One of the most intriguing aspects of the U.S. Drought Monitor is the network of observers across the country who contribute data and information each week to help identify the location and intensity of drought. @DroughtCenter @DroughtGov Learn more at http://drought.unl.edu/Publications/News.aspx?id=329
In recent weeks, federal officials have warned residents of the southwestern United States that their two major lifelines — the Colorado River and the Rio Grande — will deliver alarmingly low water supplies in the coming months.
This summer, the Rio Grande may actually run dry through Albuquerque, New Mexico, a rarity. Meanwhile by 2020 the Colorado’s biggest reservoir, Lake Mead, stands a 52 percent chance of dropping to the level at which an official shortage is declared, requiring cuts in water deliveries to Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
As snowpacks dwindle, temperatures warm, and periodic drought dehydrates the West, unprecedented levels of cooperation will be needed if farmers, ranchers, tribal communities, cities and rivers are all to have a degree of water security. That cooperation, in turn, requires some reframing of the water mantra embedded in the minds of just about every producer in the western United States: “Use it or lose it.”
The phrase stems from state laws that say if a water right is not fully put to beneficial use, the owner risks forfeiting the unused portion.
Historically, states considered farming, mining, manufacturing, and supplying drinking water to cities to be beneficial uses of water. Providing water to a river itself was a lower priority, and often considered a waste.
One irrigator in central Arizona describes this traditional thinking as, “divert all you can and use all you can.”
Agriculture accounts for 80 percent or more of water consumption in the western states. While many farmers and ranchers agree on the need to conserve water, existing policies make it hard to do so.
As a result, for decades, thousands of miles of rivers and streams in the West have run low or completely dried up at critical times of the year, decimating fish populations, bird and wildlife habitat, and recreational activities that support rural economies.
In Montana alone, more than 4,000 miles of streams are chronically or periodically de-watered.
But thanks to innovative policies, new collaborations, and smart technologies, zero-sum stalemates are giving way to more flexible water management, benefiting farmers, rivers and local economies at the same time.
In western Colorado, for example, ranchers have partnered with a non-profit water trust to curtail diversions from Colorado River tributaries when streamflows drop dangerously low. This is made possible by a 2013 Colorado law that loosens up the use-it-or-lose-it rule by allowing a water user enrolled in an approved conservation program to forego some water use without losing any water rights. The ranchers still get the water they need, the program protects the rights of other water users, and the river gets more flow to sustain its trout fishery.
In a similar vein, a 2003 Colorado law allows farmers, ranchers and other entities to temporarily loan water to rivers and streams without risking the loss of water rights.
Arizona’s Verde River Valley, a ribbon of green in the desert and a hotspot for migratory birds, is becoming a poster child for smarter water management. Farmers, conservationists and the business community are collaborating to upgrade century-old ditch systems, convert fields from flood to efficient drip irrigation, and shift some acreage to barley, which requires less water in the summer months when the river is hurting most.
As a result, portions of the Verde and its tributaries now flow stronger, enhancing habitats and recreational opportunities, a local beer-maker gets a supply of grain, and irrigators receive all the water they need from a modernized irrigation system.
Another tool gaining popularity in the West is the split-season agreement, whereby a conservation organization or public agency compensates an irrigator to forego water use in the late summer, when rivers are most depleted. A five-mile section of Colorado’s Little Cimarron River will benefit permanently from such an agreement, turning a stretch of previously dry riverbed into a flowing stream, while maintaining the agricultural use of the water right during the most-productive part of the growing season.
Strategies like these can preserve streams while sustaining agriculture and rural economies.
It is time to build on lessons learned from farmers, ranchers, businesses, and conservationists who are moving beyond the win-lose battles of the past and are working together to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes for agriculture, the environment, and local economies.
Before long, the “use it or lose it” mantra may give way to “waste not, want not.”
Sandra Postel is the author of “Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity” and co-creator of the water restoration campaign Change the Course.
Lesli Allison is executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance.
We wade through a creek just downstream from a beaver dam, one of many in this stretch near the headwaters of North St. Vrain Creek. Without the beavers’ work, their engineering prowess, this diverse wetland wouldn’t be here. The valley bottom instead would slowly transform back into a grassy plain and the stream would return to its banks, cutting deeper into the landscape, [Juli] Scamardo says. The whole ecosystem would suffer.
“They definitely are engineers,” she says. “They change their environment to suit them and it also happens to suit a lot of other species.”
Scamardo is a master’s student at Colorado State University, studying how beavers alter landscapes.
Few species manipulate their surroundings enough to make big ecological changes. Humans are one. Beavers are another.
At one point, the rodents numbered in the hundreds of millions in North America, changing the ecological workings of countless streams and rivers. As settlers moved West, they hunted and trapped them to near extinction. Now there are new efforts — not just in Rocky Mountain National Park, but across the Western U.S. — to boost their numbers, and in turn, get us more comfortable with the way they engineer rivers and streams.
Beaver benefits
The North St. Vrain Creek beavers are a tough bunch.
Heavy snow melt runoff from the jagged peaks of the Front Range frequently undoes all their hard work. On the main creek, away from the marshy wetland, Alex Brooks, a Colorado State University watershed science PhD student, points to a beaver dam made of willows, mud and aspen branches. Last year, the creek blew out the dam. And now it’s back.
“So they were homeless for a little while,” I say, not fully understanding the mechanics of beaver habitats.
“They don’t actually live in these,” Brooks says. “They build these to flood the vegetation … They’ll build lodges where they live. The dams they build all over the place not just where they live.”
“Oh, I feel like that’s a misconception,” I say. “Don’t people think that every dam has beavers inside of it?”
Brooks kindly agrees.
“Yeah, I think that’s probably true,” he says.
Much like us, beavers build dams for their own benefit. They make ponds to protect their lodges and flood areas to increase the vegetation they feed on and use for building materials. While their motivations are selfish, they end up helping their woodland friends, like elk, moose, birds, fish and insects.
Scientists have shown we get lots of benefits, too. Beaver dams improve water quality, trap and store carbon — and in the aggregate could be a significant way of storing groundwater in dry climates.
Beaver reintroduction projects are already underway in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Washington state. Sections of Rocky Mountain National Park, and vast swathes of the American West, seem primed for a beaver comeback, Scamardo says, but they’re not showing up.
“So we’re still asking the question of like, ‘What else do you want?’” she says. “Having a beaver psychologist would really be the best for one of these projects but we don’t have any of those.”
It’s no secret that water is a problem in the West. Historically, the humble beaver helped maintain wetlands and ponds across the arid landscape but their populations were decimated during the fur trade and their numbers dropped dramatically from 400 million to just 100,000 by the turn of the twentieth century. But Canada’s national animal is making a comeback and scientists think they have an important role to play as our region fights drought.
Too many ranchers and landowners out here, the beaver is a destructive little beast. Not only can it wreak havoc on irrigation systems, it can take down trees, nibble through fiber-optic internet cables, and cause the occasional flood. But if you ask Jeremy Maestas, he said there’s much more to the animal.
“Just through their diligence and 24-hour work ethic, they’re making amazing things happen in the streams,” said Maestas. “And because they’ve been here for millennia, the plants that live here have evolved with their browsing and beavery.”
Maestas is a wildlife biologist and he said the beaver is essentially a walking, talking ecosystem. Instead of just using dams to control water, Maestas said we could also follow the beavers lead. He called it a “sticks and stones” approach.
“Rather than diesel fuel and Tonka toys, we just direct the water to move sediment and grow vegetation, and do all the good things we want the ecosystem to do,” said Maestas.
One of those good things includes storing more water in the ground. Across the Mountain West, most precipitation comes in the wintertime. But when snow melts, it can often be in a hurry. Turning into runoff or rushing down a stream to a bigger river, and far away from where it’s needed.
But if it encounters something like a beaver dam, Maestas said the water gets delayed.
“The longer that we can keep that on the landscape, we increase the productivity of those plants. And ultimately leads to more drought resilience, right? These sponges fill up with water. It’s like putting money in the piggy bank for those lean times,” Maestas said.
Lean times like when you don’t get a lot of snow. Or, when rising temperatures mean snowmelt happens early and the rush of water comes too soon for peak water demand in the growing season…
“But it really isn’t until you get down in the mud and you start building these that you understand the process that you’re trying to fix,” Maestas added.
So one afternoon in early August, about 40 people got their toes wet—and muddy—building a few of these beaver-like dams on a Nature Conservancy testing ground in Wyoming. The group mostly included people from agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and Game and Fish.
“I feel like this is the perfect day to try something new,” said Corissa Busse, who works for The Nature Conservancy in South Dakota.
She and the others spent about a day and a half in the classroom, learning what makes a beaver tick. They won’t have the power of chisel-like teeth, so workshop instructor Joe Wheaton told them to be creative.
“You’ll have shovels—very useful. You’ll have buckets. Please don’t put the buckets back together without cleaning them first. You’ll have loppers. You’ll have hands. Make sure everybody’s got gloves, everybody’s got eye protection,” said Wheaton.
They brought some untreated fence posts from town to build the dams, but otherwise, they had to use supplies from the area just like a beaver would. That meant willow branches, sticks, stones and mud. The materials allow the structure to be porous. Water can trickle through, but flows will still slow down long enough to soak deep into the ground.
Jeremy Maestas said there’s another big difference between this and a dam.
“We don’t want to be constantly coming back in here with human labor and effort trying to keep it alive,” said Maestas. “So, the sooner we can turn it over to Mother Nature, to do her job, the better off we’re all going to be.”
By Mother Nature, Maestas meant beavers. Once these human-made dams are established, they will re-introduce the animal into the area.
Maestas said this won’t work everywhere, especially in more urban settings, or places where the animal could interfere with infrastructure. But in the right setting, Maestas said, “We’re bringing nuisance animals into areas where they’re wanted.”
That way, he said, maybe beavers can begin to solve the problem of water in the West.
The Colorado River Research Group has published a new paper. Click here to read the release. Here’s an excerpt:
Across the Colorado River Basin, the elevation of Lake Mead is a common point of discussion and concern. Even casual observers have come to recognize 1075’–roughly 4 feet below current (late August 2018) levels—as the elevation at which curtailments begin, and for many, the point at which the Colorado River crisis becomes real. As of today, it is highly unlikely that this threshold will be reached on January 1st of 2019, and Lower Basin curtailments will be narrowly avoided for the fourth straight year. But this is not all good news, and is not evidence of successful crisis management. The reality of the situation is that the dominos have already begun to tumble, and the proof lies upstream in Lake Powell.
From 2000 through the end of 2018 (projected), Lake Powell’s elevation will have dropped approximately 94 feet despite Upper Basin consumption only averaging about 4.5 million acre‐feet (maf)/year. Several particularly dry years—including 2018—in a process of continuing aridification contributed to the drop, but ultimately it is the operational rules that are slowly but surely draining Lake Powell. Through 2018, cumulative releases since 2000 from the reservoir will be approximately 11 maf higher than the 8.23 maf/year baseline traditionally utilized by Reclamation (see figure on page 3). Had those excess releases remained in Lake Powell, the lake level would not have declined. However, those extra releases—now governed by the 2007 Interim Guidelines—are the only thing that has kept Lake Mead from dropping into shortage conditions. Current storage in Lake Mead is approximately 10 maf.
Continuing this operational pattern will further drain Lake Powell and erode the benefits associated with its water storage, including Lower Basin water deliveries, Glen Canyon hydropower generation, and perhaps most importantly, the delicate interbasin truce brokered by the Law of the River and made operational by the two massive reservoirs. The structural deficit is the true villain in this story, mixing with the operational rules to drain Lake Powell.1 The process is already well underway. If storage in Lake Powell cannot rebound in an era where the Upper Basin consumes less than two‐thirds of its legal apportionment, then the crisis is already real.
Deciphering the Story of Lake Powell Elevations
Lake Powell entered the 21st century nearly full at 3681’ (21.4 maf), then declined rapidly before stabilizing at an uncomfortably low level (as shown below). Although Lake Powell does not have shortage triggering elevations as does Lake Mead, further elevation declines at Lake Powell prompt a variety of operational issues at Glen Canyon Dam’s hydropower facilities (via vortex and cavitation problems). This likely begins around 3525’ (approximately 5.9 maf); the official minimum power pool occurs at 3490’ (roughly 4.0 maf of live storage). This is significant for more than just hydropower users, as many key environmental and salinity control programs are funded from these hydropower revenues.2 Should the reservoir decline further, Lake Powell would move through the upper, mid and lower operational tiers that dictate the release volumes downstream to restore Lake Mead storage. At 3370’, Powell is at dead pool, and releases of any kind are impossible. To put these numbers in context, Powell is expected to end 2018 around 3587’ (approximately 10.5 maf, or half the 2000 value), while Lake Mead will hover around 1080’ (roughly 10 maf).
In the Lower Basin, the reasons behind Lake Mead declines, and the solution to those declines, is now widely understood: it is all about the structural deficit—i.e., the practice of consuming more water each year (including system losses) than enters the reservoir. Those simple inflow/outflow mathematics also apply to Lake Powell, but Powell ultimately tells a more complex story. For starters, storage in Lake Powell responds to the whims of nature with sudden, dramatic movements. Dry periods, such as 2002‐ 2005 and 2012‐2013, have an immediate impact (as shown above). We will see more of these dry periods, which become especially problematic when the reservoir is already low.3 In fact, 4 of the 10 lowest runoff years in record (going back to 1906 and using estimated values for 2018) have occurred since the turn of this century. Our hydrology is changing; so must our water use practices.
The story told by the wet years, however, is perhaps more illuminating. In reservoirs designed to provide multi‐year carryover storage, declines are expected in dry years, and recovery is expected in wet years. In the case of the Colorado, wet years occurred about 50% of the time in the 20th century, but since 2000 have occurred only 25% of the time. When large inflows do occur, current operational rules immediately trigger large releases. The experience in 2011 is illustrative: inflow was more than 5 maf higher than usual, but so was the subsequent release (as shown below). The inability of Lake Powell to achieve a lasting recovery in the wet years is another causality of how the Lower Basin structural deficit works its way through the operational rules. To view the structural deficit as a Lower Basin and/or a Lake Mead problem is thus much too simplistic; it is central to all the basin’s water supply woes.
Addressing the Lake Powell Problem
The ability of Lake Powell storage to recover in wet years could be enhanced by new operational rules, perhaps including changes to the location of the “balancing tiers” and/or the equalization threshold, the establishment of Upper Basin ICS (Intentionally Created Surplus) programs, and a wide range of other possibilities that reduce water consumption. These items will undoubtedly be discussed further in coming years. Better options might be found by thinking outside of this familiar framework. Lakes Mead and Powell, after all, are essentially one giant reservoir (bisected by a glorious ditch) if not for the Lee Ferry accounting station and the administrative delineation of Upper and Lower Basins. Managing—and thinking—of these facilities as two distinct reservoirs, one for the benefit of the Upper Basin and one for the Lower, now seems outdated. Even tinkering with these familiar elements of basin administration and the Law of the River are categorically off‐the‐table for many interests, but it might be worthwhile to think about what could be achieved in terms of water security, Grand Canyon (and perhaps Glen Canyon) restoration, and other objectives if we allowed ourselves more flexibility in managing (and perhaps modifying) the massive infrastructure investments already in place. Long‐term, we may have no choice to consider reform on this scale.
Currently, the future of Lake Powell—and for that matter, Lake Mead—is largely tied to the drought contingency plan (DCP) negotiations underway in both basins. The primary focus in the Lower Basin continues to be on avoiding deep curtailments, while the Upper Basin is increasingly coming to terms with potentially needing to manage a compact call or, at least, a loss of hydropower generation in Lake Powell. Already, these negotiations are pressing up against the deadline for starting negotiations on version 2 of the Interim Guidelines. For many in the basin, the next generation of Guidelines are the place to adopt a comprehensive solution—a sustainable water budget. This is something the current rules do not provide, even though they have extended the window of time for doing so. The new framework can potentially take many forms, but at a minimum, will need to recognize the linked future of the two basins, and the political necessity of addressing equity concerns among users, sectors, and regions. Admittedly, this is a tall order on a tight deadline, but the recent history of Lake Powell shows us that the status quo is untenable. In different ways, both reservoirs illustrate the same lesson: it is impossible to keep a bathtub full while the drain is left open.
The Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam. Photo credit: USBR
Here’s the release from the Bureau of Reclamation (Patti Aaron/Marlon Duke):
The Bureau of Reclamation has released updated 5-year probability-based planning model projections for future Colorado River system conditions, which underscore the ongoing impact of record dry conditions across the basin. With spring and summer inflow to Lake Powell at only 36 percent of average, this year is one of the driest years in the past 19 years, which is the driest 19-year period in recorded history and one of the driest in the past 1,200 years. These projections show increased risk of declining reservoir elevations over the next 5 years. Specifically, the projections include a 57 percent likelihood for Lower Basin shortage in 2020—an increase from 52 percent from the April results. Furthermore, recently published results from the August 2018 24-Month Study operational model showed that another dry year like 2018 could drop the elevation of Lake Mead by 20 feet or more by mid-2020.
“These model projections further illustrate the continuing trend of drought and increasing dry conditions in the Colorado River Basin,” said Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman. “There is a real sense of urgency across the basin to protect the river’s supply in the face of increasing demand and ongoing drought—I applaud the actions of water managers in all seven states and look forward to completing a comprehensive, basin-wide drought contingency plan before the end of this year.”
