug. 2 the agency awarded more than $865,000 in drought planning funds to water districts and agencies in five states, including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Oregon, as well as Colorado.
The seven-state Colorado River Basin is facing severe water shortages and is operating under a basin-wide set of state-level drought contingency plans. Those plans include water cutbacks for users in Arizona and Nevada, and possibly California in the Lower Basin, as well as emergency releases of water from reservoirs in the Upper Basin, including Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa. The Upper Basin includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Compared to the multi-million dollar state and federal efforts, the local WaterSmart grants are fairly small, but officials say they provide critical help in important areas and create opportunities to win matching funds from other agencies.
“This really helps because there is so much that has to be done,” said Sonia Chavez, general manager of the Upper Gunnison district. “And anything we can get will help us leverage funding to get more done. A couple of hundred thousand dollars really helps.”
Steve Pope, manager of the Uncompahgre association, said the money will go toward developing contingency plans and designing improvements to the association’s aging federal infrastructure on which it relies.
“Our infrastructure is extremely old,” Pope said. “Even though this grant is for planning purposes it will have a big impact on our system in the sense that it will allow us to best manage our water without having to make big infrastructure changes.”
Pope is responsible for delivering 500,000 to 700,000 acre-feet of water, through more than 700 miles of canals, laterals and drains, to farmers and some small towns in the Gunnison Valley.
Upper Basin water districts receive drought contingency funds
Both districts occupy key territory in the Upper Colorado River Basin, with the Gunnison district lying just above Blue Mesa Reservoir, and the Uncompahgre district lying below.
Blue Mesa Reservoir, Colorado’s largest water storage reservoir operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, has been hard hit by drought and by emergency releases of water to help stabilize Lake Powell.
Chavez said her small, largely rural district has never implemented a drought plan, in part because one has never been needed until now.
The new grant funds will allow it to better monitor and analyze its water supplies, develop ways to conserve water, and determine equitable ways for farmers and cities to use whatever water is available.
“If we get into a drought, how is my little community here going to get through that drought?” Chavez said, “and how could we better share the water we do have available?”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Colorado needs more reservoir storage and ways to manage urban growth in order protect its water supplies, prominent politicians said at a major gathering of water officials in Steamboat Springs.
“Water is central to our livelihoods and its increasing scarcity is a challenge of the first order for everyone who calls the American West home,” said Joe O’Dea, a Republican challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet for one of Colorado’s U.S. Senate seats.
O’Dea spoke, along with Bennet, Gov. Jared Polis, and republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl at the Colorado Water Congress’s summer convention. The Colorado Water Congress is a statewide association that represents water districts, utilities, environmental groups and tribal communities.
“You can’t solve our problem without talking about storage. We know this region is getting drier and large-scale weather events are coming at unpredictable times,” O’Dea said. “That makes it all that more important to store water resources whenever they do appear.
“But we need a more rational process to approving them. Chatfield took the better part of 23 years to permit a single common sense project. Environmental review and public comment are central to good decision making, but they shouldn’t take decades,” O’Dea said.
O’Dea was referring to the successful effort to convert some of the space in the federally owned Chatfield Reservoir southwest of Denver for storage rather than simply flood control, which was its mission when it was built in the 1960s.
Gov. Jared Polis, too, pointed at climate change as a key driver that will shape how Colorado and other states manage their water supplies in the coming decades.
“Over the past two decades we have faced forces that threaten our access to water. The chronic, extreme drought, the changing nature of precipitation across the West. These pressures threaten water security, not just of our farms, cities and rivers, but the entire region,” Polis said.
“As a headwaters state, our resources flow to 18 states and Mexico. The entire region relies on Colorado to be a good steward. We’re proud of that responsibility and we take that responsibility very seriously,” he said.
To fulfill that responsibility within and outside the state’s borders, Polis called for more major investments in water sustainability, citing as an example the $60 million that Colorado lawmakers approved this year to fallow land in the Rio Grande and Republican River basins to improve aquifer health and ensure the state can meet its obligations to deliver water to New Mexico and Texas, which also rely on the Rio Grande, and Kansas, which relies on the Republican River.
