A federal court trial underway in San Francisco could spell the beginning of the end of water fluoridation in America, potentially affecting drinking water for hundreds of millions of people across the U.S.
Although fluoride can occur naturally in water, many water utilities add the chemical with the goal of improving dental health. But an alliance of groups led by Food & Water Watch, a government accountability nonprofit, have sued the Environmental Protection Agency to force it to limit or ban adding fluoride altogether. They contend that the chemical presents an “unreasonable risk’’ of causing neurological damage, especially to young children and babies in the womb.
In opening statements today, plaintiffs lawyer Michael Connett said it ”will be undisputed in this case that babies who are bottle-fed with fluoridated water receive the highest doses of fluoride of any age group.” At the time of “their greatest vulnerability, we are exposing infants, often from the poorest, most disadvantage communities, to a very high burden of fluoride,” Connett said.
But James Do, a Justice Department lawyer representing the EPA, said there are too many ”uncertainties and inconsistencies” in the evidence. “Let’s be one hundred percent clear here,” Do said. ”If EPA could conclude that there was an unreasonable risk from water fluoridation, EPA would regulate.”
As reported by FairWarning, water agencies first began adding fluoride in the 1940s, and today nearly 75 percent of Americans on public water systems are served fluoridated water. Fluoridation has been a lightning rod for crackpot conspiracy theories, including that it is part of a government plot to achieve mind control. Despite the outlandish nature of these fever dreams, fluoride is far from a benign chemical, health experts say.
As things stands, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has set an advisory limit of 0.7 parts of fluoride per million parts of water as the optimum level to help prevent tooth decay while avoiding other problems associated with excessive fluoride exposure. These include dental fluorosis—which can lead to severe staining of the teeth, enamel erosion and pitting—and at much higher exposure levels skeletal fluorosis, a disease associated with joint pain, fractures and the bone disorder osteosclerosis.
But the EPA, which regulates drinking water quality, has not acted to limit the amount of fluoride that can be added. It requires that when fluoride concentrations exceed 2 parts per million parts that customers be alerted, and sets a maximum level of 4 ppm—an allowance for water systems with high levels of naturally occurring fluoride.
According to the CDC, of approximately 275 million Americans on public water systems, more than 200 million are served water with fluoride added. An analysis by the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, found that about 30 million people receive tap water with fluoride levels higher than the CDC recommendation.
Medical and dental authorities say that a small dose of the chemical is beneficial for dental health. The CDC claims that fluoridation reduces cavities by about 25% in children and adults. Still, a growing body of evidence suggests that Americans are routinely exposed to more fluoride than is good for them.
Experts point out that people already receive a daily dose of fluoride in toothpaste and mouthwash, and in many bottled drinks and processed foods. A key focus of the federal trial is a growing stack of scientific literature showing potential neurological harm from even low levels of fluoride.
In 2016, a 13-year study conducted in Mexico found that higher prenatal exposures to fluoride were associated with lower intelligence test scores for children later on. Between 2018 and 2019, several studies from Canada found similar effects, including that more fluoride in the urine of expectant mothers corresponded with an IQ loss in male children, and that youths from areas with fluoridated water had a higher prevalence of ADHD.
The EPA has asserted that there isn’t enough evidence showing neurological damage from low levels of fluoride, and that the benefits of fluoridation outweigh the risks.
The case before U.S. District Judge Edward Chen began its slow road to trial in 2016, when the plaintiffs petitioned the EPA to begin the process of banning fluoridation. A court subsequently denied the EPA’s motion to dismiss the petition, setting the stage for the legal showdown. In the months leading up to the trial, judge Edward Chen made several rulings that carry the potential to shape its outcome, including one that bars the EPA from providing evidence of fluoride’s health benefits.
The case, being tried without a jury, was filed under the federal Toxic Substances Control Act, and this is the first time a citizen’s petition under that law has made it to the trial stage, Robert Sussman, a former EPA deputy administrator, told FairWarning. “This is very much a precedent setting case which is going down a road nobody’s traveled down before,” Sussman said.
If the plaintiffs are successful, the case won’t necessarily signal the end to water fluoridation, but could cause the EPA to limit how much fluoride can be added. Any new rules could take years to implement.
“This is a good public health exercise,” said Mike Keegan, regulatory analyst for the National Rural Water Association, which represents officials of small community water systems. “You want to make sure this is an asset you’re putting into the water supply.”
This story was produced by FairWarning (www.fairwarning.org), a nonprofit news organization based in Southern California that focuses on public health, consumer, labor and environmental issues.
Dillon Reservoir in Summit County is the largest reservoir in the Denver Water system, holding more than 257,000 acre-feet of water when it’s full. With two outlets — the Blue River and Roberts Tunnel — Denver Water officials say it’s complicated to operate. Photo credit: Denver Water
By David O. Williams
DILLON — Denver Water officials increased the release of water from Dillon Reservoir into the Blue River to about 400 cubic feet per second in the first week of May as inflow held steady at about 500 cfs through Monday, May 11. The latter number is expected to steadily rise as spring runoff picks up.
The current forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Colorado River Basin Forecast Center estimates as of May 11 that there is 146,000 acre-feet of water — in the form of snowmelt — that will flow into Dillon Reservoir through July 31. There’s currently 17,500 acre-feet of space in the reservoir, according to Denver Water, so about 128,500 acre-feet will flow out of the reservoir either to the Blue River or Roberts Tunnel by July 31, with an estimated 13,000 acre-feet through the tunnel.
All of these complex calculations are the first steps in a delicate dance Denver Water performs each spring to balance public safety with Denver’s water needs, recreation, hydroelectric demands and obligations to downstream senior water-rights holders.
“Dillon is our biggest reservoir and one of our more complicated to operate,” said Nathan Elder, water resources manager for Denver Water. “Most of our other reservoirs only have one outlet, but Dillon’s got both the outlet to the Blue and the outlet to the Roberts Tunnel, which provides water to the East Slope and down the North Fork (of the South Platte River) to Strontia Springs Reservoir and then to our customers.”
The Roberts Tunnel, finished in 1962 about the same time the old town of Dillon was relocated to its current spot and the Dillon Dam was built, is a 23-mile concrete conduit that diverts water from the Blue River basin on the Western Slope to the South Platte Basin on the Front Range to supply more than 1.4 million Denver Water customers.
This system is what’s known as a transmountain diversion — one of many that bring water from the Colorado River basin on the west side of the Continental Divide to the state’s population center on the Front Range. What it’s not, Elder said, is a way to avoid dangerous spring-runoff flooding.
“We can’t use Roberts Tunnel as a flood-control option,” he said. “So we’re very careful about the amount of water we take from the West Slope over to the East Slope. And when we use the Roberts Tunnel, we can only take it over to the East Slope if it’s put towards the demand. We can’t just dump it over there to prevent flooding or high flows below Dillon.”
The 2014 Colorado River Cooperative Agreement places a 400,000 acre-foot limit on Blue River water stored in existing or future Denver Water storage facilities on the Front Range.
There are more than 1,000 properties in regulatory floodplains in Summit County, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and quite a few of them are along the Blue as it makes its way northwest through Silverthorne and toward its confluence with the Colorado River near Kremmling.
The Blue River travels north-northwest through Dillon Reservoir to its confluence with the Colorado River near Kremmling. Each spring Denver Water performs a delicate balancing act to accommodate flows from snowpack runoff. Photo credit: Denver Water
Snowpack melting
This time of year, as snowpack begins to melt into local tributaries — the Blue, Snake River and Tenmile Creek all feed Dillon Reservoir from the south — Elder and his team closely monitor snowmelt forecasts and weather reports to coordinate with local officials to prevent flooding.
“Denver Water has worked with the town over the years to release water from Dillon Reservoir at rates between 50 cfs and 1,800 cfs,” said Tom Daugherty, Silverthorne’s director of public works. “They have done a very good job of doing that. Denver Water attends our local meetings concerning snowmelt runoff and inform us of what they expect.”