These probability projections include considerable uncertainty as the long-term hydrologic assumptions used may not fully represent the possible future inflows that could occur. The Colorado River Simulation System planning model used for these projections is an important long-term planning tool for water managers across the basin. Conversely, the 24-Month Study operational model—which was most recently released on August 15—produces a single projection of reservoir conditions based on current inflow forecasts and reservoir conditions. Projections from the August 24-Month Study were used to determine annual operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead for 2019. While Lake Mead is near the level that would—for the first time—trigger mandatory cuts to Lower Basin water deliveries, it will continue to operate in normal conditions through calendar year 2019. Annual operations for 2020 will be determined in August of 2019.
A casual forum about water, while drinking beer! Meet the award-winning journalists from H2O Radio and give us your thoughts on water, the environment, and our liquid future. No host bar but discounted pints available!
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Protect Your Groundwater Day (September 4, 2018) provides an opportunity for people to learn about the importance of groundwater and how the resource impacts lives. Your involvement and passion during the week is what makes PYGWD so successful, and we have put together free marketing materials to help guide you through the event.
On June 1, a spark near the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gage Railroad ignited a flame in the Animas River gorge north of Durango. The fire would burn for weeks, torching more than 55,000 acres and filling the air with smoke.
Then came the rain.
“Mother Nature is the one that really helped out,” Bruce Whitehead, executive director of the Southwestern Water Conservation District told a group of water experts and planners at the Colorado Water Congress in Vail this week.
But Mother Nature also wreaked havoc. As the rainwater hit the burn scar and flowed along the dry surface into the Animas and its tributaries, the ash and debris it brought down with it suffocated fish and clogged irrigation ditches, Whitehead said. It also forced the Durango water utility to shut off its water intake due to high turbidity for several days and instead draw from nearby reservoirs.
The fallout of the 416 Fire is an example of how hotter, drier conditions due to climate change are making it tougher to plan water supplies in Colorado. And it is just one example of how the impacts of drought – and the broader effects of “aridification” – are being felt across the state.
For the first time, Aspen has called for stage 2 mandatory water restrictions. This includes limiting lawn watering to no more than three days a week and running sprinklers no more than 30 minutes a day.
There are currently fishing restrictions — some voluntary, some mandatory — on eight rivers in Colorado because of low flows and high water temperatures. Anglers and rafters who make their living on those rivers have had to limit their trips like never before.
Ranchers are selling off their cattle because drought has limited their natural food supplies and caused hay prices to rise.
And there is a potential for a first-ever “call” on the Yampa River, which flows through Dinosaur National Monument. That would limit users from drawing upon the Yampa in order to maintain minimum required flow levels.
These developments have brought a sense of anxiety to the annual meeting of statewide water bosses and watchdogs.
“We are not going to be able to rely on the historical hydrology that occured before 2000 to make decisions going forward,” said Lain Leoniak, a water lawyer in the Colorado Attorney General’s office. “This is a Colorado River system problem.”
A NASA report has found that drought conditions are becoming more common in the Western U.S. Several water experts at this week’s conference scoffed at the term “drought,” preferring instead “aridification,” meaning not just a lack of rainfall, but a wholescale transformation of Western land into a drier landscape.
Colorado is expected to warm 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 due to climate change, according to a Western Water Assessment study. As a parable for what to expect, the Water Congress held a panel discussion about Cape Town, a South African city of four million people that nearly ran out of water earlier this year.
Warmer, drier weather in the West has extended the fire season and made forests more prone to burning. It has also warmed up waterways and increased the rate of evaporation from rivers and reservoirs. This creates challenges for both water quality and quantity.
“I think nature could throw curve balls at us that are on the order of Cape Town,” said Brad Udall, a member of the Colorado River Research Group and a water and climate researcher at Colorado State University (also a former Colorado Independent board member). Udall added that “Day zero” – meaning the day water sources run dry – “happens here potentially because a community has only one water source and that source gets hammered for some reason — be it ash or low flows.”
‘I don’t think we have a choice’
Colorado has a statewide water plan, crafted with great fanfare by Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration. But implementing it has been difficult due to lack of funding and a dearth of knowledge about what to expect in Colorado’s water future.
The Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI), which previously predicted Colorado will run out of water in 2050, began in 2016. A full, updated report is long overdue and now expected in July of 2019.
Russ Sands, senior program manager at the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said population increases and climate change are key factors that determine water supply. The SWSI will include a variety of different scenarios with different water forecasts. Sands said he hopes it will help water planners better prepare for climate change and a variety of potential scenarios.
One scenario is already playing out. Spring snowmelt now comes one to four weeks earlier than it did about three decades ago, according to a 2018 report by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization. Given earlier seasonal peak snowpack runoff, one strategy is to store the water in a reservoir.
John Porco, the president of the San Juan Water Conservation District, has been trying to build such a reservoir on a diversion off the San Juan River near Pagosa Springs. The project is known as the San Juan Headwaters Project, and previously Dry Gulch. It began in earnest following especially dry conditions in 2002. But it lacks community support. Voters in Archuleta County rejected a mill levy increase last November to help fund the project.
Porco said the reservoir is needed to ensure the community can keep the water to which it has a right under Colorado’s complex water law system. It also could be used to regulate flows of the San Juan for fish and wildlife and boaters, he added.
“If things get really bad, we don’t have a backup,” he said of his community’s current drought preparedness.
But conservationists argue that building more water storage is not the silver bullet.
“Storage is just a bucket,” said Abby Burk, western rivers program manager for Audubon Rockies. “It doesn’t create any new water.”
Instead, Burk said water managers need to be thinking about new ideas for conservation and efficiency.
But, as with reservoirs like the one Porco wants to build, there isn’t much money to get these projects off the ground. Most of the money for water conservation projects comes from the state’s tax on oil and gas production, known as the severance tax. But that funding source is proving to be insufficient and far too volatile because it hinges on fluctuations in oil and gas prices. Tax deductions that oil and gas companies claim also have chipped away at revenues, especially since 2016 following a lawsuit brought by BP America.
The two major-party candidates running for Colorado governor hinted at a possible funding plan when they spoke to the Water Congress this week.
State Treasurer Walker Stapleton, a Republican, said there are “opportunities for Colorado to expand revenues” through sports betting and medical marijuana, but noted he wants to fund the water plan without raising taxes. He declined an interview for clarification after his speech, leaving through an exit at the side of the ballroom. His spokesperson did not return an emailed request seeking elaboration on how medical marijuana could pay for the water plan without a tax increase.
Congressman Jared Polis, the Democratic nominee for governor, spoke of a stakeholders’ group working on a funding proposal that includes ideas ranging from sports betting to bottle fees. But he did not say how, if elected, he would prefer to fund a water plan that he deems necessary.
“I look forward to hearing your ideas,” he said.
State lawmakers, in the meantime, are considering new funding ideas.
Sen. Don Coram, a Republican from Montrose who serves on the Agriculture, Natural Resources and Energy Committee, mentioned a water bottle tax, a 25-cent per thousand gallon water meter surcharge, and a sales tax as potential other sources of revenue. He also wants to pay back some of the severance tax money used to balance the budget in prior years. According to a February memo by the Joint Budget Committee, $322 million in severance tax dollars have been transferred to the General Fund since 2001.
“I don’t think we have a choice. We’re not producing any more water. We have to manage the water we have,” Corum told The Colorado Independent at the end of this year’s legislative session in May. “We need money to do that.”
Call on the River
A new forecast by the Bureau of Reclamation estimates that Lake Mead – formed behind Hoover Dam to store Colorado River water for the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California – could fall below a critical level by 2020. Currently, the reservoir is just four and a half feet above 1,075 feet, the point at which Colorado and other Upper Basin states may have to release their share of stored water from Lake Powell into Lake Mead in what would be known as a “call” on the River. The 1922 Colorado River Compact requires the Upper Basin — Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah — to send at least 7.5 million acre-feet per year to the Lower Basin. The so-called Law of the River would require users with newer rights to water to have to give up water first, depending on how curtailments are carried out.
Even so, Eric Kuhn, a retired manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said compacts are only agreements to agree. He seemed worried about total supplies in a complex Western water law system that divided water rights between Western states nearly a century ago and in which farmers and ranchers often have higher water priority than urban and suburban users.
“Deep uncertainty implies that you have to be flexible,” said Kuhn. “Nature may not care if you have a decree or not.”
Delph Carpenter’s 1922 Colorado River Basin map with Lake Mead and Lake Powell shown. The two giant reservoirs have always been part of the governance of the river.
From the Associated Press (Dan Elliott) via The Glenwood Springs Post Independent:
The drought-stressed Colorado River carried even less water than expected this summer, increasing the odds of a shortage in the vital river system in 2020, federal water managers said Friday.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said the chances of a shortfall in Lake Mead, the river’s biggest reservoir, are now 57 percent, up from the 52 percent projected in May.
The river and its tributaries serve 40 million people and 6,300 square miles of farmland in Mexico and the U.S. states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah. A nearly two-decade drought, coupled with rising demand from growing cities, has reduced the amount of water available in Lake Mead and the river’s other big reservoir, Lake Powell.
If the surface of Lake Mead drops below 1,075 feet above sea level, some deliveries would be cut under agreements governing the system. Arizona, Nevada and Mexico would have their shares reduced first in a shortage.
A shortage has never occurred in the river.
“There is a real sense of urgency across the basin to protect the river’s supply in the face of increasing demand and ongoing drought,” said Brenda Burman, chief of the Bureau of Reclamation.
The forecast worsened because Lake Powell, which is upstream from Lake Mead, collected about 500,000 acre-feet (600 million cubic meters) less water than expected between April and July, said Patti Aaron, a spokeswoman for the bureau. One acre-foot is enough to supply a typical U.S. family for a year.
That means Powell will be up to 5 feet lower than expected, with less water available to release into Lake Mead…
The Bureau of Reclamation dates the Colorado River region’s drought to 2000, but some researchers have said the river might be experiencing a longer-term shift to a drier climate, called aridification.
Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a 70 percent chance of an El Niño for the 2018-19 winter. Tom Di Liberto, a meteorologist with NOAA, said it’s too early to say with confidence the strength of the climate variation event.
“As we move into the fall, our models and the ocean-atmosphere conditions will be clearer and we can better determine how strong the El Niño will be,” he said. ”The stronger the El Niño, the more consistent with the general pattern of an El Niño this winter will be.”
[…]
Colorado straddles the jet stream as it runs across the northern and southern tiers of the United States, and scientists have not been able to find corollary data between El Niño events and the snow conditions in Colorado.
“In general, I don’t tend to make a whole lot out of El Niño predictions in terms of snow conditions in Colorado because we’re right in that inflection point,” Molotch said.
He continued, “You also have to remember that the Sierras, the mountains in the Pacific Northwest and others in the western Rockies are really efficient in squeezing snow out of these storm systems. By the time those storms get to Colorado, you don’t have a significant amount of snowfall.”
Even if Colorado’s winter definitively sways with the northern or southern jet stream, the characteristics ascribed to El Niño events are influenced by other climactic and weather elements that are unique to a specific winter season.
”We don’t necessarily see storms moving to the same places and in the same direction winter-to-winter in a normal year, which is also the case for an El Niño year,” Di Liberto said. “Every winter has other factors that can tweak the characteristics of a general El Niño.”
[…]
As Colorado awaits its uncertain snow season, the state is expected to remain in drought through the end of November with above-average temperaturesThe seasonal drought outlook for Aug. 16 through Nov. 30 produced by the Climate Prediction center forecast drought to persist but improve in the southern part of the state, but to persist without improvement in the central and northwest corner.
El Paso County — which currently is a mosaic of abnormally dry, moderate drought and severe drought — sits in the latter of the two predictions.
Recent rainfall has done little to assuage long-term drought conditions throughout New Mexico.
“We’re still seeing these long-term lingering effects,” National Weather Service senior hydrologist Royce Fontenot said Tuesday in conference call. “The very dry winter and spring have done a lot of damage to the environment.”
Some monitoring stations, Fontenot said, went more than 100 days without measurable precipitation since October, and “it really seemed like someone turned off the tap” to the start of the monsoon season, so they are still at a precipitation deficit.
The worst drought conditions in the country are centered over Colorado, Utah, Arizona and northwestern New Mexico, as well as north-central New Mexico, where precipitation levels are well below normal.
That area remains in exceptional drought.
Conditions have also worsened in the Roswell area, which is now in extreme drought.
The portion of the state in exceptional drought decreased from 15.68 percent last month to 14.54 percent.
Much of the rest of state has improved to severe and moderate drought conditions.
On Wednesday, the board of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority voted to lease 20,000 acre-feet of water from Abiquiu Reservoir to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for $2 million to keep the Rio Grande flowing through Albuquerque, largely for the protection of endangered species…
John Stomp, chief operating officer of the water authority, said that without rain and this intervention, the Rio Grande would likely have soon gone dry from the Bernalillo Bridge to Central Avenue.
Last week, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District announced it was expecting to run out of storage reserves by the end of this week.
By catching some of the 20,000 acre-feet that leaks from the Rio Grande into their drainage systems – and thanks to Wednesday’s rain – that day may now come on Sunday or Monday.
“We’re in the position now where every little bit helps and it should be a good thing for us,” said David Gensler, water operations manager for the district. “We’ve managed to kick the can down the road a little bit.”
One of the reservoirs the district uses for storage, El Vado, is at just 6 percent of capacity.
As storage runs out, farmers around the state have had to cut back on irrigation.
The lack of rainfall has curtailed grass and hay growth.
El Niño can shift jet streams south, pushing cooler, wetter weather into Colorado’s backyard, whereas La Niña usually shifts the jetstream north and brings the opposite — hotter, drier weather — to the western U.S. La Niña was one of the reasons for the drought and wildfires across the west this summer…
Even in an El Niño year, other factors, such as local temperatures and the exact path of the jet stream that separates the cool and dry air, may be more important than the broader pattern occurring in the Pacific, and even a minor jetstream shift can change local day-to-day weather patterns.
From the New Mexico Political Report (Laura Paskus):
Earlier this week, the [Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District] had already announced it anticipated entering Prior and Paramount Operations—when it can only meet the irrigation needs of about 8,800 acres of pueblo lands, which have the most senior water rights in the valley.
That includes the pueblos of Kewa, Cochiti, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Sandia and Isleta. Because the pueblos were here long before any of the valley’s other communities, when Congress passed an act in 1928 supporting the irrigation district’s creation, it noted that the water rights to those pueblo lands are “prior and paramount to any rights of the district.”
The pueblos have worked with the irrigation district and federal water officials this year, according to MRGCD, managing Prior and Paramount waters to “support regular irrigation as long as possible, for the benefit of all irrigators.”
No quick end to Article VII
Poor snowpack and low runoff has also forced other water users on the Rio Grande to exhaust their supplies. As of Thursday, for example, Elephant Butte Reservoir is at just 5.5 percent of its capacity, holding just over 107,000 acre feet of water.
In May, New Mexico entered into Article VII restrictions when combined storage in Elephant Butte and Caballo reservoirs dropped below 400,000 acre feet. Under Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact, that means Colorado and New Mexico can’t store water in any upstream reservoirs built after 1929—including El Vado.
“We will anxiously watch the snowpack this winter in hopes that it will provide some relief for the next year,” said U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Mary Carlson. “If we exit Article VII restrictions at all next year, it likely won’t be until June at the earliest.”
She added that means storage in El Vado will be limited to Prior and Paramount water for pueblo lands and then relinquishment credit water for MRGCD until the combined storage in Elephant Butte and Caballo rises above 400,000 acre feet.
That will be a long climb, she said. Projections currently show Elephant Butte and Caballo will have about 75,000 acre feet at the end of this season.
“Of course we will gladly anticipate any forecast that calls for above average precipitation,” she said. “We will hope for the best, but manage our supplies cautiously as we are aware that forecasted precipitation, especially with above average temperatures, doesn’t always provide as much benefit as we’d like.”
[…]
El Niño conditions favor, but don’t guarantee, a wet winter for NM
During the monthly National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate briefing on Thursday, climate and weather experts noted El Niño conditions have a 70 percent chance of developing in the fall, and they forecasted wetter-than-normal conditions in the southwestern United States for November, December and January.
“We’re more likely to have El Niño than not,” said Dan Collins, meteorologist and seasonal forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. But, he added, the predicted El Niño doesn’t look to be a strong one.
By tracking temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, scientists attempt to forecast what will happen across land surfaces. Typically, during El Niño conditions, the track of winter storms coming off the Pacific moves southward. For the swath of land from southern California eastward across the southern part of the U.S. to Florida, El Niño conditions can mean more winter storms. That is, it sets up the conditions for wetter weather but doesn’t guarantee them.
During Thursday’s climate briefing, Jake Crouch, a climate scientist with NOAA, pointed out that the contiguous United States had its 11th-warmest July on record—and there were record warm temperatures across much of the West, including in New Mexico.
The first seven months of the year were also warmer than normal. For the 25th consecutive year, Crouch said, January-to-July temperatures nationwide exceeded the 20th century mean. And New Mexico and Arizona experienced their warmest years to date in 124 years of record-keeping.
That warming trend will likely continue across the West through the fall, particularly in the Four Corners states.
“What El Niño tends to bring us is actually somewhat cooler temperatures, and so when we see a forecast of warmer-than-normal temperatures, that mostly reflects warming trends,” said David Gutzler, a climate scientist and professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. “But this year, that forecast is tempered somewhat by El Niño.”
Even as the climate continues its warming trend, there will be natural variability in weather patterns from year to year—swings between wet years and dry years. That’s different from changes in the climate, which relate to long-term averages.
NOAA also forecasted an improvement through the fall and winter in drought conditions across the Four Corners, including New Mexico and Arizona.
Gutzler said it’s worth being cautious about that, since drought outlooks are based on local precipitation and don’t take into account things like reservoir storage, which relies upon snowpack.
