A Colorado Parks and Wildlife officer heads out on patrol at Chatfield Reservoir. A $171 million redesign at the popular lake is now complete, providing more water storage for Front Range cities and farmers. Last week the Colorado Water Conservation Board approved a settlement that will pave the way for an environmental water plan to help offset the impacts of the new storage. Credit: Jerd Smith
Colorado water officials have reached a settlement removing one of the last barriers to a new environmental water program in Chatfield Reservoir.
The agreement settles a dispute among water agencies about who could use storage space in a special environmental pool in the reservoir.
The agreement is one of the final steps in the re-operation of the recreational site just southwest of Denver and comes after years of permitting disputes and lawsuits.
The federally owned reservoir was built in 1967 and was initially designed for flood protection in years when the South Platte River surged beyond its banks.
But as drought and climate change, as well as population growth, increased pressure on urban and agricultural water supplies on the Front Range, federal, state and local agencies began working to convert a portion of Chatfield’s flood storage to municipal and agricultural water storage. The reallocated storage space totals 20,600 acre-feet, of which 2,100 acre-feet is designated as the environmental pool.
The new storage will give south Denver metro area cities such as Highlands Ranch more protection against drought and diminishing groundwater supplies, and will give farmers on the Eastern Plains the ability to use stored water to irrigate crops late in the season when flows in the South Platte River run low. Water from the environmental pool will be used for releases to boost streamflows downstream, improving water quality and providing other environmental and recreational benefits. Downstream irrigators will also benefit from those releases.
The physical work on the re-operation was completed last year after the project won federal approval and a major lawsuit against it failed.
The latest legal dispute stems from a disagreement between Centennial Water and Sanitation District, which serves Highlands Ranch, and the Greeley-based Central Colorado Conservancy District, over whose water rights could be used to fill the environmental storage space and whose space would be filled first.
Centennial’s and Central’s boards must still approve the settlement, according to Lauren Ris, deputy director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which negotiated the deal. [Ris also serves on the Board of Trustees for Water Education Colorado, which sponsors Fresh Water News.]
“There was a disagreement among the parties about which water rights could be used,” Ris said, with ultimately Colorado Parks and Wildlife giving up some of its storage space to settle the dispute between the water agencies.
Central officials could not be reached for comment.
Centennial Water Resources Manager Rick McLoud said his agency had spent millions of dollars and more than 20 years to ensure that the new Chatfield plan would serve Highlands Ranch well, and that its ability to store water there would not get bumped too far down the priority list.
“We spent 27 years working to get it and more than $55 million. We did not want to lose out,” McLoud said.
Environmentalists, including the Denver Chapter of the Audubon Society, had long battled the re-operation of the reservoir because it inundated the existing shoreline and resulted in a loss of bird habitat, among other issues.
New habitat has been set aside farther downstream for birds and other species, and water from the environmental pool will help maintain streamflows and habitat as it is released.
Abby Burk, an Audubon Society official, said her group is still deeply worried about the loss of habitat.
But she said the fierce drought and ongoing shortages of water for environmental purposes make the Chatfield habitat water critically important.
“Chatfield was a hard go. We lost some strong riparian areas for birds,” Burk said. “But anytime we can have environmental benefits, particularly in a challenging drought year, we have to go for it.”
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.
Lake Powell is shown here, in its reach between where the Escalante and San Juan rivers enter the reservoir, in an October 2018 aerial photo from the nonprofit environmental group EcoFlight. Colorado water managers are considering the implications of a program known as demand management that would pay irrigators on a temporary and voluntary basis to take less water from streams in order to boost water levels in Lake Powell, as an insurance policy against compact curtailment. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT
The crisis on the Colorado River is not waiting for the state of Colorado to develop a program to avoid water shortages.
That was the message that Colorado Water Conservation Board members received from some commenters at their regular meeting Wednesday. The state water board is investigating the feasibility of a program known as demand management, which would pay irrigators on a temporary and voluntary basis to not irrigate and instead use that saved water to meet downstream obligations on the Colorado River.
James Eklund, former head of the CWCB and one of the architects of the Drought Contingency Plan, which allows for the possibility of a demand-management program, urged the board in the public-comments portion of the discussion to take swift action on what he called arguably the largest water crisis Colorado has ever faced.
“Time is not your or our collective out. If you wait, that’s a decision that you make to determine whether or not we have a hand on the steering wheel as we move forward with this river,” he said. “The waiting is, I think, folly.”
The state received the comments in response to a draft framework released in March of what a demand-management program could look like, with three tiers of implementation options, guiding principles, threshold issues, trade-offs and equity considerations. The framework matrix is based on the findings of nine workgroups assigned to tackle different aspects and challenges of a potential program.
In addition to written comments, Trout Unlimited Colorado Water Project’s director, Drew Peternell, also told board members at the meeting that the group has concluded that demand management should be one tool Colorado uses to avoid compact curtailment.
“We realize you are taking on some very tough issues, but I also want to urge you to pick up the pace,” he said. “Hydrology on the West Slope is not good. Additional shortages on the system are likely. They would be painful. Now is the time to get something done.”
Gail Schwartz, who represents the main stem of the Colorado River basin on the nine-member board, noted the gravity of the situation and invoked the warnings of 19th-century explorer and river runner John Wesley Powell, after whom the second-largest reservoir in the country and ground zero for many of the basin’s most pressing problems is named. In 1893, the prescient Powell said the American West was “piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.”
“I think that we are at this extraordinary moment in time,” Schwartz said. “This is a desert and we are going to empty every bucket, we are going to empty every river, and this is the inevitable unless we can develop the courage and the ability to step forward.”
The controversial water-banking program, which some fear could harm agriculture on the Western Slope, has sparked a lot of discussion but little agreement over the past two years. Some have expressed frustration with what they say is the state’s slow pace of a program rollout and want to begin pilot projects to test the program’s feasibility. Mark Harris, general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, urged the board in his comment letter to take aggressive action.
“The only way to really raise the important questions and to identify the positive and negative consequences of our actions is to try something,” Harris said. “There is no other way to advance the agenda without taking some well-considered risk.”
Water from the Government Highline Canal pours into Highline Lake in Mack. Water from the Government Highline Canal pours into Highline Lake in Mack. The Grand Valley Water Users Association – the group that regulates water flow in the canal – is calling for the state to take more aggressive steps to test out the concept of demand management. CREDIT: BETHANY BLITZ/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Drought Contingency Plan
Under the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan, signed by the seven Colorado River basin states, the Upper Basin (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming) can develop a program to send up to 500,000 acre-feet of saved water downstream to Lake Powell as a kind of insurance policy to bolster levels in the reservoir and help meet Colorado River Compact obligations. If the Upper Basin states were not able to deliver the 75 million acre-feet of water over 10 years to the Lower Basin (Nevada, Arizona and California), as required by the 1922 agreement, it could trigger what’s known as a compact call, which would force involuntary cutbacks in water use.
Over the past two decades, climate change has been robbing the Colorado River system of flows, and levels in the river’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, have plummeted to record lows. Federal officials have begun making emergency releases from Upper Basin reservoirs to prop up levels in Lake Powell and preserve the ability to make hydroelectric power. But some water managers say unless this Upper Basin reservoir water is replenished with big snow next winter, the releases may be a one-time, stopgap solution.
In addition to the urgency imposed by the worsening hydrology, the clock is ticking on the storage agreement laid out in the Drought Contingency Plan, which allows for the development of a demand-management program. It expires in 2026, when a new round of negotiations begins. All four Upper Basin states must agree to move forward with a demand-management program; Colorado cannot go it alone.
The “bathtub ring” at Lake Powell evidences lower flows coming into the reservoir. Federal officials are making emergency releases from upper basin reservoirs to prop up levels and Lake Powell and preserve the ability to make hydroelectric power. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM / ASPEN JOURNALISM
Decision making roadmap
Despite the sense of urgency expressed by some members, the CWCB did not approve the next step forward that was recommended by staff: adopting a decision making roadmap, which sets out a timeline for determining if demand management is achievable and worthwhile for Colorado. Tackling whether demand management is achievable was set to tentatively begin in September, and looking into whether the program is worthwhile for Colorado was supposed to begin in November.
Schwartz made a motion to adopt the roadmap but later withdrew it after some board members said it was too broad, left too many questions unanswered and did not incorporate feedback from the board.
“I feel this roadmap is incomplete, and until I see the roadmap with the comments from the board, I don’t feel comfortable moving forward,” said Jackie Brown, who represents the Yampa and White river basins.
This field in lower Woody Creek is irrigated with water that eventually flows into the Colorado River. The state of Colorado is exploring how to fund a program that would pay irrigators to reduce their consumptive use in order to send water downstream to a savings account in Lake Powell.CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
River District’s interests
Demand management was also a topic at the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s quarterly board meeting in Glenwood Springs on Tuesday. Amy Ostdiek, the CWCB’s deputy section chief for interstate, federal and water information gave a presentation on the state’s progress.
The River District, which represents 15 counties and advocates to keep water on the Western Slope, is conducting its own investigation into the feasibility of demand management through meetings with water users and plans to release a report of its findings. The River District has not yet taken a position on the potential program.
“My personal view is that we are going to keep pushing to protect the River District’s interests in a demand-management program, but we realize this is something necessary to move forward sooner rather than later,” said Peter Fleming, River District general counsel.
Board president Marti Whitmore, who represents Ouray County, asked staff to come up with a proposal with specifics on a demand-management program.
“The time is right to come up with something to put on the table for discussion purposes,” she said. “I’m just looking to break the logjam here, so we are talking some substance instead of just frameworks and process. It could be an opportunity for the River District to provide some leadership.”
CWCB board members plan to continue discussing demand management at an Aug. 18 workshop.
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.
Beaver dam on the Crystal River in Colorado. Beavers are being eyed as an important eco-builder because of their abilities to construct and restore natural wetlands, increasing storage. Credit: Sarah Marshall, Colorado Natural Heritage Program
By Jason Plautz
Colorado could need more than 750,000 acre-feet of new water supplies by 2050 to meet the demands of a growing population. But how to store that water, something historically done using dams and reservoirs, some massive in scale, isn’t clear. And cities, water planners and environmentalists, from Steamboat Springs to Sterling, are looking way beyond concrete to find new storage alternatives that minimize evaporative losses, enhance the environment, and provide security for the region in the face of chronic drought.
But the challenges are large. Increasing environmental and social concerns, limited geographic locations, and even more limited water rights have made water storage increasingly difficult. On top of that, long-range forecasting — to figure out how much water is going to be available to be stored — has become especially complicated due to climate change.
