The waning health of the Colorado River is impacting Grand Canyon National Park/Patrick Cone
By Kurt Repanshek
Standing in the morning sun on the right bank of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, the gin-clear river jumps, leaps, and swirls through the rock gardens close to shore, belying its dwindling health. Most raft trips pushing off from the launch ramp just upstream pay me no concern, anxious to buck the rapids that make the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park renowned world-wide.
When the national park was established by Congress in 1919, there was no dam to slow the Colorado River as it poured out of the Rocky Mountains, sliced its way across the Colorado Plateau, and squeezed into a canyon with soaring ramparts of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary layers. Its ebb and flow were constrained only by the amount of snowmelt that came out of the high country each spring, and records show that the early 1900s, 1940s, and 1980s were particularly wet. But the past 60 years have brought development and climate change that have greatly changed the once-wild Colorado.
Today the river’s ill health starts nearly 700 miles away, at its headwaters on the western fringe of Rocky Mountain National Park. Metamoprhicallty, it goes from a nagging cough there to walking pneumonia in languid Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam. Then, figuratively and quite literally, it’s all downhill.
“The Colorado River is the lifeblood of a lot of things,” Jan Balsom, the chief of external communications and community affairs tells me the next day as we sit in the sun behind park headquarters not far from the lip of Grand Canyon’s South Rim. “It’s an economic lifeblood, but it’s also the lifeblood of the canyon. Some of the tribes refer to it as the backbone of their lives.”
All those aspects tied to the Colorado River are in jeopardy due to climate change and invasive species, a one-two gut punch conspiring to strangle the river in its own ecology. Death won’t come from drowning, but rather from choking on sand and vegetation, both native and invasive, that are a tightening noose around the Colorado’s neck.
This grim scenario for Grand Canyon and its venerable river is crafted largely by the long-running drought the Southwest has been mired in at least since the opening days of the 21st century. Particularly dry stretches from 2002 to 2005 and again from 2012 to 2020 have taken a dire toll on the watershed. Declining snowfall in the river’s headwaters has greatly diminished runoff into the river and Lake Powell, which is predicted to stand at less than 30 percent of full pool by September.
While the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the hydroelectric facility in the dam, has allowed roughly 8.23-million-acre feet of the Colorado River, on average, to flow through the dam and into the national park annually, that amount is expected to drop over the next two years by almost a million acre-feet due to reduced spring snowmelt. Look back over the past four decades and the river’s life has been staggered by drought.
“In ‘83, (the downstream release) peaked at around 93,000 cubic feet per second,” Balsom said. “Today’s peak flow is going to be around 22,000 to 25,000. Maybe we’ve had a couple high flows from Glen Canyon Dam that reached 45,000 (cfs). But it’s almost impossible now, with the lowered lake level, to even get to that level of flow.”
Those raging waters, along with giving the Colorado through the canyon its raucous personality, would carry sands and sediments along the way, materials necessary for building, and rebuilding, sandbars and beaches. But the recent years of diminished flows have greatly reduced the influx of sands and allowed vegetation to gain a foothold and then some. Most of the sediments that normally would be pushed downstream by the river are trapped behind the dam.
A Muted River
Today’s river is much different than the one Major John Wesley Powell and his crews battled in 1869 and 1871 on their historic river trips. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, who was with Powell on the 1871 expedition, noted the raging river in a passage of his book, The Romance of the Colorado River.
“Down, and down, and ever down, roaring and leaping and throwing its spiteful spray against the hampering rocks the terrible river ran, carrying our boats along with it like little wisps of straw in the midst of a Niagara, the terraced walls around us sometimes fantastically eroded into galleries, balconies, alcoves, and Gothic caves that lent to them an additional weird and wonderful aspect, while the reverberating turmoil of the ever-descending flood was like some extravagant musical accompaniment to the extraordinary panorama flitting past of rock sculpture and bounding cliffs.” – Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, The Romance of the Colorado River, An Account of the Second Powell Expedition Down the Grand Canyon in 1871.
The day before I met with Balsom, I met Matt Kaplinski, a senior research associate at Northern Arizona University who has been running river trips through Grand Canyon since 1987. He was about to shove off from Lees Ferry on a two-week science trip through the Grand Canyon. Standing by the river as crews worked to ready the rafts, he explained that reduced flows through the dam had deprived the canyon of massive floods of churning water that would scour the river channel, pushing sandbars back and forth and downstream, and ripping out vegetation just starting to root in the sands.
“Why those sandbars are about the same size or bigger than they were (in the 1990s) is because once the flows were restricted, vegetation has migrated and established down to lower elevations on the sandbars,” said Kaplinski. “And those big sandbars are covered in pretty dense riparian vegetation right now, which essentially locks in that part of the sandbar from being eroded by flows from the dam.”
Keith Kohl, a U.S. Geological Survey geodesist – someone who measures and monitors the Earth’s size and shape to exacting calculations — who was leading the trip, was blunt in his summation.
“It was only 20 years ago where the lake was full, where now we’re at 37 percent, or something like that at Lake Powell. That’s tremendous that you could lose that much volume of water in just two decades,” said Kohl against the whine of pumps inflating rafts. “It’s really surprising that all of this infrastructure could get to a point where it’s worthless.”
The ongoing drought has left most reservoirs in the Colorado Basin states below normal/USDA
When the 710-foot Glen Canyon Dam choked the Colorado River at Page, Arizona, in 1963, it was called both an “engineering marvel” and the cause of “some of the most extensive and persistent scars of large-scale environmental modification.”
Designed to create a massive reservoir holding 26.2 million acre-feet of water that for decades would slake the thirst of Arizona, Nevada, and California, the dam muted the river’s seasonal raging.
Prior to the raising of the dam, the river’s flow through the sinuous, nearly 280-mile-long canyon would average just under 8,000 cubic feet per second most of the year, according to data compiled by Kaplinski. But it would jump to more than 50,000 cubic feet per second for half the time in June when spring runoff peaked, and at least once every eight years there would be a deluge flowing at 125,000 cubic feet per second, the scientist’s research determined.
Historically, the greatest flood to roar through Grand Canyon came in July 1884. It was the result of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which cooled the planet and led to a substantial snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. When runoff arrived in 1884, a flow estimated somewhere between 199,000 cfs and 228,000 cfs raced through the canyon.
That flood was documented by “an older timer living at Lees Ferry, who remembered that his cat had to climb a cottonwood tree, a certain branch in the cottonwood tree, and he was able to point that branch out to USGS water staff in 1921, I think,” said Dr. Larry Stevens, senior ecologist for Grand Canyon Wildlands Council and a conservation representative for the adaptive management of Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. “They established that flow based on the elevation of that fork in the cottonwood tree at Lees Ferry.”
But even that flow was dwarfed by prehistoric floods approaching 500,000 cfs, said Stevens. “We did a paper in 1994, a paleo-flood analysis showing a flow of a half-million cfs there in the past, about 1,400 years ago,” he said. “And there were probably bigger flows than that as the glaciers melted off.”
But present-day, things changed drastically with the 1963 arrival of the dam, which corralled the huge outpourings that came with heavy snow years. While the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam and its hydroelectric facility with eight electric generators, has in recent years tried to mimic those natural floods through “high flow experiments,” they haven’t come close to replicating the pre-Glen Canyon Dam floods down the Colorado River. Indeed, in a brochure the bureau touched on the impacts the dam brought to the river:
“As a result of the construction and operation of Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River ecosystem below the dam changed significantly from its pre-dam natural character. Before the dam was built, the Colorado River was a sediment-laden river that fluctuated in flow according to the seasons, rainfall, and inflows from side canyons. Now, the water released from the dam runs clear and cold without the springtime floods that once transported sediment, built beaches, and provided habitat for native species. Downstream from the dam, a new ecosystem emerged consisting of a mixture of native and non-native plant and animal communities.”
Another result of the dam is that any pounding thunderstorm that crosses the region and flushes sand, rock, and water down tributaries, such as the Paria River that flows into the Colorado at Lees Ferry, and into the canyon might lead to navigational hurdles for rafters by thinning the depth of the river with rocks and sediments pushed in from side canyons.
In short, the approach BuRec takes to operating the dam’s hydro station for power generation appears to conflict with the mandate of the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992 to operate the dam in such a way “to protect, mitigate adverse impacts, to and improve the values for which Grand Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area were established.”
It’s debatable how closely BuRec has hewed to the act’s directive.
“You don’t get the large flows from the dam anymore. We can’t even get 40,000 cfs; we might be getting 33,000 cfs, which is really only a meter or two meters of height,” Kohl pointed out. “I really see a point in the future where some of these boats have a hard time getting through. … My point is that one of these side tributaries may spill in, but there’s not enough flow coming from the side tributary to flush the main stem, so you’re gonna keep getting large boulders into the river and there’s no ability to flush them out with a dam.
“When the lake was full, they used the bypass tubes in the dam, you could get it up to well, 90,000 (cfs),” he said. “Right now, we can’t get 33,000. And 33,000 isn’t going to move a meter-size boulder. So everything that’s coming in can’t be moved under the current powers.”
High flow releases through Glen Canyon Dam aren’t high enough to reflect historic flows through Grand Canyon/BuRec
But, Stevens told me, politics and the “law of the river,” which tries to balance the needs and demands of the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states that rely on the Colorado drainage, also factor into what BuRec can accomplish.
“I’ve been very impressed with their attention to that full phrase,” he said, referring to the act and BuRec’s efforts to live up to its directive. “The bureau is at least outwardly trying to coordinate discussion to facilitate, as much as possible, that mandate. But that mandate also includes the law of the river, which in many ways doesn’t much care about the environmental side of things.”
The multitude of interests linked to the water that flows down the Colorado has led to a 45,000 cfs cap on the high flows BuRec occasionally releases from Glen Canyon Dam, the ecologist said.
“The coupling of love of the river with Grand Canyon Protection Act means that the decision has been made not to throw too much water downstream that’s not being used to produce hydroelectric energy,” Stevens said.
Unfortunately, as Kaplinski noted, these lesser flows aren’t tearing out vegetation from the river’s sandbars and beaches. And while some of that vegetation is native, some isn’t. That growth also is affecting the look of the river corridor through Grand Canyon.
“The vegetation has been a pretty big change,” the Northern Arizona University scientist said. “People are very surprised when we report our results that the sandbars are as big as they were in 1990 or bigger, because the perception is that there’s not big open sandbars down here anymore as there were pre-dam. And that’s because they’re covered in vegetation, and it doesn’t look like a sandbar.”
Invasive tamarisk, a native to Eurasia and Africa that can push out native species and even alter wildlife habitat, according to the USGS, can be found in the canyon as well as native willows and Arrowweed. Mesquites also are descending lower into the canyon, in part because the disappearance of the massive seasonal floods allows them to take root, said Kaplinski.
Crews are brought down to the floor of Grand Canyon National Park to remove invasive vegetation by hand/NPS file
The overall impact of this vegetation is that it basically “armors” the sandbars, he explained, and that is narrowing, or choking, the Colorado’s channel in some places. It’s not unique with the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, said Kaplinski. “The Green River, Upper Colorado, Rio Grande, you’ll see that in a lot of places,” he said.
Under normal scenarios and high runoff, the rivers would rip out much of the vegetation and prevent vegetation-heavy sandbars from slowly constricting the channels. In Grand Canyon, that vegetative encroachment is being battled by park crews through the use of “tamarisk beetles” that weaken the trees by eating its leaves and physically removing invasive species.
“The tamarisk beetle has pretty well taken care of many of those, which leaves us with stands of dead tamarisk, which then also have to be addressed,” said Balsom. “And then Arrowweed, which is a native, but it is taking over huge swaths of beaches. Pretty much our crews are going in and you have to repeatedly remove it. So, we’re working with our own vegetation crews, we’ve worked with some Native American youth crews and ancestral land corps crews, working with our tribal communities to target areas that they’re really concerned about, too.
“But we’ve got 277 miles worth of Colorado River in Grand Canyon, there’s a lot of beach. It’s hard to keep up with it,” she said. “So we’re targeting areas that have multiple resource values, recreational camping beaches being one, but also areas where we know that there are sensitive archaeological sites that require sand to be blown back up. And those of us who live in the West know that it’s windy a lot of the time, especially in the spring months, so that if you can actually open up those sandbars that wind will blow up and rebury those archaeological sites.”
A Dry Forecast
The Southwest’s ongoing drought doesn’t hold much promise for high flows through the canyon. Lake Powell is predicted to be less than a third full come this fall, a result of the fact that “(M)ountain snowpack, which is an essential source of water for Western rivers and reservoirs has declined by an average of 15-30 percent across the West since 1955,” according to Climate Central, a group of scientists and journalists that tracks the impacts of climate change.
Without an increase in snowpack and its seasonal runoff, or a massive release of water from upstream reservoirs Flaming Gorge and Fontenelle in Wyoming, Lake Powell will shrink to a “dead pool” elevation at which there’s not enough water to adequately power the hydroelectric facility, thus making the dam obsolete for generating power.
Seven states and Mexico comprise the Upper and Lower basins of the Colorado watershed/BuRec
“There’s still much discussion going on, and this is a very dire time for water in the Southwest,” said Stevens. “We’re down to less than two years of backup supply for 40 million people. The Colorado River provides that much support for that many people. And it’s not unexpected. The Bureau of Reclamation in 2012 published a report saying that there was almost a 20 percent chance of system failure at Hoover Dam (at Lake Mead National Recreation Area), not enough water to be able to deliver either water or power downstream.”
Looking upstream for a solution is not likely to be productive. While the Flaming Gorge and Fontenelle dams trap Green River water that could be passed on down to Lake Powell, the addition from a massive release would be trifling.
“Those are trivial reservoirs,” said Stevens. “There’s not enough water stored in those. Lake Powell stores, I think, 85 percent of the Upper Basin’s water.”
Back atop the South Rim, Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable shared his thoughts about the river’s health as we sat in a small amphitheater used for ranger talks.
“Our chief concerns are managing the resource in a way that protects endangered fish,” said Keable. “We have two endangered fish in the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon, the humpback chub and the razor back sucker. Our scientists work with US Geological scientists and Fish and Wildlife Service scientists and others to understand the impacts of the flow of water in the Colorado River on those species.
“But we also have other interests,” he continued, pointing to recreation and tribal concerns. “Our tribal partners refer to the Colorado River as the lifeblood of the canyon. They have perspective, which I find really interesting and helpful as superintendent to, to think about, which is that the canyon and the river are living entities and that we have a responsibility to them to protect and preserve them as living entities. And so that’s a concept that I’m still learning about, but very cognizant of as superintendent, that they’re vital to the to the success of this park.”