“I’ll be an optimist and say, [based on what we know] historically, if El Niño develops as projected and persists through the winter, the odds get shifted somewhat toward good snowpack conditions,” he said. But another important question for water managers—and users—is what happens at the end of winter and in early spring.
Warm winters, and early springs mean that snowpack melts too early and too quickly.
“I don’t think one wet winter solves all of our long-term water challenges, but I don’t want to dismiss how great it would be to get a really healthy snowpack,” he said. “We will root for a wet winter—I will, anyway.”
Low flows on the Colorado River near the Colorado-Utah state line, lead to falling water levels at Lake Powell, and Colorado and regional water managers are ramping up their efforts to develop a “drought contingency plan” in response. At the heart of such a program are payments to irrigators to willingly reduce their water use by fallowing fields. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith
Water managers from around the state gathered for a three-day meeting of the Colorado Water Congress this week and were told it was time to develop a plan to cut back on water use in Colorado in order to prevent a compact call on the Colorado River.
At the heart of such a plan is a reduction in the use of water by agriculture — on a voluntary, temporary and compensated basis — in order to send more water downriver to bolster levels in Lake Powell.
If the giant reservoir, which is now 49 percent full, drops much lower, then Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, will not be able to produce electricity or release enough water to meet the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which requires Colorado, Wyoming and Utah to send water to California, Arizona and Nevada.
Colorado state officials are now taking steps to put together a “demand management” plan to bolster reservoir levels but are also careful to say the plan may still not be necessary, depending on how much snow falls in coming winters.
The Government Highline Canal, in Palisade. The Government Highline Canal near Grand Junction. The Grand Valley Water Users Association, which operates the canal, has been experimenting with a program that pays water users to fallow fields and reduce their consumptive use of water. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Demand management
During a panel on the topic on Friday, Aug. 24, Lain Leoniak, an attorney in the Colorado attorney general’s office, said state and regional water managers were now engaged in what amounts to “emergency response planning.”
“The goal is to identify methods to provide additional security to the entire Colorado River system to address this unprecedented hydrology that we’re experiencing, and have been since 2000,” Leoniak said.
There are three main elements of a such a regional drought contingency plan: short-term releases of water from the big reservoirs above Lake Powell, including Flaming Gorge, Navajo and Blue Mesa reservoirs; cloud-seeding to produce a deeper snowpack; and “demand management.”
“Demand management is defined as the temporary, voluntary and compensated reductions of diversions to conserve water that would otherwise be consumptively used, when and if it is needed,” Leonick told the crowd at the Water Congress meeting.
State water officials, led by staff at the Colorado Water Conservation Board, have been reaching out to water managers and users around the state over the past few months, trying to figure out how such a plan might work. And this year’s hot drought has added urgency, and relevance, to their work.
One such regional demand management effort, known as the System Conservation Pilot Program, has been underway over the past four years and has been paying willing ranchers and farmers about $200 per acre-foot of conserved consumptive use.
A chart used to illustrate concerns about low inflows into Lake Powell. 2018 is expected to be among the lowest years in the history of the reservoir.
‘Reduction in use’
But the program has also identified the need for a way to track, or shepherd, the saved water as it makes its way downstream to Lake Powell.
It’s also shown a need for a new legally identified pool of water in the big federal reservoir so that the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah can get credit for their water-saving efforts.
During the Friday discussion of demand management at the Water Congress meeting, Bruce Whitehead, the general manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District, based in Durango, sought to put such an effort into plain terms.
“This is a reduction in use,” Whitehead said.
Whitehead also pointed out that “there are statewide usages of Colorado River water” and voluntary reductions of use of Colorado River water now diverted under the Continental Divide to the Front Range are going to have to be part of the solution.
“In tough times like this, we have to learn to work together,” he said.
“Our fear is that we’re not working cooperatively, and openly, in a very informed manner as a state, and we’re going to end up putting the West Slope agriculture as the sacrificial lamb on the alter of the Colorado River,” Mueller said. “And our belief is that will, in the short term, hurt the West Slope. In the long term, it will hurt the state.”
Lee Miller, an attorney for the Southeastern Water Conservancy District, which is based in Pueblo and imports water from the Colorado River basin, said it will be important to develop a demand management plan that has flexibility built into it, especially in the early years.
“The key part of this is that we have to have a framework that is flexible, one that allows us to make changes,” Miller said. “When we start making demands, and start making bright lines, ‘no this, no that,’ we put ourselves in a very difficult position to adjust in uncertain times.”
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is covering the Colorado River basin in collaboration with the Vail Daily, The Aspen Times, and other news organizations. The Vail Daily published this story on Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018.
Click here to read the latest update from the Colorado Water Conservation Board (Ben Wade):
In response to persistent and prolonged drought conditions throughout the southern half of the state and along the western border, the Governor activated the Colorado Drought Mitigation and Response Plan for the agricultural sector on May 2, 2018, additional information can be found HERE.
With only six weeks left in the 2018 water year, October through July of this year has been the second warmest and the fifth driest October through July period in the 123 year record. However, statewide values poorly convey the stark contrast across the state. July and August to-date have been as much as 5 degrees above average in parts of western Colorado, while the northeastern plains have been near normal with some isolated record low temperatures. Monsoon rains have brought beneficial moisture to some regions including the San Luis Valley and Arkansas Basin, however the Northwest has seen limited precipitation resulting in worsening drought conditions. This week brought nearly an inch of rain to parts of Mesa County, yet the 2018 water year remains the driest year on record for the Grand Mesa; indicating long term deficits continue to dominate.
■ SNOTEL water year to-date precipitation statewide is 67 percent of average, but ranges from 47 percent of average in the Southwest basins to 85 percent of average in the South Platte River Basin. The Rio Grande is at 53 percent of average; while the Gunnison is at 56 percent and would need 512 percent of average precipitation between now and September 30th to reach normal levels. The Arkansas is faring slightly better at 62 percent, while the northern basins of the Colorado and Yampa- White are at 76 and 75 percent of average, respectively.
■ High temperatures, and below average precipitation have led to increasing water demand across much of the state. Reservoir storage, statewide is at 86 percent of normal, with the Arkansas, Colorado, Yampa-White, South Platte and Rio Grande all near normal levels, despite recent declines. However, the Southwest basins of the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas & San Juan, and Gunnison have seen significant decreases in reservoir storage and are now at 52 and 64 percent of normal, respectively.
■ Warm water temperatures, coupled with low flows continue to stress fish populations, with continued fish kills reported and state hatcheries are struggling to keep up supplies, many of these areas are also impacted by ash flows and post fire related water quality issues. Water users have been working collaboratively across the state to maintain flows, where possible, and voluntary fishing restrictions are the most widespread the state has seen.
■ Agriculture has been heavily impacted this growing season by both high temperatures, drought, and hail. Irrigation canals are being shut off early due to lack of supply, and fail and prevent crop acreage is high. Hay production is down and range conditions poor, producers are concerned about finding enough feed for cattle resulting in continued sell off.
■ Some small water systems are being impacted by both continued dry conditions resulting in limited supply, and some reports of water hauling to meet demands. Restrictions, both voluntary and mandatory have been enacted in some communities, with Front Range water providers better situated than small west slope communities with limited storage.
■ Long term forecasts indicate an increased likelihood of above average temperatures for September through November. Southwestern Colorado is forecast to continue to benefit from additional monsoon moisture and has an increased likelihood of above average precipitation into Fall.
■ An El Niño watch has been issued, meaning there is a greater than 70 percent chance of an El Niño developing, which could bring an increased chance of wet extremes for southern Colorado beginning this Fall, however the Northwest corner remain an area of big concern going into the fall, as El Niño can result in dry conditions to the north.
A view of the location of the proposed Chimney Hollow dam and reservoir site in the foothills between Loveland and Longmont. The 90,000 acre-foot reservoir would store water for nine Front Range cities, two water districts and a utility, and is being held up a lawsuit challenging federal environmental reviews. Graphic credit: Brent Gardner-Smith
The Front Range water district that wants to build the Chimney Hollow Reservoir and pull more water from the Colorado River is delaying construction bids and issuing revenue bonds, citing a lawsuit by Save the Colorado, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups challenging federal approvals for the project.
The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District had hoped to have the project, now estimated at $570 million, under construction by early 2019 and completed by 2023, but now it is uncertain when construction will begin because of the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Denver late last year.
“Our original schedule was to be out to bid about right now and we would be selling bonds right now,” Jeff Drager, Northern’s director of engineering, said earlier this month.
Chimney Hollow Reservoir is at the core of what’s known as the Windy Gap Firming Project. Northern, through its affiliated municipal subdistrict, plans to build the 90,000 acre-foot reservoir to provide a “firm annual yield” of 30,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River to nine Front Range cities, two water districts and a utility.
About 9,000 acre-feet a year of additional water is expected to be diverted from the headwaters of the Colorado River as a result of the project.
The 346-foot-tall dam, which would be the third tallest in Colorado, is located between Loveland and Longmont in Larimer County next to an existing reservoir, Carter Lake.
Drager said since the litigation was filed last year Northern has taken the opportunity to do more engineering and design work on the dam, including the upcoming drilling of 40 holes to further explore softer rock found at the location of the left abutment of the dam.
“We’re now scheduled to be at a point where we could go out to bid for construction and issue bonds probably in February or March,” he said.
But at that point Drager said Northern would have to see what progress has been made in the lawsuit.
“If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d say we’ll be slowed down.”
The parties in the lawsuit are waiting for the judge in the case to rule on if the voluminous administrative record in the case is complete, including on a motion to add a recent report commissioned by Save the Colorado on actual water use, and if motions to intervene in the case by Northern, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and the city of Broomfield will be accepted…
The lawsuit contends that a review of the proposed project by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers under the National Environmental Policy Act was flawed and that the resulting approvals should be overturned.
The federal review of the project began 2003. Reclamation issued its approval in 2014 and the Corps issued its approval in May 2017.
Five nonprofit environmental groups filed a lawsuit in October, including Save the Colorado, Save the Poudre, Living Rivers, the Waterkeeper Alliance and WildEarth Guardians. The Colorado chapter of the Sierra Club joined the lawsuit in November.
“The Windy Gap Firming Project is an apt example of inadequate analysis and poor decision-making that will ultimately result in significant new diversions from the Colorado River to provide the Front Range with unneeded water supply,” the environmental groups told the court in a recent brief.
The delay in issuing bonds means that the 12 entities paying for the project will have to contribute $10 million in cash to allow Northern to keep the project moving forward, instead of using money expected to be available after selling municipal bonds. The 12 entities have put in $34 million to date toward the project.
“We had hoped that our funding for 2019 was going to come from sale of the bonds and starting construction, but because of the litigation that we have, that’s delayed a little bit,” Drager told Northern’s board of directors at a meeting in Berthoud on August 9. “That $10 million will be provided by the participants in early 2019 and that should carry us through, we hope, until we are ready to put the project out to bid and sell the bonds to pay the rest of the cost.”
Northern owns and operates the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which includes the huge Lake Granby Reservoir and the Adams Tunnel that sends over 200,000 acre-feet of water of Colorado River each year under Rocky Mountain National Park to the east slope.
The C-BT Project also diverts water pumped up from the relatively small 445-acre-foot Windy Gap Reservoir, built in the early 1980s to serve as a pumping forebay on the Colorado River, just below its confluence with the Fraser River in Grand County.
But Windy Gap is limited in how much water it can deliver because of its junior water rights and instream-flow obligations below the dam.
Northern says Chimney Hollow Reservoir will allow it to pump water from Windy Gap in wetter years and store the water until needed in drier years by the 12 participating entities, which include Broomfield, Greeley, Longmont and Loveland.
But the environmental groups say the federal agencies reviewed the proposed project with an overly narrow focus on how to fix the Windy Gap project and not on other potential ways to meet Front Range water demands.
“Reclamation did not seriously consider reasonable alternatives to provide water to Windy Gap participants and allowed (Northern) to plow ahead with its original choice — the firming project — and double down on its busted bet,” the lawsuit states.
Reclamation and the Corps told the court in May that the agencies conducted “an independent evaluation” and concluded the project “is needed to meet a portion of the existing and future water needs of the growing east slope municipalities.”
Northern, on its website, points out “the project has been approved by the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Grand County, Colorado Parks and Wildlife and endorsed by Gov. John Hickenlooper. It also has support from several environmental groups such as Trout Unlimited.”
The support from some environmental organizations, including Trout Unlimited, stems from the mitigation measures designed to reduce its impact on the Colorado River headwaters, including a new bypass, or connectivity, channel that will allow more of the river to flow past the Windy Gap Reservoir.
Lurline Underbrink Curran, the former county manager for Grand County, has also appealed to Robert Kennedy, Jr., of Waterkeeper Alliance, to drop the lawsuit.
“Any lawsuit that delays or stops this work is a detriment to the Colorado River,” Currant wrote in Oct. 2017. “If the Windy Gap Project does not go forward, the hard-won concessions evaporate, and the Colorado River will continue to degrade.”
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is covering the Roaring Fork and Colorado River basins for The Aspen Times. The Times published this story on its website on Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2018, as did the Glenwood Springs Post Independent.
Upper Castle Creek, about two miles below Ashcroft, where the city holds conditional water storage rights tied to the potential Castle Creek Reservoir, which would be formed by a 170-foot-tall dam. Photo credit: Aspen Journalism/Brent Gardner-Smith
After getting two signed settlement agreements from the United States on July 23, the city of Aspen now has agreements with all of the parties contesting its conditional water storage rights in the Castle Creek valley, and with all but one of the parties opposing its rights in the Maroon Creek valley.
During a status conference in water court Tuesday about the two cases, the city’s water attorney, Cindy Covell of Alperstein and Covell, told the court that of the 10 opposing parties in the two cases, only one, Larsen Family LP, has yet to sign a settlement agreement with the city.
Covell also told the water court referee and opposing attorneys in the two cases, that she “appreciated everybody’s hard work and assistance in getting the Castle Creek case resolved, and as far as we’ve gotten on the Maroon Creek case. It was a real team effort and everybody was very helpful.”
The city now intends to ask the referee to move a proposed water-rights decree in the Castle Creek Reservoir case to a water court judge for review and expected approval.
And the city hopes to soon send a similar decree to the water court judge in the Maroon Creek Reservoir case.
Margaret Medellin, a utilities portfolio manager in Aspen’s water department, said the city is still talking about detailed language with the attorney for Larsen Family LP.
“I wish we had that last signature so we can really celebrate, but it seems like we keep having to push that out,” she said.
Craig Corona, the attorney for Larsen Family LP, told the court Tuesday, “I believe we are making progress in getting toward resolution.”
James DuBois, an attorney in the environmental and natural resources division of the U.S. Justice Dept. in Denver, said Wednesday he could “confirm that the United States has entered into stipulations in both 16CW3128 and 3129,” the Maroon Creek and Castle Creek reservoir cases.
The agreements in both cases allow the city to try to transfer as much as 8,500 acre-feet of its conditional water storage rights from the Castle and Maroon creek valleys to four potential locations between Aspen and Woody Creek in the Roaring Fork River valley, and do so without opposition from the parties in the cases.
The agreements also provide that if the city fails in its attempts to move the water rights out of the Castle and Maroon creek valleys, it is barred from returning to the originally decreed locations.
The city has said that all of the parties in each case need to sign agreements in order for the deals to be struck.
Rob Harris, an attorney at Western Resource Advocates who also represented Wilderness Workshop in the cases, said Tuesday he was pleased to “finalize the deal as it applies to Castle Creek.”
“This means there won’t be a big dam in that valley and that’s a win for the city, residents and anyone who cares about this place,” Harris said. “And now we’re looking forward to hopefully seeing the Maroon Creek case resolved in the same way.”
The cases began almost two years ago when the city filed periodic “diligence applications” with the state in an effort to maintain its 1971 rights for the reservoir.
The Maroon Creek Reservoir would hold 4,567 acre-feet of water behind a 155-foot-tall dam about 3 miles below Maroon Lake. The Castle Creek Reservoir would hold 9,062 acre-feet of water behind a 170-foot-tall dam about 3 miles below Ashcroft.
A total of 10 parties filed statements of opposition in the two diligence cases.
On Tuesday, the court set another status conference in the Maroon Creek case for Oct. 16, but did not set one in the Castle Creek case.
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is covering rivers and water in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River basins in collaboration with The Aspen Times and other news organizations. The Times published this story on Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2018.
Xcel Energy’s Greater Sandhill Solar Farm north of Alamosa, Colo. Colorado’s San Luis Valley has some of the nation’s best solar resource. Photo/Allen Best
Guzman Energy Group—the financier of Taos-based Kit Carson Electric Cooperative’s bid to develop renewable energy sources—this week announced it has secured $130 million from two Colorado-based investors, Boulder-based Vision Ridge Partners and Denver-based Zoma Capital.
Guzman gained attention in the Rocky Mountains in 2016 when it paid Tri-State Generation & Transmission a $37.5 million exit fee to break Kit Carson’s contract.
The co-operative had previously been committed to buying 95 percent of its electricity from Tri-State, a Denver-area based wholesale supplier now made up of 43 electrical co-operatives in Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Nebraska. Included are the cooperatives serving Crested Butte, Telluride, Durango, Wolf Creek and several other ski areas.
Several of the co-ops serving mountain communities have discussed, either informally or in elections, the idea of seeking buy-outs of their contracts with Tri-State.
Kit Carson and Guzman say that hitching their wagon to solar, instead of coal, will save the co-op’s 30,000 members $50 million to $70 million during the next decade.
With Guzman as financier, Kit Carson plans to develop up to 35 megawatts of small solar arrays by 2022. That will meet 35 percent of all electrical demand and 100 percent during daylight hours on sunny days.