FEMA designates 2,500 cfs as a 10-year flood level just below Dillon Dam, while 3,350 cfs there would be a 100-year flood level. The amount of runoff pouring into the reservoir varies widely, depending on weather conditions and snowpack, from a low inflow of 410 cfs in the drought year of 2012 to a high of 3,408 cfs in 1995.
The amount of snowpack on the Front Range and rate of melting due to high temperatures or rain events also impacts when Denver Water turns on the Roberts Tunnel and how much water it takes out of Dillon Reservoir. The Blue River Decree dictates that Denver Water needs to keep as much water on the Western Slope as possible and can take water only to meet demand.
“Last year was a good example of that,” Denver Water spokesman Todd Hartman said. “We had so much snowpack on the Front Range that we just didn’t need the Roberts Tunnel water and couldn’t take it because of that demand issue.”
That resulted in higher flows on the Blue below the dam last runoff season.
“It got up to around 1,900 cfs, and we didn’t actually turn on the Roberts Tunnel until the second week in August last year,” Elder said. “That’s after everything on the East Slope filled, and we started dipping into that storage and streamflow dropped off on the East Slope.”
This year, there’s a similarly healthy snowpack above the reservoir and also decent snowpack on the Front Range, but temperatures have been higher and the spring runoff season hasn’t been nearly as wet and cool as last year.
“We have a Snotel (snow telemetry) site on top of Hoosier Pass, which is extremely important for monitoring that basin and for forecasting, and it’s still at 121% of normal right now,” Natural Resources Conservation Service hydrologist Karl Wetlaufer said in early May. “It looks like it did actually have a net accumulation through April and is just really just starting to turn around and melt out now over the last few days with this warm weather.”
The Natural Resources Conservation Service produces snowmelt forecasts used by Denver Water, which also taps into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast center.
Based on information from Snotel sites, snowpack above Dillon Reservoir peaked at 127% of normal. The forecast center’s inflow outlook for Dillon Reservoir is 104% of average, and the forecast from the Natural Resources Conservation Service was 107% of average.
The first priority for Denver Water is to fill the reservoir to meet customer needs, but it also tries to minimize high flows out of the reservoir via the Blue River and maintain water levels so that the Frisco and Dillon marinas can operate from June through Labor Day. Elder said the minimum operating level for both Dillon and Frisco marinas is 9,012 feet in elevation.
The goal, Elder said, is to get the reservoir to that level or higher by June 12. On May 11, the surface level of the water in the reservoir was at 9,010 feet. The reservoir is full when the elevation of the water, as measured on the dam, is 9,017 feet, which is 257,304 acre-feet of water. At 9,010 feet, the reservoir is holding about 236,232 acre-feet of water.
Release too much and too early — to avoid high flows and flooding downstream — and Denver Water runs the risk of missing the chance to fill Dillon for use by its customers later in the summer season as well as keep the reservoir full for a long boating season. And then there are the downstream hydroelectric factors and calls by senior water-rights holders.
An inspection team leaving the 23-mile Roberts Tunnel east portal in Park County in 2016. The tunnel, which diverts water from the Blue River to the Front Range is inspected every five years. Photo credit: Denver Water
Senior water rights
While the Blue River Decree does not have a volumetric limit on how much water Denver Water can take out of Dillon Reservoir through the Roberts Tunnel to meet its customer needs, the Roberts Tunnel right is from 1946 and is junior to Green Mountain Reservoir and Shoshone Power Plant rights, which limit the ability of Denver Water to divert. The Roberts Tunnel right is for 788 cfs, which is not a storage right but instead a direct-flow right.
So if Green Mountain gets toward the end of its fill season and hasn’t filled and Dillon has diverted, then Denver Water owes water to Green Mountain. Green Mountain Reservoir, located on the Blue River in northern Summit County, was created specifically to compensate the Western Slope for diversions to the Front Range as part of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project.
Then on the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon, well downstream from where the Blue feeds the Colorado at Kremmling, there’s Xcel Energy’s Shoshone Generating Station hydroelectric plant — which has one of the most senior water rights on the main stem of the Colorado River. A 1902 right draws 1,250 cfs of water downstream to meet the plant’s needs. During dry times of the year, such as late summer, the power plant often places a “call” on the river, meaning junior diverters upstream — including Denver Water — must stop diverting so that Shoshone can get its full allocation of water.
Elder said Denver Water wants to fill Dillon Reservoir quickly enough each spring before any potential Shoshone call. If a call came before Dillon was full, Denver Water would have to release water from Williams Fork Reservoir in order to keep water in Dillon Reservoir. However, Williams Fork can hold only 96,000 acre-feet of water.
“We want (both reservoirs) to fill quick enough that we fill both before that Shoshone power plant call comes on and before the senior call comes on the river, but not too quick that we fill before peak runoff where we get in those high-flow situations,” Elder said. “So it’s a real balancing act there. You’re balancing elevations for marinas, downstream water rights, filling the reservoir safely and then also any potential releases you may need to make from Roberts Tunnel.”
Aspen Journalism, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supported by its donors and funders, covers water and rivers in collaboration with the Summit Daily News and other Swift Communications newspapers. This story ran in the May 17 edition of the Summit Daily and the May 18 edition of Aspen Journalism.
This story was supported by The Water Desk using funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
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 Colorado Parks and Wildlife officer heads out on patrol at Chatfield Reservoir. A $171 million redesign at the popular lake is now complete, providing more water storage for Front Range cities and farmers. But environmental concerns remain about the project’s impact on hundreds of bird species. June 8, 2020 Credit: Jerd Smith
Chatfield Reservoir, one of the largest liquid playgrounds in the Denver metro area, will take on a new role this year, storing water under an innovative $171 million deal completed last month between the state, water providers, environmental groups and the federal government.
For millions of boaters, campers, cyclists, runners and bird watchers, the 350,000 acre-foot reservoir that sits southwest of the city is a year-round recreational hot spot, with 1.6 million annual visitors.
But for thirsty Front Range communities and farmers nearby and downstream, including Highlands Ranch, Castle Rock, the Greeley-based Central Colorado Water Conservancy District and six other water providers, Chatfield represents a rare opportunity to transform a reservoir once designed strictly for flood protection into a much-needed water storage vessel, a key goal of the Colorado Water Plan.
Thanks to the redesign, the reservoir will be able to hold an additional 20,600 acre-feet of water, an amount sufficient to serve more than 40,000 new homes or irrigate roughly 10,000 acres of farm land, while maintaining its ability to protect the metro area from flooding, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“It is cool to see it done,” said Randy Ray, manager of the Central Colorado Water Conservancy District and president of the Chatfield Reservoir Mitigation Company, Inc., which oversees the project. “It will be better when it fills up with water.”
Originally built by the Army Corps in 1975 to help control the South Platte River during floods, by the 1990s water agencies and others began looking at ways to actually store water there.
It wasn’t easy. To raise the shore level, hundreds of acres of land along the reservoir’s banks were revegetated to replace low-lying areas that will be inundated as water is stored. The cove that houses the marina was dredged, new boat ramps were built, and new habitat for birds was created downstream in Douglas County.
A 2,100 acre-foot pool of water for environmental purposes was also set aside. It will be used to provide water for recreation and improve flows for the South Platte River through Denver, Ray said.
Though the project has been praised for its multi-purpose nature, it also triggered a long-running battle with the Denver chapter of the Audubon Society, which feared the construction damage to bird habitat would not be adequately repaired in the reservoir’s new design.
The society’s lawsuit to stop the project ultimately failed. But Polly Reetz, the chapter’s conservation chair, said they plan to closely monitor how habitat and birds respond.
“We’re still not convinced it’s going to work,” Reetz said. “They’ve done some good work out there. Plum Creek is much better. But we plan to watch it very carefully and see what happens.”