How much water the various stakeholders, including tribes, have to work with remains to be seen. Currently, a 1922 compact guides how much Colorado River water goes to Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and Lower Basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada) plus Mexico. Tribal rights call for 20 percent of the river’s flow to be diverted to those tribes in the Upper and Lower basin states with “quantified water rights.” But population growth and the ongoing drought have started talks about reassessing water distributions in and between those basins.
“Right now, there’s still a guaranteed amount of water from the Upper Basin to the Lower Basin, which is this 8.23-million-acre feet a year,” explained Balsom. “The Bureau of Reclamation is starting to evaluate the amount of water that’s going to come from the whole series of dams from the headwaters all the way down.
“Glen Canyon marks the dividing point between the Upper Basin in the Lower Basin. There was a compact written in 1922 that divided all of this stuff, the waters between the Upper and Lower basins. Of course, they used the highest water years on record to estimate because they didn’t know anything else. And somehow they thought, ‘If we build it, it will come and we’ll always have water.’ And we know now that we won’t.”
During the first two decades of the 21st century, inflows into Lake Powell were below average for 15 years between 2000 and 2019. The outlook for a return to the early 1980s, when spring runoff filled the lake to the brim, is not promising. Through mid-June, 88 percent of the West was mired in drought, and extreme to exceptional drought conditions were noted in parts or most of Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and California.
Talks underway in an effort to navigate the Upper and Lower basin states through the drought demonstrate the corner those who crafted the law of the river have painted themselves into.
“This has been expected through long-term tree ring analysis and looking at drought frequency in the Southwest,” Stevens said. “Now, faced with the reality of an actual crisis, this is where the rubber hits the road because decisions actually have to be made. The whole fallacy of appropriated water rights is coming to bear its full fruition of conflict, which is really the only product of appropriated water rights, conflict. It supports lawyers, but nobody else.”
At Grand Canyon National Park, Balsom said part of a possible solution is for society to know when to say no, and to stand by that.
“I think we have to take the long view on some of this stuff, and I think we have to be smart about it, too,” she told me. “And we’ve got to be smart with our infrastructure developments. We’ve got to be smart with minimizing our impacts to the land. We’ve got to be smart by not over-promising and under-producing.
“And we have to realize that you just can’t keep building, that at some point, you’ve got to say, you know, I think we’re good.”
This story on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Grand Canyon National Park has been supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
A pregnant cow named Cherry Pie stands in the dry grass at Megan Brown’s Oroville ranch in late April. Brown sold off much of her herd last spring after the dry 2020 winter. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
When James Brumder and his wife Louise Gonzalez moved into their home tucked up against the mountains northeast of Los Angeles, he applied all his know-how to the task of undoing the thirsty garden they inherited.
Brumder, who worked for a commercial landscaping company, pulled up their weedy, unkempt lawn in Altadena and replaced it with native grasses, filled in garden beds with species that could make a living off the region’s fickle rainfall, installed drip irrigation, set up rain barrels and banked soil to collect any errant drops of water. Whenever the backyard duck pond – a blue plastic kiddie pool – was cleaned, the water was fed to drought-adapted fruit trees.
It was 2013, a year before a statewide drought emergency was declared, but even then the water crisis was apparent to Brumder and most everyone in California: A great dry cycle had come again. Four years later, it receded when a torrent of winter rains came. The drought, finally, was declared over.
Generals know that you always fight the last war. So California — already in the clutches of another drought emergency — is looking over its shoulder at what happened last time, anticipating the worst and evaluating the strategies that worked and those that failed.
So is California in a better position to weather this drought?Some things are worse, some better: Groundwater is still being pumped with no statewide limits, siphoning up drinking water that rural communities rely on. In northern counties, residents are reliving the last disaster as water restrictions kick in again, but in the south, enough water is stored to avoid them for now.
The good news is that in urban areas, most Californians haven’t lapsed back into their old water-wasting patterns. But, while some farmers have adopted water-saving technology, others are drilling deeper wells to suck out more water to plant new orchards.
The upshot is California isn’t ready — again.
“We are in worse shape than we were before the last drought, and we are going to be in even worse shape after this one,” said Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California at Davis.
Trucks are parked along the waters edge in the dry lakebed at Lake Folsom, a state reservoir. The water level is currently at about 48% of historical average. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
The most acute problem, experts say, is the lack of controls on groundwater pumping.
“Despite increasingly occurring droughts, we could be doing much better than we are doing,” added Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. “We manage finally to get some statewide rules about groundwater, but they are not going to be implemented for years.” As a result, he said, aquifers are still being over-pumped and land is sinking.
And an overarching question lingers: How will Californians cope as the world continues to warm and the dry spells become ever more common and more severe?
Then and now: How does it compare?
Three-fourths of California is already experiencing extreme drought, a designation that only hints at the trickle down of impacts on people, the environment and the economy. Nature’s orderly seasons are upended: As the winter so-called “wet season” ended, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in 41 counties.
This year’s drought is steadily approaching the peak severity of the last one, climate experts say. It’s a dangerous benchmark: 2012 through 2015 was the state’s driest consecutive four-year stretch since record-keeping began in 1896.
Drought is characterized by deficit — of rainfall, snow, runoff into rivers, storage in reservoirs and more. And all of these factors are in dire shape this year. Some are even worse than they were during the last drought.
Much of the state has received less than half of average rain and snowfall since October, with some areas seeing as little as a quarter. For most of Northern California, the past two years have been the second driest on record.
The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides about a third of California’s water, dwindled to 5% of average this month, equaling April 2015’s record-low percentage. That signals trouble for California’s reservoirs — even before the long, dry summer begins.
2021 is shaping up to be a really dry year.
Last month was the fifth-driest April and 2020 was the third-driest year on record with a total precipitation of 10 inches.
“We’ve had dry springs before, but that is just astonishing,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and The Nature Conservancy. “And we’re still a few months out from seeing the worst of things.”
Megan Brown, a sixth-generation cattle rancher in Oroville, worries that climate change might finally make her the last of her family to run cattle in California. Dry pastures can force ranchers to sell livestock or buy expensive feed.
Usually, she said, the hills on her ranch are as green as Ireland in the spring. But by the end of April, dry golden grass had already started to claim the slopes. The blackberry-lined creek on Brown’s ranch is so parched that her dogs kick up clouds of dust as they nose through the rocks.
“It’s turning,” she said, looking up at her browning hills dotted with so many fewer cows than usual. “I don’t like it. It’s scary.”
Prolonged dry periods, some more than a hundred years in the state, can be traced to the Middle Ages, via tree rings from stumps preserved in lakes. But while droughts are part of California’s natural cycles, climate change is exacerbating them, increasing drought frequency and making them more extreme, climate experts say.
In his 1952 novel, East of Eden, John Steinbeck depicted the yin and yang of California’s water cycle in the Salinas Valley where he grew up, how the bounty of the wet years drove out memories of the dry, until, predictably, the water wheel came back around. “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
But droughts and water shortages are more of a persistent way of life now in California than a mere cycle. The rare has become the routine.
Pastures were turning yellow in April, long before summer, on Megan Brown’s ranch in Oroville. Brown wonders what climate change will mean for the future of ranching in California. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
Drought’s terrible price
The last drought posed a palpable, day-to-day crisis. The signs were clearly visible: withered crops and gardens, bathtub rings around shrinking reservoirs, dried-out salmon streams. People drove filthy cars and thought twice about flushing their toilets. Ski runs reverted to gravel and mountain resorts shut down months early.
All Californians were ordered to conserve, and state officials in 2015 mandated a 25% statewide cut in the water used by urban residents. Homeowners used smartphone apps to turn in neighbors for over-sprinkling their lawns, and cities hired water cops to enforce the rules. Hotels notified guests of reduced laundry service. In restaurants, glasses of water that used to automatically appear were served only after patrons requested them.
The astonishing aridity also killed more than 100 million trees and weakened millions more, setting off a catastrophic cascade: The carpet of dead trees added fuel to California’s wildfire epidemic. Fire season stretched year-round and into normally damp parts of the state.
A decal on a dusty truck near the Orange County Water District’s recharge facility in Anaheim on May 6, 2015 reminds local residents to conserve water. Photo by Chris Carlson, AP Photo
As rivers heated up, their flows dwindled and about 95% of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon were lost below Shasta Dam in two consecutive years. A record number of commercial and recreational fisheries were shut down, and countless ducks and other waterbirds died as wetlands vanished.
“California was unprepared for this environmental drought emergency and is now struggling to implement stopgap measures,” the Public Policy Institute of California concluded in 2015.
Today, despite the warnings, in many ways the state finds itself in the same situation: Forewarned but still not ready.
“The universal truism is that by the time you react to a drought it’s too late to react to a drought,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute. “The majority of things you have to do to mitigate impacts have to be done before the drought.”
Droughts are expensive for taxpayers. The legislature appropriated $3.3 billion toward drought response from 2013 to 2017, including $2.3 billion in voter-approved bonds. About $68 million was spent on emergency drinking water for communities where wells went dry, but the biggest chunk funded projects to begin augmenting supply, such as more water recycling and groundwater management.
Now, to address the current drought, the Newsom administration has proposed spending another $5.1 billion, for a start. But the “start” may be already too late.
“I can think of a lot of places to spend money, “ Mount said. “But it’s too late for this drought.”
Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said California is better prepared than before the last drought, but climate change is quickly moving the finish line.
“We are in a race against time and the changing climate. And so all that we’ve done is important, but we need to do more,” Crowfoot said.
Felicia Marcus, the top water official who shepherded the state’s response to the record-breaking drought under former Gov. Jerry Brown, said California “made real progress in some areas during the last drought” but needs to conserve and recycle more water, capture more in aquifers and better protect ecosystems.
Learning to live with less
The experience of the last drought left behind lasting effects across California, in the way that trauma can afford painful lessons.
But it’s one thing to repeat the mantra that “water is precious” and quite another to learn to live with less of it. State officials are relieved that some behaviors mandated in the last drought have become habits with lasting benefits for conservation.
Between 2013 and 2016, Californians on average reduced their residential use by 30%. Since then, per capita water use has ticked up, but Californians used 16% less water in recent months than they did in 2013.
The ubiquity of drought has forced many Californians to change their fundamental relationship with water.
Their responses to the pleas to conserve have varied, reflecting the state’s diversity of climates, populations, property sizes and lifestyles. For instance, urban residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Coast and North Coast used the least amount of water in 2020 — an average of 71 to 73 gallons a day per person — compared to 86 in Southern California, 125 in the Sacramento Valley and 136 in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Every region’s use edged up slightly last year — perhaps due to COVID-19 sheltering at home — but every region is considerably lower than the early years of the last drought.
Some Southern Californians endorsed conservation with a vengeance, ripping out more than 160 million square feet of lawnsduring the last drought. Golf courses followed suit; they tore out turf on non-playing areas in favor of drought-tolerant plants, while watering greens and fairways with recycled water.
Still, households using 400 gallons per day aren’t uncommon in Southern California, said Los Angeles County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella. And, despite permanent conservation gains leftover from the last drought, some massive residential water users — called water buffalos — use 4,000 gallons a day.
The disconnect? “Water is cheap,” Pestrella said.
Despite permanent conservation gains leftover from the last drought, some massive residential water users — called water buffalos — use 4,000 gallons a day.
When conservation alone wasn’t enough, an executive order by then-Gov. Brown gave officials the authority to send help to well owners and struggling small water systems.
Some policies, however, have not yet been fully realized.
Lawmakers tasked state agencies with developing efficiency standards for residential, commercial, industrial and institutional water use, but these are still in the works. Also, statewide rules that banned wasteful practices like hosing off driveways expired in 2017. The water board’s 2018 effort to revive them was dropped after local agencies complained that mandates should be left up to them.
A major law enacted during the last drought is supposed to stop groundwater depletion over the next 20 years. But the law is still in its very early stages; the state has not limited groundwater pumping anywhere yet.
“We do an absolutely terrible job at some things, and groundwater is one,” said UC Davis’s Lund. “It takes 30 years to implement (the new groundwater act) from zero to something sustainable. It’s going to take a long time and it’s going to be ragged around the edges.”
Lawmakers were warned by state analysts last week to prepare for wells to go dry again, largely in Central Valley rural towns, and line up emergency supplies of drinking water.
“I suspect we’re going to see similar issues with wells running dry and damage to infrastructure that we saw during the last drought,” said Heather Cooley, director of research at the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. “We’re going to see a lot of that this year and in the coming years.”
The mighty agriculture industry, which uses the bulk of California’s water, plowed up some crops such as rice and alfalfa to save water. A state program awarded growers more than $80 million in grants to install low-pressure irrigation systems and make other conservation measures.
But growers also continued to plant new fruit and nut crops, despite the recurring water shortages. Some farmers offset their financial losses by fallowing fields and selling their water to other growers.
Some orchard growers intensified groundwater pumping by digging deeper wells and using “new water” to plant more trees. The number of acres of almond trees — a water-intensive, high-value crop — doubled in the last decade, although the industry has significantly improved its water efficiency in recent years. “High returns on orchard crops have made it profitable for farmers to invest in deeper wells, aggravating groundwater depletion,” according to a Public Policy Institute of California analysis.
Ranchers face difficult decisions
Katie Roberti of the California Cattlemen’s Association told CalMatters that ranchers are facing the most severe conditions in decades. “Without precipitation many California cattle producers are going to be forced to make the difficult decision to reduce the size of their herds, some more drastically than others,” she said.
Megan Brown, the Oroville rancher, already sold a third of her cattle — including all of her replacement breeders that replenish her herd — after the dry 2020 winter, when the grasslands they forage on dried up.
“I always felt like I might be the last one in the family to run cattle. I’ve just had a bad feeling. And this (drought) kind of makes it real, like my bad feeling was justified,” said rancher Megan Brown Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
“We were ahead of the game because we saw the writing on the wall,” she said. “If you don’t have the grass, you’re not going to make the money.”
She sold “anything that looked at me funny, or had an attitude, or I thought would fail or wouldn’t make me money,” she said. “It was hard, some of these cows I’ve had for ten years.”
The US Department of Agriculture declared a drought disaster that allows growers and ranchers to seek low-interest loans.
But Brown refuses to accept a loan. “Our family history has a saying that if you can’t buy it in cash, you can’t really afford it.”