Guzman has made it clear it is interested in providing energy services to other such as it is now providing for Kit Carson. Last March, for example, company representatives spoke about what Guzman could offer Pueblo, Colo., at a forum hosted by Pueblo’s Energy future.
Electricity for Pueblo is provided by Black Hills Energy, but the city council has adopted a 100 percent renewable energy goal. Pueblo recently has retained a firm to study how it might go about ending its contract with Black Hills.
It’s not clear just how important these investments are to Guzman’s plans. One individual in the co-op world interpreted the announcement as further proof that smart money is moving toward rapid development of renewable energy. But another individual, also speaking off the record, was more skeptical of the importance of the money to Guzman. In this view, this isn’t enough money to allow the company to pick up new clients as it did with Kit Carson. In this view, Guzman is and will remain a niche player.
About the investors:
Zoma Capital was co-founded by Ben and Lucy Ana Walton. Zoma Capital, based in Denver, invests in a broad range of market-based sustainable solutions addressing environmental and social challenges, with an emphasis on energy, water and community development, and with a geographic focus on Colorado and Chile.
Zoma’s website says that in Colorado in the realm of energy, it is focused on “accelerating energy technologies to create a more efficient, responsive and modernized electric grid.”
Ben Walton is the grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton and, an architect by training, was reported by Business Insider in 2013 to be living in Aspen.
“Guzman energy’s efforts to realign the energy economy—in unique bilateral markets in New Mexico, Colorado and beyond—aligns with our dedication to investing in a more efficient, responsive and modernized electric grid,” said Melissa Cheong, chief investment officer of Zoma Capital in a prepared statement.
Vision Ridge Partners, which is based in Boulder, is a fund of $430 million that in 2014 launched a Sustainable Asset Fund with Capricorn Investment Group and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, according to the firm’s website. It was founded by Reuben Munger in 2008.
“At Vison Ridge, we focus on opportunities that are good for the environment that we also believe can deliver strong financial returns,” said Munger in a prepared statement. “And with Guzman Energy having been very vocal in sharing its long-term mission of making communities thrive and be more competitive, we see this as an excellent fit.”
Guzman describes itself as a full-service energy company whose services include providing wholesale power, energy trading and hedging services.
“We offer communities—empowered by their desire for a more sustainable and competitive energy future—a path to achieve their goals,” said Chris Riley, president of Guzman Energy.
“We accomplish this via a focus on renewables, mixed when necessary with traditional fuel types; smart-grid tech; increased efficiencies; battery storage; and more, thereby leading the efforts to transition our energy economy into the renewable age.”
FromColoradoPolitics.com (Marianne Goodland) via The Cortez Journal:
A new forecast from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shows signs that water levels at Lake Mead, which supplies water to three southwestern states and northern Mexico, could drop so low by next year that it could eventually result in a demand for more water from the Colorado River and from the upper basin states, including Colorado, that rely on the big river.
The ever-increasing shortages in those three southwestern states could eventually mean water shortages in Colorado, too.
The Bureau of Reclamation forecast estimated that Lake Mead, located on the Nevada-Arizona border, will need a release of 8.23 million acre-feet of water from Lake Powell, which is about 300 miles north on the Arizona-Utah border. Both reservoirs rely on the Colorado River for their water supplies.
That water release, likely to happen by 2020, will keep water levels at Mead at around 1,075 feet. That’s the minimum water level required to provide to supply enough water for the 40 million residents of southern California, Nevada (including Las Vegas) and Arizona, including Phoenix.
Why would that matter to Coloradans, especially those on the Front Range?
Lake Powell is Colorado’s insurance policy, says James Eklund, the Colorado representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission, an interstate agency that includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The commission manages the Upper Colorado River and is working on what to do when water shortages downstream start demanding more water from its upstream source.
“A healthy Lake Mead means a healthy Lake Powell,” because Lake Powell stores water for Colorado and its fellow upper river states.
The Colorado River not only provides water to Nevada, Arizona, California and northern Mexico. It also supplies about half of the water that comes out of Front Range faucets and sprinklers. That happens through a series of tunnels, known as transmountain diversions, that cut through the mountains and over the Continental Divide and eventually fill many of the reservoirs along the Front Range.
The time may be coming when Colorado will be asked to share more of its water with the southern states.
In 1948, the seven states through which the Colorado River flows signed a compact that today requires the four Upper Colorado River states to send about 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year to the three lower states and Mexico. Las Vegas, for example, gets 90 percent of its water from Lake Mead. The reservoir is also a major water supply for Phoenix and Los Angeles.
In good water years, the upper Colorado River states send about 9 million (sometimes more) acre-feet down to Lake Powell and on to Lake Mead.
Eklund said sending less wanter isn’t necessarily good. The 8.23 million acre-feet forecast for 2020 is a sign of the sad shape of the river system, he said. There just is not enough water headed to Lake Mead. The Bureau of Reclamation estimates the chances of a shortage at Lake Mead in 2020 at 52 percent, Eklund said.
Everyone relies on the Colorado, he said. A shortage in the lower Colorado states means Colorado and the Upper Colorado River states are going to learn what it is like to live with shortages year after year.
“We don’t have the luxury of having the nation’s two largest reservoirs above us” like the Lower Colorado states do, Eklund explained. “We have snowpack – Mother Nature’s reservoir – but that’s a variable supply,” as Coloradans learned in this drought year.
There is also financial risk tied to shortages at Lake Mead that could affect Colorado and its Upper Colorado neighbors, said Taylor Hawes of the Nature Conservancy. Once Mead drops, and Powell drops with it, that could impact Powell’s ability to generate hydropower, and that means money, Hawes said.
Hydropower at Lake Powell generates revenue that repays the Bureau of Reclamation for a variety of water-related projects in the Upper Colorado states. If that revenue goes away or at least drops substantially, that is a bill that Colorado taxpayers will have to cover for projects tied to Endangered Species Act compliance, for example.
The underlying issue, Hawes said, is that the western United States is in a 19-year drying trend. “We used to say it’s a drought. After 19 years, we can say this is a pattern and trend that is punctuated by super dry years like 2002 and this year.”
One thing that might help stave off the shortage, or at least help all the seven states better prepare for a shortage, is drought contingency planning.
“We have to plan for the situation when there’s a shortage declared and that Mead and Powell are compromised,” Eklund explained. “We have to prop up our insurance policy in Lake Powell, either by pushing more water down there or by using less, and probably a combination of the two.”
Contingency planning has been in the works, one set for the upper states and another for the lower, for more than a year. Eklund said both groups hope to have that done by the end of this year. “Those plans have to work together.”
Hawes also points to the drought contingency plans being prepared by the interstate agencies as a way of preparing for what is coming, but there is one other plan that has not yet started, and that is one specific to Colorado.
The state of Colorado needs its own contingency plan, once the Upper Colorado plan is in place, Hawes said. It could look at, for example, statewide curtailment or reduction of water use, once those region-wide drought plans are implemented.
Conservation is another tool that Colorado citizens will also have to embrace more than they do now, said Ted Kowalski, who is with the Walton Family Foundation’s Colorado River Initiative.
As Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has said, “every water conversation has to start with conservation,” Kowalski told Colorado Politics. “This is underscored by the current conditions.”
Kowalski has been involved in an incentive program for water savings that he said over time could make a significant difference in the water levels for both Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
The urgency at Lake Mead on the cusp of a declared shortage in 2020 “means we need to get our house in order on how to meet obligations by reducing water use,” Kowalski said. He has been involved in a system conservation pilot program, started three years ago, with a pool of money from Denver Water, the Walton Foundation, the Bureau of Reclamation and other water providers.
Under that program, farmers, ranchers and cities willing to conserve for the benefit of the entire system are paid to do so. Over the program’s three years – it is now heading into a fourth – water saved in the Upper Colorado states total somewhere between 25,000 to 40,000 acre-feet, about the size of Dillon Reservoir (when full). “We’ve seen the seeds of a water bank,” Kowalski said. The next step is to find sustainable funding.
The cost has not been cheap: The first two years, the program cost $11 million, the third year was $10 million, and this year the program will need $14 million. As Kowalski sees it, the cost is small compared to what the Colorado River means to the nation’s economy. It represents about 20 percent of the nation’s GDP, he said.
If the program launches on a grander scale, “it could ensure water sustainability” for the southwestern United States, he added.
As the state’s Air Quality Control Commission has agreed to look into establishing emission standards for new cars in Colorado, there’s a group working to gather signatures in support of stricter standards to the members.
Environment Colorado is a statewide citizen advocacy group with a stated mission protecting our land, water and air. News5 saw the group in Acacia Park talking to people about their initiatives.
One of their goals is to increase the number of cars on the road with clean technology built in to reduce emissions.
However, the accepted emission level is still under debate. The standards would not apply to cars already under sale or used vehicles.
The Air Quality Control Commission is set to decide on new standards in mid-November.
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
Summary
Areas of low pressure brought heavy to excessive rainfall to many parts of the U.S. during this past drought week (August 14-21). Some storms brought more rainfall to already inundated areas such as the Northeast, but some activity occurred over drought regions badly in need of moisture, including the Central and Southern Plains, the Midwest, and the South. Other areas, especially along the northern tier of the country, continued to dry out amid a combined lack of rainfall and anomalously high temperatures. Some areas of northern Michigan and Wisconsin averaged daily maximum temperatures 6-8 degrees F above their typical average for this time of year…
Drought has plagued this region, but heavy, and in some instances, extremely heavy rainfalls, (ranging from 1 to 6 inches or more) brought much needed relief as most areas saw vast improvements or, at the very least, no degradation. In extreme northeastern Arkansas, several counties experiencing D2 conditions received 6 or more inches of rain over the past week. In facet, enough rain fell over the state that widespread 1-category improvements were made. Many stations received record rainfall for the month of August, including Long Pool (12.35 inches), Clinton (12.41 inches), and Murfreesboro (12.11 inches), leading to much improved conditions across the state, with no primarily drought and only lingering long-term dry conditions. Similarly, Oklahoma saw drought conditions fade as heavy rains fell, bringing normal conditions back to a large swath of the state stretching from the northwest to the southeast. Conditions also improved in Louisiana, northern, and western Texas, while dryness spread in southeastern Texas…
Similar to the Midwest, the northern tier of the High Plains saw conditions continue to dry out over this past week, exacerbated by high temperatures in some areas. Mercer County, North Dakota, for example, saw temperatures reach 104 degrees F on two days and 10 consecutive days of upper 90s. Crops have been impacted as soil moisture is depleted, with very dry topsoil and subsoil. There are reports of corn burning and severely stressed soybeans, among other impacts. As such, areas of abnormal dryness (D0), moderate drought (D1), and severe drought (D2) were expanded in various parts of the state. Eastern Montana saw an expansion of D0, including along the North Dakota border. Nebraska and Kansas, on the other hand, were the recipients of heavy rainfall events, which led to improvements across their drought regions. Although rainfall was 2-6 inches in several inches in places, long-term dryness persists across parts of the regions and thus was not adequate to erase all drought. However, two category improvements (D3 to D1) were made in southeastern Kansas, for example, as the rain did vastly improve conditions there. In Colorado, D1 was reduced in El Paso and Douglas Counties, which received 1 to 4 inches of rain over the past few weeks, improving conditions there….
Most of the West continues to experience dry conditions and drought, with dozens of wildfires burning record acreage; however, while conditions remain poor, no areas required further degradation this week. The only change made this week occurred in far eastern New Mexico, where rainfall was 1 inch or more above average for the week. This allowed for 1-category drought improvements of extreme drought (D3), severe drought (D2), and moderate drought (D1)…
Looking Ahead
Over the next week, beginning Tuesday August 28, up to 2 inches of rain is forecast for western Colorado and western New Mexico, where extreme (D3) and exceptional (D4) drought conditions prevail. No rain to less than half an inch are forecast for most of the remainder of the West. Between 0.1 and 2 inches are forecast for most of the rest of the U.S. at this time. Looking further ahead at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) 6-10 day Outlook (August 26-30), the probability of dry conditions are highest in the Plains, with a bullseye over western Oklahoma, while wet conditions may occur along the northern tier of the U.S., the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. During this period, below-average temperatures are expected in the West while above-average temperatures are forecast for the eastern two-thirds of the country, particularly stretching from the Midwest to the Northeast. Looking two weeks out (August 28 – September 3), above-average temperatures are expected across the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. and stretching across the southwestern U.S./Mexico border. Below-average temperatures are expected over most of the West. The probability of above-average precipitation is highest over the North and Northwest with the highest probability of dryness expected over western Oklahoma.
Map of the Rio Grande watershed. Graphic credit: WikiMedia
Here’s the release from the Bureau of Reclamation (Mary Carlson):
In response to ongoing severe drought, the Bureau of Reclamation and partnering water management agencies have reached several agreements intended to keep the Middle Rio Grande wet through the Albuquerque reach for the remainder of this year.
In 2018, Reclamation set aside $2 million to lease water from the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s San Juan-Chama Project supply to preserve flows through the Middle Rio Grande. Both entities will work closely to ensure continued Rio Grande flows through Albuquerque this summer and fall. San Juan-Chama Project water is diverted across the continental divide from the Colorado River basin. The City of Santa Fe is also partnering on this operation to help mitigate water loss impacts to the Rio Grande near Santa Fe.
“This is an extremely dry year with one of the lowest snowpacks on record,” said Reclamation’s Albuquerque Area Office Manager Jennifer Faler. “In an effort to effectively balance water needs within the Middle Rio Grande, we’ve joined forces with key water management entities to reach these very important agreements at a critical time.”
Although a historically low spring runoff resulted in some parts of the San Acacia reach drying in the beginning of April, actions taken by the agencies should keep much of the Middle Rio Grande flowing later this summer and fall.
“As water supplies run low in northern reservoirs, it’s important for the public to understand that this agreement is essentially what’s keeping water flowing in the Albuquerque reach of the Rio Grande,” said Trudy E. Jones, Albuquerque City Councilor and Chair of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s governing board.
The leased water will help maintain flows from Cochiti Dam to downstream of Isleta Diversion Dam when the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s irrigation storage is exhausted, which could be late this week or early next week. Reclamation will seek additional funding in 2019 for continued leasing.
The Six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos, which have the most senior water rights in the Middle Valley, are also participating in extending available water supplies. The Pueblos, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and Reclamation agreed to use water stored in El Vado Reservoir that would normally be reserved for ensuring a supply for Pueblos to meet district-wide irrigation demands in exchange for a reserved amount of MRGCD’s San Juan-Chama Project water for late season needs.
“Because of the unusually dry conditions, the Pueblos wanted to cooperate with other agencies this year, and agreed to use our senior water rights to stretch available water supplies for everyone, to the greatest extent possible,” said Governor James Richard Bernal, Pueblo of Sandia. “Long-term solutions to water supply shortage issues and protection of senior rights to water need to be identified.”
Releases of San Juan-Chama Project water will supplement the very low natural Rio Grande flow and will include water released to ensure that the Pueblos can continue to irrigate. Without adequate rains, MRGCD will divert required flow to first meet the most senior water users on the lands at Cochiti, Santa Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Sandia, and Isleta Pueblos and then for non-Pueblo irrigators as conditions allow.
“The fact that the agencies and the Pueblos worked so well together to judiciously store and use both Rio Grande and trans basin San Juan-Chama water in a historically dry year speaks to the importance of optimizing reservoir operations and irrigation diversions to extend in-river flows well beyond what the 2018 natural runoff would have provided,” said Mike Hamman, CEO of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
Audubon New Mexico is also participating in water operations this summer. Audubon has leased 990 acre-feet of San Juan-Chama Project water that is being released from Abiquiu Dam in support of the proposed operations in cooperation with all water management agencies.
FromThe New Mexico Political Report (Laura Paskus):
Under the one-time lease, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will pay the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority $2 million for 20,000 acre feet of water stored in Abiquiu Reservoir. The water will be used to keep the river flowing from below Cochiti Dam, through Albuquerque and downstream of the Isleta Diversion Dam.
During the meeting, John Stomp, chief operating officer of the water authority, assured board members it has that water to spare…
The agreement between the federal government and the water authority notes that the $2 million should be used for implementing the city’s 100-year water plan.
After a poor snow season in the mountains, the Middle Rio Grande started drying in early April, when it normally runs high with snowmelt. Monsoon rains have sporadically revived river flows this summer, but a long stretch still dried from the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge north toward Socorro. The river also dried near the Pueblo of Isleta.
“The Bureau of Reclamation stepped up to the plate, as did Santa Fe and the water authority, and we’re joining forces,” Stomp said. “We’ve all been working together to try to keep the river wet and stave off litigation, take care of endangered species and protect the river—that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Under the federal Endangered Species Act, water managers must ensure two rare species, the Rio Grande Silvery Minnow and the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, don’t move further toward extinction. In the past, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mandated minimum flow requirements through the Albuquerque reach of the river. In 2016, the agency updated its 2003 plan for the silvery minnow. Now instead of following flow requirements, Reclamation is supposed to try to manage the river to improve fish densities.
The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District will soon be out of irrigation water, and Stomp said MRGCD “did its part” to try and benefit river flows as much as possible this year. And the City of Santa Fe is helping mitigate water losses to the river near the city.
Reclamation spokeswoman Mary Carlson said the Rio Grande would have dried through Albuquerque earlier this summer if everyone hadn’t cooperated.
She said MRGCD and the pueblos coordinated water movement with Reclamation, and she commended efforts by the water authority, too. “This lease agreement between Reclamation and the water authority is a tremendous effort on the part of both parties to keep the Albuquerque reach wet through the rest of this very dry year,” she added.