The project’s $171 million price tag was paid by the cities and farmers who will store water there, with additional funds provided by the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the federal government.
“This project is a great example of federal, state and local authorities working together to address vital water supply issues along the Front Range,” said Army Corps Omaha District Commander Col. John Hudson in a statement.
That the reservoir is a highly valued part of the outdoor recreation scene in metro Denver was clear Monday morning. More than two dozen cars waited patiently to enter the park, campgrounds were brimming with visitors, and paddle boaters and sailors were already gliding across the lake.
Elizabeth Jorde and her son Jeremiah were waiting at the marina, hoping to reserve a slip for their family pontoon boat on Father’s Day.
Jorde said she’s looking forward to seeing what a fuller reservoir will look like on the many days she and her family come out to relax. But she also said the $171 million price tag seemed steep for the amount of water the project will store.
“I was flabbergasted,” she said. “It will be interesting to see if it is worth it.”
For Randy Ray the project will provided 4,274 acre-feet of critical new storage space for the farmers in his district, who anteed up $20 million to help get the deal done.
And he said it is proof that collaborative solutions to Colorado’s looming water shortages can be found.
“We rolled up our sleeves, put our differences aside and got this thing built,” Ray said.
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
This story originally appeared on Fresh Water News on June 10, 2020.
This farm of cotton and alfalfa in the San Tan Valley, south of Phoenix, Arizona, is surrounded on two sides by urban sprawl. Farms like this one are facing tough times ahead as Arizona’s water levels run ever lower. (Bill Hatcher)
By Stephen R. Miller, Food and Water Reporting Project
Photography by Bill Hatcher
Water Desk Grantee Publication
This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program.
You could almost visit Arizona without noticing it was a farming state. If you flew into Phoenix in an aisle seat, for instance, and spent your time in the city, you might not see it. But if you happened to drive south beyond the car shops and warehouses, across the sandy flats of mesquite and creosote, over dry arroyos, and past the groves of Saguaro cactus that really do stand like sentinels, you would eventually look up from the road to see fields of technicolor green. It may seem otherworldly after so many monochromatic miles, but irrigated agriculture has been a part of this desert landscape for more than 1,000 years.
Lacking deep snow in the Rocky Mountains to feed it, the Colorado River—which supplies some 40 million people and 1.75 million acres of irrigated land—has dwindled. Its enormous reservoirs have drained to half-empty, and research suggests that climate change will contribute to a further 20 percent drop in streamflow by 2050.
Meanwhile, desert populations are booming, and there’s no talk of limiting growth. States that rely on the Colorado have seen some of the country’s highest growth rates for years. In 2018 Phoenix added more new residents than any other U.S. city. Facing scarcity, the state’s longstanding economic and political order is shifting, with water and power flowing from its agrarian past to its urban future.
This story was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Many of Colorado’s rivers and streams are intermittent and ephemeral, making their classification under the Clean Water Act difficult. Credit: Jerd Smith
Colorado and other Western states will be hard pressed to shield their rivers and streams under a new federal Clean Water Act rule finalized last month, largely because hundreds of shallow Western rivers are no longer protected, and writing new state laws and finding the cash to fill the regulatory gap will likely take years to accomplish, officials said.
Though many agricultural interests and water utilities support the new Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, as it is known, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Patrick Pfaltzgraff, director of the state’s Water Quality Control Division, said they will take legal action to protect streams that are no longer subject to federal oversight.
“We are pleased the final rule protects important agriculture exemptions and provides continued assurance that states retain authority and primary responsibility over land and water resources…However, the federal government’s decision to remove from federal oversight ephemeral waters, certain intermittent streams, and many wetlands is based on flawed legal reasoning and lacks a scientific basis,” Weiser said in a statement.
Legal strategy?
Whether Colorado will seek an injunction to stop the new rule from being enforced and whether it will join other Western states in a legal challenge isn’t clear. Weiser and Pfaltzgraff declined to discuss their legal strategy, other than vowing to take action.
The Colorado Water Congress, which represents hundreds of water agencies and agricultural interests, had been largely supportive of the new rule before it was finalized. But Executive Director Doug Kemper said the group hasn’t finished its analysis of the final version.
Formally adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency April 21, the move to significantly revise the WOTUS rule began after President Trump took office and vowed to reverse policies established under the Obama Administration.
The new rule has already triggered a handful of lawsuits seeking to stop the EPA from enforcing them. One was filed by cattle growers in New Mexico alleging that the rule is still too onerous, and at least two others have been filed by environmental interests in South Carolina and Massachusetts, who say the rule leaves too many streams unprotected.
And more are expected.
The Clean Water Act (CWA) has been legally hamstrung for years over murky definitions about which waterways fall under its jurisdiction, which wetlands must be regulated, what kinds of dredge-and-fill work in waterways should be permitted, what authority the CWA has over activities on farms and Western irrigation ditches, and what is allowable for industries and wastewater treatment plants to discharge into streams.
One rule never fits all
Administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA, the CWA, now nearly 50 years old, is credited with making U.S. waters some of the cleanest in the world. But it has also been, at times, fiendishly difficult to administer, in part because of the nation’s widely different geographies.
Go to the East or Midwest, and massive rivers, such as the Ohio and Missouri, are filled with barge and shipping traffic and are clearly “navigable.” That was the term early courts used to determine how water would be regulated. If a stream was considered navigable, it was subject to federal law.
But Colorado and other Western states rely on shallow streams that don’t carry traditional commercial traffic. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates 44 percent of Colorado’s streams are intermittent, meaning they are sometimes dry, and 24 percent are ephemeral, meaning they can be dry for months or years and appear only after extraordinary rain or snow. Just 32 percent of Colorado streams are classified as being perennial, meaning they flow year round.
Under the new rule, only perennial and intermittent streams, or those deemed navigable, will be regulated, meaning that thousands of miles of streams in Colorado and other Western states would no longer be protected under the law.
A financial quandary
And that worries state water quality officials who are responsible for protecting Colorado’s streams.
They warn that writing state rules and finding millions of dollars in new cash to enforce water quality protections will be difficult, especially as the COVID-19 budget crisis unfolds. Officials of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), which includes the Water Quality Control Division, say that until state rules are in place, new housing developments and other projects could be stopped because there is no mechanism yet to issue the permits that were once issued by the federal government.
“While the specific impacts of this rule still are being determined, there’s no question this rollback removes huge swaths of Colorado’s waters from federal jurisdiction—the most of any administration since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. The state will need to put in significant resources to determine how to continue to protect these waters and to determine how this rule will be implemented as the rule is unclear as written,” the CDPHE said in an email.
“Specific construction projects and associated permitting processes that were originally covered…won’t be able to move forward without doing so illegally and harming the environment,” the CDPHE said.
Potential dysfunction
Melinda Kassen, general counsel for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said it would make sense to pursue an injunction to give the state time to set up its own regulations and find a way to fund them.
“If you read the economic analysis that accompanies the rule, there are assumptions that the states will step up and take this over. The potential is for it to be really dysfunctional. We’ve got to get something set up,” Kassen said.
EPA officials have said they don’t expect federal funding to enforce the Clean Water Act will be reduced, even though the new WOTUS rule is smaller in scope and governs fewer waterways.
Still the CDPHE and most opponents of the new rule believe millions of dollars will be needed to fill in any regulatory gap.
How far Colorado will go to challenge the new rule isn’t clear. The CDPHE’s Pfaltzgraff said his agency is still analyzing its next steps.
“It is now up to the state to provide the necessary protection of both Colorado’s economy and the environment,” Pfaltzgraff said in a statement. “We are going to do everything we can, while also addressing the impacts from COVID-19, to ensure Coloradans live in the healthy state they deserve.”
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.
This story was first published by Fresh Water News on May 6, 2020
The white-water rafting industry depends on reliable flows from the Colorado River through Canyonlands National Park. (Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler)
By Kurt Repanshek, National Parks Traveler
Water Desk Grantee Publication
This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program.