Brown has seen back-to-back calamities hit her land: drought, torrential rains and then fires that destroyed wooden flumes that ferry water from the west branch of the Feather River to Oroville and landowners like her along the way.
“It’s all these things, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam — every year. It’s not supposed to be like that. We’re supposed to have these once in a generation,” Brown said. “It’s more. It’s worse.”
She’s already weighing how to adapt her ranch to a changing California, such as raising heritage hogs and turkeys instead of cattle, and wondering whether there’s a future in emus.
“It hurts, man, it hurts your soul,” Brown said. “I always felt like I might be the last one in the family to run cattle. I’ve just had a bad feeling. And this kind of makes it real, like my bad feeling was justified.”
North and south: One dries up while one stored for a rainy day
When you take into account the path that water moves from source to tap, it’s a daily miracle that any of it arrives at its destination. Every day 20% of the electricity used in California and 30% of the natural gas is used to pump water.
All that energy is necessitated by geography: Much of the state’s water is in the north and much of its population is in the south. This shift requires the State Water Project’s massive pumping plants to push water uphill 2,000 feet from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley and over the Tehachapi Mountains, where it flows down to the great southern basin and its 24 million people.
This year, the state expects to deliver only 5% of water requested from the State Water Project. And there’s an indefinite hold on federal allocations for some agricultural users both north and south of the Delta.
Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies imported water for 19 million people in six Southern California counties, says it has managed to sock away record levels of water despite back-to-back dry years.
“We’ve gone into this year with the highest storage levels in our history, actually,” said Deven Upadhyay, assistant general manager and chief operating officer for the Metropolitan Water District. “Storage-wise, we go into this year — the second year of a drought, and now a really critical year — pretty well positioned.”
About 3.2 million acre-feet of water are tucked away in storage, with another 750,000 reserved in case of a disaster like an earthquake. That’s enough to meet the demands of 12 million households in the Los Angeles area.
As a result, Southern California agencies are unlikely to mandate rationing this year, although Upadhyay encourages residents to be careful with their water use.
A creek that once ran through Megan Brown’s property is already dry before the summer comes on April 22, 2021. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
But in the north, the situation is more dire. Some local agencies and counties are already limiting water use long before the drier summer months arrive.
The town of Mendocino, which depends heavily on rain-fed aquifers, declared a stage 4 water shortage emergency requiring residents to use 40% less water than allotted. Many residents are already there, said community service district superintendent Ryan Rhoades.
In Redwood Valley, which has roughly 1,100 municipal and 200 agricultural customers just north of Ukiah, the water district has already turned off the tap to agricultural customers.
Bree Klotter, a wine grape grower and member of the district’s board, said it’s one more challenge for residents who are just emerging from devastating wildfires on the heels of the last drought.
The district earlier this month set a 55-gallon-per-person-per-day limit on residential water use, and expected pushback. But it never came.
“We had set a meeting for two hours and literally nobody showed up,” Klotter said. “I don’t know whether it’s because they have adapted their behaviors to accommodate the drought, or whether they’re just like, this is just something else — one more thing.”
Boo the ranch dog sips from a livestock tank at Brown’s ranch. When fires burned the wooden flumes that ferried water to her land, her family sunk thousands of dollars in installing solar-powered wells. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
Her well is ‘more valuable than gold’
Novelist Joan Didion wrote that growing up in Sacramento, she knew it was summer when “coughing in the pipes meant the well was dry.”
Some well owners are already struggling with coughing pipes this year.
Jasna Hendershott, 66, has lived in the same house in the mountain town of Oakhurst outside of Yosemite National Park for nearly three decades. She has always been careful how she uses her well water.
During hot summers, Hendershott uses paper plates to avoid washing dishes. She takes short showers, only washes full loads of laundry and she doesn’t have sprinklers for her yard.
“It’s more valuable than gold, and you really need to worry about it,” Hendershott said. “If you don’t save water, then you’re putting everybody into danger.”
Even so, during the last drought, her well occasionally ran dry during summer months. And about a year-and-a-half ago, it dried up completely. While she waits to find out whether she needs to drill a deeper well, Hendershott has been relying on water deliveries to fill her well’s storage tank — first from Madera County and now from the non-profit Self-Help Enterprises.
She isn’t the only one; the non-profit coordinates water deliveries for more than 320 other households.
Monthly water deliveries can run the nonprofit $1,500 a month for a household, on top of about $5,000 to buy and install a storage tank — totaling close to $23,000 for the first year. The money comes from state grants.
Of all the lessons the state should learn, this might be the most valuable: “There’s never enough water in California,” the Pacific Institute’s Gleick said. “We have to assume that we are always water-short and we have to act like it.”
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
Liz Roberts is digging into snow-soaked dirt just above the banks of Grizzly Creek in western Colorado. With bare fingers she sifts through the dark soil, looking for life amid the ruins of last summer’s devastating Grizzly Creek fire.
When she finds tiny dormant roots, she smiles and exposes more soil to show visitors that this ground, just two or three inches down, is filled with plant matter that will grow and bloom in the summer when the snow melts.
But farther along this same trail, in the White River National Forest just east of Glenwood Springs, there is thick ash beneath the snow, and few dormant roots. This means the soil was so injured by the fire, which burned for more than four months, that it has become disconnected from the mountainside, and the ash lying unrooted above it will be carried into the creek this spring as the water melts.
In unburned forests, the spring snowmelt is a glorious, annual event.
But not this year.
Roberts and other forest experts know that the spring runoff will carry an array of frightening heavy metals and ash-laden sediment generated in the burned soils, posing danger to the people of Glenwood Springs, who rely on Grizzly Creek and its neighbor just to the west, No Name Creek, for drinking water.
Unseen toxins
Raging wildfires, like the massive burn that almost consumed Glenwood Springs last year, are easy to see. But what is rarely seen is the devastation to the natural mountain collection systems, where water starts as snow before melting in the spring and flowing down into creeks and eventually into water systems for towns and agricultural lands.
As soils burn, naturally occurring substances that would normally be locked in place are released.
“Sometimes we see lead, mercury, cadmium, possibly arsenic,” said Justin Anderson, Roberts’ colleague and a U.S. Forest Service hydrologist. “They can be dangerous, especially in high concentrations.”
Like other Western states, Colorado is in red alert mode this year, in part because these new megafires, triggered by drought and climate change, ravaged not just Glenwood Springs’ water system, but other major systems as well. Northern Water, for example, manages the Colorado Big-Thompson Project, which serves more than 1 million people and hundreds of farms on the northern Front Range and Eastern Plains. Burning at the same time as the Grizzly Creek fire, the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires rampaged through the project’s mountain collection system, affecting water supplies for Fort Collins, Greeley, Boulder, Broomfield and Loveland, among others.
Data Source: Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center, Graphic by Chas Chamberlin
Even as communities across the state keep their eyes on a 2021 fire season expected to be as bad as that of 2020, when the state saw the largest fires in its history explode, they are racing to create high-tech water treatment programs capable of filtering out the toxins now present in their once-pristine water, and replacing the pipes, intake flumes and grates damaged beyond repair last year.
Esther Vincent, Northern Water’s director of environmental services, expects the agency to spend more than $100 million over the next three to five years, restoring hundreds of thousands of acres of forest in Rocky Mountain National Park, Grand County and along the Front Range in Boulder and Larimer counties. That is nearly triple the agency’s $40 million reserve fund.
Ravaged pipes, reservoirs
“Over half of our major watersheds were affected,” Vincent said. “In some of them 90 percent is burned. Because there is no option to bypass the runoff that is going to come into our system, it will enter our reservoirs and affect all of our infrastructure on the West Slope.”
Restoring forests is an undertaking that requires decades of work and whole new industries to execute effectively.
Mike Lester is Colorado State Forester. Thanks to Colorado’s rapid recovery from the Covid-19 budget crisis and federal relief funds expected later this year, his agency has more money than it’s ever had to help restore forests.
”We’re going to be pretty well supported this year,” Lester said. The state added $6 million this past year for restoration work and it is expecting another $8 million July 1, when the new fiscal year begins.
Colorado has some 24 million acres of forest, most of which is owned by the federal government, and to a lesser extent, private landowners. Roughly 10 percent of those acres are in need of immediate attention to protect towns and homes in the wildland urban interface, Lester said. Colorado’s wildland urban interface, also known as the WUI, has become increasingly populated, creating greater risk to lives and infrastructure and complicating forest management.
Loggers wanted
Repairing the forests, thinning trees so the fires don’t burn with such intensity, and stabilizing hundreds of thousands of scarred mountain slopes requires skilled personnel and methods for utilizing the downed timber.
“We’re way short of resources,” Lester said. “We don’t have a huge amount of logging and professional forestry in Colorado. There is only so much money you can spend well before you run into capacity issues.”
In the short-term communities are focused on doing what they can now to keep their water systems safe.
Matt Langhorst is Glenwood Springs’ director of public works. When the Grizzly Creek fire ignited last August, he could tell almost immediately that the flames were going to engulf the water system’s intake structures in the White River National Forest high above the town at the top of Grizzly and No Name creeks.
“The second I saw the smoke coming over the hill, I knew it was right around our two watersheds. I picked up the phone and called the fire department and said, ’We’re going to have a problem.’”
A massive loss
Nine months later, Langhorst and his crews have reworked the high mountain intake structures and they’ve finished a complete rebuild of the town’s small water treatment plant so that it can remove the pollutants expected to contaminate its once-clear waters, and filter out massive sediment loads that are already beginning to come down into the creeks as they enter the Colorado River just east of town along I-70.
“We are expecting it to change the water quality for three to seven years, but it could be longer than that,” Langhorst said. “It is a massive loss.”
And costly. Glenwood Springs Mayor Jonathan Godes said the work needed to repair and rebuild its water system, and create a safe evacuation route if Glenwood Canyon is shut down again as it was last summer, will likely cost three times its annual operating budget of $19 million.
“It’s something we can’t afford,” Godes said. “But we can’t afford not to do it.”
In response, state agencies are rethinking how they provide emergency funds as natural disasters such as these megafires happen more frequently.
Help, please
The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), last fall, was able to offer Glenwood Springs $8 million in a matter of days so that Langhorst and his crews could get into the high country to do critical construction work before winter snows arrived.
Kirk Russell oversees the CWCB’s loan funds. He said the agency was able to move quickly because it had seen the damage done and the loan delays that occurred after the state’s catastrophic floods of 2013. Back then, federal emergency funds took months to reach devastated Front Range communities and farm irrigation systems that were blown out by powerful flood waters.
“Fast forward to the wildfires that we saw last year and we foresaw there was going to be a need to respond quickly,” Russell said.
Now the agency has new emergency rules that provide for quick approvals on three-year, no-interest loans when water systems are harmed by wildfires.
“Do we need more money and more flexibility? Absolutely,” Russell said.
Crossing boundaries
The state also needs a more cohesive response to managing and restoring forests and the water systems embedded in them. Key to that effort is a two-year-old initiative called the Colorado Forest and Water Alliance, an advocacy group that includes federal and state forest officials, water utilities, logging industries and environmental groups.
Ellen Roberts, a former state lawmaker from Durango, has helped spearhead the fledgling effort and is working on other local initiatives designed to work effectively across city and county boundaries, as well as private, public and federal lands.
Colorado’s lawmakers and the federal government have pledged more than $20 million this year to quickly jumpstart the work.
“I am very encouraged by that,” Roberts said. “A good chunk of the money will need to go to immediate post-fire work, but we need to shift gears soon to put the money in at the front end [to thin the over-grown forests]. Hopefully we will be seeing both with the money that has been set aside. This is not a one-and-done investment. It has to be viewed as being chapter one of a very, very long book.”
Water comes down
Back out in the White River National Forest, the annual snowmelt above Grizzly and No Name creeks has begun.
Liz Roberts, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, examining burned soils in the White River National Forest near Glenwood Springs. March 25, 2021. Credit: Dave Timko, This American Land
And Matt Langhorst is waiting, hoping that the residents of Glenwood Springs, who have enjoyed more than 115 years of clear mountain water, won’t notice any difference in how their water tastes.
He got hundreds of calls last August when the town was forced to shut off its fire-engulfed water system and use an emergency source temporarily.
Each call was roughly the same, he said.
“Everyone wanted to know, ‘What happened to my water?’”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
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.
Major funding shortfalls and bureaucratic barriers between state, federal and private entities are hobbling efforts to clean up watersheds and protect drinking water for more than 1 million Coloradans this summer.
Berthoud-based Northern Water is Colorado’s second-largest water provider, behind Denver Water. It operates the federally owned Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which serves a number of Front Range cities as well as hundreds of farms, and its collection systems were devastated last summer by the massive East Troublesome and Cameron Peak fires. It estimates that it will cost more than $100 million over the next three to five years to clean up some 400,000 acres of its mountain system, which spans the Continental Divide in Grand County and Rocky Mountain National Park.
Federal funds that have been used in the past have been depleted as states across the American West have turned to the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service for help restoring burned forest lands.
Colorado lawmakers this week stepped in to help, approving SB21-258, which creates two new grant funds totaling nearly $30 million designed to help utilities and local governments do more to address forest restoration and wildfire risk mitigation.
And while agencies like Northern say the cash is critical, it’s only a down payment on what is going to be needed to restore mountain water collection systems embedded in national forests.
“We’re very worried,” said Esther Vincent, Northern Water’s manager of environmental services. “The runoff season is upon us and we’re starting to see the black water.” She’s referring to the water laden with sediment and toxins entering streams from burn areas.
Colorado’s 10 largest fires on record have occurred since 2000, with seven of them happening in the last 10 years. The red circles indicate the number of acres burned in proportion to one another. Locations are approximate. Credit: Chas Chamberlin
Vincent said working through Congress to get emergency funds and to address federal agency rules that limit how funds can be used on private and federal lands will take months and, more likely, years.
“There is a reasonable chance that the U.S. Forest Service may not see funding for this until 2022. But it’s really urgent that we do some of this work now,” Vincent said.
To address the crisis, Northern, as well as a number of cities and agencies across the state, have turned to Colorado’s congressional delegations for help. But so far, little progress has been made.
U.S. Senator Michael Bennet and his staff are working on finding small pools of cash across a variety of federal agencies in various states to help fund work this summer. And there is some hope, staffers said, that emergency cash might be set aside by Congress later this summer through a special disaster appropriation or through a national infrastructure bill.
But longer-term fixes are needed, said Troy Timmons, director of federal relations for the Western Governors Association.