The water being leased is stored in Abiquiu Reservoir and comes from tributaries of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River. That water is piped through tunnels to the Chama River, which flows into the Rio Grande in Española. The San Juan-Chama Project was built decades ago, and before Albuquerque built its drinking water project, 110,000 acre-feet of San-Juan Chama water supplemented the native flows of the Rio Grande each year.
MRGCD officials estimate the district will cease regular deliveries to most irrigators within the next week. Most of its stored water in El Vado Lake has been depleted, about two months before the typical end of irrigation season.
Once the lake’s storage reaches a particular threshold, MRGCD will enter “Prior and Paramount Operations,” which means it can only meet the irrigation needs of about 8,800 acres of pueblo lands, which have the most senior water rights in the valley. That includes the pueblos of Kewa, Cochiti, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Sandia and Isleta. Because the pueblos preceded any of the valley’s other communities, when Congress passed an act in 1928 supporting the irrigation district’s creation, it noted that the water rights to those pueblo lands are “prior and paramount to any rights of the district.”
MRGCD officials and Reclamation’s Carlson have both noted the pueblos worked to help the district and water managers this year.
In a statement, Pueblo of Sandia Gov. James Richard Bernal also spoke to the need for cooperation this year, and for long-term solutions. “Because of the unusually dry conditions, the Pueblos wanted to cooperate with other agencies this year, and agreed to use our senior water rights to stretch available water supplies for everyone, to the greatest extent possible,” he said. “Long-term solutions to water supply shortage issues and protection of senior rights to water need to be identified.”
A water-sharing agreement between Colorado Springs Utilities and an Arkansas Valley water management group would give that city access to an additional 2,100 acre feet of Arkansas River water a year — an agreement that concerns some regional water users.
That would be in addition to the 50 million gallons of Arkansas River water that Colorado Springs gets each day through the Southern Delivery Service pipeline from Lake Pueblo.
“The deal means another 7,500 shares of water will be leaving Bent County in the future,” argued Jay Winner, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservation District. “And that’s a step toward drying up that county.”
According to news reports, what Colorado Springs has done is buy 2,500 shares of water from Arkansas River Farms, a Littleton-based agriculture company. That purchase makes it a member of the Lower Arkansas Water Management Association.
That’s a nonprofit group of Arkansas River water users. Essentially, it has the job of seeing that water pumped up from groundwater wells is replaced into the river.
The deal that Colorado Springs wants approved calls for a shared use of its 2,500 shares of water between the management group and the city. Over a 10-year-period, the city would have the use of that water for five years, with the management group getting it the other five years.
City officials have said the shared-use plan would help guarantee Colorado Springs has additional water supplies in drought years.
A spokesman for the water management group said the deal would require Colorado Springs to pay for additional storage near Lamar for those years when the city is using the water.
Officials with Colorado Springs Utilities have fended off complaints that this might dry up areas in the Arkansas Valley by noting that the water management group would share authority over the water.
Winner said it is likely his organization, the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservation District, will intervene when the question comes before a state water court for approval. That is likely to be a few years away, he acknowledged.
The next step for the water-sharing plan is to get the approval of the Fort Lyon Canal Co. The water management group has been buying water from that company for its augmentation program and Fort Lyon currently doesn’t allow its water to be routed to cities.
The second step is to get approval from the state water court, which will review any deal to ensure that no other water rights are damaged.
FromWyofile (Angus M. Thuermer Jr) via the The Gillette News-Record:
The draft bill discussed by the committee would limit water banking to the Green River and Little Snake River drainages, Wyoming’s Colorado River tributaries, a restriction many legislators opposed. It states that water may be banked “for any beneficial use including use for drought contingency planning and use for water compact security.”
One goal is to help ensure that the state can meet water-supply obligations under the Colorado River Compact that says Wyoming and other upper-Colorado basin states must let certain volumes flow downstream. Delivering the owed water could, without banking, require reducing irrigation or other uses in the upper basin — a prospect that’s increasingly worrisome given a 16-year drought period between 2000 and 2015.
Under the bill, water could be placed in a bank or reservoir for up to 10 years by a person with a valid water right. But “no person shall acquire any new or enlarged water right through the use of the water banking program,” the draft states (see below).
In addition to making storage for drought and compact compliance, the bill should include another provision not yet articulated, Sen. Larry Hicks (R-Baggs) said. That would be to allow banked water to be used for endangered species conservation.
Hicks told committee members a water banking bill would also allow Wyoming, among other things, to account for water it conserves. Today, for example, the state gets no credit toward its compact obligations for water that Wyoming ranchers leave in the stream via a pilot program to increase late-season river flows by paying ranchers not to irrigate after haying season.
Once that conserved water leaves Wyoming, it becomes “system water” available to other states and users, he said. Consequently, it can’t be “shepherded” to Lake Powell with Wyoming’s brand — for release past the Lees Ferry gauge with credit to the state…
“The reason [the conserved Wyoming water] is system water [is] we haven’t shown a beneficial use … we can’t claim it,” Hicks told members of the Select Water Committee and Water Development Commission in Gillette on Friday. “Once we establish a water bank and establish a beneficial use to that water, it’s no longer system water. That water now belongs to the State of Wyoming.”
Hicks didn’t immediately convince all members of the committee and commission the bill is necessary. Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen, whose family owns a ranch near Big Piney in the Green River drainage, appears to be among the commissions skeptics. Her family participated in the pilot conservation program that’s now in its fourth year.
In 2018, the pilot program is anticipated to conserve 14,617 acre feet in Wyoming and generate $2.2 million to users who temporarily forego a portion of their annual diversions, according to information from the Wyoming State Engineer’s office — all without water banking legislation.
Budd-Falen said she understands some ranchers don’t like the program, funded by the Bureau of Reclamation and municipal water providers. But it made sense for her ranch, she said.
“The money was good and we’re cutting hay anyway [and not irrigating], so why not get paid,” she said. “I don’t know why we need a water banking system to do what we’re doing this year. We don’t have any storage to put the water anywhere.”
Hicks said a water banking bill would allow Wyoming “to “track the trickle” that irrigators conserve through such programs. “Then you get into shepherding,” he said, whereby Wyoming can get credit for its contribution to flows at Lees Ferry.
For Wyoming, the biggest benefit could be the claiming of unappropriated water, Hicks said. “This gets to the whole ability of the State of Wyoming to exercise our full rights under the Colorado [River Compact] or any other compact,” he said…
Such uncredited outflow happens at a rate of at least 400,000 acre feet a year, he suggested.
“What it potentially allows us to do,” Hicks said of a water bank, “is take that 400,000 acre-feet that currently leaves Wyoming. We’re now going to color that,” or give it Wyoming’s brand, he said. “We’re going to put it in Fontenelle Reservoir or any other basin down the road that we want to.
“It would allow us to claim that water in the water bank and claim that use,” Hicks said. The water in the bank would be held by the State of Wyoming. Anybody in the Colorado River drainage could come to Wyoming and say they need to acquire so many acre feet, Hicks said.
“If we had 50,000 acre feet … and we had an agreement with Bureau of Reclamation to deliver it to Lake Powell, that would be $10 million to the state of Wyoming,” Hicks said. He used a value of $200 an acre foot to calculate the value, saying he’s heard that price is “very close” to what ranchers in the pilot conservation program are receiving.
But Budd-Falen questioned whether new state government claims like those Hicks described could leave others short-changed.
“That makes me nervous,” she said of the state claiming a beneficial use for previously unappropriated water. “If the State of Wyoming goes out and starts tagging the unappropriated water … if I need a new water, where do I get my new water?
“I hate having it designated as a beneficial use because that means somebody else that comes in … that needs that water … can never get it,” Budd-Falen said. She supports Wyoming keeping control of its unappropriated water, she said, but, “I’m not convinced for the need for water banking for a beneficial use.”
Others questioned whether the draft bill contradicted one of its intended purposes. It states that the legislation would allow no person to claim a new or expanded water right, yet Hicks said he sees it as allowing Wyoming itself to claim a new beneficial use.
Budd-Falen also said the maximum 10-year transfer of water rights into a bank would make such rights unusable for endangered species preservation, contrary to Hick’s goal. “You cannot cut off an endangered fish’s water after 10 years,” she said.
The committee and commission also debated whether the bill should apply only to the Colorado River drainage — meaning the Green River and Little Snake Rivers in Wyoming — or statewide. A consultant to the Legislative Service Office that drafted the bill recommended it apply only to the Colorado River drainage. Lawmakers appeared to favor a statewide application.
Hicks brought the bill to the Select Water Committee as a courtesy, he said, because its members had attended a meeting on the topic with the Joint Agriculture, State and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee in Pinedale in June. That committee is sponsoring the draft bill and will formally consider it in September.
Meantime, lawmakers suggested complexities in the potential legislation be hammered out by a subcommittee, “We could cause quite a little bit of harm if it wasn’t put together and discussed thoroughly, ” Sen. Curt Meier (R-LaGrange) said.
Hicks agreed. “Everybody in the Colorado River basin is talking about this,” he said, “so we’ve got to get it right the first time.”
WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
Colorado Division of Water Resources Division Engineer Erin Light delayed a call on the river, which would curtail users according to the doctrine of prior appropriation. The delay comes as water managers wait to see if increased flows in the upper Yampa reach Dinosaur.
The Yampa River has never been placed on call.
“The last pumps on the river were sweeping the river,” Light said of her Tuesday visit to the lower Yampa. “If you can imagine, literally, the Yampa River getting to the point that all the water has been taken out of it, is frightening and monumental. It never has happened.”
The Colorado Division of Water Resources places a call on a river when water rights owners do not receive the amount of water they have a legal right to. When a call is in place, some water users are forced to reduce or stop their use in order to send enough water downstream to fulfill the older water right.
Though reservoir releases have boosted flows in the upper Yampa near Steamboat Springs and Craig, it’s not clear if or when that water reaches the state line. Water managers aren’t positive that the gauge measuring flows at Deerlodge Park in Dinosaur National Monument has been providing an accurate reading.
On Tuesday, flows at Deerlodge Park fell to about 35 cubic feet per second. On Wednesday, it was up to about 70 cfs. Historically, the river flows at 351 cfs on the same date.
“It’s very extremely dynamic what we’ve got going on here,” Light said. “Obviously the rains affect everything. As much as we love the rain, it makes it difficult to see what’s going on in the system and what effects it’s going to have, but the reservoir water that was in the river before is now being reduced.”
The Colorado Water Trust has been releasing reservoir water to increase flows for aquatic habitat and recreational use. Tri-State Generation and Transmission added a significant boost in flows with released reservoir water to maintain power generation at Craig Station. As weekend rain has increased flows, the organizations have slowed their releases.
“They only have so much contract water, and they have to manage and budget that contract water for times when it’s critical for their purpose,” Light said.
Last week, total releases from Stagecoach Reservoir jumped from 65 cfs to 125 cfs, Light said. This fell back to 70 cfs Wednesday. Releases from Elkhead Reservoir between Hayden and Craig were also reduced, from 75 cfs to 25 cfs.
“The reservoir water and the rainwater has hit Craig, and it has hit Maybell, but it’s just not getting to Deerlodge,” Light said. “I’m hoping it will.”
The first to be curtailed are those that do not have a water right or do not have a measuring device on their water intake. Then, users with the newest water rights are curtailed, followed by those with older rights…
Light said the fact that, if it occurs, this would be the first call on the Yampa, and that has made her and the water users on the river “very cautious.”
“We’re very hesitant about this scenario,” Light said. “Who wants to be the one that’s been tagged as being the first one to actually request administration by our office?”
Gore Creek is healthy as it emerges from the Eagles Nest Wilderness Area, but has problems soon after, via The Mountain Town News. All photos by Jack Affleck.
George Brauchler is in the persuasion business — he’s a lawyer, after all. On Wednesday, Aug. 22, he made the case for his candidacy for Colorado attorney general to a mostly full room at the 60th annual Colorado Water Congress at the Hotel Talisa…
Wednesday, Brauchler talked about his background and his philosophy about how the state’s top law enforcement officer should do that job…
IF ELECTED
Speaking to a group of people focused on water rights, Brauchler said part of his job is protecting the state’s water rights from federal interference. Another part is negotiating when it comes time to talk about multi-state compacts, such as the one governing the Colorado River.
Brauchler said he’s gained a keen appreciation of how water rights are viewed in different parts of the state. Speaking in Delta recently, Brauchler said he was asked about prosecuting victims of theft. The punchline, as most longtime Western Slope residents know, is “Denver’s stealing our water.”
As he’s traveled the state, Brauchler said he’s come to believe that areas outside the Interstate 25 corridor between Pueblo and Fort Collins increasingly see themselves as part of a “second Colorado.”
In a conversation after his presentation, Brauchler said he’d like to bring some of his office’s resources to those other parts of the state. He questioned why so many state offices have to be “a horse and buggy ride” away from the state capitol.
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Western Resource Advocates President Jon Goldin-Dubois released the following statement today on the Trump administration’s proposal to gut the Clean Power Plan by dismantling the federal government’s framework for cutting greenhouse gas pollution.
“The Trump administration is backing away from action on climate change as communities across the West struggle through years of record drought and a summer choked with wildfire smoke – both fueled by global warming. We need leadership on climate change at the federal level. Today’s action is further abdication of the responsibility to act on climate to protect our health, livelihoods, and future generations. Fortunately, smart utilities in the West and nationwide are moving in the opposite direction, motivated by market forces and public demand for clean energy. We urge the administration to take its head out of the sand, listen to Westerners, consumers, and the marketplace, and honor its responsibility to cut carbon emissions.”
Grand Junction back in the day with the Grand Mesa in background
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Amy Hamilton):
In what may be the first time ever, the city of Grand Junction on Tuesday imposed mandatory outdoor water use restrictions, as the ongoing drought has drained area reservoirs and rivers that will struggle to refill if the state endures another dry winter.
The city’s roughly 9,700 domestic water customers can only water lawns and gardens and use outside water three times each week for the remainder of August. Indoor water use is not restricted.
Residents can only water twice a week in September and once a week in October. City officials dubbed the water program 3-2-1 to help residents remember to scale back the weekly days of water usage in the ensuing months.
Residents can choose which days of the week to water outdoors.
Water providers across the Grand Valley are supporting Grand Junction’s efforts, but no other mandatory water restrictions were set in place Tuesday for users who receive water from the Ute Water Conservancy District, the town of Palisade or the Clifton Water District.
Low reservoir water levels, extreme drought and extended hot weather conditions, combined with a lack of monsoonal wet weather usually seen this time of summer, contributed to Grand Junction’s decision to call for mandatory water restrictions, said Randi Kim, city utilities director.
“What we don’t want is if the drought continues and we don’t have the runoff in the spring, we’d be tapping into our water reserves,” Kim said. “We want to be sure we have enough water to carry over into the next year.”
Grand Junction, like other local water providers except Clifton Water District, obtains its water from Grand Mesa. Grand Junction receives most of its water from Kannah Creek, which typically runs at 60 cubic feet per second. The creek now is running at 8 cfs and the city is barely able to get its full allotment of 7.8 cfs, Kim said.
Kim said reservoir levels are as low as they were during the 2012 drought, but city officials had been waiting for forecasted monsoonal, wet weather before considering stricter water restrictions this year. When the late summer monsoons didn’t materialize, city officials opted to instate the mandatory restrictions.
As you read this, you’re surrounded on all sides … by water.
Even in the driest of climates, it’s everywhere, found in gaseous form as an integral part of Earth’s hydrosphere. And though not as apparent as its solid and liquid counterparts, vapor may prove a crucial tool in the future of sustainable humanitarian and agricultural infrastructure.
“There’s largely untapped water resource all around us,” said Michael May, a senior sustainable-systems engineeringMSU Denver sustainable-systems engineering senior Michael May talks about the atmospheric water capture appliance at Denver Botanic Gardens and how it utilizes two energy methods. Photo by Alyson McClaran major at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “It was intuitive to ask about accessing it – and how to put it to use in a dry environment.”
One approach that water futurists such as May are interested in is coupling “horizon materials” – those that aren’t yet feasible to scale – with existing technologies to bridge the gap between imagination and reality.
“Think about silica-gel packets that come with new shoes; they absorb moisture, and you can extract the water, but it requires too much energy to do so at scale,” May said. “Right now, though, there are some promising studies happening in this area, and we could see a potential increase by an order of magnitude – 10 times over on the low end.”
Another budding area of development is community partnerships to harvest that ever-present vapor around us.
“We brought in an expert who talked about technologies like fog nets for air-based extraction,” said Jennifer Riley-Chetwynd, director of marketing at Denver Botanic Gardens and co-director of the One World One Water Center at MSU Denver. “That planted the seed – if we could use renewable resources to harvest water without burning fossil fuels, it would be a game-changer.”
Shown here outside of the Jordan Student Success Building, the device’s center panel is solar electric to run fans, a pump, recharge a battery and operate other moving parts. Either side of the solar electric portion of the panel is solar thermal. Heat is used to facilitate the condensation process of vapor into liquid. Photo by Elizabeth Moreno
After subsequent research, Denver Botanic Gardens then acquired several atmospheric-water-capture devices, called SOURCE, from Arizona-based Zero Mass Water.
The apparatus uses solar-electric and solar-thermal panels to power fans that draw in ambient air; vapor is then passed through a condenser and collected via an onboard reservoir.
In addition to three at its York Street headquarters and one at its Chatfield location, Denver Botanic Gardens donated a device to MSU Denver, currently outside the Jordan Student Success Building (another was donated to University of Colorado-Boulder as well).
May was also involved in the equipment deployment as a guest lecturer for a CU Boulder environmental-design class.
Though SOURCE is devised to provide potable water to drink, Denver Botanic Gardens is also the first location to test modified versions for irrigation purposes, with one located next to the Hive bistro for a tasty slice of stewardship.