From the high country in Rocky Mountain National Park a muddy flush of water rushes downstream, through western Colorado. It turns left, going south through Utah, and then takes a hard right as it enters Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.
Along the way, the Colorado River brings promise and excitement; the promise of water for irrigation and the thrill of rapids that tantalize white-water cowboys, as it plunges deep into the earth.
The river flows past Moab, Utah, and Page, Arizona, providing an economic pulse that lures recreationists to those two towns. It fills their tourist economy coffers, similar to other towns which are gateways to national parks. And as the river goes, so go the local economies.
“On average, communities that have national parks nearby tend to get a lot of benefits from those national parks from visitors coming through there. From staying in hotels, from hiring guide services, and sort of the traditional tourism model of economic development,” said Megan Lawson, an economist with Headwaters Economics, a Bozeman, Montana, firm that specializes in rural economics.
“But then what we’re also seeing is that people might visit national parks and their gateway communities as tourists fall in love with the area, and figure out a way to move there,” she adds. “So we’re also seeing that particularly since the last recession, places with those outdoor recreation economies, like national park gateway towns, have grown faster than places without those kinds of natural amenities.”
While new residents come to Moab, they don’t always generate the same economic benefits other gateway towns enjoy, according to research conducted by Headwaters. That very likely is due to the jobs those new residents are coming to fill.
“In Grand County, the folks moving in do not have higher income than people who are already living there. In most recreation counties we’re seeing faster growth in earnings per job. But we’re also not seeing that in Grand County,” Lawson said.
“It’s not entirely clear exactly why that is happening. I think part of it might be related to the types of folks who are moving in. We know that over that similar time period, the main growth in population for Grand County has been in retirees. But also kind of a younger working age folks, kind of in that 18 to mid-30s range.”
This series on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Canyonlands and Glen Canyonhas 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.
National Parks Traveler, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization, depends on reader and listener support to produce stories such as this one and other coverage of national parks and protected areas. Please donate today to ensure this coverage continues.
As climate warming shrinks the Colorado River Basin’s snowpack, runoff into the river will decrease by 9.5% per 1 degree C (Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler)
By Kurt Repanshek, National Parks Traveler
Water Desk Grantee Publication
This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program.
By mid-century, annual runoff into the Colorado River could be reduced by nearly a third as declining snowpack leads to greater evaporation of snowmelt, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.
That’s because as snowpack in the 100,000-square-mile river basin shrinks, it increasingly loses the ability to reflect solar radiation back into space, said Christopher Milly.
“We estimated that the warming effect alone (ignoring changes in precipitation) would, by the year 2050, reduce the flow by something in the range 14-31 percent, relative to historical 1913-2017 flows,” said Milly, who works in USGS’s Integrated Modeling and Prediction Division. “The loss would tend toward the higher end of this range for higher levels of greenhouse gases and toward the lower end for lower levels.”
The National Park Service is doing what it can but control is out of their hands. Rob Billerbeck is the NPS Colorado River Coordinator, and says their job is to “prevent unacceptable impacts to natural and cultural resources, and maintain natural processes. It’s really tough to answer questions of ecosystem health, and the condition of the park resources.”
But it now seems certain that there will be major deficits in Colorado River flows in the future, with unintended consequences to downstream users, hydroelectric power, recreation, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood control and all water-dependent ecological systems along the entire river. It all depends on whether the weather and the climate continue to change as predicted. And that’s a problem for everyone.
This series on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Canyonlands and Glen Canyonhas 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.
National Parks Traveler, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization, depends on reader and listener support to produce stories such as this one and other coverage of national parks and protected areas. Please donate today to ensure this coverage continues.
Water is big business, bigger in the Southwest than perhaps anywhere else in the United States, and so where the Colorado River flows, economics and politics closely follow. More than 40 million people downstream depend upon its waters for agriculture, cities and businesses. At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in southern Utah and northern Arizona, that reality rises in the 710-foot tall Glen Canyon Dam and shimmers in the reservoir that it has formed, Lake Powell.
But years of drought, upstream diversions and impoundments, and an overly optimistic forecast of Colorado River flows, have sapped the river once literally called Grand. Invasions of non-native species, and growing crowds of visitors, are contributing to the insults the river has struggled to bear, insults that only figure to worsen as climate change continues to squeeze the river from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park down to the Gulf of California.
Lake Powell today holds barely half of what it was designed for, and downstream, Lake Mead is less than 40 percent full. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area’s future as storehouse for water, and a summer place to play, are threatened. It’s a conundrum for the two federal agencies — the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) and National Park Service (NPS) — that manage these two lakes with two decidedly differing missions.
“Recreation is an important benefit, but it’s a side-benefit,” says Marlon Duke, a spokesman for the Bureau of Reclamation that operates the dams on Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But the primary purpose of the dam, part of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), is not recreation or even hydroelectric power. “The primary purpose of the dam,” he says, “is to store water and hold it.”
The National Park Service, however, is responsible for preserving and protecting the natural and cultural resources, unimpaired, for future generations, but has no authority on the management of the dam, or water levels in the lake and river. With few tools to battle climate change, the NPS is studying the changes that have already occurred, while planning for a different climate and future.
Video: long-time residents and scientists agree that the climate is changing at Lake Powell
Video by Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler
The data is in, the science has been done, and the results of global climate change are very evident along the Colorado River, and specifically at Lake Powell. Dozens of studies by hundreds of scientists and many published reports attest to the fact that the climate is definitely becoming warmer, and drier, at Lake Powell. Less water and higher temperatures are threatening the animals, plants, and, in fact, the entire ecosystem. And, it’s going to get a lot worse, researchers say.
The numbers don’t lie. Climate scientist Brad Udall writes of the Colorado River, “Between 2000 and 2014 annual river flows averaged 19% below the 1906-1999 average. It’s the worst 15-year drought on record. One-third of flow loss is due to high temperatures.” By his calculations, river flows will be reduced by 20 percent mid-century, and 35 percent less at the end of the century. Meanwhile, temperatures have risen nearly one degree Celsius from 2000 through 2014. That’s a big change in a short amount of time.
But what can be done to mitigate this diminishing resource, which provides water to so many people? What sort of climatic conditions will we see in the future on the Colorado Plateau? How can we predict these changes and react to them? How will this warmer and drier climate affect the entire environment and ecosystem, the animals and plants that live there?
The Southwest has been locked in a long-term drought/NOAA via EcoWest
Glen Canyon Dam was put into service in 1964, creating Lake Powell and changing the river ecosystem forever, both above and below the dam. Lake Powell is the second-largest reservoir in the United States, next to Lake Mead downstream. The concrete, double-arch dam is sandwiched between the narrow canyon walls of Navajo sandstone, and the lake took 18 years to fill. It covers more than 1.25 million acres when at full pool. The Colorado River feeds the lake from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and takes in what the Green (which flows out of the Wind River Range in Wyoming), San Juan, Dirty Devil, and Escalante rivers will give it.
Contributing to the stress on the Colorado River are 15 large dams on the river’s main stem; all are part of the massive CRSP, created in the 20th Century. The river water supports a $5 billion agricultural industry along its 1,450 miles, with 80 percent of the water dedicated to crops. Just 10 percent goes to downstream cities.
In 1922, 15 million acre-feet of Colorado River water was divided equally by the Colorado River Compact into a Lower Basin and Upper Basin, whose border is 15 miles downstream of the Glen Canyon Dam at Lees Ferry. But that was 1.2 million acre-feet over the apportionment.
When Colorado River flows were calculated during the 1950s, it was based on just 18 years of streamflow measurements. But now scientists realize how optimistic these numbers were. During planning for the Glen Canyon Dam, Raymond Hill, a hydrologic engineer for the BOR, said that there was 6 million acre-feet less water.
“The discharge of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry has averaged only 11.7 million acre-feet since 1930,” he said.