“As we look to the future of our state, we need to understand the connectedness of water to the many challenges we face,” Polis said. “We are facing consistent growth in Colorado. But we can’t afford the water profile of exurban sprawl. We need to grow in a sustainable way,” he said, citing the need to develop more housing that reduces Coloradans’ per capita water use.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl also called for more water storage and promised to limit federal intervention in Colorado’s water affairs, including negotiations over how to reduce water use among the seven states that rely on the Colorado River. These include the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.
“The Upper Basin states have done just fine working through water issues. But expanding water storage is a must … and we must go in a different direction [regarding federal permitting requirements],” Ganahl said, adding that she would push the federal government to streamline water project approval processes.
She also criticized the Colorado Water Plan, a multi-million dollar collaborative effort by the Colorado Water Conservation Board to ensure the states’ major river basins are able to plan for and secure the water they need. Ganahl said it was too expensive and bureaucratic and that the current work to update the plan, first approved in 2015, “misses the mark. As governor I would simply work to develop more water.”
Bennet urged the conference attendees to look ahead and continue the hard work that has already been done.
“The conditions are as dire as we’ve seen, and we have a very difficult negotiation in front of us,” he said. “The people in this room have stepped up and made sacrifices,” he said. “But we know temporary Band-Aids are not going to cut it. All parties have to live with what the Colorado River can provide. This is an opportunity to make decisions that will strengthen the West for the next 100 years and fulfill our responsibility to the next generation.”
Political pollster Floyd Ciruli said that so many candidates spoke at the water conference was an indicator of the national attention that Western water shortages are generating, and he gave the politicos credit for providing on-point suggestions for what could be done.
“All four of these candidates were ready for today,” Ciruli said. “All of them talked about water.”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Powerful storms across the South, following flash floods in Dallas, Death Valley, St. Louis, Yellowstone and Appalachia, have left cities across the U.S. questioning their own security in a warming climate.
Dallas was hit with nearly 15 inches of rain that turned roads into rivers and poured into homes starting Aug. 21, 2022. Neighborhoods in Jackson, Mississippi, were inundated a few days later as the Pearl River rose and a water treatment plant breakdown left the city without clean drinking water. In late July, extreme storms struck the mountains of eastern Kentucky, sending rivers sweeping through valley towns and triggering mudslides that killed more than three dozen people.
Floods are complex events, and they are about more than just heavy rain. Each community has its own unique geography and climate that can exacerbate flooding, so preparing to deal with future floods has to be tailored to the community.
I work with a center at the University of Michigan that helps communities turn climate knowledge into projects that can reduce the harm of future climate disasters. The recent floods provide case studies that can help cities everywhere manage the increasing risk.
Extreme storms in mountainous regions like eastern Kentucky can quickly funnel floodwater into valleys, creating different hazards than flatter cities would face from the same storm. Arden S. Barnes/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Flood risks are rising
The first thing the recent floods tell us is that the climate is changing.
In the past, it might have made sense to consider a flood a rare and random event – communities could just build back. But the statistical distribution of weather events and natural disasters is shifting.
What might have been a 1-in-500-year event may become a 1-in-100-year event, on the way to becoming a 1-in-50-year event. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 delivered Houston’s third 500-year flood in the span of three years. Ellicott City, Maryland saw catastrophic floods in 2016 and 2018, and the town flooded again in June 2022.
Basic physics points to the rising risks ahead: Global greenhouse gas emissions are increasing global average temperatures. Warming leads to increasing precipitation and more intense downpours, and this increases flood potential.
Communities aren’t prepared
Recent floods are revealing vulnerabilities in how communities are designed and managed.
Pavement is a major contributor to urban flooding, because water cannot be absorbed and it runs off quickly. Similarly, after a forest fire or extended drought, water runs off of soil rather than soaking in. This can overwhelm drainage systems and pile up debris that can clog pipes and culverts.
Failures in maintaining infrastructure, such as levees and storm drains, are a common contributor to flooding.
If the infrastructure is well designed and maintained, flood damage can be greatly reduced. However, increasingly, researchers have found that the engineering specifications for drainage pipes and other infrastructure are no longer adequate for the increasing severity of storms and amounts of precipitation. This can lead to roads being washed out and communities being cut off.