“The garden we’re using it in is producing squash, tomatoes, herbs and other ingredients you can order on your pizza,” Riley-Chetwynd said.
This is all more than pie-in-the-sky, too – the implications are international.
Take the scenario facing Africa, which is home to 1.2 billion people; that number is expected to more than double by 2050. And the impact of that will be felt everywhere, said Aaron Brown, Ph.D., professor of mechanical engineering technology.
“We all need water to live, and a huge population explosion is going to happen on the poorest continent,” he said. “These kinds of problems are often best solved from a mulitidisciplinary perspective, and here at MSU Denver we look at research in humanitarian technologies for vulnerable populations.
“We’re training students to address the nexus of energy, water, food and health in a holistic, systems way.”
That’s Brown’s approach to this fall semester’s Sustainable Development Strategy course. Following up on a 2016 trip to Bhopal, India, where students worked in a local integrative-health clinic, the class is a launching pad for a study-abroad effort that will map geographic information systems’ health data compared with water delivery and water tables to see if there’s a correlation between pollution migration and health.
It’s part of a comprehensive community-based conservation conversation. And though using technology such as atmospheric water capture to irrigate beyond small plots of land isn’t currently viable, future research is encouraging.
“If you can pull two to three liters of water from the air in Denver, with 25 percent humidity, that’s really promising for more-humid environments,” Brown said.
For May, whose continued commitment to advancing sustainable solutions included a recent Colorado Science and Engineering Policy Fellowship, coupling innovative material with emerging practices is less of a silver bullet than one of many silver BBs, as he quoted John Stulp, Gov. John Hickenlooper’s special policy advisor for water.
And thanks to partnerships such as the one between MSU Denver and Denver Botanic Gardens, today’s water stewardship is built to scale for tomorrow’s world.
Grand Falls Little Colorado River, Spring of 2010.
From the Navajo Nation via the The Navajo Hopi Observer:
Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye met with Interior Department representatives Aug. 16, to discuss the framework for a settlement of Navajo water rights on the main-stem Colorado River and the Little Colorado River (LCR).
Also present at the meeting, held at the Office of the President and Vice President, were Navajo Nation Council Speaker LoRenzo Bates and various Council delegates. Navajo leaders met with the Secretary’s Indian Water Rights Office (SIWRO), an agency that operates under the Interior Department.
The Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe have been negotiating water rights for the Colorado River and LCR for decades without substantial resolution.
“We’re ready to move forward on this and we have been,” Begaye told SIWRO officials. “Establishing Navajo water rights to the main-stem and LCR is critical to the future of the Navajo Nation. I’ve been advocating for water allocations for homes, businesses and tribal operations, and for funding to build a pipeline to provide water to communities in the Western Agency.”
In June 2017, the Udall Foundation provided mediation between the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe to work toward agreeable terms in a settlement. Although the tribes were able to gain certain consensus on some issues, they failed to come to an agreement.
Begaye said the negotiation process is now back at square one.
“When it comes to LCR, we go full circle. We’ve come to this impasse before,” he said. “We have a good relationship with Hopi, but this is an area we can’t seem to agree on. However, when it comes to water rights and how they affect the future of our people, this settlement is paramount.”
Begaye said the SIWRO, the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe need to consider alternatives in reaching a settlement.
“Maybe there is another way of looking at this. Yet still, Navajo is ready to move on with a settlement,” Begaye said.
Access to public lands have caused St. George to become one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country.
In 1861, Mormon Church leaders dispatched 309 families from Salt Lake City to the arid southwestern corner of Utah, telling them to grow cotton. The plan to settle this inhospitable desert region was part of a larger church-led effort to colonize the southern part of the state. The water-intensive crop never took off, but the community of St. George did, and today it is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. In the past two years, St. George has added nearly 12,000 new residents to a population of approximately 153,000 people, many of them drawn by the city’s mild climate and access to public lands. But all this growth has stoked some rising tension over water and land in this former farm town.
ST. GEORGE, UT – SEPTEMBER 27: New single-family homes and others under construction are shown on a ridge September 27, 2013 in St. George, Utah. Housing starts on single-family rose at a faster pace in August, and building permits rose to a five-year high, according to published reports this week. (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images)
And many of the resulting problems will land right in the lap of Adam Lenhard, the new city manager, who started his job in February. On a warm summer day not long ago, he gazed over a seemingly endless expanse of newly shingled rooftops. “In some ways, St. George is just being discovered,” he told me. “A lot of us have been coming here for decades, and now it really feels like there is this spotlight and people are really just moving in.”
We were overlooking the community of Little Valley, where, as in many of St. George’s neighborhoods, rapid development is one of the challenges facing Lenhard. Alfalfa fields have been dug up for baseball diamonds and pickle-ball courts, and former ranchland is now covered by new tract homes.
One of these homes, Lenhard said, was being built for his family, which will be moving soon from Layton, Utah. Lenhard said he’d thought about relocating to St. George ever since he spent several vacations exploring nearby Zion National Park — one of Utah’s “Mighty Five” — and the red rock formations of Snow Canyon State Park, just 23 miles from the city center. Such places are a big draw here, in a county that is 75 percent public land, and, as a newcomer himself, Lenhard is deeply sympathetic to the motivations of many of his constituents. “Growth is a two-edged sword,” he said. “It brings jobs, quality of life, better amenities. But we have to preserve what has brought people. … We have to find the right balance as we grow.”
Source: University of Utah Policy Institute. Compiled with data from U.S. Census Bureau, Utah Population Estimates Committee and Utah Population Committee.
While amenity-driven growth in the West is most often associated with ski towns like Telluride, Colorado, or Jackson Hole, Wyoming, places like St. George have discovered that access to public lands — from slickrock deserts to mountainous wilderness to national parks and monuments — has become a migration magnet. This trend is playing out in communities across the region, according to John Shepard, director of programs for the Sonoran Institute. In the Old West, people’s migratory patterns were driven by jobs created by mining, timber and other resource-based economies, but today, people are moving because of the region’s “natural amenities, great outdoors, open space and wild lands,” he said. It’s no surprise that Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Oregon and Nevada are all seeing a spike in the number of new residents.
While retirees still make up a large percentage of new arrivals, St. George’s diversified economy is also attracting a new workforce, with employment in construction, hospitality, health care and manufacturing seeing the biggest upticks, according to a report compiled by the Utah Department of Workforce Services. “We’ve got growth pervasively across all age groups, mostly fed through migration,” said Pamela Perlich, director of demographic research at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. The city is also preparing to become the state’s next high-tech hub, with the creation of Tech Ridge, a mixed-use development designed to attract companies from across the country.
County-to-county migration-flow data from 2015 show that nearly 30 percent of new residents come from Utah’s crowded Wasatch Front, according to a report from the institute. The highest numbers of out-of-state residents are coming from California and Nevada, largely because they can take advantage of St. George’s lower cost of living. “The dynamic of being able to cash in your equity in California and move into other places … St. George has definitely been a beneficiary of that type of migration,” Perlich said. If this keeps up, the county is expected to house more than half a million people by 2065. That’s a lot of people struggling over limited resources of water and land — to say nothing of the preservation of the area’s agricultural heritage. Not surprisingly, this has added to the tension.
ON A LATE AFTERNOON IN JUNE, parents watched as their children splashed in a moat-like water feature in St. George’s Town Square Park, wading through channels and jumping between jets of water. Amid the watery revelry, one could almost forget that St. George is located in one of the driest states of the country; Washington County has an annual rainfall of just 16 inches per year. A majority of the county’s water comes from the Virgin River. Now, with droves of new residents moving in, long-term residents are worried that this precious and vulnerable resource could be drained, leading to water shortages.
That’s why in 2006, the Washington County Water Conservancy District announced plans to pursue a controversial pipeline connecting Lake Powell to southwest Utah. The nearly $1.5 billion project would divert 86,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Powell over 140 miles of desert into the county. The pipeline, which has yet to be approved, would provide security for the community’s future, said Ron Thompson, the district’s general manager. Supporters say the county needs to diversify its water sources. “Right now, our growing population is dependent on this one water source, which is really variable,” said Karry Rathje, the district’s public information manager.
Opponents of the project point out that even as the city’s population has grown, water use has actually gone down. According to figures released in June, the county decreased its consumption of potable water by over 1 billion gallons between 2010 and 2015, thanks to conservation measures and the conversion of irrigated agricultural land into housing developments. Groups like Conserve Southwest Utah, a local nonprofit, say even more can be done. That includes raising the county’s water rates, which remain some of the lowest in the United States.
Farm Security Administration members post on a cooperative pipe line used for irrigation in Saint George in 1940. Contributor Names Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, photographer Created / Published-1940 Oct.-Subject Headings – United States–Utah–Washington County–Saint George
All this growth is having a serious impact on land use. The region’s post-settlement character is rooted in an agricultural tradition, but agrarian outposts like Little Valley are rapidly being erased. In response, local resident Nicole Hancock, who grew up in what she calls her “beloved fields,” started the Washington County Agricultural Development Committee. The county committee, which will be composed of 18 to 20 members, was approved for funding in May, with its mission to preserve farmland and promote agriculture education.
Eventually, it might help people like Sherrie Staheli, a fourth-generation farmer from Washington Fields who has seen her farm, once 1,500 acres, encroached on by subdivisions and retirement communities. “Never in a million years would I think we’d have houses this close to us,” said Staheli. Yet the pressure to sell the land has been unrelenting; Staheli’s own family sold some parcels for profit and others because more and more road easements through the property were being approved. “People built out here because of the beauty of these fields,” Staheli said, “but they don’t like what comes with it.”
EVEN MORE DEVELOPMENTS are being planned in other parts of the county. One of them, called Desert Color, will eventually house an estimated 30,000 residents on state trust lands. The plans include a lot of “smart-growth principles,” such as xeriscaping and walkable amenities to reduce driving needs, said Jane Whalen, a resident of nearby Hurricane and a community organizer.
In 2006, Whalen and other residents worked with officials to create a set of principals to guide the region’s growth. Other master-planned communities being built by the new St. George Airport, south of the city, will eventually run up to the Arizona state border, site of some of the last developable land within city limits. Such developments mean less open space for wildlife migration corridors and fragmented habitat for mule deer, quail and pheasants.
Even where it isn’t directly overtaking habitat, St. George’s sprawl puts pressure on wildlife. The 62,000-acre Red Cliffs Desert Reserve, for example, was established in 1996 to protect the Mojave Desert tortoise, a federally listed threatened species. The reserve is governed by a county conservation plan, part of a compromise that unlocked over 300,000 acres of protected habitat for the development of housing, freeways and shopping centers.
In another sign of the times, state lawmakers are now reviewing that agreement. A new bill, the so-called “Desert Tortoise Habitat Conservation Plan Expansion Act,” was introduced by Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart in April. If passed, that “conservation” bill could transform the tortoise’s habitat — a stark landscape of lava flows, cinder cones and desert brush — into a five-lane highway. No one doubts that if it’s built, more traffic will come.
Jessica Kutz is an editorial fellow at High Country News.
Join Water Education Colorado on September 18 for a 5th anniversary, full-day tour of the 2013 flood-affected zone along the Front Range (to begin and end in Loveland). Jump on the bus with lawmakers, water managers, attorneys, engineers and members of the public to get an up-close look at various recovery projects. Participants will learn about the initial actions that were taken to protect lives and property as well as the subsequent projects that were undertaken to recover and build resilience. View the draft agenda here, then hurry and reserve your spot today. Seats are limited!
Pristine Halfmoon Lake, shown here under hazy skies in August 2018, is on Lime Creek within the Holy Cross Wilderness and is near the location for a potential diversion dam and tunnel back toward the existing Fry-Ark Project to the south. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith Aspen Journalism
The U.S. Forest Service is questioning whether the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District ever will be able to get approval to build six potential diversion dams and related tunnels and conduits in the Fryingpan River basin that are located on USFS land above 10,000 feet within the Holy Cross Wilderness.
In a statement of opposition filed last month in Division 5 water court in Glenwood Springs, attorneys for the USFS said it “cannot authorize development of these six conditional water rights … because they lie within a congressionally designated wilderness. Only the president has authority to approve water developments within the Holy Cross Wilderness.”
The USFS statement of opposition, which was the only one filed in the case (18CW3063), also said “as currently decreed, the subject water rights raise questions as to whether they can and will be perfected within a reasonable time.”
The opposition statement was submitted July 31 in response to a periodic diligence application filed with the water court by Southeastern on May 28.
Southeastern is seeking to maintain its conditional water rights that are part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. The rights were decreed in 1958. Six of the rights are within the Holy Cross Wilderness, which was designated in 1980, but most are outside of it.
Southeastern, which is based in Pueblo, owns and manages the water rights for the Fry-Ark Project, which was built by the Bureau of Reclamation.
A detail of map of the Fry-Ark Project prepared by the Colorado River District, showing potential diversion points as purple circles. The map does not show the wilderness boundary.A map prepared as part of a study by Wilson Water Group showing the locations of six potential diversion dams in the Holy Cross Wilderness, shown in light purple. The diversion points would be connected with tunnels and conduits and connected to the existing Fry-Ark Project system at Carter Creek, the most northern dam and tunnel in the existing system.A map filed as part of Southeastern’s diligence application that shows the extent of the Fry-Ark Project. On its southern end, it diverts water from creeks near Aspen. The conditional rights within the Holy Cross Wilderness are on its northern end.
375 cfs
The six diversion dams inside the Holy Cross Wilderness would allow for the diversion of 10 cubic feet per second from an unnamed tributary of the North Fork of the Fryingpan River, for diversion of 135 cfs from Last Chance Creek and for 10 cfs from an unnamed tributary to Last Chance Creek, for 85 cfs from a creek called Slim’s Gulch and for 85 cfs from an unnamed tributary of Slim’s Gulch, and for 50 cfs from Lime Creek.
In all, the six conditional rights in the wilderness would allow for 375 cfs of additional diversions in the Fry-Ark Project.
The diversion structure on Lime Creek would be near pristine Halfmoon Lake, which is above Eagle Lake.
Chris Woodka, who is the issues management coordinator at Southeastern, said the conditional water rights in the wilderness “are like a bargaining chip that we really don’t want to give up.”
“If they could be developed at some point, we would still be interested in developing them, as far as getting the yield from there,” Woodka said. “But can we get more of a yield from the system using the mechanisms we have in place? Probably.”
The entrance to the Chapman Tunnel on the creek in Chapman Gulch, part of the existing Fry-Ark diversion system.
Maximizing limited yield
The Fry-Ark Project today includes 16 diversion dams and 26 miles of tunnels and conduits on the Western Slope that move water from the Hunter Creek and Fryingpan River basins to the centrally located Boustead Tunnel, which can divert as many as 945 cfs under the Continental Divide.
The water is sent to Turquoise Reservoir near Leadville and then farther into the Arkansas River basin for use by cities and irrigators.
The six potential dams and tunnels in the Holy Cross Wilderness would connect to the existing Fry-Ark Project at the Carter Creek dam and tunnel, which is the most northerly point of the system. It was completed in 1981.
James DuBois, an attorney in the environment and natural resources division at the Justice Department and who filed the USFS statement of opposition, said he could not discuss the case.
DuBois filed a similar statement of opposition in a 2009 diligence filing for Southeastern’s conditional rights.
In that case, the USFS eventually agreed, in a 2011 stipulation, that Southeastern would study “the potential for moving its conditional water rights off of wilderness lands” during the next six-year diligence period, which ended in May.
It also would look at other ways to increase the project’s “authorized yield.”
A view of the Slim’s Gulch area in the upper Fryingpan River basin. The Lime Creek basin is on the other side of the jagged ridge in the background, and a tunnel under the mountain would move water from Lime Creek to Slim’s Gulch.
Yield limits
Under the project’s operating principles, the authorized yield of the Fry-Ark Project is limited to diverting 120,000 acre-feet in any one year, and to diverting no more than 2.35 million acre-feet over a 34-year rolling average, or an annual average of 69,200 acre-feet.
From 2010 to 2015, the project diverted an average of 63,600 acre-feet, indicating there is more yield to be gained.
This year, a dry year, about 39,000 acre-feet was diverted. In 2011, the last really wet year, 98,900 acre-feet was diverted, according to an annual report on the Fry-Ark Project prepared by the Bureau of Reclamation.
A view of the Last Chance Creek basin in the upper Fryingpan River basin. The main stem of Last Chance Creek wraps around the forested mountain in the middle of the photo, and a tributary to the south is off to the right, just out of view in the photo. Photo credit: Aspen Journalism
Improving existing facilities
In accordance with the 2011 stipulation, a study on how to get more water out of the system was done by Wilson Water Group and presented to Southeastern in April.
In the presentation slides, Wilson Water told Southeastern’s board of directors that “analysis indicates contemplated project yield could be met through existing infrastructure and software upgrades.”
Another option studied was to move the six rights in the Holy Cross Wilderness downstream and out of the wilderness. However, Wilson Water said it would require pumping stations to lift the water back up to Fry-Ark system and the “cost per-acre feet is likely prohibitive.”
Despite the finding that improving the existing system would increase the yield on the project, Southeastern voted in April to file for diligence on the six conditional rights within the wilderness, along with other conditional rights, telling the court that “while the construction of certain conditionally decreed project features has not yet been started, there is no intent to abandon these features or any of the conditional water rights … .”
A sign marking the boundary of the Holy Cross Wilderness in the Last Chance Creek basin. The trail up the basin does not see a lot of hiking traffic. Photo credit: Aspen Journalism
‘Inappropriate location’
Upon learning of the diligence application this week, Will Roush, the executive director of Wilderness Workshop in Carbondale, said “the Holy Cross Wilderness is a completely inappropriate location” for the development of the conditional water rights.