“There is no one thing that is broken. There are statutory issues, like how the [NRCS] Emergency Watershed Protection Program operates, and the limitations on what the forest service can do. There are cultural issues with how all of these agencies interact with one another,” Timmons said. “There are a lot of threads here that need to be worked on.”
But for this summer, Northern and other water utilities across the state are focused on restoring their watersheds and finding the cash needed to fix them.
“It’s a vast landscape,” said Northern General Manager Brad Wind. “How do we fix a burn and at the same time keep looking forward and investing in our watersheds for the future?”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The eight major river basins, plus the Denver metro area, are shown on this map from the South Platte River Basin Roundtable. Each basin has its own roundtable, made up of volunteers, to address local water issues. CREDIT: SOUTH PLATTE BASIN ROUNDTABLE
The state water board is encouraging all nine basin roundtables to adopt a code of conduct requiring members to communicate in a professional, respectful, truthful and courteous way. But some Western Slope roundtables are pushing back.
Over roughly the last month, Colorado Water Conservation Board Director Rebecca Mitchell has been visiting the remote roundtable meetings on Zoom, answering questions about the code of conduct and urging the roundtables to adopt it. The goal of the document is to make sure everyone feels comfortable speaking up in meetings.
Mitchell said that with important and potentially contentious discussions on the horizon for water-short Colorado, it’s important to have a set of conduct standards in place to guide those discussions.
Gunnison River Basin Roundtable member Bill Nesbitt said at the May meeting it was a “third-grade sandbox question.” Mitchell agreed.
“I think it is similar to a third-grade sandbox, but not every sandbox is fair and some kids throw sand in other kids’ eyes,” Mitchell said. “We need to make the message clear about the expectations as we move forward to some of those really difficult discussions.”
Some members of the Southwest Basin Roundtable welcomed the code of conduct.
“I support adopting a policy,” said Mely Whiting, environmental representative and legal counsel for Trout Unlimited. “I think that things do get more and more controversial as we move forward. In my experience on this roundtable, in recent times things have gotten a little bit out of hand and quite a bit more aggressive. I’ve been, myself, uncomfortable quite often.”
The Colorado legislature created the nine basin roundtables — South Platte, Metro, Arkansas, Rio Grande, San Juan/Dolores (collectively known as Southwest), Gunnison, Colorado, Yampa/White/Green and North Platte — in 2005 to encourage locally driven collaborative solutions on water issues. They represent each of the state’s eight major river basins, plus the Denver metro area, and are made up of volunteers from different water sectors like agriculture, environment, recreation and municipal.
In addition to asking members to promote an inclusive environment that treats everyone fairly, the code also lays out best practices for conducting business. According to the code, the roundtables have the responsibility for noticing meetings, adhering to federal and state laws and public health orders and performing job tasks promptly and effectively.
Members at both the Southwest and Gunnison roundtables had issues with the best practices section. Montezuma County representative Ed Millard said the best practices section seemed more relevant to employees of the Division of Water Resources, not a volunteer board.
“I just think it’s going to have to be tuned to a volunteer organization before we adopt it,” he said at the April Southwest Roundtable meeting. “We certainly do need to resolve the tension and friction, but I don’t think adoption of (an) employee code is the way to do that.”
Southwest adopted the rest of the code of conduct, minus this best practices part at its May meeting. In the Gunnison basin, a motion to adopt the code of conduct failed; the discussion has been tabled until the July meeting.
Roundtable member Michael Murphy, who represents Hinsdale County, said the group already holds their meetings with respect and that the code was unnecessary.
“We are western Colorado. We don’t like being told what to do,” he said at the May Gunnison Basin Roundtable meeting.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board is hoping the nine basin roundtables adopt their code of conduct. From left, back row: Steve Anderson, Dan Gibbs, Kevin Rein, Jim Yahn, Heather Dutton, Russell George, Curran Trick, Greg Felt; front row: Jessica Brody, Gail Schwartz, Celene Hawkins, Jaclyn Brown, Becky Mitchell. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
While the code of conduct will be the policy of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Mitchell admitted there was little the CWCB could do to enforce it on the roundtables, and the roundtables don’t have to adopt it.
“Being perfectly honest and transparent, enforcing a code of conduct on a volunteer roundtable is difficult,” she told the Southwest Roundtable. “(Enforcement) is as much a responsibility of me as a self-policing in the way we treat each other.”
Arkansas and Yampa/White/Green roundtables are aware of the code of conduct, but have not adopted it. The Rio Grande, South Platte and Metro basin roundtables have formally adopted it. The Colorado and North Platte basin roundtables have not discussed it yet.
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.
With drought and climate change continuing to dry the American West, the state of Colorado is moving to declare one of its last, mostly free-flowing rivers, the Yampa, over-appropriated.
The action, initiated in March, is emblematic of the water situation across Colorado and the West: growing demand, shrinking supplies.
“It’s a sign of the times, that is, it’s happening in the context of lower flows and increased demand — and we’re seeing that all over the West,” said Anne Castle, senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School. “The majority of the problem in the Yampa is created by a decrease in flows, although there has been some increase in demand.”
According to a recent analysis by the state, the Yampa’s flows have dropped roughly 25 percent over the past 100 years, from 1.5 million acre-feet to 1.12 million acre-feet annually, a change attributed to sustained drought and climate change.
“The combination of continued adjudication of new water rights and the potential for a hotter, drier climate will likely cause the trend of declining streamflows to continue,” wrote Erin Light, the top water regulator in the region, in her report detailing why she’s recommending the over-appropriation designation.
The river is important not just because of its key role in Northwestern Colorado, but also because it is one of the largest tributaries to the drought-stressed seven-state Colorado River system.
Kevin Rein, the state engineer and Colorado Division of Water Resources director, is still considering Light’s March 17 recommendation, which encompasses the Yampa River and all of its tributaries upstream of its confluence with the Little Snake River to the town of Steamboat Springs. If approved, the designation will affect 2,321 total square miles, which includes 148 miles of the Yampa itself.
Credit: Chas Chamberlin
At a virtual meeting in March, some Yampa-area stakeholders expressed concerns about the quick pace of the process and the lack of in-person conversations. They also asked for more information and more time to understand the implications and potential ripple effects of the designation.
Before he makes his decision, Rein said he wants to be able to meet in person with the basin’s residents, something the COVID-19 pandemic has so far prevented. He said he did not yet have an anticipated timeline.
“I’m not confident that people understand some of the nuances, and so I want people to be believers in why we’re doing this,” Rein said. “I want to be out there meeting with people in person, answering all the hard questions before we make a decision that sets things in motion.”
Over-appropriation, explained
The state uses the over-appropriation designation when it has determined that there’s not enough water in a stream system, some or all of the time, for all of the people and organizations who hold water rights in the system.
Over-appropriation is the norm in Colorado — other portions of the Yampa system are already designated as over-appropriated, as are the majority of other stream systems in the state.
Still, the recommendation to designate this new section of the basin as over-appropriated is a major change to the status quo in this region, where water has historically been so abundant and demand so low that a majority of water users never measured what they took from the stream.
To more accurately glean the full water picture in the Yampa Basin, the state ordered water users there to install measuring devices in September 2019. Though installation was initially slow-going, the state and several local community groups have been working with water users in the intervening months, which has brought the proportion of water users with measuring devices up to 58 percent as of April 2021, according to state officials.
“It’s normal for people to want to be able to continue the water use they’ve enjoyed in the past, but the hydrology is changing,” Castle said. “The overall balance of the system is different and that means that the way we do business in terms of administering water has to change as well. It’s quite understandable that people may not be welcoming this kind of additional state regulatory overlay that they are used to doing without.”
For divvying up the state’s water, Colorado uses a “first in time, first in right” system known as prior appropriation. This means that the people or organizations with the oldest decreed water rights, known as senior water rights, get priority over later-decreed, or junior, water rights.
When there isn’t enough water to satisfy those senior water rights, the state can stop or slow the flow for junior water rights, a measure known as a call or a curtailment.
This temporary action, taken to ensure that senior water rights holders can get all of the water they’re legally entitled to, is becoming more and more common in the Yampa River Basin. State officials have implemented calls in two of the last three years — in 2018 and 2020.
There would likely have been additional calls in the basin, but the community avoided them by sharing water, getting by with less, and releasing stored water from reservoirs into the river and allowing it to remain there rather than diverting it for irrigation or drinking water, according to Light.
“We have many stream systems where water rights are not fully met but owners opt to not request our office to place a call,” Light wrote in her recommendation. “While their cooperative approach to ‘make do’ with water they have and/or share it among their neighbors is admirable, it is yet one more indicator that, more and more frequently, the water supply of the Yampa River Basin cannot support the … demand.”
Groundwater vs. surface water
The overarching goal of the over-appropriation designation is to protect the rights of senior water rights holders moving forward, Light said.
If the designation is applied, people will still be able to obtain new surface water rights, for instance to take water from streams and rivers for approved uses like irrigation, but they should be aware that there may not be enough water available to satisfy those rights, Light said.
The over-appropriation designation would also affect groundwater rights, or water pumped up from below ground. More specifically, the designation will affect residents’ ability to drill new wells and bring into compliance existing wells with unpermitted uses.
Under the designation, landowners who want permission to drill a new well would need to meet stricter criteria and might need to be prepared to replenish that well water to the river, a process known as augmentation.
The reason for the distinction between surface and groundwater? Groundwater diversions like wells have a delayed impact on rivers and streams, whereas surface water diversions like ditches have a more immediate impact.
When water is in short supply, state officials can simply stop the flow to junior ditches to ensure there’s enough water for senior water rights holders. They can’t do that as easily with wells, which is where plans for augmentation come into play.
For some landowners in the proposed over-appropriation region, creating an augmentation plan will be a difficult process, one requiring lawyers, court filings and engineers. For others, it will be as simple as reaching out to a nearby reservoir manager and paying for stored water to meet the augmentation needs.
The Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, for example, has a blanket augmentation plan that covers some of the proposed over-appropriation area. Landowners within the plan’s boundaries can apply to the district for augmentation water, which costs from $212.54 to $248 per acre-foot, according to district spokesperson Holly Kirkpatrick.
Meanwhile, augmentation is less straightforward for water users who live outside of those bounds.
“The community really has a choice of whether to continue with the status quo where people have to have their individual augmentation plans … or come together and implement some sort of blanket augmentation plan to remove that barrier to water development,” said Hunter Causey, senior water resources engineer for the Colorado River District, during the 2021 Yampa Valley State of the River meeting in May.
Sarah Kuta is a freelance writer based in Longmont, Colorado. She can be reached at sarahkuta@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.
When Julie Badonie was growing up in the small Navajo community of Tohatchi in the 1940s, her father drove a horse-drawn wagon early each morning to a nearby spring. There, he filled wooden barrels with water the family would use that day to drink, cook, and wash.
Badonie, the youngest of seven children, including brothers who fought in World War II and the Korean War, or one of her siblings would go along. She remembers it as fun. At home, a hose siphoned the water into buckets to bring into the house.
Badonie left for boarding school in kindergarten, first just a few miles across town, then several days’ travel away in Crownpoint, where an older sister worked as a cook, and eventually, all the way to Albuquerque for high school. Coming home meant coming back to life without flushing toilets, running faucets, or lights that turned on with a switch, but she didn’t mind.
“We just enjoyed being home with our parents, our sisters, our brothers, you know, so that didn’t really matter,” Badonie said. “When you go home, you’re free.”
Tó’háách’ih means “One Who Digs for Water,” a reference to a seep near the Chuska (Ch’ooshgai) or “White Pine” Mountains.
The community tucks between the blue ridges of Ch’ooshgai Mountain, frosted with snow in winter. When that snow melts or rain falls, water runs off the peaks into a canyon where horses browse among junipers. Erosion and rockfall have so narrowed the dirt road up the canyon that, today, an ambulance can’t reach the few houses higher on the ridge, and even the propane trucks struggle.
A chapterhouse the color of cream trimmed with maroon houses local government offices near a senior center, where staff hand meals into car windows as lunchtime approaches, and a preschool with a playground, quiet this year with schools closed by the pandemic. Across the street, boxy houses with stucco walls and peaked roofs line up in rows.
For the last eight years, Badonie has visited the chapterhouse almost every day. After her retirement, she became more involved, running for office and serving as chapter vice president and president. Her term ended in December, but she’s still a frequent presence, helping new officials with ongoing projects.
Among those concerns is connecting more of Tohatchi’s residents with utilities, and ensuring a long-term, abundant water supply for the community itself.
“The population is growing, and we need to have water,” Badonie said.
Julie Badonie, former president of the Tohatchi Chapter, stands in front of Ch’ooshgai Mountain. Image/Elizabeth Miller
Badonie’s house, like most homes close to Tohatchi, now has running water and electricity. But the 800 to 900 people in Tohatchi, and another 600 to 800 in Mexican Springs, eight miles to the west, all depend on a single well and single pump.
If the pump running it fails, or if the water level in it drops — both issues that have troubled nearby Gallup this year — water will cut out for the homes, the head-start center, the schools, the clinic, the senior center, five churches, and the convenience store and gas station.
It’s a tenuous situation common across the Navajo Nation, and one that also keeps Tohatchi from growing.
But there’s promise in the community’s location along the route for the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, which will draw water from the San Juan River and deliver it to communities on the eastern side of the Navajo Nation.
The project consists of two pipelines. A 200-mile pipeline, called the San Juan Lateral, will move 37,700 acre feet of water each year as far south as Gallup, an economic center in western New Mexico surrounded by a patchwork of Navajo Nation and private land whose long-term water supply is in jeopardy due to groundwater depletion. Another smaller pipeline, called the Cutter Lateral, branches east about 100 miles and was completed in the fall of 2020.
Because of delays, the San Juan pipeline likely won’t distribute its first water until 2028, nearly 20 years after Congress approved the plan and nearly a quarter of a century after the Navajo Nation and New Mexico agreed to it.
But it promises a drastic improvement. The new water would relieve the single well and pump in Tohatchi. In other places, the pipeline will provide running water to some of the 30 to 40% of Navajo Nation residents who still live without it in their homes.
For those people, often elders, water to cook with, to wash their hands or splash over their faces, comes from barrels and jugs.
Refilling those barrels can mean driving tens of miles over dirt roads that stay slick for days after it rains or snows and paying for it by the gallon. They might use closer, unregulated water sources, which can carry contaminants and create health concerns.