An April 2020 study published in the journal Science found that the American West’s current drought is as bad or worse than any in the past 1,200 years of tree-ring records. Ordinarily, storage would be the obvious solution to drought and dry years. You collect moisture in wet years and save it for times of need. But climate change has created a catch-22. Storage may be necessary, but it has become more challenging to build and less water is available to capture.
Dan Luecke, former director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Rocky Mountain office, says these challenges have upended a philosophy long built on risk analysis to one defined by “decision making under uncertainty.”
“For a long time, we’ve known there’s risk but we could look to the historical record to manage it,” says Luecke. (Luecke also serves on the Board of Trustees for Water Education Colorado, which sponsors Fresh Water News.) “With climate change, that record is called into question … the nature of the game has changed.”
The cascading challenges of climate change have led water managers to think creatively about alternatives to traditional infrastructure. Greeley, for example, replaced a plan to expand an existing reservoir with one that will store water underground. Front Range districts collaborated to reallocate the space in Chatfield Reservoir, a flood storage basin, raising the water level to add permanent water storage supply. As part of the Basin Implementation Plan for the Yampa/White/Green River Basin, water managers are exploring putting reservoirs high in the mountains to limit evaporative loss.
Decision making under uncertainty makes it all the more complicated for water providers to meet Colorado’s water needs and has caused many to reexamine what a smart storage project is made of — one that can help meet water supply goals for many water users while respecting the environment, one that is also acceptable to stakeholders, and one with minimum impacts so that it can make its way through the permitting process. Water managers are growing increasingly innovative, out of necessity, to develop water storage projects that will work.
Reservoirs under climate change
It’s not simply a matter of how much water is available to store. Everything from the location and size of reservoirs to the timing for capturing runoff and for making releases is being reviewed. Various climate models, including those used by the Colorado Water Conservation Board for state water planning, project warmer temperatures that will affect evaporation rates in rivers and reservoirs and seasonal shifts in precipitation, including reduced mountain snowpack and earlier runoff. Earlier and reduced flows could, for instance, necessitate dams releasing water earlier to meet demand.
Temperature rise, too, makes storing water a challenge. Any pool will lose water through evaporation, and more during hot, dry times, but the loss is worse for reservoirs at lower elevations with more exposed surface area. The science used to estimate evaporative loss is imprecise — estimates could be off by as much as 20% to 30%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which is conducting a study to refine its methods. Even so, a 2018 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society study estimated that losses from Lake Powell and Lake Mead could total as much as 15% of the annual upper basin allocation among Colorado River Basin states, or five to six times the annual water use of Denver. The same study said that summer evaporation rates may have risen by as much as 6% over the last 25 years.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment, published in 2018, states that climate change is fueling stronger storms that could overwhelm dams and infrastructure designed to capture more moderate storm surge flows. It’s also intensifying wildfires that destroy landscapes, load reservoirs with sediment, and threaten water delivery infrastructure.
The 2019 Technical Update to the Colorado Water Plan lays out a number of alternatives to new traditional storage projects, including rehabilitating existing infrastructure, reallocating flood storage to active storage, and using below-ground aquifer storage alternatives. While the options are vast, the update says that to meet the state’s goals, “at least some new large reservoirs are needed.”
But building those reservoirs also requires water to fill them, says Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. Water rights are not as easy to come by in an era of constraint. Any new water rights claimed today are junior in the state’s legal priority system, making storage necessary to capture peak flows after all senior water rights are satisfied. But as climate change shifts the timing and magnitude of peak flows, reservoirs may not be as effective a tool for managing junior water rights.
“A dam is a bit like opening a bank account, there has to be something to put in it,” Udall says. “Ultimately, everything bends to the hydrological realities of what the supply is.”
The jigsaw puzzle
The era of uncertainty doesn’t just make individual storage projects a puzzle — the long-range plans that help utilities figure out what storage they need are now a tangle of variables. Balancing climate-complicated precipitation projections with population and water use trends, regulatory changes, and competition for resources can make the standard planning process a head-spinning endeavor.
When Colorado Springs Utilities started updating its 2017 Integrated Water Resource Plan (IWRP), the utility wanted a “comprehensive view” that would take a hard look at risk analysis, says water planner Kevin Lusk. Colorado Springs doesn’t sit on a major river system and relies on storage in remote watersheds to manage its variable supply. In the early 2000s, the utility’s water yield saw a 600% difference between the driest and wettest years.
Realizing that a backward-looking dataset might no longer apply to a present and future defined by climate change, the utility took a state-of-the-art new approach to its planning process. Recently, Colorado Springs partnered with the consulting firm Black and Veatch, which expanded the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) to utilities to help them assess the complexities in planning. The machine learning tool can project thousands of possible futures using precipitation, temperature and hydrological factors, then help planners narrow down their range of possible options.
“As these plans get so big, it’s hard for the human mind to comprehend them,” says Leon Basdekas, a private consultant who worked at Colorado Springs Utilities, then Black and Veatch, designing and managing the utility’s IWRP. “This tool allows you to evaluate complex planning options in ways that would be impossible to do otherwise.”
Leon Basdekas, pictured beside Monument Creek, worked with Colorado Springs Utilities using a machine learning tool to help the water provider assess complex future water supply and demand scenarios and evaluate where new water storage could be beneficial. Photo by Matthew Staver
More than anything, Lusk says, the advanced modeling helped the utility gain a better appreciation for the full scope of storage and transmission. The “a-ha moment,” he says, is seeing how one individual new reservoir may not mean as much for the system as, say, shoring up existing pipelines to make the already-built system run more efficiently.
“We can’t just look at storage on its own, it’s a package deal with supply and conveyance,” Lusk says. “This is a complex jigsaw puzzle.”
Mitigation meets enhancement
To the north, the Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, has been moving through a decades-long process to obtain the necessary permits and to gain the favor of local stakeholders. NISP has been reshaped, with operational changes and environmental improvements now built in, in response to stakeholder concerns.
The project, spearheaded by Northern Water, if fully approved, will build two reservoirs, one northwest of Fort Collins off the Cache la Poudre River and another northeast of Greeley, to deliver nearly 40,000 acre-feet of water a year to 15 communities and irrigators along the Front Range. With the population of northern Colorado expected to double by 2050, backers say that such a large shared storage project is necessary to efficiently serve booming towns like Erie, Windsor and Severance. Through water exchanges with farmers — which will average about 25,000 acre-feet per year — and the purchase of conservation easements on farms, Northern Water says the project will also help farmers reduce the negative impacts of buy and dry by keeping water on farms while serving the growing Front Range population.
But supplying those growing towns will have impacts. NISP will involve constructing the 170,000 acre-foot Glade Reservoir (to accommodate the reservoir, seven miles of U.S. Highway 287 will be relocated) and the 45,600 acre-foot Galeton Reservoir. Northern Water will also build another forebay reservoir, five pump plants, and 80 miles of pipeline.
That kind of construction worries environmentalists and some communities, with major concerns centering on the impact of taking water out of the already-stressed Poudre River, reducing its crucial spring peak flows, which flush sediment downriver and restore habitat.
Several environmental reviews as part of the permitting process concluded that the need for storage was there, even after accounting for planned water conservation savings. With so many communities involved, scrapping the collaborative project, as some environmental groups advocated for, would leave them all competing for limited resources.
“I think quite a few participants who saw [NISP] as a [potential] future supply are now looking at this as the future,” says Christopher Smith, general manager of the Left Hand Water District and chairman of the NISP participants committee. “I don’t think anyone is left who is speculating on this. It’s necessary.”
So Northern Water started looking for what project manager Carl Brouwer calls “the wow factor.”
“We really changed our perspective to thinking about how we could put water back and be a part of the preservation of the Poudre River,” Brouwer says.
The Cache la Poudre River through Fort Collins encounters many small diversions and has historically faced dry-up points. Through the Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP), Northern Water, though diverting water upstream, has committed to stream channel improvements and revegetation, E. coli and nutrient reduction measures, year-round streamflows, and more. Photo by Flickr user JeffreyJDavis
Project proponents added an estimated $60 million in mitigation and enhancement measures, bringing the total estimated project cost to about $1.1 billion. The idea is that water would be released from Glade Reservoir year round and no water will be diverted to storage when flows dip below 50 cubic feet per second (cfs) in the summer and 25 cfs in the winter to eliminate spots where the river already dries up. Collection operations will be adjusted to keep peak flows in the Poudre River two out of every three years, and 90% of the time little or no diversion will take place during peak flows. Organizers will also build new fish passage structures and improve 2.4 miles of stream channel near a Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) fish hatchery north of Fort Collins.
The mitigation and enhancement plan received unanimous approval from CPW and the Colorado Water Conservation Board in 2017, and the Colorado Water Quality Control Division approved the project’s 401 Water Quality Certification in 2020.
Karlyn Armstrong, water project mitigation coordinator for CPW, says that the flow program will be a benefit to the river. “Currently the river goes dry in places — once the program comes online, the river will have water 365 days a year through the conveyance flow reach,” Armstrong says. “Aquatic life will benefit from sustained minimum flows.”
Critics remain. In August 2020, the Fort Collins City Council voted 5-1 to oppose the project, citing the potential loss of spring flows, and some environmentalists say communities should explore options with less of an environmental footprint.
But Brouwer says that the project, combined with Northern’s efforts on conservation and water exchanges, should set the new standard for infrastructure in the state with its environmental focus.
“What really changed was embracing the enhancement part of mitigation and enhancement. We can make it better,” Brouwer says. “We’ve set the bar pretty high and I do think this will become the norm.”
Addressing demand
Improved or not, some still say a large storage project like NISP shouldn’t happen at all. Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates has been a long-time opponent of NISP and in 2012 released an alternative plan it said could meet the needs of Front Range communities without the footprint of new infrastructure. The nonprofit’s “Better Future” alternative included conservation tools that would offset 20,482 acre-feet of use by 2060 and apply reuse technology to another 4,905 acre-feet. Combined with flexible water sharing agreements between agricultural users and municipalities and more thoughtful expansion onto previously irrigated agricultural land that could come with water rights, WRA says their plan reimagines what adding supply could look like.
“We know we need more storage going forward, but new storage doesn’t have to be connected to new development,” says Laura Belanger, water resources engineer at Western Resource Advocates. “Alternative supply portfolios that include reuse or conservation can mean storage that optimizes existing supplies more efficiently.”
WRA’s plan as an alternative to NISP was rejected in 2018, as were all other alternatives proposed during the public comment period, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued NISP’s Environmental Impact Statement, saying that these options “did not meet the project’s purpose and need and practicability screening criteria.” WRA says it relies on different calculations than the economic reports backing NISP and has continued to update its alternative in a series of recent comments on the NISP proposal.