Even in a future with low greenhouse gas emissions, extreme precipitation events will be more likely in parts of the U.S. National Climate Assessment 2018
The increasing risks affect not only engineering standards, but zoning laws that govern where homes can be built and building codes that describe minimum standards for safety, as well as permitting and environmental regulations.
By addressing these issues now, communities can anticipate and avoid damage rather than only reacting when it’s too late.
Four lessons from case studies
The many effects associated with flooding show why a holistic approach to planning for climate change is necessary, and what communities can learn from one another. For example, case studies show that:
Floods can damage resources that are essential in flood recovery, such as roads, bridges and hospitals. Considering future risks when determining where and how to build these resources enhances the ability to recover from future disasters. In Jackson, an aging water treatment plant stopped working, leaving people without safe running water.
A crew inspects a levee constructed around a medical center to hold back floodwater from the Mississippi River in Vidalia, La., in 2011. Scott Olson/Getty Images
It is difficult for an individual or a community to take on even the technical aspects of flood preparation alone – there is too much interconnectedness. Protective measures like levees or channels might protect one neighborhood but worsen the flood risk downstream. Planners should identify the appropriate scale, such as the entire drainage basin of a creek or river, and form important relationships early in the planning process.
In the communities that my colleagues and I have worked with through the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessment center, we have found an increasing awareness of floods and, more generally, the challenges of a warming climate.
Many communities have some capacity to deal with weather-related hazards, but they realize that past practices will not be adequate in the future.
Tim Edwards, facility manager for the National Archives, with the flood control gate system that kept a 2019 storm from flooding the building in Washington, DC. Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images
We have found that by focusing on vulnerabilities, discussions about future climate risk become more real. Communities start to recognize the interconnectedness of zoning, storm drains and parks, for example, and the value of clearing of debris from stream beds. They also see the importance of engaging regional stakeholders to avoid fragmented and ineffective adaptation responses.
We use scenario planning to help officials examine several plausible climate futures as they develop strategies to deal with specific management challenges. Examining case studies and past floods provides a way to consider future flooding events from an experience base of known community vulnerabilities.
In most exercises I have participated in, local officials’ instinct is to protect property and persist without changing where people live. However, in many cases, that might only buy time before people will have little option but to move. Scenario planning can bring focus to these difficult choices and help individuals and communities gain control over the effects of climate change.
This article was updated Aug. 26, 2022, with flooding in Mississippi.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Canby Mountain, 13,460 feet in elevation, near Stony Pass in the San Juan mountains of southwestern Colorado is the headwaters of the Rio Grande. The 1,885 mile-long river flows to the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: Dean Krakel
Albuquerque, New Mexico — In late June, the mornings start out at 80 degrees but temperatures quickly soar past 100. Everywhere fields are brown and the high desert bakes in glaring sunlight. But there is one long, narrow corridor of green here: the Rio Grande.
Jason Casuga, CEO of the Middle Rio Grande Water Conservancy District, and Anne Marken, water operations manager, have been watching the river’s water gauges around the clock for days, knowing that entire stream segments below Albuquerque may go dry at any time. If rains come over the weekend, everyone will relax, at least for a while.
If that moisture doesn’t come, Casuga and Marken must move quickly to release to these dry stream segments whatever meager water they can squeeze from their drought-strapped system, giving the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation time to save as many endangered silvery minnow as they can from almost certain death.
“We only have so much time to start the drying operation,” Casuga said, referring to a practice where his district shifts water in its system so that Reclamation can rescue the fish before the stream goes completely dry and leaves them stranded to suffocate.
The Rio Grande Basin spans Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Credit: Chas Chamberlin
“If we don’t do it, you might see 30 miles of the entire river go dry. It’s stressful. We’ve been doing this controlled hopscotching for weeks now.”
The Middle Rio Grande district, created in 1925, is responsible for delivering waters to farmers as well as helping the state meet its obligations to deliver water to Texas under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact. It coordinates management activity with Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of engineers on a river system that includes five major reservoirs and hundreds of miles of canals.