“Lime Creek, Last Chance Creek and the surrounding lands and tributaries provide amazing opportunities for solitude and the rare opportunity to experience a landscape and alpine watershed free of human infrastructure and without the diversion of water,” Roush said.
An informational memo on the diligence case was presented to the Southeastern board of directors on Aug. 16, and there was no discussion of the case by the board.
An initial status conference in the diligence case has been set for Sept. 18.
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is covering the Roaring Fork and Colorado river basins in collaboration with The Aspen Times. The Times published this story on Saturday, August 19, 2018. This version of the story corrected the date of the earlier stipulation between Southeastern and USFS, which was reached in 2011, not 2012, when the case was closed.
On April 7, 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed adding the “Bonita Peak Mining District” to the National Priorities List, making it eligible for Superfund. Forty-eight mine portals and tailings piles are “under consideration” to be included. The Gold King Mine will almost certainly be on the final list, as will the nearby American Tunnel. The Mayflower Mill #4 tailings repository, just outside Silverton, is another likely candidate, given that it appears to be leaching large quantities of metals into the Animas River. What Superfund will entail for the area beyond that, and when the actual cleanup will begin, remains unclear. Eric Baker
Project to clean nearly 30 mines in 5 years has drawn criticism
The Environmental Protection Agency will not release public comments before it makes a final decision on a proposed plan to clean up 26 mine sites over the next five years in the Superfund area near Silverton.
In June, the EPA released the proposed plan, which identified quick action projects the agency wants to take while it comes up with a long-term plan for improving water quality in the upper Animas River. The proposed plan is expected to cost about $10 million.
“We’ve got years’ worth of investigations to do,” Rebecca Thomas, the EPA’s project manager, said in a previous interview. “These early actions are not intended to be a final remedy. They’re no-brainer activities to help get the water clean and reduce the amount of loading.”
The release of the plan kicked off a 30-day public comment period, which was extended another month in response to requests by the public. The comment period ended Wednesday.
When The Durango Herald asked EPA officials to review public comments, spokeswoman Cynthia Peterson said the public comments and the EPA’s response won’t be made available for review until the EPA makes a final decision.
“All significant comments, and EPA’s responses to those comments, will be compiled in a responsiveness summary. The responsiveness summary will be included in the final decision document – the Interim Record of Decision. The Interim Record of Decision will be published once the agency has had a chance to review and consider all comments received.”
Withholding of public feedback and the agency’s replies until after a final decision is made is in contrast with other comment periods the EPA has held. In 2015, for example, comments were posted in real time for the listing of the Superfund site.
“In some instances, such as federal rule-makings, comments can be made available in real time,” Peterson wrote. “However, significant comments on a site-specific Record of Decision are released in a responsiveness summary with the decision document.”
This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]
Despite ash flows and mine waste, the river is resilient
It’s been a rough couple of years for the Animas River.
This weekend marks three years since the river, which runs through the heart of Durango, endured a massive mine waste spill from a blowout at the Gold King Mine. The waterway turned an electric orange and gained international attention.
The Aug. 5, 2015, spill brought to the forefront the longstanding issue of toxic metals leeching into the Animas River from legacy mining in its headwaters around Silverton.
This year has been an especially vicious dagger into the Animas.
A winter that never showed up in the San Juan Mountains resulted in one of the lowest snowpack years in recorded history. Then, through spring and early summer, extreme drought tightened its stranglehold on Southwest Colorado.
The Animas River saw its third lowest peak flow in more than 100 years of recorded history, and one of its earliest, hitting a high of about 1,000 cubic feet per second in May. Typically, the river peaks at about 4,700 cfs in early June.
Fish and other aquatic life were already stressed from low flows and high water temperatures when ash runoff from the 416 Fire burn scar came tumbling down north of Durango.
The dark-chocolate colored waters suffocated fish, which desperately washed ashore seeking oxygen. Though an official population survey won’t be conducted until this fall, it’s estimated thousands of fish died.
A raw sewage spill last week at Santa Rita Park was an extra twist of the dagger.
A river without fish
For some perspective, it’s likely aquatic life is either all but gone or dramatically depleted through the entire 126-mile stretch of the river from the headwaters in Silverton, down through Durango to the Animas’ confluence with the San Juan River in Farmington.
In recent years, the river from Silverton to Bakers Bridge (about 15 miles north of Durango) has been basically considered a dead zone because of toxic metal-loading from leeching mines.
The ash flows during the month of July killed most of the fish in the river through Durango. Even the most tolerant species – carp – was found dead along the river’s banks.
Fish in this stretch of the Animas River have been unable to reproduce because of a combination of factors, such as high water temperature and mining pollution. The fish that do live in the river are stocked by Colorado Fish and Wildlife.
The Southern Ute Indian Tribe declined to comment about how fish are doing in the Animas through tribal lands. Attempts to reach a biologist with New Mexico Fish and Game were unsuccessful. The Animas, however, has all but dried up before it reaches the San Juan River.
“It’d be unusual if everything was dead, but it’s probably to the point where it’s virtually that way,” said Jim White, an aquatic biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
But despite the onslaught of doom and gloom, there is reason to be optimistic: Rivers are resilient, and steps are finally being taken to make significant strides in the cleanup of the Animas River.
Improving water, habitat
After the Gold King Mine spill, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency (which triggered the blowout while working at the inactive mine) declared a long-awaited Superfund listing, which will clean up nearly 50 mining sites around the Animas River headwaters.
Already, a temporary water-treatment plant built in 2015 has shown improvement in water quality downstream, said EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Peterson, though it’s too soon to know its effect on aquatic life…
While ash flows have decimated fish populations, research has shown aquatic species rebound quickly after wildfires, said Scott Roberts, an aquatic biologist for Mountain Studies Institute.
Note: I will not be at the conference Tweeting away this year. I’m depending on all you other Tweeters to keep me informed.
The three-day conference, which starts Wednesday at the Hotel Talisa in Vail, is expected to draw more than 300 water policy experts as well as local, county and state officials who handle water issues…
Drought issues will be a key discussion topic this week, said Doug Kemper, the group’s executive director. Drought has hit the southern half of the state pretty hard, Kemper said.
“You’re looking at record low flows in some areas,” especially around Gunnison, he said. “We came into this year universally above average in every river basin, but will exit this water year in a different condition.”
Negotiations with the six other states that draw water from the Colorado River are at a critical point, Kemper said, even as a new governor and attorney general are coming to Colorado.
The conference will hear from the major candidates for both offices, marking the first time that many in the water community will meet them. They’ll likely be asked how they view the state water plan, whether the next governor will have a special water adviser, as Gov. John Hickenlooper has, and how they view the work of the basin roundtables, which carry much of the workload for the water plan.
Funding for the plan also is in question. Kemper said it’s still unclear whether funding will come from grants or loans and whether it will be spent on infrastructure, wastewater treatment or environmental protection.
The congress will meet Wednesday with Republican attorney general candidate George Brauchler, followed by Republican gubernatorial candidate Walker Stapleton.
Thursday, Democratic attorney general candidate Phil Weiser will speak to the congress.
U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, is to address the group Friday.
Congressional candidates also will visit: Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton will be at the congress Thursday, and Democratic opponent Diane Mitsch Bush will address the congress Friday.
Thursday, the Legislature’s interim water resources review committee will hold its August session at the congress. The committee is to review funding for the state water plan, the Colorado River compact and drought contingency plans for the Colorado River.
Thursday’s keynote address, “A New Culture of Certainty at EPA,” will be delivered by Doug Benevento, the EPA Region VIII administrator, and comes on the heels of a federal court order Thursday that the Trump administration reinstate the Obama administration’s “Waters of the USA” rule.
The Central Arizona Aqueduct delivers water from the Colorado River to underground aquifers in southern Arizona. UT researcher Bridget Scanlon recommends more water storage projects like the aqueduct to help protect against variability in the river’s water supply. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The total stored is nearly 3.6 million acre-feet of water in 28 sites across Pima, Pinal and Maricopa counties. That’s well over two years worth of CAP deliveries. They’ve stored another 600,000 acre-feet for Nevada.
The total tab has topped $330 million for the state and the Central Arizona Project to design and build storage basins and recharge water in them by artificial means.
But all that work has left a key detail unsettled: how to withdraw the bank’s water when needed.
No wells or other infrastructure exists to pump the water from recharge sites where nearly 25 percent of the water-bank water is stored, including one of the system’s largest recharge facilities. While water is also banked in some of the cotton, alfalfa and grain fields served by CAP water, and they do have infrastructure to get the water out, many of these facilities are far from urban and tribal users…
Tucson is better primed than most cities for water-bank recovery. The water bank has put more than two years worth of the city’s water needs into city-owned recharge basins in the Avra Valley, many miles west and northwest of the city limits.
City wells to pump that water out are already in place. But that’s mainly because Tucson Water’s original delivery of CAP water in the 1990s was so problematic that it had to switch to something more innovative and farsighted like recharging its supply. The city first delivered corrosive CAP water that rotted out many homeowners’ pipes. That fiasco led to a citizen-backed initiative requiring the city to recharge CAP water rather than run it through a treatment plant.
But in general, many major questions about water-bank recovery remain unanswered. They include: How, when and where will the water be recovered? Who will recover it? How will this be done legally, meeting contractual obligations? How much will it cost?
The water-bank water is stored mainly for the benefit of Tucson and Phoenix and their suburbs, and tribes such as the Gila River Indian Community and the White Mountain Apache Tribe. (The Tohono O’odham Tribe near Tucson is not in line for water-bank water.) Water users along the Colorado River also have a claim to some of the bank’s water.
There is a recovery plan, done in 2014, but to many city water agencies, it’s longer on concepts than details: “It’s a plan to plan,” says Kathryn Sorensen, the city of Phoenix’s water service director. She is secretary for the Arizona Water Banking Authority’s governing commission, and one of many municipal water officials who has pushed hard for a more thorough plan…
The 2014 plan reflects the longstanding, conventional wisdom that CAP cutbacks to cities and tribes wouldn’t start until the mid-2030s at the earliest.
Today, the outlook for Lake Mead and the river in general is worse. Shortages cutting off agricultural water are expected in the early 2020s. Urban shortages are considered possible by the mid-2020s and maybe even 2022, under the worst-case, least-likely scenario.
So water officials are now grappling with the nitty-gritty details of putting together a more complete recovery plan, perhaps by the end of 2018.
The effort is being led by a committee representing various water utilities and other interests, and shepherded by the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, which runs CAP, the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the Arizona Water Banking Authority, which manages the water bank.
Wally Wilson, water service manager for the suburban Metro Water district, said that the big questions about recovery weren’t addressed before, “to the chagrin of many.”
[…]
“One thing we know when it comes to water, Arizonans are very innovative,” Sorensen said. “There are a lot of difficulties and a lot of uncertainties. But I know we’ll get there.”
Lawyer: “What the courts are saying is we’re going to enforce the laws that Congress wrote, and this administration is breaking those laws and needs to stop.”
Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration three times in the last three days, arguing that the administration short-circuited the regulatory process in its push to reverse policies on water protections, chemical plant safety operations and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. In each instance, the courts either reinstated the existing rule or delayed the administration’s proposal from taking effect.
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to delay new chemical and safety requirements was “arbitrary and capricious.” The day before, a judge on the U.S. District Court in South Carolina reinstated a rule in 26 states limiting the dredging and filling of streams and waterways on the grounds that the EPA had not solicited sufficient public input. And on Wednesday, a judge on the U.S. District Court of Montana ordered the State Department to conduct a more extensive environmental impact statement of the Keystone XL’s proposed route through Nebraska.
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Dennis Webb):
Never mind the ear plugs and duct tape available in the Parachute camp’s supplies section on that early August day, and take that contracted food service as one example. Even said she received a food invoice for $7,000 for the previous day. She said a typical daily bill for two hot meals and a sack lunch that provide firefighters with the 6,000 calories a day needed for toiling long hours on the fire line can run close to $15,000, depending on the number of personnel on the fire.
Such expenses quickly add up. Last year, wildland firefighting cost federal agencies a record $2.9 billion, and the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management currently are on a pace this year to potentially exceed what they spent in 2017 for firefighting.
The interagency Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center estimates that as of Wednesday, 60 large fires in Colorado this year had cost $144,774,523.61. That’s for fires that covered 431,606 acres as of that day, and the price tag is expected to increase as active fires keep burning and as other costs tied to all the fires are all eventually tallied.
Altogether, through Monday, the center had received reports of 1,585 wildfires in Colorado so far this year, covering 438,307 acres. Center spokesman Larry Helmerick said that tally may not include a number of fires not yet reported to the center by the state and counties.
In 2012, another bad year for wildfires in Colorado, 426,403 acres burned in the state. In 2002, 619,000 acres burned.
COSTLY ‘AIR SHOW’
Figuring mightily into firefighting price tags is aerial firefighting.
“This one’s pretty much an air show,” Even said in reference to the amount of helicopters and airplanes that were being used to drop water and retardant on the Cache Creek Fire as of early August. She said that it was likely racking up $200,000 or more in aerial firefighting costs per day, noting that the cost of retardant alone was going for $2.71 a gallon.
Two hundred thousand dollars here. Two hundred thousand dollars there. Before you know it, you’re talking real money.
As of Friday, the 2,520-acre Cache Creek Fire — which earlier this month had calmed down enough that the Rocky Mountain Blue management team had turned it over to a local management team, but more recently has flared up again — had a price tag of $4.9 million.
Three Western Slope fires are among the five-costliest in the state so far this year.
The 54,000-acre 416 Fire in the Durango area is the most expensive, at nearly $40 million, and the 12,600-acre Lake Christine Fire near Basalt has cost $17 million.
Those fires are pretty well tamed, but the still-growing Bull Draw Fire northwest of Nucla had a price tag of $6.6 million as of Friday, when its acreage stood at 27,320.
Putting a total price on the costs of wildfire firefighting isn’t a simple matter in part because the costs can be borne among multiple agencies. Cost-sharing agreements factor in things such as what proportions of a fire burn on federal, private or other land.
Some of the fire expenses are borne locally. Earlier this month, Garfield County commissioners authorized the Sheriff’s Office to spend contingency funds for what are expected to be $250,000 in county costs for a fire this year in the area of the Oak Meadows rural neighborhood outside Glenwood Springs. That fire’s total costs are estimated at $450,000.
THE STATE’S ROLE
Caley Fisher, spokeswoman for the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, said that generally in the case of a fire that starts on private land, once it exceeds the capabilities of local responders, state assistance can be requested. If the state determines the fire is eligible for state responsibility, it assumes the costs, with ongoing involvement from local and county partners.
A number of state-level funding streams exist to help absorb costs. Forty-three of the county’s 64 counties voluntarily participate in contributing to an emergency fire fund, based on a formula considering their nonfederal forested acres and property tax valuation.
Resource mobilization funding exists to help local agencies during emerging fires, and a wildfire emergency response fund can be tapped through the governor’s office.
Fires qualifying as major disasters can tap Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursement for up to 75 percent of eligible costs, if funding is requested while the fire is still burning.
The state also provides other assistance such as training, technical support, mutual aid equipment and aerial fire-detection and mapping flights.
Fisher said that for the state, this year is on pace to rival other major wildfire years such as 2002 and 2012 in terms of state-responsibility fires, acres burned and suppression costs.
She said that as of Monday, her agency has spent about $39 million on firefighting so far this year.
“There’s a lot of different variables that play into that … so it could be more,” she said.
She said that through the multitude of available funding streams, her agency and the governor’s office will be there to support local-level responders. But she said there is a need for more state funding to help fight fires and pay for work such as vegetation treatments to reduce fire risk and helping homeowners reduce the threat from wildfires.
A $3 BILLION FEDERAL TAB
Funding challenges also have bedeviled national agencies — most notably the Forest Service — that also would like to spend more on things such as prescribed fires and fuel mitigation, not to mention on nonfire agency programs, but have been increasingly spending on fighting fires instead.
Last year federal agencies spent nearly $3 billion fighting fires covering about 10 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Looking at data dating back to 1985, in only one other year, in 2015, did the agencies fight fires covering that much acreage, and the first time federal firefighting costs exceeded $1 billion was 2000.
Last year the Forest Service incurred a record $2.4 billion of the total federal firefighting cost. Agency spokeswoman Jennifer Jones said that as of Monday it has spent $1.8 billion this year.
The remaining $508,000 in federal firefighting costs last year was incurred by Department of Interior agencies. This year, Interior agencies so far have spent $338 million, the highest the department has spent at this point in any year, said Kari Cobb, a Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman at the National Interagency Fire Center. She said the BLM accounts for $223 million of that total.
Jones said fire seasons have grown larger, there have been more large wildfires, the average numbers of acres burned annually have grown and the number of homes in what’s known as the wildland urban interface has grown. Accordingly, firefighting funding has grown from 13 percent of the Forest Service budget in 1991 to 57 percent this year.
“That just leaves less and less money available for other programs,” said Scott Fitzwilliams, supervisor of the White River National Forest, which covers much of Colorado’s central mountain region. He expects the firefighting costs on that forest this year to be somewhere in the $25 million to $30 million range, which he believes would be a record amount. The Forest Service will bear some of the costs associated with the Lake Christine Fire and with the Cabin Lake Fire in Rio Blanco County, which by Friday was nearly 6,000 acres in size and had racked up at least $4.3 million in costs.
Fitzwilliams has watched the toll firefighting costs have taken on the budget of the White River National Forest during his nine years as supervisor there. When he arrived, the forest’s appropriated funds and other funding totaled close to $30 million, and now the total is about half of that. Some of the drop is due to the end of some bark-beetle infestation work, but Fitzwilliams said the cost of firefighting is largely to blame.