Whether or not it could replace NISP, the “Better Future” model represents how some are thinking about limiting demand as a way to reduce the need for additional storage. Aggressive conservation has started to decouple water use from population growth in some cities across the West; a survey of 20 Western cities published in the journal Water found that between 2000 and 2015, total water use dropped 19% while populations increased by 21% on average. Denver Water has reduced per capita water use by 22% over the past decade.
Still, Belanger says that the strain on resources under the drought makes it necessary for all municipalities to embrace conservation.
“The more efficient existing and new development is, the more water you can have in the supply,” Belanger says. “Managing the demands of your community produces sustainable savings.”
Can restoration double as storage?
Some advocates say it’s time to think beyond cement and instead embrace natural watershed restoration as a storage solution.
In 2016, the California legislature declared that source watersheds would be considered “integral components of water infrastructure,” putting reviving watersheds on essentially the same level as building new dams or pipelines. While Colorado hasn’t adopted similar language yet (Montana is the only other state to do so), there is increased attention to restoring watersheds as an ecological tool with water storage benefits.
“Our water has so much to do, we should give it a longer reach and take advantage of all the benefits,” says Abby Burk of the Audubon Society. “When water is in rivers instead of sitting in reservoirs, there are so many more benefits that support healthy, thriving ecosystems.”
Snowmelt and storm events, for instance, flash quickly through incised streams that are disconnected from their floodplains. Healthier connected floodplain-riparian areas can restore plant life, recharge underground aquifers, preserve flows for aquatic species, and even reduce flood risk. Water in the ground also won’t evaporate like it does from reservoirs. However, it’s less clear if this restoration work can provide the kind of material storage benefits providers want to see.
“We’re careful about saying that restoration of floodplains and wetlands does not produce more water, but it can change the timing,” says Jackie Corday, a consultant working with American Rivers on healthy headwaters issues. “The water can be attenuated [by absorption into the restored floodplain], the runoff is slowed when it’s stored as groundwater, then it slowly gets released throughout the summer instead of all at once.”
A series of beaver dams span much of the Middle Fork of the South Platte River in the Placer Valley, pooling water and spreading the river’s flows. Beaver systems like these store water and provide refuge for other species, even during low flow and drought conditions. Photo courtesy EcoMetrics
Stretching natural runoff releases into the hot summer months could help farmers irrigate for longer growing seasons without storing water above ground, but little research has quantified that potential. Researchers are eyeing projects meant to mimic beaver structures to see how they change flows. A project that is currently underway to restore floodplains and wetlands upstream of Grand County’s Shadow Mountain Reservoir could offer a good model; preliminary assessments from that project are expected by the end of the year.
According to Melinda Kassen, senior counsel for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, restoration fits into a more natural philosophy of water systems. She hopes to see more municipalities begin to view natural infrastructure as just as valid as traditional infrastructure.
“You just have to remember that there is an alternative, and sometimes that’s hard when you’ve done something one way for 150 years,” Kassen says. “When we talk about water storage now, one of the first things we say is that we should be looking at green infrastructure instead of gray.”
Thinking system-wide
A bigger way of thinking is taking hold in the South Platte River Basin, home to approximately 70% of the state’s population and its largest projected water supply gap. The 2019 Technical Update to the Colorado Water Plan projects that the entire state could need more than 750,000 acre-feet in new municipal water to meet the growing population’s needs by 2050. The South Platte Basin Implementation Plan, completed in 2015 to inform the state water plan, showed that, with the basin’s population expected to reach 6 million by 2050, there could be a maximum annual water supply gap of 540,000 acre-feet.
The “status quo” strategy to fill that gap for cities is buy and dry, says Joe Frank, general manager of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District in northeastern Colorado. Frank has always worked on behalf of the water users in his district, but as water stresses increase, he is thinking more creatively about the future of agriculture by “providing water security for both” farms and cities.
There are more water rights on the South Platte River than there is water to fulfill them in most years, which is why buy and dry — where cities purchase senior agricultural water rights, drying up a farm and gaining the priority to divert that water when flows are low — has been attractive to municipalities. As an alternative, new storage might help. Some flows are available for capture, just not every year. The South Platte Storage Study, ordered by the Colorado Legislature in 2016 and completed in 2017, found that while flows were extremely variable between 1996 and 2015, a median flow of 293,000 acre-feet per year in excess of South Platte River interstate compact obligations crossed the state line into Nebraska. The amount of water that could be put to use in Colorado is much less, the study found, but additional South Platte storage could help with a variety of things — from compact compliance to water sharing agreements to river flows and to better utilizing reusable return flows from upstream municipalities. It also found that a combination of storage pools working conjunctively up and down the river could be more beneficial than individual reservoirs.
To explore ways to move beyond individual reservoirs to close the gap, Frank and other water managers throughout the basin are collaborating on the South Platte Regional Opportunities Water Group, or SPROWG, and working toward a system-wide approach to storage and water use.
In a feasibility study published in March 2020, SPROWG members identified four alternative concepts that could help close the supply gap without diverting additional water from the Western Slope or buying up valuable water rights from local farmers. The study analyzed the potential to store between 215,000 and 409,000 acre-feet of water in various generalized locations between Denver and the Nebraska state line. New storage would rely on available flows not obligated to existing water rights, water that can be reused, or temporary lease agreements with farmers. Stored water would then be used locally, transported through a pipeline for regional use, or exchanged between locations.
The idea, said SPROWG advisory committee member Lisa Darling, was to think regionally instead of by district, to move water where it’s needed at any given time.
“Maybe there was this sort of older water buffalo thinking in the past, but I think we know now that we can’t develop projects in a vacuum anymore,” says Darling, the executive director of the South Metro Water Supply Authority. (Darling also serves as president of the Board of Trustees for Water Education Colorado, which sponsors Fresh Water News.) “There’s a holistic system and that’s the prism we have to look through now.”
Dan Luecke, who fought multiple large infrastructure projects across the state, says he’s been encouraged by an increase in innovation where cities and growers are thinking more collaboratively on both storage and use. In an era of constraints, he says, it will take all users — even those across state lines — working together to think about creative and efficient approaches to the storage dilemma.
“If we could get cities and irrigators to agree to some kind of combined management scheme, we might need more storage but we could look at it in a more integrated and efficient context,” Luecke says. “It’s not about storage for this user or that area, it’s about an entire system that’s more flexible.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Spring 2021 edition of Water Education Colorado’s Headwaters magazine.
Jason Plautz is a journalist based in Denver specializing in environmental policy. His writing has appeared in High Country News, Reveal, HuffPost, National Journal, and Undark, among other outlets. He can be reached at jason.plautz@gmail.com.
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.
Las Vegas, known for its searing summertime heat and glitzy casino fountains, is projected to get even hotter in the coming years as climate change intensifies. As temperatures rise, possibly as much as 10 degrees by end of the century, according to some models, water demand for the desert community is expected to spike. That is not good news in a fast-growing region that depends largely on a limited supply of water from an already drought-stressed Colorado River.
With this in mind, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), the wholesale water provider to more than 2 million people in the Las Vegas metro area, is seeking to drive down daily per capita water use (now at about 112 gallons), through wide-ranging, innovative and permanent conservation methods. The goal is to reduce daily water use to 98 gallons by 2035, even as projections indicate per capita water use could increase by nine gallons a day as the climate warms.
Meanwhile, the Colorado River Basin plunges deeper into historic drought that seems certain to lead to water supply curtailments for Nevada and Arizona. Cities in the arid Southwest for years have sought to drive down water use to stretch supplies. Now, a warming climate, continued population growth and increased water demand have raised the stakes.
In response, SNWA aims to wring more water savings out of everything from ice machines and grassy medians to industrial cooling towers, an aggressive conservation effort that could provide examples for communities throughout the Southwest.
“We have been extremely successful helping the community embrace living in the desert and adopting a conservation mindset,” said Marilyn Kirkpatrick, chair of SNWA’s board of directors. “However, we have more work ahead to continue helping the community – especially new residents – use water as efficiently as possible.”
A warming basin
Arguably the hardest-working river system on Earth, the Colorado River helps meet the water needs of 40 million people, farms and ecosystems across a huge landscape. Premised on an annual flow that was overestimated and overallocated, the river is under extreme stress as climate change drives warming temperatures.
Drought in the Colorado River Basin has pushed the water level in Lake Mead, Southern Nevada’s main water source, to a historic low. (Source: Southern Nevada Water Authority)
According to the Bureau of Reclamation’s January 2021 Colorado River Basin SECURE Water Act Report to Congress, 2000 to 2019 was the driest stretch in more than 100 years of record-keeping. Average annual temperatures are creeping up and the past 20 years were likely warmer than at any time in the past 2,000 years, the report said. Of the 20 warmest years on record, 17 have occurred since 1994. The trend shows no sign of abating.
A warming climate has major implications for water supply in the Colorado River Basin. A warmer atmosphere sponges up more water from the land surface and water bodies, leaving less to run off or flow to downstream reservoirs. Everything – people, wildlife and vegetation – is left thirstier.
Writing in their 2020 report, Climate Change and the Aridification of North America, climate scientists Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall explained the phenomenon of aridification: “Soils dry out in a straightforward manner understood by anyone gardening on a hot day, and they dry out faster the warmer it gets.”
Overpeck, at the University of Michigan, explained that hotter temperatures are robbing moisture from the Colorado River Basin. The drought in the Basin, he wrote in a May 18 Twitter post, “is really an ongoing temperature-driven aridification, that if combined with a true precip-dominated megadrought, will get much worse.”
SNWA’s 2020 Water Resource Plan notes that the impacts of climate change on water supply can no longer be considered as something that might happen later. Instead, “evidence supports the fact that climate change is happening now and that it will have a lasting effect on the availability of Colorado River water supplies.”
Already in the midst of a decades-long drought, conditions in the Colorado River Basin dramatically worsened in 2021, with record low inflows into the anchor reservoirs of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Over the last 20 years, Lake Mead’s water level has dropped about 130 feet. As Mead’s level continues to fall, water supply reductions increasingly kick in.
Ensuring water security
Lake Mead, filled by Colorado River water, is Las Vegas’ mainstay. Ninety percent of the area’s water supply comes from the lake. Nevada’s Colorado River allocation is 300,000 acre-feet per year. In the past 10 years, SNWA’s take from Lake Mead has been about 445,000 acre-feet. However, factoring in the approximately 220,000 acre-feet of treated effluent returned to Mead each year means the average net consumptive use of Colorado River water has been 225,000 acre-feet.