A crippled river
The district’s liquid juggling act is becoming increasingly common, and it is painful for everyone to watch, from the 19 tribes and six pueblos whose homes have lined its banks for thousands of years, to the 6 million people and 200,000 acres of irrigated lands that rely on the river across the three-state river basin.
“The worry is heavy,” said Glenn Tenorio, a tribal member of the Santa Ana Pueblo north of Albuquerque, who also serves as the pueblo’s water resources manager.
The Pueblo of Santa Ana lies just north of Albuquerque on the Rio Grande. Credit: Creative Commons
Under the terms of the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas share the river’s flows before it reaches Mexico. They have watched drought cripple the river, with flows dropping by 35% over the last 20 years.
But unlike other Western states, in New Mexico water users share both supplies and shortages, and that’s a lesson other states might benefit from, experts say. In most Western states where the prior appropriation system, known as first-in-time, first-in-right exists, water users with younger, more junior water rights are routinely cut off in times of shortage, creating expensive, conflict-ridden water management scenarios.
Water scarcity grows
Still, in response to growing water scarcity, Texas sued New Mexico in 2013, alleging that groundwater pumping in the southern part of New Mexico was harming its own share of water in the river. After being heard briefly before a special master for the U.S. Supreme Court last year, the three states—Colorado is also named in the case—agreed to pause the lawsuit while they conduct mediation talks.
Whether the talks will succeed isn’t clear yet. In addition to the groundwater dispute, New Mexico owes Texas roughly 125,000 acre-feet of surface water from the river and, under the terms of the compact, cannot store any water in its reservoirs until Texas is repaid.
But there is some hope emerging, as Colorado embarks on a $30 million land fallowing program to reduce its Rio Grande water use and as New Mexico seeks new federal rules that will allow it to store more water and re-operate its federal reservoirs.
Abiquiu Reservoir, in northern New Mexico, is one of several that are being drained by the mega drought. Credit: Mitch Tobin, Water Desk, March 2022
Page Pegram helps oversee Rio Grande river issues for New Mexico’s Office of the State Engineer. Unlike Colorado, New Mexico has never had the resources to quantify its various water users’ share of the river. Until now, the state has survived on healthy snowpacks and summer rains.
Though the drought has lasted more than 20 years, in the last five years, Pegram has seen the system deteriorate significantly.
“We’re seeing a fundamental change in water availability,” she said. “Suddenly, everything is different. Temperatures are higher, evaporation is higher, and soil moisture is lower. It’s new enough that we can’t pinpoint exactly what’s happening and we don’t have time to study the issue. It’s already happened.”
In the beginning
The Rio Grande has its genesis in the lush high mountain tundra above Creede, Colo., flowing down through Monte Vista and Alamosa, making its way along Highway 287, crossing the Colorado state line as it flows toward Santa Fe and Albuquerque, then dropping down to the tiny town of Truth and Consequences before it hits the Texas state line. At that point it travels through El Paso and forms the border between Texas and Mexico until it hits the Gulf of Mexico.
It is in the headwaters region in Creede where the majority of its flows originate. And while the hay meadows outside Creede are lush, and the streams cold and full, water has become so scarce even here that if homeowners want to drill a water well, they have to buy water rights from elsewhere to ensure those farther downstream on the river have adequate supplies.
Visitors walk along the sidewalks and streets of Creede, Colo., during a summer rain on July 18, 2022. Creede came into existence during the silver mining boom of 1889. The nearby Rio Grande, which rises on Stony Pass in the San Juan mountains that surround the town, has played a key role in the area’s farming and ranching history. (Dean Krakel, Fresh Water News)
Zeke Ward has lived in Creede for some 40 years, and has served on citizen advisory boards that oversee the river, water quality, and mine residue cleanup efforts.
He said the headwaters area has largely been protected from the most severe aspects of the mega-drought gripping the Rio Grande Basin and much of the American West because there are few people here and 80% of the land is owned by the U.S. Forest Service.
Still, he says, the river is vital to the region’s small tourist economy. “We don’t have a ski area,” he said. “So we have to make a living in 100 days, and that’s not easy.”