Indian Health Service reports estimate 10% of American Indian and Alaska Native homes lack potable water, compared to a national average of 1%. The largest share of these homes scatter through remote Alaskan Native villages. The second largest is in the Navajo Nation, an area that covers 27,000 square miles in western New Mexico, southern Utah, and eastern Arizona and is bigger than 10 of 50 U.S. states.
When COVID-19 reached the Navajo Nation last spring, infections spiked to the highest per capita rate in the United States. The absence of a fundamental tenet of life in America — clean drinking water in every home — exacerbated conditions that spread the virus.
“Every Navajo member has family members who live remotely and don’t have running water — We knew this was going to be an issue from the beginning,” said Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor at the University of Arizona who has studied indigenous water use, water laws, and settlements. “There is a strange, worrying correlation and overlap: You see that the places we know have less running water, and have all these problems … are also the same places that have high infection rates.”
Repeated academic and government agency reports have pointed to the lack of water as a failure of the federal government, which pledged to create viable communities for the Diné (Navajo people) in exchange for their 1868 treaty agreement to live on a fraction of their historic homeland. In shorthand, this is called the federal trust system.
Despite the federal responsibility, the Navajo Nation has waited more than a century for pipes and water treatment plants that would bring drinking water to all of its people while watching nearby off-reservation cities and farms grow, swallowing up water from the Colorado River Basin that the tribe has a claim to.
In 2009, the U.S. Congress signed off on an agreement between the Navajo Nation and the state of New Mexico that settled Navajo claims to water for drinking and household use. For the first time since the treaty was signed, the tribe had a number for how much water they were owed.
Had they taken the question through the legal system, the tribe might have won far more water, but in working with Congress, they made a deal that appeased all sides. The Navajo Nation secured both an official amount of water and federal funding to build a pipeline to move that water toward communities. In exchange, they agreed to less water than a judge might have awarded and assured Congressional representatives from other states along the Colorado River that adding tribal water use in the strained river basin would not someday force the likes of Phoenix and Las Vegas to turn off their taps.
The agreement brought more water into the Nation. But it left communities, like Tohatchi, with the burden of finding ways to build lines to connect to the new pipeline.
“The problem is not a Navajo problem; it’s a government problem and it’s a bureaucracy problem and it’s a problem that continues to center corporate interests or large-scale development schemes over the needs of everyday citizens,” said Janene Yazzie, co-founder of Sixth World Solutions, a business that works with Navajo Nation communities on sustainable development. “We’re considered a democracy and the leader of the free world, but we don’t have a human right to water in our own country.”
The longstanding link between water and health
“A homeland for the Navajo people is not merely a piece of land between our four sacred mountains, but is a place where our culture, our language, and our way of life and our people can live and grow,” former Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley, Jr. testified to Congress in 2007. “Without water, viable economic and social communities wither and die.”
Nothing comes without water. The tribal housing authority won’t build homes if there’s no water to plumb them. Schools, health clinics, administrative offices, restaurants, and businesses cannot be constructed or continue to operate without it.
The first U.S. Public Health Service survey of Native American health in 1913 found alarming rates of contagious diseases, linked to the absence of basic sanitary facilities. For decades since, lack of clean water for handwashing and hygiene has correlated to the spread of and deaths from influenza, pneumonia, and some of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the nation, as well as waterborne illnesses like cholera, typhoid, and dysentery.
In the 1950s, when 80% of American Indian and Alaska Native families were still hauling water to drink from ditches, creeks, stock ponds, and other unprotected sources, they were also dying of gastrointestinal diseases at more than four times the rate found in the rest of the U.S. That situation was particularly deadly for infants and the elderly.
In the early months of the COVID-19 crisis, though 11% of New Mexico’s population is Native American, tribal communities reported roughly 60% of the state’s COVID-19 cases. A year later, Native Americans accounted for 28% of all deaths in the state, and as of early April, the Navajo Nation’s 173,600 residents had weathered 30,182 cases and 1,259 deaths.
COVID-19’s transmission among Navajo communities was propelled in part by the reality that it’s impossible to stay home when having water to drink, cook, or clean means driving to a community watering point and filling 50-gallon barrels or going into a border town and purchasing water there every few days. When every ounce poured out counts down to the next trip down rough, dirt roads to haul barrels that weigh up to 400 pounds, water is precious. Running it to wash hands for half a minute feels like an exorbitant use.
Insufficient federal funding has left myriad unmet basic needs, including health care, education, public safety, housing, and rural development, according to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. The Commission found “significant disparities” between funding for Native Americans and other groups in the country.
“Native Americans living on tribal lands do not have access to the same services and programs available to other Americans, even though the government has a binding trust obligation to provide them,” the commission reported in 2003.
Again in 2018, the Commission found not only had the federal government failed to address the housing crisis that left 10 times as many Native Americans in homes without adequate plumbing as the national average, the number of Native Americans living in overcrowded houses or without complete kitchens or plumbing had grown by 21%.
On a tour around town, Badonie, wearing a brilliantly patterned wool jacket, strings of turquoise and spiny urchin, and a pale blue mask, pointed out the landmarks that bear witness to decades of uneven progress, in which gains are made only to be lost: The scraped foundations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, the former health clinic closed by mold, and the Women, Infant and Children center also shut down when it was deemed unsafe.
She paused longer to take in the new post office, the new health clinic fronted by a tent for COVID testing, and the new elementary and middle schools that educate children bussed in from surrounding communities. She caught up with her son, a special education teacher, on his way back to school after lunch from the new teachers’ housing.
Badonie paused, too, where the road overlooks the cemetery. The field of silk flowers was scattered with American flags, snapping in the breeze, marking the many veterans’ graves. Since COVID-19 hit, the cemetery has nearly run out of space.
When the chapter sent requests for funding during New Mexico’s legislative session this year, the need to dig more wells or lay pipes to connect to the San Juan lateral was edged out by the need for a new backhoe. The old one quit working, leaving one family to dig a grave by hand.
The chapter also prioritized constructing a warehouse to store that equipment, so maintenance staff don’t have to park it in their yards, and improved emergency services. With no fire station in town, when part of the chapterhouse caught fire, staff used fire extinguishers to put out the flames themselves. If Tohatchi residents call for police, it can take hours for officers to arrive from the nearest station. Sometimes, they don’t show at all.
Federal funding and oversight gaps left tribes a century behind
An expansive and complex federal government bureaucracy has shorted Native Americans on basic provisions for their welfare for more than a century.
Seven federal agencies have programs to lay pipes or fund construction for tribal communities: the Indian Health Service, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.
According to the Government Accountability Office, confusion among the agencies around roles and responsibilities, inaccurate reporting, and absent plans have all contributed to leaving so many Native American homes without water.
The lapses span decades.
For instance, a 1980 GAO report found that the Environmental Protection Agency failed to effectively implement a drinking water program on the Navajo Reservation and needed to improve recordkeeping, reporting, sampling, and public notification, as well as correct public water system violations. When GAO staff tested 32 drinking water wells for bacteria and radionuclides for that report, they found six with excessive levels of radionuclide contamination.
The New Mexico Department of Health has also documented contaminants in groundwater wells in northwestern New Mexico. It’s these kinds of wells that remote communities continue to rely on while they wait for water from the Navajo-Gallup Project.
“There are many rural communities that lack, or have lacked potable water supplies. We have that all over New Mexico in a number of areas,” said Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, director of New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission, which oversees how New Mexico’s waters are developed. “Over the last 20 years, there have been multiple different efforts through the state with the drinking water program to try to address those pieces.”
The Indian Health Service tracks the need for water, sewer, and solid waste projects in tribal communities. In the first years after taking up that task in 1960, the agency used low-cost, fast projects to replace dried-up wells, contaminated springs, or seasonally inaccessible watering points.
Engineers worked in remote, water scarce areas, amid harsh climates, and while facing finite budgets. They revived old wells instead of drilling new ones, and utilized gravity, solar power, and wind power where electricity wasn’t available. The most complex project added a 5,000-gallon water storage tank and five miles of plastic piping for 80 homes in Twin Lakes, New Mexico. Homeowners dug the trenches for their own house service lines.
“The population is growing, and we need to have water.”
Julie Badonie, Tohatchi
A growing population, rising construction costs, inflation, and stagnant funding impaired the goal of connecting every home with water, as did aging infrastructure and increasingly stringent environmental standards, according to the agency’s 50th anniversary report.
When the IHS considers projects to address poor quality water sources, upgrade existing systems, or construct plumbing to houses for the first time, the most expensive projects score in such a way as to deprioritize them. These projects, 523 of 1,837 on the Service’s list, are deemed “economically infeasible.” More than 80% of them are in Alaska Native and Navajo areas.
Research commissioned by the Colorado River Basin Water and Tribes Initiative has spent about eight months studying clean water access on tribal lands, and investigating why nearly 48% of tribal homes among the Colorado River Basin’s 29 tribes do not have access to reliable water sources, clean drinking water, or basic sanitation. A review of the Indian Health Service’s list of water and sanitation projects for tribal communities found a funding gap of around $3.1 billion
“So it will take big money to solve this problem, but it’s also shameful that the federal government that has a responsibility to provide a permanent homeland to tribes in exchange for the land that was taken for them has not fulfilled that responsibility,” said Anne Castle, who served as assistant secretary for water and science in the U.S. Department of the Interior from 2009 to 2014 and co-leads the initiative on Universal Access to Clean Water for Native Americans.
Most Americans are unaware of the problem, and that contributes to “lackadaisical efforts” to address it.
“Our country’s collective ignorance of this lack of fundamental life support need is an example of environmental injustice and institutional racism,” Castle said.
The initiative has begun sharing their findings with Congressional staffers, and on March 26, 10 senators, including New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, cited that research when announcing a resolution to reaffirm the federal government’s responsibility for providing clean drinking water to tribal communities.
Public officials interviewed for this story agreed the Navajo Nation would have been better off had the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project been finished before the pandemic hit.
“This project was an important project before the pandemic in that it settles the Navajo claims in the San Juan Basin and it’s going to provide a firm drinking water supply for a region that desperately needs it,” said Pat Page, manager of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Four Corners office, which is overseeing the project’s construction. “The pandemic has raised awareness for how important this project is.”
Construction remains underway on the main pipeline, but design changes are pushing the estimated date for completion from 2024 to 2028. Residents born the year the state and tribe agreed to this plan —2005 — would have time to finish college before the water runs in the pipeline.
“We are making progress putting pipe in the ground,” Page said. “The San Juan Lateral may not help with this pandemic, but it hopefully will put the Navajo Nation and this part of the country in a better position if and when there’s an issue like this in the future.”
Whether that water reaches their communities or homes, some of which have already spent a lifetime on the waiting list for plumbing, remains to be seen.
The San Juan River hugs the northern boundary of the Navajo Nation. Image/Marjorie Childress
Water within sight, but out of reach
The Colorado, Little Colorado, and San Juan rivers wend through red mesas, creating ribbons of green river valleys that run up against the Navajo Nation’s boundaries and occasionally cut through pieces of tribal lands. Water is both right at hand, and unavailable to tribal members.
Navajo people, who call themselves Diné, which means “the people”, have made their homes for centuries in the high desert of what’s now the Navajo Nation by shaping their lives around when and where water became available in a homeland they call Dinétah. For more than a century, they’ve watched water run by, downstream to cities and other farmers’ fields, waiting for a way to access what’s rightfully theirs.
More than 100 communities and settlements tuck along fins of sandstone and rise out of fields spotted with junipers. They crop up on stretches of flat scrublands, too, where trees rarely interrupt the sky or obscure views of distant spires like Shiprock, which floods with morning sun before the light touches any other piece of the landscape. Water threads sandy washes, the swooping corners of canyons, and the depressions where cottonwoods grow.
Livestock validate a family’s occupancy of the land, according to custom and Navajo law. Livestock also lay an economic and food security baseline people built on by hunting, farming, and gathering. When they had access to all of their historic homeland, Diné ranchers moved herds of sheep, goats, and cattle, and horses too, to graze rangelands shared among extended families, their presence shifting with moisture.
The practice has been greatly reduced, but for some, still keeps people in touch with the needs of the land and deities to whom they pray for rain and grass.
“People presently living on these Native lands are unique in American society as their traditional lifestyle requires intimate knowledge of the ecosystem, knowledge that has been passed on for generations through oral traditions,” reads a 2011 report on disaster risks from drought in the Navajo Nation, research for which was led by the U.S. Geological Survey and included interviewing 50 Navajo elders.
But the reservation system has impeded that practice. When some families moved herds north of the San Juan River, into Utah, during a drought in the 1950s, nearby white ranchers took the issue to the courts, which ruled Diné ranchers were trespassing. They then rallied U.S. Bureau of Land Management employees to remove Diné families who’d lived on the north side beyond reservation boundaries for generations. The employees posted notices first — written in English, neither read nor spoken by some of the Diné — and then rounded up and hauled away or killed livestock, handcuffing Diné ranchers and marching others south across the river, and setting their hogans and shade houses on fire.
Historically, the Diné relied on shallow aquifers in sand and gravel along rivers and floodplains, where water fluctuated with the season’s snow and rainfall. Some of the drier lowlands receive just 150 millimeters of rain a year; wetter areas might see twice as much.
When the federal government established the reservation in 1868, Anglo and Hispanic settlers carved out the best rangelands for themselves, while the tribe retained the Chuska and Lukachukai Mountains. The federal government added to the reservation over the coming years, with it finally covering one-third of the traditional Dinétah, the driest, hottest piece of it.
An already delicate balance around water has only become more tenuous.
Decades of drought have turned year-round streams into seasonal pulses, dried out historic springs, and concentrated groundwater so wells become so saline that they corrode their own pipes and pumps. Vegetation has died, leaving loose sand that feeds dust storms thick enough to turn the sky red. The Navajo Nation now sees less than half the snowfall it did decades ago.
The San Juan River also flows with half the water it did a century ago, and the entire Colorado River Basin is expected to dry further as the climate continues to change.
As colonists moved into this arid country, where rainfall could not be relied upon for water and rivers were turned to instead, they imported a “first in time, first in right” principle for allocating water that prioritized its earliest users. The U.S. Supreme Court read that “first in time” right as transferring to tribal nations in 1908, when it issued what’s now called the Winters decision in a dispute over water for the Fort Belknap Reservation.
The Winters decision stated that when Congress created reservations, it implied that water went with the land. That dates tribal water rights to the reservation’s establishment.