A hotter climate is expected to drive up Southern Nevada’s per capita water use just as its primary water source, the Colorado River, is shrinking. Map: Water Education Foundation Created with Datawrapper
SNWA’s water conservation campaign has helped cut its Colorado River consumption by about 23 percent between 2002 and 2020 even as 780,000 new residents arrived.
But the thermometer is inching up. Clark County, home to about 75 percent of Nevada’s population, is projected to warm by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, according to SNWA. That means incorporating warming temperatures into water accounting with greater intensity and urgency.
“We have acknowledged that warming is going to go on in the valley for a very long time,” said Colby Pellegrino, SNWA’s deputy general manager for resources.
“Two years ago, we started taking a more serious approach to defining the conservation programs that would be necessary to meet our goal,” she said. “We have done a lot of work on what local temperature projections would look like in the future. While we’ve been making progress … there are going to be these upward pressures on demand occurring at the same time.”
Like some other Southwest cities that depend on the Colorado River, SNWA has an aggressive water conservation program that pairs education and outreach with financial incentives. The agency relentlessly pursues saving water wherever possible, from urging restaurant customers to forego the complimentary glass of drinking water (and all that gets saved as a result) to rebates for turf removal and ensuring the efficiency of all water-using machinery.
Colby Pellegrino, Southern Nevada Water Authority’s deputy general manager for resources. (Source: Southern Nevada Water Authority)
Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy in Phoenix, said Las Vegas and Phoenix have pursued similar approaches in that they are desert cities that emphasize certainty and the preservation of reliable water supplies.
“Both of these cities are held to a really high standard compared to other cities across the United States in terms of water security,” said Sorensen, who previously served as director of the city of Phoenix’s Water Services Department. “They are very risk-averse and spend a large amount of money and go through a very large effort to make sure that they are planning methodically for what might come.”
In Phoenix’s case, she said, that meant devising a water rate structure that charges users more for water in the summer than in the winter. Sorensen called it a “direct financial signal” for people to get rid of their lawns and lush landscaping without employing a rebate program. As a result, grass landscaping at single-family homes in Phoenix fell from about 85 percent in the 1970s to about 10 percent in 2021, she said, noting that turf for median strips has been prohibited since the 1990s.
One of the big water users targeted for reduction are the evaporative cooling towers that keep Las Vegas’ commercial and industrial buildings cool. (Source: Southern Nevada Water Authority)
Rewarding innovation
Southern Nevada’s hunt for water savings knows no limits. The uses may seem miniscule, but they add up. A glass of water not served at a restaurant saves about three gallons, when considering the amount used for dishwashing, ice production and filling the glass, said Patrick Watson, SNWA’s conservation programs administrator. SNWA subsidies for new ice machines at the region’s many golf courses saves 3 million gallons a year. The list goes on.
“We reward innovation,” Watson said. “If you have a project and it involves a new technology or an innovative way to save water, we’ll take a look at it.”
Case in point, the Ocean Spray bottling plant in Henderson. An engineer there devised a process in which industrial water is used three times during production before it gets sent out as wastewater.
“We never saw something like that before,” Watson said. “We studied it for six months, determined what the water savings was and ended up paying them an incentive.” Ocean Spray received $45,600 for saving 5.7 million gallons a year through that engineering change. Ocean Spray pursued two other water-saving innovations for which they were rewarded $27,000 by the agency, Watson said.
One of the big water users targeted for reduction are the evaporative cooling towers that keep Las Vegas’ commercial and industrial buildings cool. Transitioning that technology to other cooling processes such as air conditioning is one way to save water, more than two gallons per person per day, according to SNWA.
SNWA subsidizes tunnel washers, an amazing piece of hardware that uses less than a gallon of water per pound to wash 150 pounds of laundry in 90 seconds. Tunnel washers reduce the amount of water used per pound of laundry by three gallons, a considerable figure considering that commercial laundries in Las Vegas can wash as much as 1 million pounds of laundry each month.
The agency is now targeting homes that are on septic systems to connect them to the wastewater stream, where the effluent can be cleaned and reused or returned to Lake Mead.
Goodbye grass
One of the highest-profile conservation tactics is the war on turf. Outdoor landscaping is the single largest consumptive water user in Southern Nevada. Las Vegas’ desert environment is an unlikely place for lush, water-guzzling lawns more suited for the Midwest and East Coast. In the hot and dry West, average customer demand for water (mostly for outdoor irrigation) can be 50 to 80 percent higher than in the humid East, according to the Water Research Foundation. Limiting outdoor irrigation is critical in a region where 4 inches of rain is considered a good year.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority offers rebates for $3 for every square foot of grass replaced with water-smart landscaping. (Source: Southern Nevada Water Authority)
Grass requires about 73 gallons per square foot, per year, while drip-irrigated landscaping only consumes about 18 gallons, according to SNWA.
The agency for years has preached that turf only belongs where it’s regularly used, such as in parks and athletic fields. In 2003, local municipalities in Southern Nevada adopted ordinances that prohibited the installation of grass in front yards of new homes and limited backyard grass to 50 percent of the area. Grass was also prohibited in commercial developments.
For yards with existing turf, SNWA pays homeowners $3 for every square foot of grass replaced with water-smart landscaping. The money applies to as much as 10,000 square feet per site per year and $1.50 per square foot thereafter. It’s a popular program that’s removed more than 4,500 acres of grass, amounting to about a quarter of the turf in the Las Vegas Valley, saving about 11 billion gallons of water every year. SNWA also offers incentives for installation of artificial turf on athletic fields.
Southeast of Las Vegas, the city of Henderson adds funds to the SNWA rebate to promote turf replacement for swaths as large as 40,000 square feet in commercial, industrial and multifamily housing areas.
“We know it’s important to replace natural turf in areas where it doesn’t make much sense… so we built our program to accelerate conversions there,” Henderson’s conservation supervisor Tina Chen said on SNWA’s Water Smarts podcast. “We believe the additional incentive will entice more businesses to participate and streamline their operating costs.”
Henderson’s assistance means participants can receive as much as $120,000 for those large conversions.
A new law prohibits using Colorado River water to irrigate so-called nonfunctional (or ornamental) turf, indicated by the red circles in this photo. (Source: Southern Nevada Water Authority)
Now, the focus is on eliminating as much turf from Southern Nevada as possible, with an emphasis on reshaping parts of the urban landscape installed years ago and modeled after American communities much wetter than Las Vegas.
A bill passed by the Nevada Legislature and signed into law in early June will prohibit Colorado River water from being used to irrigate ornamental grass on non-residential properties starting in 2027. Of the more than 12,000 acres of turf in the Las Vegas Valley, 5,000 is considered nonfunctional.
“It’s only being walked on by the person that’s mowing it,” said Pellegrino, SNWA’s deputy general manager for resources.
Clinging to turf
While turf removal has been successful, enthusiasm for it may be waning, said Tom Warden, senior vice president with Summerlin, the largest master planned community in Nevada. Warden, a Las Vegas resident of more than 30 years, said a renewed emphasis is necessary because water rates are likely to jump and SNWA’s rebate will eventually vanish.
“It is safe to say there are folks who resist it,” said Warden, who interacts with the homeowner associations and sub associations that are part of the 22,500-acre Summerlin development. He said initially many people didn’t like the idea of not having turf everywhere, but they have come to accept the much-improved desert landscape designs.
“Southern Nevadans understand that we all have to embrace a more sustainable approach,” he said. “They are getting the picture. It’s the growth of stewardship.”
Still the conservation ethic has changed significantly since the days before the drought when Lake Mead was full and spilling water.
Back then, “nobody was thinking about conservation,” Warden said. “They were building other master planned communities that were wall-to-wall turf without a thought.”
But ornamental turf is still a part of many neighborhoods.
Water use in Southern Nevada is on the rise after years of decline. (Source: Southern Nevada Water Authority)
“Homeowner’s associations in Southern Nevada are still watering more than 64 million square feet of non-functional turf,” SNWA’s Watson said. “That’s close to five billion gallons of water every year to maintain grass for purely visual effect.”
SNWA’s turf replacement has reached residents but business participation has been more challenging, SNWA spokesman Bronson Mack said. Many owners of business parks, strip malls and shopping centers are out of state and disconnected from the community.
“They don’t hear the same conservation messages on a regular basis, and they are not attuned to desert living or the need to replace grass,” Mack said.
The road ahead
Climate change and the plummeting Colorado River, where a 20-plus year drought is forcing unprecedented adaptation measures, are pushing desert cities toward more aggressive water management. Anticipating drier times, SNWA in 2015 took the extraordinary step of building a third intake deeper into Lake Mead, at a cost of nearly $1 billion, to ensure it could continue to draw water from a dropping reservoir. Phoenix spent $500 million to move Salt and Verde River supplies to areas of its service territory that historically have been entirely dependent on the Colorado River.
The actions signal that both cities are able to ensure reliable water deliveries, come what may on the Colorado River, said Sorensen, with Arizona State’s Kyl Center. Increased demand management and extended use of recycled water are areas “where there’s still a lot that can be done.”
John Berggren, water policy analyst with Western Resource Advocates in Boulder, Colo., said that as municipalities realize their irrigation demand is going to go up because of warming temperatures and their water is becoming scarcer, they’ll begin taking a hard look at landscapes to see what’s expendable. It’s important to note that the effort doesn’t stop with getting rid of ornamental turf.
Berggren said more attention is being focused on gray water reuse, where types of household wastewater from dishwashers, sinks and the like can be used to irrigate outdoor landscaping.
“All communities around the West can find more ways to be water efficient, both on the indoor and outdoor side of things,” he said. “The banning of non-functional turf is a great step on an already well-developed conservation path for Nevada, but the path is long, and I hope they continue to push the envelope. I hope more states and more water providers take that step.”
Halting irrigation to ornamental turf can free up quite a bit of water that provides a cushion for future growth, Berggren said, and even allows for putting water back into rivers.
Kirkpatrick, chair of the SNWA board, said it’s up to community leaders to push the water conservation message and get people to participate in rebate programs.
“We’ve made a lot of very impressive gains over the past 20 years, but we have more work to do, she said. “Any efforts on the part of Clark County and other municipalities to implement policies that increase sustainability will help us meet the challenge together.”
This article was supported in part by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Firefighters clear debris around a water diversion structure in the White River National Forest as part of an effort to protect it from the Grizzly Creek Fire in 2020. Courtesy, City of Glenwood Springs.
Western governors told top federal officials that it was time to dramatically rework programs to help states recover from wildfires, thin overgrown, drought-ravaged forests, and protect mountain water systems.