Randy Riter with the BOR concurred in 1965, when he said, “There is not enough water in the Colorado River to permit the Upper Basin to fully use its apportionment of 7.5 million acre-feet and still meet compact obligations to deliver water at Lees Ferry.”
So, there is less water to go around, and a changing climate means even drier conditions. That’s what managers are up against now.
“We operate Glen Canyon and Hoover Dam at Lake Mead, and operate those two reservoirs together,” says BuRec’s Duke. “We balance the contents of the reservoirs. We operate based upon the hydrology we see, and then we use those models to determine how to operate in a given year.”
But right now, that means trouble. “We’re 19 years into the one of the worst droughts in recorded history,” adds Duke. “We’ve gotten 19 years into this drought, but we can’t just continue the status quo. We have to take major steps to protect the water supply.”
There has not been a big shortage declaration either for the 40 million users downstream, but that could change. And that is why the Compact and is now being renegotiated.
Dr. Jack Schmidt is professor of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University, and heads the Center for Colorado River Studies. Politics, he says, are making negotiations over the Compact difficult.
“The political agreement is about how to share the pain of drought. The renegotiation of that pain is supposed to begin sometime in 2020, and has to be concluded by 2025. The game that is played is that we have a hierarchy of treaties, laws, compacts, and rules, collectively called the Law of the River,” he explains. “The treaty we work off of is the 1944 treaty. We have changed the treaty 300 plus times. It’s called the Interim Shortage Guidelines negotiated in 2007. Those pending negotiations will carry the fate of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and reservoir recreation is going to be the furthest thing from anyone’s mind… It’s pretty much an irrelevancy.”
There are plenty of climate models being developed to predict water supplies in the future. The Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS) looks at 12 reservoirs and 29 headwater tributaries, and is used by the BOR and other stakeholders. There’s the aforementioned 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and coordinated operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the 2012 Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study and the 2015 Glen Canyon Dam Long-Term Experimental and Management Plan.
Models developed by James Prairie, a hydrologic engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation, look out in the near term, from 1-2 years, the mid-term, from 1-5 years, and long term, from 1 to 50 years in the future, utilizing historic data and paleo information going back thousands of years. “But,” he says, “none of us know what dataset is right for the future.”
Figuring out how to operate two large dams under these conditions, BuRec’s Duke says, is a monumental challenge, just as building the Glen Canyon Dam was.
“Modelers are looking at historic hydrology, looking at future forecasts, at likelihoods of how the climate is going to change. (This data) is plugged into the models and kicks out a likelihood of certain river flows. It’s a 24-month study, and that’s kind of short, but it’s really difficult to forecast accurately next week, let alone two years or five years down the road. It tells us what the model thinks is going to happen as far as inflows into the reservoirs, but we update that every month.”
Dr. Schmidt is not very optimistic.
Video: “there is a strong correlation between a warming climate and decreased runoff” – Dr. Jack Schmidt, Utah State University
Video by Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler
“The thing that we know is that the climate is warming. There is a strong correlation between a warming climate and decreased runoff in the Colorado River,” he said. “What we know is that there will be an ever-decreasing amount of water flowing into Lake Powell from the Colorado River, the Green River and from the San Juan River. We also know it will be highly variable, there will be more drought years than big water years. Every once in a while, it’ll be a big winter. They will be fewer, but they will still come.
“The most important point is that the fate of the reservoir is contingent partly on climate change, and partly to society’s response to climate change,” he went on. “The thing we are trying to understand with Powell and climate change, if it is the case that there is not enough runoff to sustain both reservoirs, and it’s inevitable that Powell will get really warm, then are we are on a fool’s errand to be trying to manage Grand Canyon to be a cold place, when it fact it’s impossible to maintain forever.
“Perhaps we are better off to robustly anticipate the future but when Powell gets really low, it’ll get really different. So, we better develop a new ecosystem plan. But what happens to Lake Powell is not only about decreasing runoff, it’s about how society makes decisions about what to do with that water.”
Schmidt has proposed letting Lake Mead fill first, with Lake Powell as a backup pool.
“So, what do you do when you have less runoff in the system? You could preferentially store your water, though less water, in Lake Powell. Therefore, Lake Powell would be full,” he explained. “Or you could store it in Lake Mead and Lake Powell would be empty most of the time. Now we keep the contents of Powell and Mead approximately equal, and they both go up and down. You have the two of the largest reservoirs in the United States, and operate them as one. The political decision is that we keep them both half full.”
But what comes next, and what impact will it have on the river, the canyons, the environment and the species that live there?
Scott Vanderkooi is the chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center for the USGS in Flagstaff, Arizona, and is seeing rising water temperatures.
“Changes have been really rapid. We’ve had a long-term drought in the Southwest, since 2000. There’s a lot less water coming into the reservoirs, particularly Lake Powell, and that’s affected water quality released from the dam,” he said. “Previously when the reservoir was full the temperatures would peak at 10 to 11 degrees Celsius (around 50 degrees Fahrenheit). This year dam releases peaked at 16 degrees Celsius. Water temperatures control all biological processes in rivers. It’s the new abnormal, not just a 20-year drought. It has huge consequence on ecosystem and the creatures that depend upon them.”
Long-time Page, Arizona, resident Ada Hatch has certainly seen the change in climate during her 51 years teaching school there. “Of course, the climate is definitely getting warmer. When I first got here, we had snow in the winter. Now if we get snow it only lasts three or four hours and it’s gone. For sure it’s drier, and definitely the climate is warming up.”
And summer monsoons during the summer of 2019 were nearly nonexistent. “That moisture is very important to Arizona, New Mexico, the Grand Canyon and Utah,” observes John Weisheit, the Colorado River Keeper, one of 300 in the Living Rivers network globally. “It’s important to our highlands and high deserts. And that’s going away. They’re not as frequent, and when they do come it’s not as much volume.”
Video: “We’re using more than the river provides” – Taylor Hawes, The Nature Conservancy
Video by Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler
Ken Hyde is the chief of Science and Resource Management at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area for the National Park Service, and says, “Our temperature patterns are beginning to accelerate; 2018 was the second driest ever. We’re going in completely uncharted territory, faster than scientists thought 20 years ago. We’re watching some of our plant communities fading into the sunset. Our climate (at Lake Powell) will be about like Lees Ferry, which is 1,200 feet lower, in about 30 years, and more like Las Vegas by the end of the century.”
Hyde, and Assistant Chief John Spence, are seeing impacts of the changing climate on many different species.
“This monsoon period there was no recharge of the waterpockets, so desert bighorns are coming down to lake level. But there’s no water up in the high country,” says Spence. “Our biggest concern is leopard frogs They require wetlands, and clean and clear water. We are the only place in southern Utah that they exist. They are rare, and probably declining. The numbers of canyon wrens have dropped off. We can tie some other species moving north due to climate change. We’ve had several species becoming more common in the last 20 years.”
Some species are being stressed by the drought and heat, and are already in trouble. Across the Colorado Plateau the Pinyon trees are dying off, possibly due to the drought. Without these trees, the biological soil crusts and grass cover beneath them are threatened. They hold moisture, and secure the soil and without them, we could be in trouble. “We need something to stabilize the soil or we’ll end up being a big sand dune,” says Hyde. “And, what do we do when we start seeing natives of the Sonoran and Mojave Desert? Do we consider creosote bush a weed?”
Lake Powell is already stressed and in crisis due to one invasive species: Quagga mussels. Since 2012 they have spread throughout the lake, clogged boat motors and impeded operations at Glen Canyon Dam, according to Clem Wasicek, a technician with the Utah Division of Wildlife. Decontamination stations last year cleaned and inspected about 120,000 water craft leaving the lake. “We are on the lookout for other invasive plants,” he says. “Eurasian watermilfoil and water hyacinth haven’t taken over our lake yet, and possibly New Zealand mud snails and crayfish, another invasive. It’s a very big mosh pit of things going on.”