“This doctrine is grounded in the principle that in ceding millions of acres of land to the United States, tribes in no way intended to relinquish their ability to use water for the benefit of their homelands and reservations,” water rights attorney Jay Weiner summarized to Congress in 2015, testifying as assistant attorney general for Montana, home of the lawsuit that led to the Winters decision.
In water rights parlance, the Navajo Nation has “paper water” — rights to some unquantified amount of water — but not “wet water.”
The Colorado River Compact, which allocates Colorado River Basin water, splits estimated annual river flows in two, half for upper basin states and half for lower basin states. No tribal members were represented when those negotiations were finalized in 1922.
In deference to Winters, the compact allows for separate dealings on indigenous water rights. New Mexico’s allocation of the Upper Colorado River Basin — 11.25%, or 669,000 acre feet per year — was granted with the expectation that the state would someday have to share a then-unquantified amount of water with tribes.
The federal government left tribes and states to determine how much, from where, and how to access that water through settlements approved by Congress or in the court system. That meant the Navajo Nation needed to negotiate with three different states — Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico — to settle how much the tribe acquired from each state’s allocation.
“This has the effect of pitting tribal nations against the states and all of the interests the states represent,” said Yazzie, with Sixth World Solutions. “There’s so many layers of conflicts this has created.”
States often treat tribal water rights as a subtraction from what’s theirs to use, instead of a provision for some of their most financially strained communities. Meanwhile, they’ve built farms and cities reliant on water tribes could claim as their own, and now, the looming prospect of tribal water rights clouds their future.
As tribes have negotiated settlements with states on how much water is theirs to use, lawmakers essentially trade money to build pipelines, pumping stations, and treatment plants to access “wet water” for an agreement that reduces tribal water claims and defers to current water users.
Water allocations also estimate need based on census population, rather than tribal membership, ignoring the possibility that if homes on reservations had running water and electricity, more people might want to live there.
“It’s just manipulation of information and data to further minimize our claims,” Yazzie said. “They know that we really need water and we really need water infrastructure, and we can’t get that water infrastructure until we settle our claims. … It’s this way of manipulating this urgent need, this human right, in order to put in these conditions that further minimize tribal sovereignty.”
When the Navajo Nation and New Mexico signed a settlement in 2005, it directed the federal government, with some money from the state, to fund and construct the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project to move water from rivers to homes
“A ‘paper’ water right does not benefit people who must haul their drinking water,” Shirley explained when the settlement went before Congress to approve in 2007. “The Navajo Nation is foregoing a large paper water right in exchange for a smaller paper water right, [and] conditions on the wet water development outlined in the settlement legislation.”
The Navajo-Gallup Project includes 300 miles of pipeline, multiple pumping plants, and two water treatment plants that will reach 43 Navajo chapters. The project splits into two major components. The Cutter Lateral serves Navajo communities along Highway 550 and reaches Jicarilla Apache communities near Teepee Junction. The San Juan Lateral parallels Highway 491 through a series of Navajo communities before a terminus at Gallup, where the city’s tapped-out groundwater wells are putting long-term viability of their water supplies in question.
Spokes would stretch from Gallup to nearby Navajo communities, some with more than half of their residents without water at home. Spur lines will reach Crownpoint, farther east into New Mexico, and Window Rock, the Navajo Nation capital just across the state line into Arizona. The project will serve a population expected to reach 250,000 by 2040.
During congressional hearings in 2007, Bush administration staffers testified in opposition, calling the project too expensive. Then New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, a co-sponsor on the legislation, was quick to point out that the $714 million requested was less than a third of the $2.3 billion the Bush administration spent on water infrastructure and management in Iraq. Shirley also pointed out that after Hurricane Katrina, Congress authorized billions to rebuild water systems for New Orleans residents. Now, the tribe was asking Congress to do the same for Navajo people.
Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Carl Artman, an enrolled member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, said the administration hadn’t thoroughly analyzed the matter or completed their search for a more affordable option, even though a federal team had been investigating it for years.
“It’s just not a credible response,” Bingaman replied. “The Federal Government’s been AWOL is essentially what you’re saying.”
Arizona’s water resources department director, Herbert Guenther, also objected. He argued that piping San Juan River water, from the Upper Basin of the Colorado River, to Window Rock and Gallup, which lie in the Lower Basin, violated the Colorado River Compact. He also said supplying Navajo communities across the state line in Arizona would compromise Arizona’s pending settlement with the Navajo Nation. He argued all of the Navajo Nation’s claims to Colorado River water should be resolved before the project advanced.
Shirley disagreed: “We are disappointed that the Arizona testimony talks about the need to resolve litigation with the Navajo Nation, but no acknowledgment of the real needs of the Navajo Nation to obtain sufficient water rights to create a permanent homeland.”
Still, Senator Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., inserted a clause that bars communities in Arizona from tapping into the Navajo-Gallup supply line until Congress approves a settlement for Navajo claims on the Little Colorado River and the Lower Basin of the Colorado River. That clause has stalled out the spur line to Window Rock for a decade and effectively trapped 6,411 acre feet of water, the amount the Navajo-Gallup project would have delivered to Navajo communities in Arizona.
An omnibus public land management act finally approved the New Mexico settlement in early 2009. It was signed by President Barack Obama just weeks into his first term. That passed a milestone Congress had foreseen a need for as early as 1971, when they authorized a feasibility study on the project.
A settlement between Utah and the Navajo Nation passed Congress this year, dedicating funding for 5,000 people living without reliable water supplies or relying on wells contaminated with heavily mineralization, including arsenic. The largest part of the reservation and the greatest share of its population live in Arizona. That state has yet to reach a settlement with the Navajo Nation for its water rights. Now the federal government is facing litigation for this failure.
“The United States Supreme Court has characterized these responsibilities as ‘moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust,’” Shirley told Congress in 2007. “The federal government should not be allowed to shirk its trust responsibility or its treaty commitments with Indian nations by hiding behind a veil constructed of legalese that can be applied to the detriment of the poorest of the poor in America.”
The San Juan Lateral under construction along Highway 491 in western New Mexico. Image/Elizabeth Miller
More than what flows from the faucets
With water would come a greater chance of development in economically depressed communities in a corner of the state that is threatened with significant job losses due to the shuttering of several major employers. Tohatchi could add a supermarket, a restaurant, a fire department, a police station, or emergency services. The start-up Red Willow Farm could produce crops that would spare people a drive to Farmington, 90 minutes away. The footprint of an old boarding school could be converted into an office complex or housing for doctors and nurses who drive from Gallup to work in the clinic. A laundromat could open. A restaurant could move into the empty half of the new post office building, giving residents an option other than the heated shelves at the convenience store, where customers can pick up a small pizza, burrito, or pre-made burger.
These aren’t just conveniences. Unable to buy goods and services locally, tribal members spend their money outside their communities, and it rarely cycles back. This economic “leakage” keeps communities from becoming self-sustaining.
That development would also curtail the flow of young people off the reservation, a trend Badonie’s own life followed. Leaving for school led to staying away for work. She took a job as a bookkeeper in the Navajo Nation’s finance department, but didn’t own a car, so she couldn’t commute from Tohatchi, which straddles Highway 491. Instead, she lived in Gallup, about 25 miles south, where a bus ran to and from Window Rock on a schedule that matched her work hours.
After she married, her husband’s job moved them around, but she was able to buy a car and keep her job in Window Rock, where she became an accounting clerk, then a supervisor. By the time she retired in 2003, she and her husband had built a log-sided house on land his grandmother owned three miles north of Tohatchi and they had moved home.
A house or business can’t be plumbed into a 48-inch trunk line. It would be like plumbing a fire hose into a kitchen sink. Smaller pipes must be installed for water to flow from kitchen taps and shower heads, to run laundry machines and flush toilets.
“The water is useless if that isn’t done,” the late New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici said when the settlement went before Congress.
More than a decade after Congress agreed to this settlement, communities along the pipeline are still seeking funds to construct those smaller pipes, or waiting to reach the top of the Indian Health Service’s project list. When there was no water to fill water lines, the Indian Health Service lacked incentive to build them. Now, the service could face the inverse of that problem.
“The problem is not a Navajo problem; it’s a government problem and it’s a bureaucracy problem and it’s a problem that continues to center corporate interests or large-scale development schemes over the needs of everyday citizens.”
Janene Yazzie, co-founder of Sixth World Solutions
Tohatchi’s officials secured enough money from the state to plan and design a pipeline, but nothing to construct it.
A binder inches thick describes the design, and maps of both the entire project and the local pipes hang on the chapterhouse wall. The price tag to build pipe from the trunkline to the community is estimated at $9 million to Tohatchi and another $4 million to Mexican Springs, which relies on Tohatchi’s well.
New Mexico has distributed tribal infrastructure and capital outlay funds to help some communities, and the Navajo Nation has pitched in as well. Some communities, but not all, have secured the money to pipe water from the San Juan Lateral at least to a central watering point people can haul water from, if not to pipes that reach individual homes.
“We are finding some monies to do the connections to the system and right now, we’re estimating we need about $50 million to do these, to build these smaller regional systems to connect the project to existing systems,” said Jason John, director of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources.
That’s for communities that have water lines and will see improved quality or supply from the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project.
The Indian Health Service also lists thousands of homes across the Navajo Nation that don’t have water at all, John said, and about $500 million needed to deliver water there, which far outpaces annual funding.
“We’re constantly tackling a huge list with just a limited amount of money,” he said
But this is also the piece that will matter most in the face of the next pandemic.
“If you want to think about this in the context of, how do you get water to people’s homes like we do in other areas, there’s a lot more work that needs to be done,” said Schmidt-Petersen, director of New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission. “From a pandemic standpoint, in the future, that’s where we all want to be, but it’s still a ways away. But the first thing we have to do is get the trunkline in.”
When the Navajo Nation received $600 million from the first emergency stimulus package after the pandemic, the CARES Act, its leaders talked about spending as much as $300 million on water projects. The latest stimulus package, which President Joe Biden signed in March, also includes $20 billion for tribal governments and another $11 billion for federal programs that help support them.
The Secretary of the Treasury will determine how much money goes to each tribe. President Jonathan Nez has said he hopes the secretary considers the size, population, and devastating effects the Navajo Nation faced from COVID-19 last spring in deciding their allocation.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has directed $20 million to providing potable water. An upcoming major infrastructure package provides another opportunity to fund projects that could make a difference for generations.
The CARES Act money came with a spending deadline of Dec. 30, forcing permanent water projects to be shelved in favor of temporary fixes. It was the kind of stipulation that continues to impede tribes’ abilities to do what local leaders, especially, recognize as the greatest needs for their community members.
“It takes years to build a water line. You can’t get it done in months or weeks,” John said. “The money did go toward some water projects, those that could be completed in a few weeks, like installing cistern systems. Maybe only one hundred of them were completed, and we’re talking about thousands of homes that don’t have water.”
The Navajo Safe Water Project, developed specifically to increase water access during the pandemic, reported spending $5.2 million in CARES Act money to install 59 transitional water points. Gravel and cement cover the ground under a water spigot and hose where people can fill barrels with potable water, alongside a small hand washing sink and jug of hand sanitizer. People can fill barrels there for free.
Pandemic mitigation efforts included installing new water sources for communities, like this one at the Tse Daa K’aan (Hogback) Chapter. Image/Elizabeth Miller
The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority and Navajo Engineering Construction Authority received about $20 million to work on water systems, but delays meant some of that money had to be returned to Navajo Nation leaders. A lot of it went to a hardship fund to give money directly to people, John said.
When Badonie heard talk of giving that money out as $1,500 to each family, she was incensed.
“What’s $1,500 to a family, when that money is going to be gone in no time, compared to a waterline or a bathroom addition?” she asked.
Often, people who need water are scattered, their homes remote. It’s a few people per chapterhouse, maybe 25 people in Tohatchi, Badonie said, and in the next chapter north, Naschitti, another 15 to 20.
“It’s like that at every chapter on up the highway,” she said.
Some of these people may be out of reach indefinitely for any water pipeline. Indian Health Service staff told Badonie that if a few houses are grouped together, a water line can reach them. But for a single, remote homestead, it’s not feasible, even if more water is brought into the central part of the community.
“These are elders that don’t want to live in a town. They want to live where they were raised, in the rural areas,” Badonie said. “They have livestock still out there. They don’t want to leave where they were born. They want to keep their area, and live there, where they’re happy. So we’re just going to go ahead and drill wells for them in the rural areas.”
“Our elders need to live a quality of life also,” she added. “We’d like to have the same quality of life as other U.S. citizens have.”
A deal climate change could bust
As part of the settlement that made the Navajo-Gallup Project a possibility, the Navajo Nation shifted its priority date from 1868, when the reservation was established and among the earliest rights in the Colorado River Basin, to 1955.
“That’s yesterday, in terms of water rights,” said Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University.
Given that the system puts the newest rights at the top of the list to cut when faced with a shortage, that puts Navajo water supplies in the crosshairs when faced with ongoing drought and increasing aridification of the Southwest.
Flows in the entire Colorado River Basin are down by 20%, at least half of which is attributed to climate change. That exacerbates the ongoing over-allocation of water in the Colorado River, which counts on seeing 17 million acre feet per year of water in a basin that has reported only about 12.6 million acre feet in recent years. Water managers have been scrambling to avoid a brewing crisis for the millions of people who depend on the river for water, and for the river itself.
“There’s a tenuous balance that exists between supply and demand right now, so if you add demands or reduce supply, you’re going to knock the system out of balance,” Udall said. The more factors climate change researchers consider, the more dire that situation becomes.
Lower Basin States have grown to use their full allowable water, or even a little more. But Upper Basin states still use just about 4.3 million acre feet per year.
“For New Mexico, we take our settlement with the Navajo Nation and Jicarilla Apache Nation very seriously, and the water we’re talking about here for human uses is a really big piece of that,” said Schmidt-Petersen, director of New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission. “It’s human uses in this area, potential for economic development in those areas, and potential for reducing human health and safety risks, so we see that as being really, very important, and because we’re still using well less than our Upper Basin compact agreement, that’s still reasonable to do.”
The Navajo Nation has said that if water runs short, under certain circumstances, they’ll reduce diversions to their farms to leave more water for downstream users, he added. The settlement also committed the Navajo Nation to add $45 million in water conservation measures to the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project so annual water needs there could shrink.
The agreement protects the water supply for farms, power plants, and residents of Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
Even faced with diminished river flows, water managers point to the Navajo and Cutter reservoirs, which will supply the San Juan and Cutter laterals.