Governors representing 17 states gathered last week for the virtual Western Governors’ Association conference, which included sessions on forest health, climate change and broadband initiatives, among other policy concerns.
Because the federal government owns vast swaths of land across the West, expanding shared stewardship programs, building in more flexibility to distribute more cash in new ways, and creating a new “green” timber industry to help thin ailing forests and reduce wildfire risk are all needed quickly, according to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who addressed a roundtable meeting with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.
“With the federal government owning a big part of our state, it’s a shared responsibility to address forest health and fire mitigation,” Polis said. “Shared stewardship agreements are a valuable tool. But these need to be reimagined and re-upped given this new normal.”
The Western Governor’s Association represents 19 western states, as well as Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.
The federal government owns roughly 30 percent of Colorado’s land and even more in other states, such as Idaho and Montana.
Thinning forests and protecting mountain watersheds is an often daunting, cross-boundary exercise between the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and state and local agencies.
Congress has been working on a massive infrastructure bill that has some bipartisan support and which will, if approved later this year, provide millions of dollars in new spending for roads, bridges and rural broadband networks, and may also include new funding to help deal with the devastation from wildfires across the West.
Governors made clear to federal leaders that forest health needs to be included in that definition of infrastructure, in part because of its importance to the West’s water supplies. In Colorado, for instance, approximately 80 percent of the drinking water for all residents flows off of forested watersheds.
“We have to have more treatment and to do that we will need more resources,” said Idaho Gov. Brad Little. “Hopefully we can get Congress to understand that as they are working on infrastructure [funding] for bridges and roads, we need to invest in our forests as well.”
Vilsack told governors he was hopeful that the new infrastructure bill as well as other federal legislation, such as the Great American Outdoors Act, would deliver funding and new programs that would help the West cope with a warming climate, water shortages and more frequent wildfires.
“We’re aware of the fire issue and we know the importance of having additional money on the treatment side, as well as ways to create more markets for the wood we produce [when forests are thinned],” Vilsack said.
“But I see a lot of opportunity, especially if we innovate and create voluntary programs and encourage people to take advantage of the income crops that are going to be created,” Vilsack said.
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.
This Parshall flume, which was installed in the Yampa River basin in 2020 and is shown in this August 2020 photo, replaced the old, rusty device in the background. State engineers are developing rules for measuring devices, which would apply to the entire Western Slope. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
By Heather Sackett
State officials are preparing for a future with less water by developing rules and guidance for water users to measure how much they are taking from streams.
State Engineer with the Colorado Division of Water Resources Kevin Rein is planning a rule-making process on measurement devices that includes stakeholder input. Although state engineers in each water division have the authority to enforce the requirement of measurement devices, Rein said drafting more formal rules through an administrative rule-making process, instead of an ad hoc push like in the Yampa River basin, would affirm that authority. Rules would also include specific technical guidance on the best types of flumes, weirs and meters to use for different types of diversions.
“The idea about rule-making is that we would have consistent guidance across the basin, developed through a formal process,” Rein said. “One thing I’ve found is that when you have stakeholder involvement in the development, then you have stakeholder buy-in during the implementation.”
Sprinklers and a ditch irrigate this section of Crystal River Ranch outside of Carbondale on Wednesday. According to state officials, about 95% of diversions in the Crystal and Roaring Fork River basins already have measuring devices. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Yampa/White/Green river basin
Division 6 Engineer Erin Light is still taking a lenient stance with water users in the White and Green river basins while the measurement rules are developed. In fall 2019, Light ordered nearly 500 water users in the Yampa River basin to install measuring devices to record their water use and initially received some push-back from agricultural water users unaccustomed to measuring their diversions.
In March 2020, Light issued notices to water users in the White and Green, but decided to delay sending formal orders after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the economy. Orders are still on pause while Rein’s office develops the measurement rules, which would apply across the Western Slope.
“It made more sense to wait for the measurement rules to at least get started, maybe not necessarily get completed, but allow Kevin to get out and start doing the stakeholder meetings and encourage these structures to be installed without orders,” Light said.
Compliance is gradually increasing across the basin, but at a slower pace than Light would like. In January 2020, 49% of diversions in the Yampa River basin did not have a measuring device; as of April 2021, 42% were still without one. White River basin compliance has improved from 83% without a measuring device to 68% over the same time period; water users in the Green have gone from 69% to 49%. As a whole, Division 6 has gone from 55% of diversions without measuring devices to 46%.
“I would have hoped that we would have had more compliance at this point,” Light said. “I look at those numbers and think we still have some work in front of us and how are we going to accomplish our goal, which is to assure that all of these structures that we maintain records on have operable headgates and measuring devices.”
In some basins on the Western Slope, nearly all diversions already have measuring devices. For example, in the Roaring Fork and Crystal river basins, about 95% of the structures have devices, according to Colorado Department of Natural Resources Communications Director Chris Arend. That’s because there has traditionally been more demand and competition for water in these basins, he said.
Scott Hummer, water commissioner for District 58 in the Yampa River basin, checks out a recently installed Parshall flume on an irrigation ditch in this August 2020 photo. Compliance with measuring device requirements has been moving more slowly than state engineers would like. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Water shortages drive measurement push
The push for Western Slope diverters to measure their water use comes down to impending water shortages. Division 6, in sparsely populated northwest Colorado, has traditionally enjoyed abundant water and few demands, but as climate change tightens its grip on the West, there is less water to go around. Calls by senior water users have gone from unheard of to increasingly common in just the last few years.
“We definitely have systems on call that have never been on call,” Light said of current conditions in the Yampa.
A call occurs when a senior water rights holder is not getting their full amount they are entitled to. They place a call with state engineers, who shut off more junior water rights users so the senior user can get their full amount. Under Colorado’s prior appropriation system, the oldest water rights have first use of the river.
“If you don’t have a measuring device during a call, we are shutting you off, period,” Light said.
As the threat of a Colorado River Compact call and the possibility of a state demand-management program grow, state officials say the need to measure water use grows, too.
A compact call could occur if the upper-basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — were not able to deliver the 75 million acre-feet of water over 10 years to the lower basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — as required by the 1922 compact. Colorado water managers desperately want to avoid this scenario, in part because it could trigger mandatory cutbacks for water users.
If a compact call were to play out, measuring devices would be crucial, because as Rein says, you can’t administer what you can’t measure.
“We need to better measure what has been diverted, so having measurement rules and therefore measuring devices in place will be critical to prepare for and implement compact administration, should it happen,” he said.
The state is also currently exploring a potential demand management program, which would temporarily pay irrigators to not irrigate and leave more water in the river. The goal would be to boost water levels in Lake Powell and avoid a compact call. But in order to participate in the voluntary program, feasibility of which is still being evaluated, irrigators need to first measure their water diversions.
“We would have to know how much they were using in the years before, before we can give them credit for not using it,” Rein said.
Sprinklers irrigate this section of Crystal River Ranch outside of Carbondale on Wednesday. State engineers are creating rules that will lay out guidelines for water users to install measurement devices for their diversions from the river. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Low interest in grant funding
One of the reasons Light originally paused enforcing the measurement device requirement in the White River basin was to give conservancy districts time to secure grant money to help irrigators pay for the potentially expensive infrastructure. But there was not much interest from water users in getting grant money, according to Callie Hendrickson, executive director of the White River & Douglas Creek Conservation Districts.
“We did not proceed with (securing grants),” she said. “We didn’t hear from very many people that they were seeking funding.”
The story was similar on the Yampa. The Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District had a $200,000 pot of money — half of it state grant money and half from the district — to reimburse water users for installing measuring devices. Irrigators can get 50% of their costs covered, up to $5,000 through the first tier of the grant program. According to Public Information and External Affairs Manager Holly Kirkpatrick, despite a very simple application process, the program has doled out just under $40,000 so far for about 20 projects.
“I had certainly hoped to have more interest in the first year of the program,” she said.
As Rein plans for webinars and meetings with water users later this summer and fall, the situation in the Colorado River basin grows more dire. The Bureau of Reclamation this week began emergency releases from Upper Basin reservoirs to prop up levels in Lake Powell to try to maintain the ability to produce hydroelectric power at Glen Canyon Dam.
“I recognize the value in having measurement rules as soon as possible because, yes, they would be extremely helpful if we need to take measures toward compact administration,” Rein said. “Having more data sooner rather than later is important.”
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.
Research technician and Grand County rancher Wendy Thompson collects hay samples as part of a far-reaching experiment to see if ranchers can fallow hay meadows and conserve more water for the Colorado River. Credit: Dave Timko, This American Land. Aug. 12, 2020
Colorado’s high altitude hay meadows, a significant water user in the state, could be re-operated to yield more than 40 percent in water savings, according to a new report.
The report is based on a major high tech research initiative to see if ranch-scale water conservation techniques, in which farmers are paid to voluntarily stop irrigating their fields temporarily, could produce enough saved water to help protect the Colorado River from unplanned shortages due to drought and climate change.
The research is one of several efforts to find ways to ensure demand on the Colorado River doesn’t outstrip supply, resulting in mandated cutbacks in water use in Colorado to meet the legal rights of downstream states.
The report, released June 24, looked at how much water was saved across more than 1,000 acres of hay meadows spanning several ranches near Kremmling last summer.
Ranchers stopped irrigating their hay meadows for several months, allowing the water to stay in the river rather than being diverted and applied to the fields. Because Colorado’s regulatory system only allows so-called conserved consumptive-use water to be legally transferred to another user, it was critical to the study to understand how much the hay crop would have consumed and how much remained in the river system by foregoing irrigation.
The experiment showed that the fallowing project generated 42 percent of such legally transferrable conserved water.
Credit: Chas Chamberlin
As a multi-decadal drought ravages the Colorado River system, many are focused on how to more closely balance its dwindling supplies with demands. Across the American West, irrigated agriculture uses roughly 80 percent of water supplies, so any breakthroughs in finding ways to maintain productivity with less water are critical to the river system’s long-term viability.
“It’s pretty promising,” said Alex Funk, an agricultural water specialist with the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The CWCB has contributed $750,000 to the research, along with other funders including American Rivers, Trout Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy. The Colorado River Basin Roundtable, a public group charged with helping determine how best to manage the Colorado River’s supplies within state boundaries, is also a funder.
Funk and researchers, however, are quick to point out that the savings achieved is only one part of determining how to help agriculture reduce its water footprint while continuing to thrive, raise hay and cattle and other crops, and feed Coloradans.
An equally important finding, according to researchers, is that they were able to accurately use satellite imagery and remote sensing devices to collect data from hundreds of sites at different elevations where different types of hay were being grown.