Follow the river below Creede and soon you enter the San Luis Valley, where irrigated agriculture dates back at least to the 1500s and where the combination of drought and overpumping have sapped an expansive, delicate series of aquifers. So much water has been lost that the state has issued warnings that it will begin shutting wells down if the aquifer, which is fed from the Rio Grande and its tributaries, is not restored within 10 years.
Craig Cotten is the top Colorado regulator on the Rio Grande and has overseen state and community efforts to make sure Colorado can deliver enough water to fulfill its legal obligations to New Mexico and Texas.
Craig Cotten, Colorado’s top regulator on the Rio Grande, stands on a ditch that delivers water to New Mexico to help meet Colorado’s obligations under the Rio Grande Compact of 1938. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News
To do so, Cotten routinely cuts water supplies to growers, based on where they fall in the valley’s system of water rights. Right now, Colorado is meeting its compact obligations, but the cost to the valley is high and the cost of failure higher still.
“The farmers are struggling with reaching sustainability,” Cotten said. “If they don’t get there, wells will be shut down.”
But Cotten said he is cautiously optimistic that the Rio Grande can be brought back to health as the climate continues to dry out, in part because there are new tools to manage its lower flows more precisely, including sophisticated airborne measuring systems that show with greater accuracy how much snow has fallen in remote areas and how much water that snow contains.
Knowing more precisely how much water is in the system means the state can capture more when flows are higher, and see more accurately when streamflows will drop. Previously, snow-water estimates have varied widely, miscalculating by as much as 70% or more how much water is in a given mountain region.
In addition, this year Colorado lawmakers approved $30 million to begin a program that will pay San Luis Valley farmers to permanently fallow their lands, something that will relieve stress on the aquifer and the Rio Grande and which could stave off a mass well shutdown.
Plenty to learn
Cleave Simpson manages the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in Alamosa and is also a Colorado state senator.
He believes that the work on the upper Rio Grande holds important lessons for the three states sharing its water and others in the American West.
The people of the Rio Grande Basin have been living with whatever the river can produce for years now, and effectively sharing in any shortages. In addition, though the San Luis Valley aquifers are deteriorating, the farmers in the region have taxed themselves and used some $70 million from those tax revenues to fallow land, something that more and more experts agree will need to be done everywhere, including in the crisis-ridden Colorado River Basin.
“You don’t have very far to look to see your future on the Colorado River,” Simpson said. “Just look at the Rio Grande.”
With storm clouds looming over the distant La Garita mountains windrows of freshly cut alfalfa hay wait to be baled up on a farm near Center, Colo., on July 19, 2022. (Dean Krakel, Special to Fresh Water News)
Farmers in the San Luis Valley, including Simpson, are also testing new crops, such as quinoa and industrial hemp, which use less water than potatoes, a longstanding local mainstay.
“I don’t think I can keep doing what our family has been doing for four generations,” Simpson said. “I raise alfalfa because my dad and my grandpa did. But now I am raising 50 acres of industrial hemp for fiber … it certainly uses less water than my alfalfa crop.”
Daily prayers
The work in the San Luis Valley, including the new $30 million paid fallowing program, is a major step toward bringing the Rio Grande Basin back into balance.
And while “fallowing” is a term somewhat new to the water world, it is a management practice some of the oldest users of the river, its tribes, have practiced for millennia.
Tenorio’s family has lived in Santa Ana Pueblo for thousands of years. He said tribal members have learned to balance their needs with whatever the river provides. These days that’s not easy, but he said they focus on the future, to ensure their communities can grow and that their irrigated lands continue to produce the corn, melons, grains, beans and alfalfa that they’ve raised as long as anyone can remember.
“We only can do with what we’re given from Mother Nature,” Tenorio said.
Like other tribes in New Mexico, the Santa Ana Pueblo’s water rights have never been quantified, but because they are so old, they get their water first based on how much is available.
Looking ahead, Tenorio is hopeful that better coordinated use of New Mexico’s few reservoirs, as well as more efficient irrigation systems, will allow everyone to adapt to the drier environment.
“We pray every day for our farmers and everyone who lives on the river,” he said.