“To the extent they rely on reservoir water, it’s going to be more reliable than most sources on the river,” said Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District and co-author of Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River. “I’d rather be below Navajo Reservoir and relying on Navajo Reservoir than below Lake Mead and relying on Lake Mead.”
But Yazzie contends the whole system may need to be rethought.
“We assume there’s plenty of water out there, we just need the infrastructure to bring it to us,” she said. “I think what would be important in this time is to recognize how unsustainable our demand has become and how important it is for us to build collective consciousness and collective power around restoring our responsibility to maintaining these water systems.”
Reporting for this story was supported by grants from the National Geographic Society’s Covid-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Elizabeth Miller is an independent journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico who writes about energy and the environment, the outdoors, and a range of public policy issues. Contact her at: elizabethmmiller@gmail.com
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
A truck drives out to Ritschard Dam, which forms Wolford Reservoir, on July 13, 2016. The River District will spend $323,840 to study potential cracking and erosion at the dam after a study found it is at greater risk of failure than previously thought. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Colorado River Water Conservation District’s board of directors has approved a contract with an engineering firm to address problems with a dam that are turning out to be worse than previously thought.
At its second quarterly meeting, held in April, the River District board agreed to pay $323,840 to HDR Engineering to further study the movement and potential cracking at the district-owned Ritschard Dam. The dam forms the 66,000-acre-foot Wolford Mountain Reservoir across Muddy Creek, about 5 miles north of Kremmling in Grand County. Muddy Creek is a tributary of the Colorado River.
River District staff, aware since 2008 that the dam is settling and moving more than expected, have been monitoring the situation. However, a 2020 Comprehensive Dam Safety Evaluation prepared in December by HDR Engineering for the state’s Dam Safety section of the Division of Water Resources found that the risk of internal erosion of the dam due to cracking had increased from a 2016 evaluation. That year’s evaluation estimated the chances of a dam failure at 1 in a billion in any given year; the 2020 report found a 1.5-in-10,000 chance of a dam failure.
A crack causing internal erosion is the primary driver of the risk of dam failure.
“It is currently expected that the core will crack at some point, if it has not already done so,” the report reads. “Although a deep crack through the core would represent a severe defect and a serious dam safety incident that significantly compromises the dam’s ability to store water, formation of a crack does not necessarily mean the dam would breach.”
Ritschard Dam has an impermeable clay core that is covered on the upstream and downstream sides with rockfill. Because the rock-fill is poorly compacted, the dam’s outer shells are still moving, especially on the downstream side. The 122-foot-tall dam was built for the River District in 1995 by D.H. Blattner and Sons of Minnesota. The cost was $42 million.
According to the report, normal reservoir operations that involve cycles of drawdown and refill appear to have a detrimental effect on the deformations. Even if the dam does not breach, there could still be very serious incidents that necessitate emergency actions and downstream evacuations or a reservoir restriction.
“The probability of a serious dam safety incident will only increase over time as deformations continue, and therefore there is urgency in taking actions,” the report reads.
The report said risk of dam failure at Ritschard is about the same as the historical failure rate for dams built prior to modern dam safety. Generally, a dam designed and constructed in the 1990s should have a much lower risk of failure than the historical rate.
The River District has been monitoring the dam with instruments, but HDR Engineering will help identify areas that could benefit from additional inclinometers, which measure slope angle, and piezometers, which measure underground water pressure.
“First and foremost, the River District puts public health and safety as our number one priority always, and every action we take is with public safety in mind,” said River District chief of operations Audrey Turner, who is acting as spokesperson on Ritschard Dam matters. “The River District has and will continue to increase our monitoring and emergency preparedness at the dam as recommended by the report.”
The River District also will use a LiDAR survey program — which utilizes lasers for remote sensing — to track and visualize dam deformation, stockpile emergency materials onsite such as gravel and riprap and is planning an exercise for the fall that will improve the community’s emergency preparedness.
It’s still unclear whether or when the dam will need to be rehabilitated; that’s what adding more monitoring instruments may help the district figure out.
“There are still some other areas of exploration and additional information before any decision is made toward the rehabilitation of the dam,” Turner said.
A view of the upstream side of the dam that forms Wolford Reservoir, on Muddy Creek, a tributary of the Colorado River, above Kremmling. A recent dam safety evaluation found that the dam is at greater risk of cracking and internal erosion than previously thought.CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH / ASPEN JOURNALISM
Runoff season operations
The dam deformation won’t stop the reservoir from filling this runoff season. The plan is to still fill the reservoir, as long as the drought conditions allow. Turner said the River District also will still be able to fulfill all of its contract demands for water later in the summer.
Dam Safety has signed off on the district’s operation plan, which calls for letting Denver Water make releases from Wolford instead of from other Western Slope reservoirs in order to get the reservoir level down to 10 feet below the crest as soon as possible after it fills with runoff.
“The plan looks well thought out, and we appreciate the proactive steps taken to continue to monitor conditions and toward emergency preparedness,” Bill McCormick, chief of Colorado’s Dam Safety Branch, said in an email to the River District.
Denver Water leases 40% of the water in Wolford. After 2020, the Front Range water provider was supposed to have become the owner of that water. But the deal is off, at least temporarily, while the dam’s problems are studied.
“The River District and Denver Water have temporarily postponed that transfer of ownership to allow the parties to conduct further study related to the risk-assessment recommendations,” Turner said.
Denver Water spokesman Todd Hartman said the two entities mutually decided to extend the lease temporarily while they determine the next steps.
“We were supportive of the 2020 risk assessment and shared some costs of that process along with the expertise and guidance of our engineering team,” Hartman said in an email. “We’ve continued to consult on the path ahead and will remain engaged in helping to develop and guide the upcoming engineering study.”
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.
For a while, Chee Smith Jr. thought he was going to have to send his father to die among strangers. His family lives at Whitehorse Lake, a Navajo chapter where, until a few years ago, roughly 550 of 700 residents had no running water in their homes, including Smith’s. As Smith’s father aged and his health worsened, it became harder and harder for him to live at home.
“We had to haul water from the chapterhouse or the watering points every day for just basic things — for cooking, for laundry, for stuff like that, and also for our livestock,” Smith said. “It takes a big toll. … It gets worse in the winter when it gets muddy.”
The drive to the chapterhouse, the headquarters for local tribal governance, took 20 or 30 miles roundtrip. If the well there ran low, as they sometimes do, the next closest source required 100 miles round trip, sometimes on ice, or in blowing snow, or on dirt roads that stay slick enough days after a storm to send a vehicle skidding. Some people avoid the slick mud by leaving home before dawn to drive on the roads while the mud is still frozen, then wait until after dark, when the ruts re-freeze, to drive home again.
“We get to the watering point, and then let’s hope that the pipes are not frozen,” said Smith, former chapter president for Whitehorse Lake.
If the water ran, they filled 50-gallon barrels, which weighed more than 400 pounds, and drove them home, where water came inside in buckets and jugs. No running water also means no bathrooms in the house, and bundling up against the cold to visit an outhouse in winter.
“He didn’t want to go to a rest home. … He thought he’d be lonely because he didn’t know anybody,” Smith said.
Whitehorse Lake Chapter residents fill barrels for livestock at a community watering point. Image/Elizabeth Miller
An estimated 30 to 40% of homes on the Navajo Nation lack running water, a share second only to the rate found in remote Alaskan villages. The size of the reservation and complexity of its terrain are often blamed, but the failures start with a federal system that promised to provide a home for Navajo people, who call themselves Diné, when establishing the reservation, but has yet to deliver a fully functioning one.
Indian Health Service reports first linked devastating rates of infectious diseases among Native Americans to the absence of basic sanitary facilities in residences a century ago. Since then, infectious diseases have been an ongoing crisis, which the world took note of last year as COVID-19 spread through and ravaged the Navajo Nation. Following guidelines around washing hands and staying home were all but impossible for people who must leave home to replenish their reserves of water and who can’t even turn on a tap to wash their hands.
Addressing lack of water in homes runs into a catch in where to start: begin plumbing communities and houses when there is no water, or build the trunkline that brings water nearby when there are no local waterlines to connect it to the people who live alongside it. The Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project, under construction in New Mexico’s Navajo communities, is testing these approaches.
The project has two main trunk lines, one that runs from the San Juan River to Gallup along Highway 491, called the San Juan Lateral, and another much smaller one that follows Highway 550’s route through a string of Navajo chapters — Huerfano, Nageezi, Counselor, Pueblo Pintado, Ojo Encino, Torreon, and Whitehorse Lake — from east of Bloomfield into Jicarilla Apache communities north of Cuba, called the Cutter Lateral. On the San Juan Lateral, federal funds are paying to construct a trunkline that communities will then need to find money and develop projects to tap into.
But the Cutter Lateral connects to local chapters that linked water systems in anticipation of its arrival. That grassroots organizing, cooperation, and determined fundraising by a group of Navajo communities aided the Cutter Lateral’s progress toward completion and compelled the federal agencies managing the project into faster action. It also brought water to almost every home in Whitehorse Lake, piped from a well in a nearby community, years before the trunkline was finished in 2020.
“We were basically tying into parts of a system that was started before our project was authorized,” said Pat Page, manager of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Four Corners office, which is overseeing the Navajo-Gallup Water Project. “It really is a great example of collaboration on many different levels.”
Since the water turned on, five families moved back to the community, Smith said: “A couple of them came back to me, they said ‘Thank you for helping me, that’s what we needed, the running water and electric. That’s the main reason we moved back.’ They’re happy about it.”
For Smith’s father, the water came just in time.
“My dad was very emotional when he turned on the faucet. He couldn’t believe water was coming out,” Smith said. Water meant caretakers could come to him. He was able to spend his last year at home and die among family.
Chee Smith Jr. at the Whitehorse Lake Chapter house. Image/Elizabeth Miller.
Smith had begun thinking he might have to send his father to spend his last months in an assisted living facility in Farmington.
Andrew Robertson, a civil engineer with Souder, Miller and Associates, was at a Torreon chapterhouse meeting discussing how to reach a few families without water when an Indian Health Service engineer first mentioned the idea of a project to pipe San Juan River water to these communities.
“At first it was, ‘Yeah, right. … Sure, bring water down from the San Juan River,’” Robertson said.
For those families in Torreon, a water line to their homes wouldn’t help, because there wasn’t any water to fill it. Groundwater wells tap into unregulated water supplies that come with health concerns and are running low in several parts of New Mexico. A pipeline to bring in reliable, high-quality drinking water offered a real solution.
Robertson has focused his career on water access. He first worked along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, where he sometimes dug the trenches himself for a new pipeline. When he moved to New Mexico in 2000, he quickly saw Navajo communities facing the greatest need for that work. Working on construction projects has taken him all over the Navajo Nation.
After that meeting at Torreon, a local leader started rallying other chapters around the idea of a regional system, even before Congress approved the settlement for the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project.
“The chapters got together … and said, ‘We’re going to push for this project. Whether we get a settlement or not, we’re going to regionalize our water system. At the very least we’ll have a regional system among chapters to share water, so if one chapter’s well goes down, we can help them out,’” Robertson recalled.
Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project Map
The Navajo Nation and state of New Mexico had signed a settlement around how much water the Navajo Nation could draw from the San Juan River, a tributary of the tightly allocated Colorado River, in 2005. But it was another four years before Congress approved that settlement, clearing the way for funding and construction to begin in 2012. That settlement included the Cutter Lateral, a far smaller project than the San Juan Lateral, at just 4,645 acre-feet per year compared to 37,000.
The environmental impact statement for the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project mapped a rough line marking a pipeline to that area, said Jason John, director of the Navajo Department of Water Resources. Communities used that concept to route the pipeline to existing water systems, avoiding culturally sensitive sites and private property.
“The communities already had concrete plans on where the lines would be built, and some of it was already put into place,” John said. “They kind of got a running start before the federal funding from the settlement started flowing.”
They’d essentially put the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the position of playing catch up. But Robertson said those federal agencies also went on to collaborate and cooperate — to listen to what the people this pipeline was serving were asking for.
It hadn’t started out looking as though things would go that way.
When the federal government came to talk to Navajo Nation residents about the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project in summer 2007, they held a series of meetings in border towns and chapter houses as part of drafting the environmental impact statement. Navajo Nation residents drove hours to attend, only to find the explanatory video about the project ran only in English and not Navajo and that they were given just a few minutes to talk.
Leonard Tsosie, a council delegate with the Navajo Nation representing Whitehorse Lake, Pueblo Pintado, and Torreon chapters and a former New Mexico state senator, said he’d come into the meeting optimistic.
“On the way over I saw a rainbow over Crownpoint, and it was a good sign, and so I just want to mention that,” Tsosie said. “I think it’s a blessing. And also rain. I saw raindrops. So that’s a blessing. It’s a blessing because this is a matter of survival for our people and for the communities.”
He asked the federal staff to consider giving more time to the elders speaking in Navajo: “It’s also not too polite to cut them off. So if you could take that into account also, because they have a lot to say about this.”
“Thank you,” was all the hearing officer said in reply.
The meeting was about listening to people, not answering questions, but people had questions. Hadn’t there been a previous project? (There had been.) Didn’t it go farther east? Why were some places left out? Stories poured forth, too.
Robertson told the visiting federal officials that in the seven years he had worked on water projects for the eastern Navajo Agency, he’d seen a friend need surgery and spend days hospitalized because of years of chronic dehydration. Another friend’s father had a leg amputated because he didn’t have water to wash the pressure sores from his diabetes.
“I’ve had a chance to see firsthand the need for water. It is very real. It is very dire, and it is very urgent,” he testified. “I know of, in the Torreon and Ojo Encino area, at least four projects alone, which would serve 800 or 900 people that are not being built because there’s not — even though there’s funding available to extend the water lines, there is not enough water to fill the pipes. The pipes would be full of air. And that problem will not go away until a water supply is made available to those chapters.”
As in, even if these communities came together and built a pipeline, local wells could stretch only so far. They needed that water from the San Juan River. The Chapter President from Ojo Encino said three wells in that area supplied water lines to that community and its neighbors, but the water table was dropping. Wells that provided for ranchers, homes, and churches were becoming useless holes in the ground that the New Mexico Environment Department recognized as a pending emergency. Houses burned when water pressure ran low in fire hydrants.
The absence of water cascades. In addition to complicating every step of daily life — from washing hands, to making stew or having a cup of tea, to doing the dishes afterwards, it drives up illnesses and complicates public health issues. No water meant a school wasn’t built in Torreon, and other buildings were abandoned because of dry taps. Businesses didn’t open, medical clinics couldn’t operate, jobs drifted away.