Dr. Schmidt believes climate change will make way for other invasive species. “The most obvious invasives, that are a direct function of climate change and water supply management, are nonnative fish. There are two kinds: cold water, mainly trout, and warm water, mainly small mouth bass, gizzard chad (Dorosoma). As things get warmer nonnative reservoir fish might come up and swamp the system.”
The National Park Service is doing what it can but control is out of their hands. Rob Billerbeck is the NPS Colorado River Coordinator, and says their job is to “prevent unacceptable impacts to natural and cultural resources, and maintain natural processes. It’s really tough to answer questions of ecosystem health, and the condition of the park resources.”
But it now seems certain that there will be major deficits in Colorado River flows in the future, with unintended consequences to downstream users, hydroelectric power, recreation, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood control and all water-dependent ecological systems along the entire river. It all depends on whether the weather and the climate continue to change as predicted. And that’s a problem for everyone.
This series on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Canyonlands and Glen Canyonhas 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.
National Parks Traveler, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization, depends on reader and listener support to produce stories such as this one and other coverage of national parks and protected areas. Please donate today to ensure this coverage continues.
You can’t say “At first glance” at Canyonlands National Park. It’s just too big and complex to really take it all in. On the macro scale, it covers nearly 350,000 acres. It’s carved by two major Western waterways: 47 miles of the Green River, and 50 miles of the mighty Colorado River. But it’s much more than just a river canyon. It’s a land of mesas and grasslands, slot canyons and water pockets, roaring rapids and clear streams. There are deer and bighorn sheep, native fish and frogs, cottonwoods and cacti, who all call this rugged landscape home.
Over millions of years the sediments were laid down, then revealed by erosion, in layers of colorful sandstone. The vanilla, caramel, chocolate, and strawberry cliffs look like a giant cake of stone layers, but one that was left it out in the rain. It might be 100 degrees on the Colorado River at 3,730 feet, but snowing high up on Cathedral Point at 7,120 feet.
It’s a huge playground too, attracting hikers, rafters, mountain bikers, and campers, nearly 750,000 visitors in 2018. Low water in Lake Powell downstream in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area has even revealed long drowned rapids. Canyonlands and nearby Arches national parks feed the gateway tourist town of Moab, Utah’s economy.
But the entire region is changing before our eyes, locked into an extended drought, and the climate forecast is grim: warmer and drier. With atmospheric carbon dioxide at its highest level (around 407 parts per million) for at least the past 800,000 years, ecosystems are threatened, rainfall is unpredictable and, a hot and dry desert is going to get even hotter.
What Will The Future Bring?
What can we expect to happen in the next 5, 10 or 50 years? Terry Fisk is the chief of resource stewardship and science for the National Park Service at Canyonlands, and he’s not exactly sure.
“The part where climate change plays in, we can’t really depend on the past as a guide to what to expect in the future,” he said as we sat in his Moab office. “The global situation in the Four Corners area, and particularly San Juan and Grand County (Utah), we are already above 2 degrees Celsius (warmer). And, the Four Corners area, on the U.S. Drought monitor is back in a drought. … We’re in an unexplored environment for CO2 in the atmosphere. We don’t have any experience in that.”
The Colorado River flows are also forecast to diminish, according to Fisk.
“We want to prevent long-term reduction in flow that has a negative effect on ecosystem functions,” he said. “I don’t know if we can say that it’s because of the flows or changes we have seen, since 1963 when Flaming Gorge dam gates closed, but that’s been the biggest impact on the river.”
“In 2012, the Bureau of Reclamation said that the Upper Colorado Basin had flows that declined by 300,000 acre-feet per year. The next couple of decades will be critical for us, but not in a satisfactory way, but more than likely we’ll see declining flows,” said Fisk.
One result of reduced river flows is the reduction in the amount of sediments transported by the rivers. This suspended sediment is extremely important to how the river functions.
But the National Park Service really has no authority on the how much water is in the rivers; that’s determined by nature and the Bureau of Reclamation and other water managers.
“There’s not much we can do. When I think of the river, we have local and regional climate impacts. We are not a headwater area,” said Fisk. “They can have a great snow year and we can be in drought down here. A big storm locally won’t have a big ecological impact, and sediment input.”
While the Bureau of Reclamation has modeled river flows for the last decade or two, Fisk said the trends are not good on any of the models.
“How have things changed along the river corridor over the past 70 years, in the context with the pre-dam situation? What we may expect going forward?” he said. “The pace of what’s changing, that’s amazing. There are no real solutions. We just have to make the best choices we can with the flows we get.”
And it seems that weather patterns too are being disrupted. Last year the summer monsoons, annual events that typically recharge aquifers and fill waterpockets and streams, were nearly nonexistent.
Video: Resource management in an era of climate change
River guide and former Park Service ranger Herm Hoops has seen impacts on wildlife: “Bighorn sheep, especially rams, have increased along the river corridors along with ewes and lambs. Normally one would expect the rams to be at higher elevations in a sort of ‘fraternity’ until the rut. I believe that warmer temperatures higher up, and lack of moisture have moved them down to the river for feed and water.”
Bird populations are being impacted as well by changing conditions. “Until 2013, black crown night herons, blue herons, egrets and bitterns were very common upriver from Sand Wash,” said Hoops. “By 2015 the blue heron sightings were greatly reduced, and at that time no black-crowned night herons, only one egret, and no bitterns were sighted. It appears that something is causing lesser use and nesting of these wading birds.Something going on with Canyonlands. If that’s climate, I don’t know. I don’t know what could be bigger.”
Fisk agrees that “(T)he summer monsoons are one indicator of change.”
Also alarming is that as the climate warms, snow levels in the high mountain headwaters are moving upwards. Above 10,000 feet. Below that level, precipitation is more in the form of rain, which is a big change.
Not only are the river flows decreasing, but the channels are narrowing, as well.
“In the last 20 years we have seen in Canyonlands, and other reaches on both the Green and Colorado, channel narrowing and simplification, because we don’t get the massive 50-60,000 cfs flows anymore that would tend to take out riparian vegetation and increase the width of the river,” noted Fisk. “As flows diminish, it provides a foothold for vegetation on both banks, especially tamarisk. My fear is that as flows diminish that we will worsen narrowing, and channel simplification because we won’t be getting the volumes of water to move a lot of sediment.”
Dr. Jack Schmidt is the director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, and has spent decades studying this same issue. He has seen the changes coming to the rivers.
“The Green and Colorado rivers are getting narrower, they are shrinking, they are becoming less complex physical habitat,” he said. “Since 1940, the Green River is about 12 percent narrower by new flood plain formation and the sandbars are becoming overgrown by vegetation. The hydrology is that we have a more cyclic pattern. Now we have a couple of wet years, longer periods of drought.
“During the dry years, riparian vegetation invades the sandbars, gets established, tap roots get in and lock themselves in. The bad news is that in this narrowing, the culprit is sandbar willow, which is a native,” said Schmidt. “It would be nice to blame it on an invasive, but it’s not that simple. It’s both native and nonnative vegetation.”
So, while rangers and scientists are studying the current conditions, the real question is what to expect the impacts will be on river flows, flora and fauna, and vegetation.
Scientists are now looking to the past to predict the future. When John Wesley Powell explored the Green and Colorado in 1869, the river flowed at around 45,000 cfs, according to his journals. John Weisheit is the Colorado River Keeper, part of the Living Rivers network, and said, “In Cataract Canyon they saw fresh driftwood 50 feet above the river, and took a picture of a cottonwood tree with a stack of driftwood against it. We found that tree, and it’s fallen over, and it’s really far away from the river.”
The paleo record has also recorded some huge flows. “I would say the last one of 700,000 cfs was around the year 1580 BCE,” said Weisheit. “We’ve had max flows on the Colorado River of 350,000 cfs through Moab, twice in the past 2,000 years.”
Today, that amount of water would more than likely flood the town itself.