That data was matched up against traditional tools, which were manually installed and monitored last summer, in order to verify on the ground the remotely collected data.
This is key to the research because traditional, manual data collection is too costly to conduct and cannot produce the vast amounts of detailed data such studies require.
Colorado State University’s Perry Cabot, who led the research initiative, said the experiment confirms that broad-scale, satellite-based data gathering combined with remote sensing devices produces reliable results.
“We now have a spatial model we can use to do an inventory of [water] use across fields.
“Farmers are spatial people. When they look at a map and see a water use inventory of their fields, that resonates with them,” Cabot said. (Editor’s note: Cabot serves on the Board of Trustees of Water Education Colorado, which sponsors Fresh Water News.)
“This opens up our ability to start talking about numbers that we can all look at without having to get into ‘do we need another study in another river basin,’” Cabot said.
But agricultural producers say much work remains to be done before they could commit to such a water-saving initiative, in part because they have to ensure any payments they receive will cover the costs of lost hay production, as well as the cost of buying hay for their cattle in the three-year period after they begin irrigating again.
“The big question is the recovery,” Funk said. “How long does it take to scale back your crop base and your relationships with your market? Ranchers are not lining up to do this. The bigger questions are still unanswered.”
Don Shawcroft, a producer and immediate past president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, said ranchers continue to watch the issue closely.
“Producers have got to know more than they know now,” he said. “What does it mean when we force the use of less water than we normally would? For an individual producer, the question is, ‘Will I forego my ability to produce in order to have water for the residents of Colorado?’” (Editor’s note: Shawcroft also serves on the Board of Trustees of Water Education Colorado, which sponsors Fresh Water News.)
For this season and the next two summers, researchers, growers and conservationists will continue to monitor the hay fields, to measure their health, and to see what hidden effects of a summer of going without water may have on the ranches and the Colorado River itself, and the wetlands that thread these hay meadows.
Aaron Derwingson oversees agricultural water projects for The Nature Conservancy, which is one of the conservation groups helping fund the research initiative.
“We’ve got to find ways to reduce our water footprint to bring things into balance and there is a huge question about what that means for agriculture,” Derwingson said.
“Our interest is across all of these questions. How can it work for agriculture? How can it work for the environment and what does it mean for the system as a whole?”
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.
Wildlife biologist Bill Vetter watches and listens for birds in irrigated fields outside of Kremmling. Vetter is part of an avian monitoring program run by Audubon Rockies that aims to learn more about how birds use irrigated agriculture. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
By Heather Sackett
KREMMLING — In the gray light of dawn, hundreds of swallows darted over a pool of standing water in an irrigated field along the Colorado River. The birds were attracted to the early-morning mosquitos swarming the saturated landscape. Bill Vetter, a wildlife biologist with Wyoming-based Precision Wildlife Resources, methodically counted the birds. For six minutes, he marked down every bird he saw or heard at eight different locations across the ranch, 250 meters apart.
Vetter is part of an avian-monitoring program, headed up by Audubon Rockies, which aims to learn more about how birds use irrigated agricultural lands. In 2020, the fields near Kremmling where Vetter counted purposely did not irrigate as part of a state-grant-funded study on water use in high-elevation pastures. This year, irrigators are back to watering their usual amount and Vetter is tracking the trends in bird species and numbers.
This year, Vetter counted four or five additional species, including the yellow-headed blackbird, white-faced ibis and sora.
“I can say that for sure we got additional species this year that we didn’t have last year, and those species are largely associated with water habitat,” he said.
Across the Western Slope, birds and other wildlife have come to depend on these artificially created wetlands, a result of flood irrigation. But as the state of Colorado grapples with whether to implement a demand-management program, which would pay irrigators to temporarily dry up fields in an effort to send more water downstream, there could be unintended consequences for the animals that use irrigated agriculture for their habitat.
Learning more about how birds use these landscapes is a key first step, according to Abby Burk, Western rivers regional program manager with Audubon Rockies.
“Wetlands are the unsung hero for all the ecological services and functions they provide for wildlife,” she said. “Those low-field wetlands are good habitat for birds, for breeding, for migratory stopovers.”
In 2020, the bird count turned up 1,285 birds, comprising 39 different species, including great blue herons, meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, an osprey, a peregrine falcon, and several types of swallows, warblers and sparrows. The numbers are not yet tallied for this year, but the general expectation is that more water means more birds.
“Birds have adapted to how we have created these different habitat types,” Burk said. “We’ve really got to look at the larger effects of how we use water can impact birds and other wildlife. Where there’s water, birds also do thrive.”
This pool of standing water in a field near the Colorado River is a result of flood irrigation. It’s also great habitat for mosquito-loving swallows.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Water-use study
The seven ranches where the avian monitoring is taking place are part of a larger water study that is evaluating conserved consumptive use in the upper Colorado River basin. Consumptive use is a measure of how much water is consumed by thirsty plants. Conserved consumptive use is the amount by which consumptive use is reduced as a result of changing irrigation practices.
Researchers from Colorado State University are studying the impacts of using less water on the high-elevation fields in Grand County and how long it takes them to recover once water returns. Researchers hope to fill in a data gap about the impacts of reducing irrigation water on high-elevation pastures.
In 2020, some participating landowners did not irrigate at all and some only irrigated until June 15. This year, landowners reverted to their historical irrigation practices. Remote sensors and ground-based instruments are monitoring the difference in plant and soil conditions, and will continue to do so through 2023. Early results found that the plants used about 45% less water in 2020 compared with the previous four years.
The first phase of the project received a $500,000 grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) under its Alternative Agriculture Water Transfer Method program, which aims to find alternatives to “buy and dry” water transfers. The CWCB in September will consider another $60,000 grant request for Trout Unlimited to continue to do monitoring with a field technician.
This monitoring station is part of a research project by Colorado State University to track soil and plant conditions in irrigated pastures. The study aims to learn more about how using less water affects high-elevation fields. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Demand management
Although the project is not directly related to the state’s demand-management feasibility investigation, the results could have implications for any potential program that the state eventually comes up with.
“We are hoping all this information and research is going to be used down the road if a program does develop,” said Mely Whiting, Colorado water project legal counsel with Trout Unlimited. Trout Unlimited is helping to fund and implement the research project.
At the heart of a demand-management program is paying irrigators on a voluntary and temporary basis to not irrigate and to leave more water in the river in an effort to bolster levels in Lake Powell and help Colorado meet its downstream obligations.
Under the Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico) must send 7.5 million acre-feet each year to the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada). Failure to meet this obligation could trigger a “compact call” where junior water users in the Upper Basin would have their water cut off. (An acre-foot is enough water to cover one acre of land one foot deep.)
As rising temperatures due to climate change continue to rob the Colorado River and its tributaries of flows and increase the risk of a compact call, finding solutions to water shortages is becoming more urgent. Lake Powell, the upper basin’s biggest reservoir, is just under 34% full and projected to decline further. Demand management would let the Upper Basin set aside up to 500,000 acre-feet in a special pool in Powell to help avoid a compact call.
Some still-unanswered questions remain: How much of the conserved consumptive water from high-elevation pastures would actually make it downstream to Lake Powell? And how much would local streams benefit from the added flows?
“One critical part of what we’re doing is looking at the stream and saying: Do we see any changes from one year to the next? How much water would actually make it to the stream?” Whiting said. “We are measuring to see if there’s any distinction between the year the conservation practices were applied and the following year.”
Wildlife biologist Bill Vetter and Western Rivers Regional Program Manager with Audubon Rockies Abby Burk walk along an irrigation ditch in Grand County. An avian monitoring program aims to learn more about how birds use irrigated agriculture. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Trade-offs
The unintended consequences of different irrigation patterns under a demand-management program could be many and far-reaching. In 2018, the CWCB formed nine workgroups to examine some of these issues, including one that looked at environmental considerations.
In notes submitted to the CWCB last July, the environmental workgroup acknowledged there could be trade-offs, sometimes among species. For example, reducing irrigation and leaving more water in rivers would benefit fish and riparian habitats, but might negatively impact birds or other species that use wetlands created by flood irrigation. And with full irrigation, birds may thrive, but to the detriment of river ecosystems.
David Graf, water-resource specialist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, participated in the environmental-considerations workgroup. He said irrigated agriculture provides a lot of diversity in forbes, grasses and insects — good sources of protein for birds. But fish need water too. And in the summer and fall, the more, the better. There is an environmental value in irrigated agriculture, but only if the streams aren’t suffering at its expense, Graf said.
“There is a whole bunch of wildlife that is dependent on irrigated agriculture,” he said. “I think we all recognize the value that irrigated agriculture brings to wildlife, but it’s at the expense of fisheries in a lot of cases. There’s a little bit of a trade-off on a local level. I think we get the balance wrong sometimes.”
This pool of standing water in a field near the Colorado River is a result of flood irrigation. It’s also great habitat for mosquito-loving swallows. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Birds as indicator
Burk acknowledged that the usefulness of the bird count is limited by the absence of baseline data, because there was no bird monitoring on the fields before 2020. But trends are still important and, like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, birds can be an indicator of what’s happening on a landscape. Burk said she would like to do a bird-monitoring program on a larger scale at different locations around the Western Slope.
“As we learn more about how birds respond to water on the landscape, whether that’s in the river, in the fields, in the wetlands and adjacent habitats, it’s going to help give us a better picture of how the entire landscape and our natural systems are responding,” Burk said.
Colorado River water issues sometimes make for seemingly strange bedfellows. Nonprofit environmental groups such as Audubon are usually focused on keeping more water in the rivers, while irrigators traditionally take it out. In this case, interests align with keeping water on the landscape, with birds as the beneficiaries. Burk said those “us-versus-them” distinctions among water users are evaporating as people realize they are not facing the water crisis alone.
“When we drop the silos, drop the fences and walls between water users, we can see that this is one water — people, wildlife, the environment, the recreation industry — we all depend upon it,” Burk said. “So, how do we keep these natural systems so they can keep doing their job for everyone with reduced water? Water has to go further because there’s less of it.”
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 Werner will be planting a pistachio grove on his land near Visalia after he lost his hay crop due to lack of rain. Photo by Shae Hammond for CalMatters
By Julie Cart
Severe drought is gripping most of California, but its misery isn’t spread equally. While most of the state compares today’s extreme conditions to previous droughts, people in Tulare County speak of drought — in the singular, as in a continuous state of being.
“The drought has never stopped in north Tulare County. It never left,” said county Supervisor Eddie Valero. “Domestic wells are drying up at an alarming rate.”