Near Wagon Wheel Gap, Colo., the Rio Grande flows through an area known as the Pinnacles. Wooden, numbered trout signs guide visitors through the Wagon Wheel Gap interpretive site. The Gap is one of the few places early settlers could find passage for wagons into the upper Rio Grande Valley. (Dean Krakel, special to Fresh Water News)
Unlocking manmade infrastructure
Casuga, of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, describes himself as the CEO of bad news. But he said he has some hope that the river can be better managed.
If new rules to operate the federal reservoirs are eventually approved, he says New Mexico could easily meet its water obligations to Texas. An effort is now underway in Washington, D.C., to make that happen.
“This river is highly developed from a human standpoint,” Casuga said. “We as men impact the river so we have to unlock this manmade infrastructure to help it.”
Until then though, the day-to-day reality of operating the river remains complex. In June, when the temperatures were soaring, the rain did come, but it offered only a brief respite for the Rio Grande.
This week, as the searing heat returned, the river began drying out, forcing Casuga and Marken to launch their elaborate hopscotch game again.
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
This reporting was made by possible by a grant from the CU Water Desk.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
A bridge and road submerged by floodwaters from the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Kentucky, July 28, 2022. Leandro Lozada/AFP via Getty Images
Flash flooding is a specific type of flooding that occurs in a short time frame after a precipitation event – generally less than six hours. It often is caused by heavy or excessive rainfall and happens in areas near rivers or lakes, but it also can happen in places with no water bodies nearby.
Flash floods happen in rural and urban areas, as in late July 2022 in St. Louis and eastern Kentucky. When more rainfall lands in an area than the ground can absorb, or it falls in areas with a lot of impervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt that prevent the ground from absorbing the precipitation, the water has few places to go and can rise very quickly.
If an area has had recent rainfall, the soil may be saturated to capacity and unable to absorb any more water. Flooding can also occur after a drought, when soil is too dry and hardened to absorb the precipitation. Flash floods are common in desert landscapes after heavy rainfalls and in areas with shallow soil depths above solid bedrock that limits the soil’s ability to absorb rain.
Since water runs downhill, rainfall will seek the lowest point in a potential pathway. In urban areas, that’s often streets, parking lots and basements in low-lying zones. In rural areas with steep terrain, such as Appalachia, flash flooding can turn creeks and rivers into raging torrents.
A home security video shows floodwaters rising rapidly in Waverly, Tennessee, in August 2021.
Flash floods often catch people by surprise, even though weather forecasters and emergency personnel try to warn and prepare communities. These events can wash away cars and even move buildings off their foundations.
The best way to stay safe in a flash flood is to be aware of the danger and be ready to respond. Low-lying areas are at risk of flooding, whether it happens slowly or quickly and whether it’s an urban or rural setting.
It’s critical to know where to get up-to-date weather information for your area. And if you’re outdoors and encounter flooded spots, such as water-covered roadways, it is always safer to wait for the water to recede or turn back and find a safer route. Don’t attempt to cross it. Flood waters can be much faster and stronger than they appear – and therefore more dangerous.
Building for a wetter future
Engineers design stormwater control systems to limit the damage that rainfall can do. Culverts transfer water and help control where it flows, often directing it underneath roads and railways so that people and goods can continue to move safely. Stormwater containment ponds and detention basins hold water for release at a later time after flooding has ceased.
Often the design standards and rules that we use to engineer these features are based on historic rainfall data for the location where we’re working. Engineers use that information to calculate how large a culvert, pond or other structure might need to be. We always build in some excess capacity to handle unusually large floods.
Now, however, many parts of the U.S. are experiencing more intense storm events that drop significant amounts of rainfall on an area in a very short time period. The recent St. Louis and Kentucky floods were both on a scale that statistically would be expected to occur in those areas once in 1,000 years.
With climate change, we expect this trend to continue, which means that planners and engineers will need to reconsider how to design and manage infrastructure in the future. But it’s hard to predict how frequent or intense future storm events will be at a given location. And while it’s extremely likely that there will be more intense storm events based upon climate projections, designing and building for the worst-case situation is not cost effective when there are other competing demands for funding.
Right now, engineers, hydrologists and others are working to understand how best to plan for the future, including modeling flood events and development trends, so that we can help communities make themselves more resilient. That will require more, updated data and design standards that better adapt to anticipated future conditions.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