Fisk is probably most concerned about the impact of climate change on the vegetation.
“What grasses or shrubs will be favored, and under what conditions?” he wonders. He is concerned about some die-off of pinyon juniper forests in the region. “It seems to be widespread in small locations. We see it here on Cedar Mesa in the Abajo area, and somewhat in our parks, and in northern and central New Mexico,” said Fisk.
Weisheit is seeing the same thing. “The desert plants are changing, especially juniper and pinyon pine. They aren’t regenerating, and a lot of pinyon pines are dying,” he said. “If it’s dry, junipers will abandon a limb, but now I’m seeing whole juniper trees dying. That’s actually alarming to me. It’s a plant adapted to dry conditions, but can’t adapt to these particular conditions.”
Video: USGS Scientists model a warmer and drier future in the desert Southwest
While we might not know exactly what the climate will be in the future, just south of Moab, in a sandy half-acre plot of land, set against some sandstone walls, USGS scientists Jayne Belnap and Sasha Reed have created a test plot to determine how vegetation might react to a warmer and drier climate. Key to ecosystem health are the biological soil crust communities, which hold moisture and secure the soil. These crusts are symbiotic partnerships between green algae, mosses, fungi, liverworts and lichens with cyanobacteria acting as a glue. To the eye they appear as crunchy soil, but are a critical component of the desert environment.
The plot, started in 2007, is the longest running desert experiment in the world. The soil is warmed by infrared lamps.
“There are sensors in the soil constantly monitoring the temperature at different depths,” explained Dr. Reed. “The computer is comparing the temperature of the warm spots to the average of the spots without warming, and maintaining it above that average temperature by 4 degrees Celsius. It’s incredibly effective.”
A few test plots are partially covered to mimic drier conditions too.
“One thing we’ve learned the last few years,” she continued, “is that the biological soil crusts love the winter. They’re really taking up a lot of carbon and photosynthesizing. The warming in winter could have a disproportionately large effect compared to summer warming. These plots are teaching us new things every year. We’re trying to do our best to create conditions to understand how these ecosystems change in hopes that we can help management understand options.”
One unintended aspect of a warming climate is an increasing recreational tourism season. Rob Billerbeck of the National Park Service has been studying the relationship between increasing temperatures and visitation.
“In about 95 percent of the parks we looked at, temperature changes and visitation showed a correlation. There’s just more time for recreation.”
Emerging Rapids
But there’s a flip side to river rafting, too; lower flows mean rockier rapids, with some at low levels being impassable. Hoops has seen this along the Green River.
“In the extended drought, river levels (flows) are generally lower,” he said. “Rapids are formed from rockfall or debris washed into the river because of steeper side channels. Over time, normal spring and fall flushes of the main river current make some form of passage for recreational activities like river running. The near closure of boat passage has already occurred on the San Juan River at Government Rapid.”
Holiday River Expedition’s Lauren Wood has seen changes in as well.
“Last year (2019), raft companies had to reduce their season and cut back the number of trips on the river because of diminished flows. In Cataract Canyon inside Canyonlands National Park we are seeing the over-use of the Colorado River system equating to a significant draw-down in “Lake” Powell,” she said. “This means each year we wait to see what new zombie rapids may come back to life as the Colorado River cuts a new path through the former high-water lake bed sediments.”
Mike DeHoff has been a boatman in Cataract Canyon for years. As Lake Powell water receded, he and others had more rapids to run at the bottom of the canyon.
“When the lake was full, it would inundate 65 percent of the canyon,” he said. “When you would run the Big Drops, the biggest rapids in the canyon, while scouting you’d see jet skis and house boats. But that all changed around 2000 when the reservoir (Lake Powell) receded 100-150 feet very rapidly. The river was flowing across its own sediments. We thought it would be a short-term thing and the lake would come back up to its level, but that didn’t happen. Over the last 15 years, the river has slowly been carving back more rapids in that area.
Video: Boatmen in Cataract Canyon document changes in Lake Powell
Gypsum Canyon rapid has the potential to be a major rapid again, as John Wesley Powell noted in his own journals. DeHoff, along with boatmen Bego Gerhardt and Peter LeFabrve, have been comparing historic photographs with current images to understand its true nature, but 50 years of sand, silt, and sediments still line the river’s banks.
“It’s like mini geologic time, it’s erosion,” said DeHoff. “It’s eroding at our time frame. You see banks collapsing, and see how silt is being flushed out of the side canyons. It’s trying to restore itself down there.”
Changes are here, and more are coming, some caused by human manipulation of the river’s headwaters, others by a climate changing before our eyes.
“In 2018, the Yampa River was closed to (water) withdrawal for the first time ever,” recalled Hoops. “It’s either poor math or understanding. It’s certainly obvious.”
Dr. Jack Schmidt agreed.
“Flaming Gorge Dam affects half of the flow coming, but the future of the river in Canyonlands will mostly be affected by decisions in how to manage the Yampa River,” he said. “The Park Service is largely powerless to affect to the primary drivers, which is the flows in the river, amount of water in the reservoir, the temperature of the water, or how much sediment the river has available to move. The large interregional rivers are not the responsibility of the parks, though it probably should be that way.”
With an entire ecosystem in the balance, a changing climate could lead to a water emergency for 40 million users downstream, and an environmental disaster.
“We just need to adapt to climate, we’ve never done it in our history,” pointed out Weisheit. “It’s about time. One thing is for sure, there’s just not enough water. The party’s over.”
The first flyer arrived at each house in early fall. Another came in November. The message they delivered was alarming: the residents of Pleasanton, California had been relying on contaminated water sources.
What they didn’t say was where the contamination had come from. Or how exactly the city planned on handling the contamination in the long term.
Pleasanton, located in the East Bay about 25 miles east of Oakland and six miles west of Livermore, is home to an estimated 80,000 residents, nearly a quarter of them under 18. It is one of many towns around the country facing a newly recognized problem: PFAS.
PFAS (polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals found in many ordinary items, from non-stick pans to dental floss to microwave popcorn bags. These chemicals have been in use since the 1940s, but much about them remains unknown. They have strong carbon bonds, making them persistent in the environment and in the human body—they are also known as “forever chemicals.”
A New “Forever Chemical” Known to Be Bad. But How Bad?
These substances are the latest entry into the directory of toxic industrial chemicals that have made their way into people’s bodies over the last several decades. Their predecessors include lead, asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and chromium 6, the focus of the 2000 “Erin Brockovich” movie. But PFAS pose an unusual challenge the predecessors did not.
PFAS (polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals found in many ordinary items, from non-stick pans to dental floss to microwave popcorn bags.
“Other kinds of contaminants that have come along were known problems well before they were discovered in areas where they presented a threat to public health,” said Philip Angell, who spent much of his career working at top levels at the Environmental Protection Agency. When asbestos was found in schools in the 1980s, Congress acted quickly because the risks were clear.
But newer chemicals pose a different problem. Many of the PFAS contaminating wells like Pleasanton’s were created in the mid-20th century, when chemical marvels were hailed as signs of progress. From 1935 to 1982, the advertising tagline of DuPont, the giant chemical company, was “Better Things For Better Living… Through Chemistry.” PFAS-containing Teflon, invented by a DuPont chemist, was heavily marketed as a nonstick surface for cooking pots.
Even as more information on PFAS is available every day, basic questions remain unanswered. In Pleasanton, the source of contamination is unclear. Nor are all effects of PFAS known, though some are shown in the 2019 film “Dark Water.” And associated cleanup costs are anyone’s guess. One European study estimates the price tag — including environmental screening, contamination monitoring, and water treatment — to be anywhere between 821 million and 170.8 billion Euros ($927 million to $193 billion).