The entire West is suffering from extreme dryness, heat and fire risk, and the small, rural towns of northern Tulare County, outside of Visalia, are caught in its vortex.
While officials around the state are devising strategies to restrict or conserve water, here in the upper San Joaquin Valley there isn’t much in the way of water to begin with. The spigot, for farms and for households, has been constricted to a trickle. For many residents, water comes in a bottle, delivered year-round by a truck from a county or social service agency.
An oft-repeated phrase in Tulare County is that there are more cows than people, and it’s true, thanks to a long tradition of dairy farms. This is a lonely place: about 92 people per square mile compared to the state average of 240.
Early settlers in this region were Okies fleeing the 1930s Dust Bowl, pushed by drought into a valley that is now suffering its own insistent drought. For many, it’s a choice to live with elbow room, out of the reach of nosy neighbors or the government’s long arm. For others, it’s simply the place where they grew up and love. And some are here because they are trapped in a financial rut with barely enough money to stay and too little to move away.
About 50,000 residents of Tulare County — 10% of its population — are designated as “water insecure,” which means their drinking water supply is unreliable or nonexistent, according to county officials. Many are Latinos, who make up two-thirds of the county’s population. Entire communities have no connection to water systems, wells are old and failing and many water sources are contaminated by fertilizers and pesticides.
During the last statewide drought, more than 2,600 dry wells were self-reported by residents in California, about 50% of them in Tulare County. Many were in a single town, East Porterville. The largest proportion of failed wells are for residential use, not agriculture, so for many families, just taking a shower means using buckets or hooking hoses to neighbors’ homes.
The drought is an awful burden here, but it’s not the only factor adding to the county’s misery index. Its homes have half the value of California’s average, and they have less access to broadband or computers. More than a quarter of the county’s residents live in poverty, almost twice the national average. Tulare County ranks at the highest extreme for social vulnerability, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention index that factors drought in its assessment.
For those whose fortunes depend on water, the debilitating drought of the last decade has been a bleak time.Suicide hotline numbers are listed on the webpage of Tulare County’s Agriculture Commission alongside the annual crop reports.
It’s a region that demands grit and rewards resilience. In the town of Orosi, a large sign in front of El Monte Middle School (Home of the Lobos) proclaims, “Let Obstacles Become Opportunities.”
A white pickup truck and a shovel
John Werner knew he was a bona fide farmer the first time he filled out an IRS Schedule F form, an option open only to those who farm as a business and can show a profit. He qualified for the first part: He grows olives, peaches, figs and hay on his own 60 acres. The profit part has proved more difficult.
“I grew up poor, out in the country,” said Werner, who lives outside of the small town of Seville in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “I thought the rich guys drove white pickup trucks and had shovels in the back.”
As a lifelong resident of Tulare County, Werner knew that scratching crops out of dry ground was never going to support his family of five. So he has worked as an adult education supervisor for two counties. “If I didn’t have a day job, I would’ve had to sell.”
Werner was lucky that his property sits on an aquifer so he drew water for his house and farm from two shallow wells. But his luck ran out, tracing the same path of the quickly depleted groundwater. His agricultural well went bad, and he drilled a new domestic well for his home that reaches as far down as it can go.
Today, the idea that water can be found at a 60-foot depth is not remotely feasible. He’s drilling a new agricultural well to bedrock, about 280 feet down. The digging and the pumps don’t come cheaply; they can set farmers back $60,000, and sometimes much more.
The unrelenting heat, which sucks moisture from the soil, makes matters even worse, negating even the most thorough watering. Hay can be dry-farmed, surviving on rain — if there is any. Werner has already lost his hay crop to drought this year.
“Normally I harvest around Easter,” he said. “The week prior I was standing out there and the hay, which should have been about three feet tall — in a good year I’ve had it up to five feet — was seven to eight inches. Turned into dust.”
Werner used groundwater from his house pump to survive the last drought, redirecting water from the laundry to keep the fruit trees alive. Limping along on subsistence amounts of water, the trees didn’t produce for three years, but they survived. In the meantime, there’s no crop to bring in money, but it still costs to pump water, prune the orchards and maintain equipment.
Werner is catching the tail of a pistachio trend, refinancing his property to raise money to put in the high-value trees, a decision he made before the last two dry years. Pistachios tolerate salty water and need less of it, but it’s costly to care for the orchards while waiting years for the nuts to come.
With less water for crops, farmers are struggling to keep orchards alive. Photo by Shae Hammond for CalMatters
“There’s going to be losers with this drought,” he said. “Those with money will hold on. The small farming operations will have to give way to the agribusiness outfits. They are more efficient than any of us are. I hope it doesn’t break the mom and pop farmers. It’s gonna affect a lot of poor rural communities, places like Ivanhoe and Seville, towns no one has ever heard of.”
Still, each young tree or tiny seed that’s put into the San Joaquin Valley’s dusty ground is a sign of optimism, a confident investment in the future. Farmers hoping for rain, even with no rain in sight.
“This is the place where we raised our kids. It’s our home,” Werner said. “Come hell or high water, I’ve got to plant.”
Water everywhere. Until there’s not enough.
Viewed through today’s lens of extreme water scarcity, it’s difficult to believe that the San Joaquin Valley has historically been notable more for its persistent and severe flooding. The backstory bears little resemblance to the Tulare region of today.
Until the turn of the century, steamboats plied Tulare Lake, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi. In the 1940s homeowners in Visalia complained that cars driving through flooded streets threw up wriggling fish onto front porches. Artesian wells bubbled with warm water day and night. The valley once held a vast sea. The Kern River flowed to San Francisco.
“We still have sea mammals of different types trying to come up as far as they can on the San Joaquin, sea lions in particular,” John Austin, author of Floods and Droughts in the Tulare Lake Basin, said in an interview. “In Tulare Lake we had sea otters, harbor seals, and sea lions. We had chinook salmon runs here. When the Spanish showed up they saw the Indians swimming under water after salmon.”
It was a land of plenty, with plenty of water. Farming began to take hold when people passing through the valley to make their fortunes in the California goldfields lingered on their return trip south, busted and broken.
In time those 49ers began the water engineering that would transform the San Joaquin Valley. In the late 1800s, dryland farming produced the nation’s largest wheat crop. Then, with the New Deal, rural electrification, and the invention of centrifugal pumps, more and more water was siphoned from vast underground stores.
Using a local invention known as the Fresno Pan, farmers scraped out canals to redirect river water to thirsty crops. By 1906, the Kings River, the biggest of the valley’s four major rivers, was irrigating more than a million acres. And the irrigated land made farmers rich.
“They grew plums, cotton, grapes and citrus,” said Austin. “It was possible because they had land, children for labor, sunshine. And now they had water.”
Neighbors helping neighbors — with water tanks and hoses
An employee from Bubba’s Water Truck Service unravels a hose in preparation to pump water into Luzvianey Gonzalez’s new home water tank in Madera. Photo by Shae Hammond for CalMatters
The road to Jim Myers’ house offers a clue as to what has been taking place in the wide fields for decades: Rusting farm machinery, odd parts and plows, are repurposed into yard art. There’s a small broken-down tractor that’s a centerpiece in a cheerful new garden Myers created.
Most residents in the area are farmers, or used to be. Roads are defined on both sides by irrigation ditches. Regimented rows of trees pass like a dizzying kaleidoscope. Shimmering heat rises.
It’s 106 degrees outside at Myers’ home and he motors out to meet the delivery of a 2,500-gallon water tank, a service facilitated by Self Help Enterprises, a non-profit that will pay to keep the above-ground tank filled with water.
Myers is in the driveway, sitting sidesaddle on a small red ATV that he’s using as a motorized wheelchair. A former mechanic, Myers lost his foot in a workplace accident and is on disability.
Like everyone in his community near Madera, just northwest of Tulare County, he and his wife get their water from a well. And, like many people, his wells have failed to reach the sinking water table.
His first well, sunk to 200 feet, gave out in the last drought, and his second, at 300 feet, went dry last week. “We went to turn the water on, and, boom, it just ran out.”
The new water tank, while welcome, is not a long-term solution. Some valley residents are attempting to finance their way out of the drought through second mortgages and bank loans. Myers, 62, said he has been trying to pay down his mortgage but will have to get a personal loan to dig a new well.
But that isn’t sustainable, either. Experts say the efforts to drill deeper and deeper wells are depleting aquifers, and in many areas eventually will reach water too saline to drink or irrigate crops.
While they waited for their water delivery, Myers and his wife made do with a neighbor’s garden hose jury-rigged to bring water into their home, where they’ve lived for 20 years. To avoid running up his friend’s bills, the couple used the water sparingly and only during times when the rates were lowest — between midnight and 4 am.
“Everybody is suffering, it’s why I have all this gray hair,” he said with a laugh.
The drought response of local non-profit organizations has ramped up significantly, with daily deliveries of bottled water, assistance in getting new wells and help in connecting to water systems.
Calls to Self Help Enterprise’s water hotline have quadrupled in recent months, said Marliez Diaz, who oversees the group’s water program, which is partially funded by state grants.
“I don’t think many of our residents have the option to leave,” she said. “They’re just very grateful that they have our tank water and they’re trying to conserve as much as they can. They’re just holding on. We’re kind of their last and only hope.”
Luzvianey Gonzalez, who lives in Madera, in one of the 350 households that have received a water tank from Self Help in recent months. She has been showering at her sister’s house since May, when her well dried up.
Luzvianey Gonzalez is relieved when water is delivered to her home. Since May, when her well dried up, she’s been showering at her sister’s house. Photo by Shae Hammond for CalMatters
It’s a commonplace workaround. Diaz has her own firsthand experience with water insecurity. Her family’s well gave out during the last drought and they, like the Myers household, relied on a garden hose for a time. The family went to a relative’s house to shower, cook and do laundry, then went home to sleep.
Like others in the region, the Diaz family couldn’t afford to put in a new well so her father took a job with a drilling company.
The stress of drought seems to pile heavily on top of everything else. Myers said two of his grown children’s friends committed suicide. He’d move away if he could afford it.
“I know it’s nature, but I’m just tired of what’s been going on,” he said.
No Plan B when the water’s gone
Tulare County supervisors are housed in a streamlined, modern building in Visalia, the county seat. The lobby displays various historical artifacts, among them a framed, yellowing 19th century map of the county, a lavishly illustrated sales pitch for the nation’s agricultural powerhouse that boasted: “Bounteous stores of water. Abundant streams of surface water and untold volumes subject to Artesian flow. The greatest Artesian Basin in the world.”
All true but, alas, all gone.