Whitehorse Lake Chapter and Pueblo Pintado had both been denied housing — the square, stucco-sided houses with peaked roofs housing agencies often construct — because there was no water for those houses. People who might have preferred to stay where they grew up moved to cities to have running water. Tsosie called it “the brain drain” and “the people drain.”
“When there’s no water, there’s no developments,” Chee Smith Jr. told federal officials. “So we’re kind of still like in the — kind of like a third-world nation.”
Frank Willetto, who had lived in Pueblo Pintado for 50 years and served as its chapter president since 1986, said Pueblo Pintado, by his count, is 70 miles from Farmington, 48 miles from Crownpoint, 100 miles from Gallup.
“So we’re out there,” he told the visiting officials in 2007. “A lot of people say ‘nowhere,’ but we know where we are.”
The chapterhouse had a public high school, a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school, an Indian Health Service clinic, and a store, but not even half of their residents had water.
“The chapter is trying to get water to each hogan or house or trailer house,” he said. “When you don’t do things for your community, that means you are doing bad things for that community. And water is number one that we need.”
Willetto, who had been awarded the Congressional Silver Medal for his service as a Navajo Code Talker during World War II, had been denied veteran’s benefits to build a house because there were no fire hydrants in his community. He would be taken to Congress to tell that story again as lawmakers considered approving the settlement between the Navajo Nation and the state of New Mexico, and he’d go to Washington, D.C. on the day President Obama signed the bill approving the settlement. But he didn’t live long enough to see water in the pipes.
“The communities regard the water project as a priority,” Tsosie said. “They’ve been waiting a lifetime for this.”
Before the Cutter Lateral broke ground in Whitehorse Lake, a traditional Navajo medicine man blessed the earth on which it would be built, the people who would work on the project, and the communities who would receive its water. Again, when the Bureau of Reclamation and Navajo Nation Water Commission began construction on the lateral’s water treatment facility, the ground was blessed, and again, when everything was finished last fall.
“It’s spiritual. I don’t know how I would describe it — the same way as a person praying in a church, I guess. Asking the lord for spiritual help, spiritual guidance,” Smith said. “That it will happen, that it will help our people, and nothing will get in the way. … That’s what we bless it for, and that it will help our people.”
Even the reservoir, a pool of blue nestled among a maze of mesas in northern New Mexico, miles from the San Juan River that feeds its water and far down dirt roads from any town, was blessed. The reservoir sits above Blanco Canyon, where a single lane bridge crosses a section of the dry wash. Signs caution to yield to oncoming traffic, and watch for flash floods, which could swamp a car in the depression between where the bridge ends and the riverbank climbs out of the floodplain. Tamarisk line the banks, their bare branches red in winter. A few houses perch on promontories overlooking the empty riverbed and the canyon walls, where lines of junipers mark layers in the rock and dirt. Propane tanks and firewood sit alongside the houses. School bus stops appear on the side of some of the graded dirt roads, sometimes where there’s not a house in sight.
Installing new water pipeline has meant working in remote stretches of northwestern New Mexico. Image/Elizabeth Miller
Blue posts dot the horizon, marking the buried pipeline. The line weaves among more prevalent natural gas pipelines, marked with yellow posts. All of it has the beginnings of a grown-over, nondescript look, as though it has been there for ages. The first piece of the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project began running in October.
Water came first to Huerfano, the closest community to the source, at the start of a six-month testing phase. Other communities will come online this year, all the way to Jicarilla Apache land.
For some communities, the project means access to running water. For others, the groundwater quality is poor, so this connects residents with water they might actually enjoy drinking, moves them off increasingly strained groundwater wells, and reduces risk of exposure to heavy metals, which are known to be prevalent in New Mexico’s groundwater. In others, more water means a chance to grow.
“All things they need, and things we take for granted like schools and gas stations, they couldn’t build because there wasn’t enough water to provide those services,” Robertson said.
The first 24 hours the pumps ran for the Cutter Lateral, Robertson slept in the pumphouse. Though it dropped down to 50 degrees that autumn night, the engines kept the building so hot that he turned on the air conditioning. Noise filled the room, and he slept, listening for rattling, a shift in the hum, or anything else that indicated a problem.
“Just to make sure,” he said. “After all this time, I wanted to make sure everything was good.”
Whitehorse Lake sits in an arid, treeless landscape. Smith moved away for college and worked as a civil engineer in Tucson for eight years. But the heat proved unbearable and he missed home and the friends he’d grown up with, who had been left wondering what had happened to him. So he went to work as an engineer for the BIA and moved back to Whitehorse Lake. That time away, a college degree, and his work as a civil engineer, he said, prepared him to get things done for his chapter.
“This is my homeland, it’s where I grew up and my relatives still live out here,” Smith said. “You know how it is, I’m just used to being out here because that’s where I was raised, and I like this place.”
One paved road connects Whitehorse Lake to Grants, 50 miles away, which takes a solid hour to drive. People drive that far or farther, to Gallup or Farmington, both about an hour and a half away, Smith said, “to go grocery shopping or just to get a hamburger.”
The closest police station is in Crownpoint, 40 minutes away. Even until a few years ago, to make calls on their cell phones, people living in Whitehorse Lake had to drive miles to find a signal. They’d park on the side of the road while they talked. The only alternative was to use the office phone at the chapterhouse, which also housed a shower that residents pay to use. Electricity is also still missing from some homes, as are indoor bathrooms. All the services in the chapter come from the chapterhouse and senior center.
“I guess the big issue is, people just don’t want to live out here, because there’s no stores, the roads are dirt, so I guess that’s why we ran out of business,” Smith said.
Whitehorse Lake wasn’t originally on the map for the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project, but when chapters in that area began organizing a regional water system, they decided to include a pipeline between it and Pueblo Pintado, about a dozen miles from Whitehorse Lake and divided from it by the long buttress of tawny sandstone that is Chaco Mesa.
“The eight chapters decided they weren’t going to leave anyone out,” Robertson said. “So [when] Whitehorse Lake said ‘We want to be part of this, and we’re going to step up.’ The other chapters who had put their own money into it said they were okay with some of their money going to support Whitehorse Lake. Think about that for a minute — it’s like people in Bernalillo County saying we’re okay with our money helping people in McKinley County.”
The water flowing into the Cutter Lateral system will eventually reach all the way to Whitehorse Lake. With water, Smith hopes more stores, a gas station, and a laundromat, saving the drive to Gallup or Grants to wash clothes, could follow for Whitehorse Lake and Pueblo Pintado.
“Years ago, when we asked for stores, housing, stuff like that, and they’d tell us, ‘There’s no water. We can’t do it,’” Smith said. “There’s no excuses anymore. They can’t say there’s no water. We have water now — so start building.”
With water, Smith said, it’s time the Navajo Tribal Housing Authority reconsider allowing construction. Smith still attends meetings with updates on the San Juan Lateral, the bigger piece of the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, and encourages other communities with water on the way to push for development. In Crownpoint, a bit of a headquarters for the region, he’s encouraging officials to think about everything from fast food to banks to colleges.
“I want to see development, see improvements for my people,” Smith said. “That’s what keeps me going. … I want to see better things for my people.”
Reporting for this story was supported by grants from the National Geographic Society’s Covid-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Elizabeth Miller is an independent journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico who writes about energy and the environment, the outdoors, and a range of public policy issues. Contact her at: elizabethmmiller@gmail.com
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.
Editor’s note: This story is part of a nine-month investigation of drinking water contamination across the U.S. The series is supported by funding from the Park Foundation and Water Foundation. Read the launch story, “Thirsting for Solutions,” here and the other stories in the series here.
First, Crystal Stephens noticed the new, odd odor of her tap water. “It smelled either like bleach or fishy,” says the resident of Hannibal, Missouri. Then, when she showered, she developed a cough, sinus issues and dry skin.
“People called it ‘the crud,’” she says.
In late 2015, Stephens was one of many residents in Hannibal, a city of 17,000 people on the Mississippi River, who complained about the quality of the city’s drinking water. That was after the Hannibal Water Treatment Plant introduced ammonia to their chlorine disinfection system, a move that aimed to meet federally regulated standards by lowering levels of total trihalomethanes (TTHM). Trihalomethane is a disinfection by-product and known carcinogen.
The disinfectant created by the chlorine-ammonia mix, chloramine, was effective at eliminating trihalomethanes, and provided protection against waterborne diseases. However, the use of chloramine raised a new problem: As the new chemical interacted with organic materials in the water, it created more, unregulated disinfection by-products — which coincided with “the crud” that concerned Stephens and other people drinking the water in Hannibal.
Hundreds of disinfection by-products have been found in treated drinking water across the U.S. since the 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently regulates a small number of those. The federal government also asserts that chloramines are safe at the levels they are consumed in treated water. But some researchers and activists have argued that emerging science is finding potential long-term hazards in newly identified disinfection by-products, and that regulations need tightening to protect the public.
Without such regulations, citizens in many communities around the country — including Tulsa, Oklahoma; Portland, Oregon; and Stockton, California — are questioning, and sometimes criticizing, the use of chloramines. In some instances, consumers worried about the safety of these chemicals have successfully pushed utilities to switch to other treatment options that can provide clean water, and remove disinfection by-products, without adding more chemicals.
That’s what happened in Hannibal, where, in late March, 2020 the city brought online a state-of-the-art water treatment system that uses granular activated carbon (GAC), a porous media made from high-carbon material such as wood, coal or coconut shells. This material can bind to and remove some chemicals and heavy metals from water. It’s “much like you would see inside of a Brita filter,” says Karen Marie Dietze, a water process engineer at the engineering firm Black & Veatch. “When water is filtered through the GAC media, dissolved organic compounds in the water are attracted to the surface of the GAC media and removed from the liquid stream.” Also similar to a Brita filter, the media requires periodic replacement.
Building the Hannibal facility cost US$10 million, and came about after a protracted battle between the city and some of its residents. Initial operational costs were budgeted at US$350,000 per year.
Complaints of Rashes, Breathing Problems and “Frankenwater”
Hannibal wasn’t the first city to make the switch after an upswell of negative public sentiment.
The pushback against chloramines often starts with consumers who report adverse effects from drinking or bathing in chloramine-treated tap water.
“People get rashes and people have breathing problems with chloramines,” says Randy Alstadt, administrator for the Poughkeepsie, New York, Water Treatment Facility. The city, which takes its water from the Hudson River, also tried using chloramines to lower their levels of disinfectant by-products and meet EPA regulations. It was the cheapest option offered by the engineers hired to consult on the project, says Alstadt.
But in 2016, he says, the city switched to a system that removes the contaminants using granular activated carbon, a change that came after controversy in the community over the use of chloramines. Alstadt says there were complaints, and even lost business, as one of the city’s wholesale customers labeled the Poughkeepsie product “Frankenwater” and elected to install their own well and treatment plant rather than remain with the water utility.
The Poughkeepsie water distribution system also experienced significant problems with corrosion when using the added chemical. “Chloramine is very corrosive and eats up rubber,” says Alstadt. “It eats gaskets.”
In some cases, that deterioration caused brown water to run from taps. “It looked like iced tea,” Alstadt recalls. The new system has turned things around, he says: “We’ve been very happy with what we did. It was the right thing to do.”
Battle in Hannibal
Hannibal, famous as the childhood hometown of author Mark Twain and the place that inspired the setting for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, pipes its water from the Mississippi River, and had already experienced its share of water treatment woes before the struggle against chloramines ramped up in 2015. For several years, the city’s Water Treatment Plant exceeded federal, health-based standards for disinfectant by-products in drinking water, leading the city and Board of Public Works to settle a class-action lawsuit with four Hannibal residents, including Stephens, that alleged the board had knowingly provided sub-standard drinking water.
Click the link for an interactive version of this chart on the Environmental Working Group website.
Under pressure to control disinfectant by-products from chlorine, Hannibal hired an engineering firm to present options for meeting compliance. From the available choices, the city chose chloramination to solve the problem. That decision became a hot-button issue in town as soon as customers received a notice from the Hannibal Board of Public Works announcing the plans to add chloramines to local drinking water. “It was really a fight,” says Hannibal resident Pat Berg Yapp, who, with her husband, owns The Belvedere Inn, a B&B in an 1859 mansion near downtown Hannibal’s historic district. Stephens and several other residents gathered to discuss the issue at a local coffee shop, and eventually formed a group, now called Concerned Citizens for Safe Drinking Water, to organize against the use of chloramines and instead advocate for the use of GAC. Water quality advocates Erin Brockovich and Robert Bowcock visited Hannibal, and, at a packed public meeting, spoke about the risks of chloramine by-products.
The Hannibal City Council soon declined to vote on a proposed ordinance, the Safe Drinking Water Chemical Use Reduction Act, which local citizens had brought to the council in a bid to halt the city’s use of chloramines for water treatment. After the council’s decision, chloramine opponents gathered enough signatures to put a proposition on the ballot that year to remove ammonia from municipal water treatment. That proposition passed in 2017, forcing the city to find an alternative.
Hannibal hired Black & Veatch to evaluate several methods for modifying the treatment process to reduce the formation of disinfection by-products without using ammonia. They tested enhanced coagulation, oxidation, adsorption technologies — including powdered activated carbon and granular activated carbon — and reverse osmosis. The decision to select GAC as the preferred approach was driven by its ability to effectively meet treatment goals, ease of implementation and operation, and ability to meet the city’s ordinance schedule. “Among the treatment alternatives evaluated, GAC adsorption was one of the more cost-effective approaches and would be able to reliably meet the treatment objectives under varying water quality conditions,” says Black & Veatch’s Dietze.
Graphic provided by the Hannibal Board of Public Works.
So far, “the system is performing as anticipated,” says Mathew Munzlinger, director of operations at the Hannibal Board of Public Works.
Yapp and her husband say they have noticed the change, both in the taste of their coffee and in the clarity of their drinking water. They once supplied bottled water to guests, and told them to avoid the city’s tap water. No longer. “I now tell people you can drink the water here,” says Yapp. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have told you that. Now it literally comes out of the faucet and it is as clear as a bell, and the taste is fabulous.”
For Hannibal, this also means water clear of disinfection by-products. Many other communities questioning the use of these chemicals are trying to decide if this matters to them, as the EPA reviews its rules on disinfection by-products, and experts continue to weigh in.
Editor’s note: The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a collaborator on this reporting project.
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.