Lawsuits produced evidence that DuPont knew in 1979 that small doses of one kind of PFAS, known as perfluoroctanoic acid, or PFOA, could harm lab animals; the company had reason to suspect potential dangers from PFAS long before the public did. So did 3M, another big firm. “The chemical industry had [studies] showing health effects long before they were shared with the EPA or the scientific communities,” explained Anna Reade, a staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Now we’re playing catch up. “That gap comes from not being told by industry that they were seeing these health effects. Or even just that they were finding PFAS in every blood sample they looked at way, way back in the day.”
So these chemicals have been in the environment for decades with little publicly known about the associated risks. Even now their precise health impact on humans remains unclear. Because scientists can’t directly test humans, they have to turn to animals. Some animal studies have linked PFAS to health effects including changes in liver function and altered hormone levels. However troubling, the studies do not conclusively show the impact of PFAS on people.
But there is little argument that PFAS are harmful, even if the specifics of why and how remain a mystery. Definitively proving causation can take a long time. “For some people, that’s not acceptable. We find a chemical, it looks like it can have an impact on health, why are we waiting?” said Angell.
The overall weight of evidence is clear and, according to Reade, “provides enough for [agencies] to say they have a list of different health effects they’re pretty confident are associated with exposure to PFAS chemicals. So that’s about as good as we can get.”
While Questions Remain, Evidence Suggests Limiting Human Exposure
Even with uncertainty, there are ways forward. A community member recently told Reade that their doctor suggested they act like they’re immunocompromised during COVID-19. Though not diagnosed as immunocompromised, Reade’s acquaintance has high levels of PFAS, which are associated with immunosuppression. “Knowing somebody’s exposed isn’t necessarily going to give you a perfect answer on what to do next,” said Reade, “but it gives you more information on how to be proactive with your health.”
After finding the contamination, Pleasanton sent flyers by mail, emailed customers directly, included information on utility bills, and discussed it at a city council meeting.
Pleasanton has a similar philosophy. “We’ve actually taken a real proactive approach,” said Kathleen Yurchak, the Director of Operations and Water Utilities for Pleasanton. After finding the contamination, Pleasanton sent flyers by mail, emailed customers directly, included information on utility bills, and discussed it at a city council meeting in November.
The two most contaminated wells both contained PFOA and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS)—two of the most widely studied PFAS. With combined PFOA and PFOS levels of over 100 parts per trillion, both wells were quickly designated last priority: they will only be operated when necessary. The town hired a consultant to identify treatment options and their cost.
CITY OF PLEASANTON
The discovery in Pleasanton highlights one of the major challenges of these chemicals: they are everywhere, even more so than asbestos or lead ever were. As PFAS testing improves and becomes standard, more towns are finding that their water is contaminated. “If you look for PFAS—and you look for more of them at lower levels that are still toxic to people and to the environment—you’re going to find them. That’s the sad part about these chemicals,” said Andria Ventura, the Toxics Program Manager for the California chapter of Clean Water Action, an environmental advocacy group.
“If you look for PFAS—and you look for more of them at lower levels that are still toxic to people and to the environment—you’re going to find them”
Andria Ventura, California chapter of Clean Water Action
That’s what happened in Pleasanton. In March 2019, the California State Water Board initiated Phase 1 of its PFAS investigation. The State Water Board sent investigation orders to airports, landfills, and military bases—all common PFAS sources—and sampled over 600 water systems. As of March 2020, these chemicals have been detected in roughly 50 percent of sampled wells. Eleven such wells supply drinking water to Pleasanton; contamination in three exceeds California’s response level.
The State Water Board announced stricter response levels for PFAS in February 2020. Now just 10 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFOA and 40 ppt of PFOS are enough to spark action. One part per trillion is a miniscule amount—the equivalent of one drop of water in 20 Olympic sized pools. ”When you’re talking about a substance that’s being measured in parts per trillion, that doesn’t say to me, ‘Oh, this isn’t much of a problem.’ That says to me it’s much more toxic than even something we know, like lead,” said Jill Buck, an environmental activist and Pleasanton resident.
If concentrations of PFAS in a water system exceed these levels, it must take the water source out of service, provide treatment, or notify customers in writing. The water system must also communicate the test results to the public. Pleasanton did just that—even before the new law was passed. “To preempt that [legislation] the city has actually done communication in advance of the requirement,” said Yurchak.
Combatting a chemical like PFAS can be expensive and disruptive, according to Angell. “We don’t know at what level it’s a problem, and we don’t know what it takes to eliminate that risk.” The costs of dealing with PFAS are largely unknown, but likely to be beyond what a municipality like Pleasanton can afford. “We are looking to our state and federal officials to help us solve this problem and also look for funding,” said Yurchak. “Having to deal with this is going to be a costly endeavor.”
Pleasanton residents are worried about cost as well. “I don’t think it’s fair that taxpayers have to pay to clean up somebody else’s mess,” said Buck. “We can spend millions of taxpayer dollars to treat the water, but if we don’t cut off the source, we will continue to clean up somebody else’s mess and we will pay for it.”
Arroyo Mocho in Pleasanton, near one of the Zone 7 groundwater wells. (STEVEN MILLER VIA FLICKR)
But what is the source? That’s still unclear. More questions than answers seem to come out of studying PFAS in Pleasanton, including what to do when the source is impossible to trace. “We are not finding much of a pattern,” said Valerie Pryor, the General Manager for Zone 7 Water Agency, a utility service from which Pleasanton receives some of its water.
Some are speculating that the contamination might originate at Camp Parks military facility, or at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both nearby. But Pryor is less sure. “Maybe some from a landfill, maybe some from the airport, maybe some from people doing laundry of their water repellent clothes… I doubt that we’re going to find one or two organizations to go after.”
No single agency seems to be able to address these challenges alone. In Pleasanton, the city itself is focused on immediate management and future planning. By shutting down highly contaminated wells and hiring water consultants, city officials are doing what they can, but they do not have the capacity to search for the source. Zone 7 is working with the state to follow sampling plans and regulations.
State Water Board maps show testing sites across California, many of which have revealed PFAS contamination. Across the country, PFAS have become a national problem — enough so that Congress is taking action.
A Nationwide Catalog of PFAS Contamination
The Environmental Working Group, a non-profit research organization, maintains a map of PFAS contamination sites in the United States. It documents pollution in public water systems and military bases, airports, industrial plants, landfills, and firefighter training sites. The data comes from public sources and is updated regularly. Click the image to view the interactive map at EWG.org.
Congress Works to Add Superfund Coverage for PFAS Cleanup
One bill in Congress, H.R. 535 or the PFAS Action Act of 2019, passed the House of Representatives in January and has been sent to the Senate. “This legislation is a response to try to make sure that we are helping communities not only limit their exposure to PFAS, but also help them to clean up the contamination that they’re seeing in their communities,” according to a statement from the office of Representative John Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat.
There has never been a class of chemicals about which so little is known.
This bill would require that PFAS be covered by Superfund, a law that empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to respond to pollutants endangering public health or the environment. The Superfund law can ensure the cleanup of sites where no one is identifiably responsible. This could be crucial when dealing with PFAS—though there have been PFAS found at existing Superfund sites, how the EPA will deal with those cleanups is not entirely clear The measure would also require the EPA to inform communities of public health risks and of contaminant sources, if known.
There has never been a class of chemicals about which so little is known, according to Angell. Since the creation of the EPA in 1970 and the passing of the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, chemical regulation has improved slightly, though existing chemicals—including PFAS—were grandfathered in. “We know more before a new chemical is introduced into commerce… but don’t know everything,” said Angell.
How do we find out the rest? “It’s up to regulators and scientists and academia to play catch up and figure it out,” said Reade.
This bill would require that PFAS be covered by Superfund, a law that empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to respond to pollutants endangering public health or the environment. The Superfund law can ensure the cleanup of sites where no one is identifiably responsible. This could be crucial when dealing with PFAS—though there have been PFAS found at existing Superfund sites, how the EPA will deal with those cleanups is not entirely clear The measure would also require the EPA to inform communities of public health risks and of contaminant sources, if known.