Denise England is attempting to get a handle on what’s left, mapping and measuring the county’s aquifers and wells. As water resources planning director, part of her job is to quantify the local water supply and use.
It’s surprisingly difficult. Given water’s central role, England is not happy to say that she’s still “getting my arms around” groundwater in a region where four counties share a single unconfined aquifer. What maps there are have proven inaccurate. This is not a region connected to networks of municipal pipes and treatment plants like much of urban California. Most communities get their water from wells, and there’s no reliable count of how many have gone dry.
“A lot of our wells have gone dry,” England said. “I don’t know what the future holds.”
Dryness here has become so omnipresent that England quickly reconstituted a drought task force disbanded after the last drought with hardly a noticeable pause. Emergency services instituted during the last drought remain in place.
“Even when the (last) drought ended we still had bottled water delivery, ran a tanks and hauled-water program and private well assistance,” she said. “We know communities are already struggling with this drought. A lot of people are white-knuckling it.”
The entirety of Tulare County is classified as being in extreme drought, and last month the Board of Supervisors declared a drought emergency.
“What that gets us, how that helps, we don’t know,” said board chair Amy Shuklian. “What’s our battle plan? It’s not a battle against any one entity, it’s a battle against the drought.”
In many places, the drought is already winning.
“You see people pulling up orchards, or just not farming land because they don’t have water anymore,” Shuklian said. “I know dairies that have sold out, and they’re planting trees where the cows were. The oldest dairy in the state sold everything last year. I have a friend who in the last couple of years sold off all his farming land and used the money and went into commercial real estate — yeah, out-of-state commercial real estate.
Signs of entrenched drought are everywhere, she said.
“These areas that have gone fallow, we’re seeing huge solar farms. We have the most fertile land around and it’s going to solar panels. But if you don’t have the water for the crops in this great fertile land, what do you do? You have to make a living.”
The drought-driven stressors are innumerable, county officials say: an uptick in the need for social services, mental health services and food assistance programs, while unemployment rises and the tax base falls. The region’s fiscal fortunes are intertwined with agriculture, a tenuous tether as drought intensifies.
County Supervisor Dennis Townsend said he’s heard estimates that as much as 20% of the region’s farmland is being fallowed because of lack of water.
“Agriculture is our economy. You harm it and you harm every industry in the valley,” he said. “It’s the probability of what’s going to happen that worries me. If we do lose farmland, what is Plan B?”
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.
In this era of climate change and water scarcity, one dry winter can change everything. As of this week, 95 percent of California is in a state of extreme or exceptional drought. Sierra snowpack is rapidly fading to rock, and reservoirs across the state are at a fraction of their normal levels. This has dire consequences for the state’s waterways.
In early June, water administrators who manage the San Joaquin River watershed announced that they will curtail flows from Friant Dam into the San Joaquin River until September, allowing it to dry up in a long section that environmentalists and federal water managers have worked hard over the past decade and a half to restore. The reduction in water doesn’t bode well for the river’s spring-run Chinook salmon, which spend the summer in the river below Friant Dam before laying their eggs in the fall. Adequate water is the key ingredient in an ambitious restoration program that, for the past 15 years, has sought to remake the river and bring back its vanished runs of Chinook salmon.
The loss of water impacts other animals as well. “The drying river is an unfortunate loss to the downstream reaches where riparian vegetation has started to take root and other non-salmon fish species have begun to repopulate the [once] dry sections,” said Don Portz, the manager overseeing the San Joaquin restoration for the Bureau of Reclamation. “These fish species have sustained intermittent drought conditions for centuries. But it’s man’s intervention that makes it more sudden and drastic—and that affects them the most.”
In a little over 350 miles—from its headwaters in the Sierra to its endpoint at the San Francisco Bay Delta—the San Joaquin River passes through some of the most intensively cultivated, hydrologically altered, and polluted landscapes in the world. In the few places where it runs freely in this terrain of 10,000-acre farms, it is a whisper of the wild river that, a century ago, could accommodate steamboats and held salmon runs so prolific that people living along its banks were said to have been kept awake at night by the sound of fins slapping on the water.
I wanted to see for myself what this intensively managed waterway looked like and how the restoration efforts had changed it, so last July I toured the San Joaquin with river guide and activist Tom Biglione. At the time, the state’s reservoirs and rivers were faring far better. There was enough water for us to traverse 25 miles by canoe. I discovered a river that is heavily damaged—particularly in its lower reaches—but that to my surprise, still has natural stretches that feel almost wild, evoking the faint promise of what the river could be like when the restoration project is completed—that is, if there’s the water to sustain it.
I met Biglione on a hot July morning at a dirt pullout on the outskirts of Fresno. A volunteer “river ambassador” for the Sacramento-based nonprofit Friends of the River, Biglione is a large man, 6’2″, with the baritone voice of a newscaster. He grew up near the San Joaquin’s banks, on a ranch in the town of Clovis. For the past five years, since retiring from the insurance industry, he’s led river trips to help the public understand the story of the San Joaquin. He believes that the more people get to know the river’s hidden beauty, the more likely they are to become advocates for its protection and restoration. “Most people assume that it is nothing but an agricultural ditch,” he said. “You’ll see after we’re done that this is not the case.”
The two of us hoisted his canoe from the top of his truck and carried it into a wide stretch of the river. The water was surprisingly cold and clear. Less than a mile upstream, the concrete curtain of Friant Dam towered above us—a stark reminder that the river here was carefully controlled and moderated by the Bureau of Reclamation.
We loaded our gear into the boat, and Biglione made a few short strokes, pulling us into the flow. Suddenly, the canoe caught the current and we charged ahead, toward a small rapid. “Draw right, draw right!” Biglione barked as the boat surged through a brief section of churning whitewater and into a stretch of calm, deep water. Below us we could see the outlines of darting fish. “We’re through,” he said, dragging an oar through the blue-green water.
The canoe glided downstream and into a lovely tree-lined section of the San Joaquin. The river here had the feel of a large creek rather than that of California’s second-largest waterway. Its flow during our journey, a modest 400 cubic feet per second, is a tiny fraction of what the San Joaquin carried before the great impoundment and irrigation projects of the 20th century. And yet it was a marked improvement of the San Joaquin of years past, which was reduced to little more than a trickle filled with agricultural pollutants. For years, one 60-mile stretch of the river (the same section set to go dry again this summer) had been erased entirely, its water siphoned away by unchecked agricultural withdrawals.
“It’s actually amazing that we can even get a canoe out here,” Biglione said. He mentioned the landmark 2006 settlement that forced the Bureau of Reclamation to provide enough water to sustain Chinook salmon populations downstream of Friant Dam and to restore critical sections of spawning habitat. “Before the Bureau of Reclamation was forced to put water back into the channel, this would have involved dragging the canoe through long stretches of river. A lot of time you’d end up in the blackberry bushes.”
Though pleasant, the section we were drifting through was a far cry from the upper San Joaquin River—an idyllic waterway, born of hundreds of small alpine streams, each fed, in turn, by rivulets of snowmelt. The river’s official birthplace is Thousand Island Lake, considered by many a backpacker on the John Muir Trail to be the gem in the ragged crown of the High Sierra. At 10,000 feet, one has the sense of being in a connected and ecologically intact system. “When you’re up there standing on the Sierra crest, looking down on the creeks feeding into the main stem of the San Joaquin, it all makes sense,” said Peter Vorster, a hydrologist with the Bay Institute who was involved in the 2006 settlement. “It’s easy to forget what happens to the river just a short distance downstream.”
Unlike the upper river, the lower San Joaquin leaves one with disparate images and impressions rather than a holistic sense of a connected and ecologically functional waterway. But here and there the river retains traces of its wild past. Ahead of Biglione and me, a great blue heron launched from the riverside vegetation. Tall sycamores and oaks shade the river and provide roosts for kingfishers and ospreys. These small riparian sections, which comprise critical spawning habitat for salmon, are also understandably coveted by people, many of them living in low-income communities lacking access to nature.
In one deep run fed by a fast riffle—a stretch that seemed particularly well suited to spawning salmon—we watched a group of roughly a dozen teenagers launch wildly from a rope swing into the river. Just downstream, beneath an overpass, three men in snorkels armed with spear guns patrolled the river. Further on, in a beautiful, slow-moving part of the river, we spoke with two bikini-clad women on horseback who coaxed their thousand-pound animals into the flow. “It’s so hot,” one woman said. “This is really the only place in town to escape the heat.”
Within an hour, the silhouette of the Highway 99 bridge loomed, and we paddled through a long stretch of slack water toward our exit point. As we dragged the canoe out of the water and onto shore, I told Biglione that I was sad to be leaving the river.
“I told you it was beautiful,” he said.
The next day, Biglione and I abandoned the canoe. To see the sections below the Highway 99 bridge downstream to the San Joaquin’s confluence with the Merced River, we drove a maze of roads winding through agricultural lands.
In one section accessible only by a dirt road running along the perimeter of a sprawling almond orchard, the river surged through heaps of garbage and homeless encampments. We pressed on, to the outskirts of the farming community of Mendota, where subsistence fishermen were defying warning signs—one read “Prohibido El Paso”—and casting their lines into murky irrigation canals.
The farther downstream we went, the more disorienting and dehumanizing the landscape became. On the outskirts of Los Banos, Biglione and I tried to decipher a knot of side channels, several of them completely dry, before realizing that the river’s flow had been shunted into an arrow-straight channel called the Eastside Bypass, which faded to a vanishing point in an endless sea of almond orchards.
On our last stop, near the San Joaquin’s confluence with the Merced River, we parked on the narrow shoulder of a two-lane highway as a steady stream of cars whooshed unnervingly past us. Biglione and I ducked onto a path littered with garbage and picked our way carefully down an embankment. Below, the San Joaquin slithered beneath an overpass, its flow almost imperceptible. The water was tinged a eutrophic green and smelled stagnant, almost dead. I could hardly believe this was the same crystalline, wilderness waterway I’d hiked and fished in the High Sierra numerous times over the years.
We walked over heaps of broken concrete to the river’s edge. On a piece of clear plastic lay a weathered knife and several mutilated baitfish teeming with flies. I told Biglione that it felt like we had stumbled onto a crime scene.
“It is a crime—a crime against nature,” he said. “The question is whether or not anyone cares if justice is served.”
In this series
Can we save the San Joaquin’s salmon?
Tour the San Joaquin River
Floating down the San Joaquin River
Jeremy Miller is a writer in Richmond, California. His recent work has appeared in publications including Harper’s, Orion, and Pacific Standard. Follow him on Twitter @jeremyj_miller.