‘FIRE BORROWING’ BURDEN
The impact has come as a result of what’s called “fire borrowing.” Jones said the Forest Service has historically determined its wildfire firefighting funding request each year based on the 10-year average of firefighting costs over the previous 10 years, adjusted for inflation.
Even with increases in that 10-year average, the agency’s costs have exceeded the average in all but three years since 2000. That has forced it to borrow funds from other forest programs to cover firefighting costs in some years, and in others to use money from unobligated sources, she said.
Fitzwilliams said fire borrowing in the Forest Service began for this fiscal year just this week, as the agency scrambles to make up for a projected shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars.
He said fire borrowing has meant the White River National Forest has seen a steady erosion of funding for everything from seasonal rangers to road and campground maintenance and repairs. He’s thrilled that Congress acted this year to address the fire borrowing problem (see related story).
“That is going to be extremely helpful that we won’t have to go through this every year,” he said.
Randy Eardley, another BLM spokesman at the National Interagency Fire Center, said there has been fire borrowing at the Interior Department as well, but typically money borrowed from other accounts would be repaid in subsequent years, whereas the Forest Service has been borrowing year after year. He noted that Interior’s firefighting costs are a lot less than the Forest Service’s, which partly reflect that Forest Service fires typically burn in heavier fuels, for longer periods of time, and can be more complex to fight.
Eardley said the passage by Congress several years ago of what is called the FLAME (Federal Land Assistance, Management, and Enhancement) Act made something of a difference, reducing some of the fire borrowing by providing access to a separate account of firefighting funds after a certain level of spending was surpassed.
“But it didn’t really solve the problem,” he said.
Randi Spivak, director of the public lands program for the Center for Biological Diversity, said firefighting should occur to protect lives, but her group wants to make sure that federal agencies don’t receive a blank check for suppression and their activities are accountable and effective.
“There is some waste going on,” she said.
She said studies show retardant often is used in the wrong place, like in wilderness, or at the wrong time of day, sometimes with the goal of easing worries among the public and politicians even if it’s not effective.
“The Forest Service needs to start looking at this and spend those dollars more effectively,” she said.
‘THREE-HEADED MONSTER’
Spivak believes it’s important to do more prescribed burning, let more naturally ignited fires burn where possible, put more focus on creating defensible space around homes, and have local governments take action to not allow homes to be built in dangerous, fire-prone areas.
Fitzwilliams agrees with the need to focus on residential development in wildland areas. He said another looming factor is a changing climate that is resulting in longer wildfire seasons, record temperatures and fuel dryness, and more extreme fire behaviors such as fires making downhill runs at night, like when the Lake Christine Fire burned three homes.
“As many firefighters that I’ve talked to this summer have said, the (fire-behavior) norms are out the window. What we thought we knew often doesn’t apply anymore,” he said.
He said the Forest Service can work to do fuel mitigation, but it doesn’t have much control over the weather or climate and building homes in the wildland-urban interface.
“This is a three-headed monster and we’re only dealing with one head of the monster,” he said.
Eardley said fire seasons used to move around the country, starting in the Southeast early in the year, then moving to the Southwest, and so on. Now there’s more overlap between fire seasons in various parts of the country, raising the concern about the potential for fatigue for firefighters who used to sometimes get some down time between regional fire seasons.
In an extreme fire year like this one, a focus for officials like Fitzwilliams is the safety of firefighters and the public. Having once had to knock on a family’s door and tell them their son had died fighting fire, he never wants to repeat that experience.
“We cannot take the risk of losing someone to protect trees or houses. Human life is too precious,” he said.
Fitzwilliams said the White River National Forest’s strategy this year also is on initial attacks designed to put out fires as fast as possible.
By July 4th this year, numerous fires were burning in Colorado — the 416 Fire near Durango, and the Spring Creek Fire in the southern part of the state have been the biggest so far.
As everyone knows, fires destroy and reshape ecosystems, but they also affect the freshwater supplies we eventually drink. Water providers, like that in Fort Collins, Colorado, spend a lot of effort making sure that when their customers turn on the tap, clean water comes out. And if there have been fires in the watershed, providers don’t want the water to smell smoky – like you’re drinking out of a canteen near a campfire.
Until recently, says Jill Oropeza, water quality services manager for Fort Collins Utilities, there hasn’t been much research about how wildfires change the chemistry of water and what utilities would have to do to treat it. She said, “The High Park Fire which happened in 2012 was the first time that we had seen some really major and sustained impacts on water quality in the Poudre River, so we were suddenly needing to understand what is our new normal in this watershed.”
The High Park Fire was started by lightning six years ago, about 15 miles west of Ft. Collins, and it destroyed nearly 260 homes, burned more than 85,000 acres, and killed one person. The fire surrounded parts of the Cache la Poudre River – one of the two water sources for Ft. Collins.
The city reached out to the research community to help answer questions about how fires affect what comes down the river afterwards. They turned to Fernando Rosario, an associate professor, in the University of Colorado’s Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering Program, who, with funding by the Water Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation, studied the issue. He began with much fieldwork and then took his research into the lab because, obviously, one can’t go start a new fire in the field to see what happens.
Rosario collected soils and litter from areas where fires occurred in order to simulate wildfire conditions by dissolving them in water. He then created wildfire-impacted water that matched some of the properties that were observed in the High Park Fire.
Next he did studies to see how to effectively treat those waters. One major problem that confronted water utilities was the amount of carbon the water contained. Oropeza with Fort Collins Utilities says they had to develop specific treatment requirements to get rid of as much of the organic carbon as possible.
The reason they have to get rid of the carbon is because it can interact with chlorine they use to treat the water and create disinfection byproducts that are carcinogenic and strictly regulated by the EPA. Ironically, the chemical used to treat water can become a contaminant if there are too many other contaminants in the water.
One finding as a part of Rosario’s research was that different levels of heat on soils factored into the amount of organic carbon that was released.
His team observed that while a high-temperature fire may result in more ash and sediment and might be more damaging to the watershed, the high temperatures caused lower amounts of carbon to be released from the soil than a low- to mid- temperature fire.
A lower temperature wildfire may be less damaging to the watershed, but by releasing more organic carbon, it creates more problems for water treatment professionals – and likely higher utility bills for consumers.
Oropeza says that before the new research no one was looking at how to treat wildfire-affected water. She says that the insights will allow providers to be more prepared, which can help to keep costs down for consumers.
And as far as global warming, she adds that because the number and intensity of fires influenced by climate drivers will likely increase, the requirements for water treatment will likely grow as well.
Reprinted with permission of H2O Radio, a Yale Climate Connections content-sharing partner.
About 566 wildfires are currently burning across the province [British Columbia], prompting the evacuation of 3,000 people
About 566 wildfires are currently burning across the west coast province, prompting the evacuation of some 3,000 people. Another 18,000 residents have been warned that they may have to flee their homes at a moment’s notice.
So far this year more than 1,800 fires have charred some 380,000 hectares (939,000 acres), making it the province’s fourth worst fire season since it began keeping track in 1950.
The fires have left a wide swath of western Canada, including metro Vancouver, blanketed in a thick layer of smoke and haze. Public health officials are warning residents in some regions to avoid strenuous exercise and stay indoors as much as possible.
More than 3,000 firefighters – from across Canada and as far away as Mexico and New Zealand – are working to contain the fires. Some 200 Canadian armed forces personnel are expected to be deployed in the coming days to help the province.
Officials said the decision to declare a state of emergency was based on advice from the province’s wildfire service.
“Public safety is always our first priority and, as wildfire activity is expected to increase, this is a progressive step in our wildfire response to make sure British Columbia has access to any and all resources necessary,” Mike Farnworth, the province’s public safety minister, said in a statement.
It marks the second year in a row that the province has declared wildfires a state of emergency; last year saw a record-setting 1.2m hectares (2,965,264 acres) scorched by fires raging in the province.
Climate change is having an impact, Farnworth said on Wednesday.
“We know that the fire season is starting earlier,” he told reporters. “And each year is different. The bulk of the fires – what we have seen this year – have been lightning-caused.”
The fires have sent huge plumes of smoke wafting across British Columbia, blotting out the sun and darkening skies.
“Ash has been falling like snow,” Shannon Hatch of Fort Fraser, a community in northern British Columbia that was put on evacuation alert this week, told the Globe and Mail. “Yesterday in the afternoon, it was pitch black, like nighttime.”
Enacted into law in 1964, LWCF provides funding for the acquisition and management of federal, state and local public lands nationwide so that all Americans can enjoy access to the outdoors — and in a wonderful compensation improving local economies and community well-being. It is the only federal program devoted to the continued conservation of our national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, wilderness, Civil War battlefields and developing state and local parks.
Remarkably, LWCF does not cost taxpayers one dollar — it is funded using a small portion of the royalties paid by oil and gas companies to drill offshore. The fund is authorized for $900 million annually, but that has occurred only once since its inception.
Ensuring access to the outdoors for everyone is more than just a concept; it’s our Colorado way of life. It’s a value that every community, people and culture hold dear. As a Mexican American and native Coloradan, I believe the conservation of our land is a central value of our heritage for generations. In fact, recent results of a poll from the respected Colorado College Conservation in the West bear that out in six western states, showing that 75 percent of Latino voters support continued funding of the Land and Water Conservation. Simply put, protecting our land preserves our nation’s history.
In our home state of Colorado, LWCF has been a huge benefactor over the past five decades, contributing approximately $268 million to places like the Rocky Mountain and Great Sand Dunes national parks and hundreds of state and local park projects, including acquisitions at Golden Gate Canyon and Roxborough State Parks — investments that have helped to shape Colorado’s impressive $28 billion annual outdoor recreation economy.
The City and County of Denver alone has received nearly $4 million in LWCF grants that have supported over 75 projects; $1.2 million of LWCF money was invested along the South Platte River, which began a renewal of Denver’s downtown that continues today. If you’ve ever visited Confluence Park or Denver’s popular Washington Park, then you have enjoyed the benefits provided by the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
These city parks and others provide a wonderful place to gather with the extended family, eat and enjoy recreation together. Physical activity for our children is critical and, as such, the protection of parks, enabled by LWCF, should be a high priority for all people — no matter the zip code.
We are all fortunate in Colorado to have both senators Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner fully on board with permanently authorizing LWCF. With only weeks remaining before the expiration date, now is the “do or die” time for the rest of Congress to get on board and keep the bipartisan promise made to protect America’s public lands, water resources and cultural heritage. Without the certainty of LWCF renewal, Americans everywhere will be deprived of current and future opportunities to enjoy our Great Outdoors, whether that is a wildlife preserve or a community ballpark.
At zero cost to taxpayers, why would any member of Congress want that to happen?
Born and raised in Denver’s westside, Paul D. Lopez has been a Denver city councilman for District 3 since 2007.
In Episode 12 of We Are Rivers, we discuss the complicated nature of water law in the West. Listen in to learn more about how water law affects you and the rivers you love.
Water in the West is inherently complicated. A complex web of laws, compacts, and a little thing called “prior appropriation” dictates how and when people and entities are allowed to use water in the West, such as cities and towns, farms and ranches, and industry. This ability is what we call “owning a water right,” and explains much of how the West has been settled over the last century, and how many of the economic forces that affect our daily lives are driven by these water rights. Listen in to learn more about how water law affects you and the rivers you love.
Prior appropriation is the backbone of our water law system. Perhaps you’ve heard of “first in time, first in right,” – this phrase refers to the water law system. Prior appropriation allows individuals or entities who first apply water for a beneficial use to be entitled to that appropriation into the future (and has priority over subsequent users). Holding a water right doesn’t actually imply ownership over the water (water in Colorado is “owned” by the people) but is instead the right to use the people’s water for a beneficial use like agriculture, municipal water, and now more recently, in benefit of the environment as in-stream flows.
Even if the term “water rights” leaves you scratching your head, and you call a western state your home, you still are impacted by them. There’s a fairly high chance that you use water connected to a water right, (unless you have your own well or diversion). Water running through pipes in cities and towns across the West are likely municipal water obtained through a water right held by city or town. Your community has to have a water right themselves to divert and distribute the water that ends up in your home. Agriculture, industry, and even our rivers and streams all depend on the legal structure managing our water.
Join us in this month’s episode of We Are Rivers as we navigate through the complicated nature of water law in the West, including prior appropriation, instream flow rights, and the history of water law.
Extremely low water levels have forced the city of Aspen to declare a stage 2 water shortage for the first time in history.
The Aspen Times reports Aspen City Council approved the move Monday. Aspen Utilities Portfolio Manager Margaret Medellin says she anticipates stage 2 restrictions to remain in effect indefinitely.
Under the restrictions, Aspen water customers must not water lawns more than three days a week and no more than 30 minutes per sprinkler zone per day.
Restrictions also include no watering native areas more than two days a week and no watering lawns between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Large reservoirs have buffered urban areas in the Southwest from the worst of the year’s dry conditions, but rural farmers and ranchers are bearing the brunt of water shortages and the economic fallout.
Farmer Scott Sunderland runs the numbers on his smartphone and the outlook is bleak. He needs $250,000 just to pay the taxes and debts he owes on the 700-acre farm he’s managed for more than three decades. If he’s lucky, he’ll have $220,000 by the end of the season.
“If the drought holds on another year,” he said, “we’re going to have to start liquidating … But once you start down that road, it’s almost a dead end.”
Chester, an unincorporated community in central Utah, has been hit by “exceptional” drought conditions, the most severe rating issued by the United States Drought Monitor. For much of the southwestern U.S., this past winter has marked one of the driest periods in recorded history.
Population centers in the West have been relatively insulated from the disaster, protected by large reservoirs capable of storing water for multiple years. But rural towns and the farmers and ranchers who populate them have been devastated. In many cases, struggling farmers have already been pushed off more fertile lands by urban development. Now, some of the remaining ones hope to sell out and scrape together enough cash to retire, while others have already begun to look for new jobs.
“It’s hard to paint a picture because a lot of the time when people talk about drought, you just shower less and water your lawn less,” said Cassidy Johnston, a rancher in Capitan, New Mexico. “In town, yeah, your lawn may be yellow, but here, you may have to move and sell the business your family has had for generations.”
A Regional Crisis
More than half the western U.S. is currently experiencing some level of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Sparsely populated areas in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona in particular are grappling with dry conditions of historic proportions – many small irrigation companies are reporting water shortages the likes of which have not been seen since the 1970s.
This isn’t necessarily because these areas got less snow over a disastrously dry winter than some of the surrounding environs, said Troy Brosten, a Utah-based hydrologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation Service. The main issue is the lack of water storage in some remote areas.
Despite the lack of snowfall this past winter, Brosten said, larger reservoirs started the year with plenty of water left over from last year. These reservoirs are still mostly full, so the areas that draw from them haven’t experienced actual water shortages.
But some smaller reservoirs only have capacity for enough water to last about one year, Brosten said. They rely on each year’s snowpack to provide the following summer’s irrigation water. This year, there simply wasn’t enough snow to replenish their reserves.
Many farmers are increasingly reliant on these smaller reservoirs and water systems, said Kate Greenberg, who oversees western chapters of the national Young Farmers Coalition from her office in Durango, Colo. Farmers who once held senior rights in more secure reservoirs have, in some cases, opted to escape pressure from urban development by selling their lands and moving their operations further afield. The situation has been exacerbated by government policies to encourage water managers to secure water for urban growth by buying out farms, Greenberg said.
This was the fate of the Sunderland family farm, which was originally located in Lehi, Utah – a city that in a few short years has been completely transformed by the arrival of several big-name software companies, including Adobe.
The family knew that the new property in Chester was “drier country” when they moved more than 30 years ago to avoid being crowded out by development, Scott Sunderland’s brother Edwin said. But they were willing to take the risk so they could expand their operation and hopefully increase their earnings potential.
But compared to even a decade ago, Scott Sunderland added, Chester’s water doesn’t seem to go as far as it used to.
Chester doesn’t have access to a full-sized reservoir, but gets its water from a series of pipelines and storage ponds, said Edwin, who now manages a small portion of the family property. They started the season, he said, with about half their total water capacity. By July 4, the water was gone.
Last Friday, Colorado Parks and Wildlife began releasing cooler water from Lake Avery in an ongoing effort to keep coldwater fish in the river alive as tough, drought conditions persist.
Trout have adapted to thrive in water temperatures between 50-60 degrees. According to CPW, some sections of the White River have exceeded 70-plus degrees consistently since early June. In addition, water flow in portions of the river have been running at or below the 25th percentile of the historical median in recent weeks.
When flows are low, water is susceptible to warming quickly and dissolved oxygen levels drop, leading to significantly stressed fish. They gather in residual pools and become easier to catch. Even if returned to the water immediately, stressed fish hooked under these conditions could quickly perish.
In addition to the water release, CPW has implemented a voluntary fishing closure between 2 p.m. and midnight on both north and south forks of the White River, from the boundary of the National Forest through the main stem down to the bridge at Rio Blanco County Road 5, west of Meeker.
CPW has implemented additional voluntary fishing closures across the region, due to similar conditions.
The White River within Rio Blanco County is renowned for excellent fishing, drawing thousands of anglers from across the world to catch the large rainbow, cutthroat and brook trout that typically thrive in these waters.
“It’s a great place to fish, but the White River fishery is also a critical resource that local residents depend upon for their livelihoods,” said deVergie. “Whether you run a hotel, a restaurant or an outfitting business, everyone up here has a vested interest in conserving this important natural resource.”
Since the voluntary closure went into effect last week, deVergie says he has seen excellent cooperation from the public. He stresses it could be a while before things improve.
“Now that we have a little more flow in the river, we are asking irrigators to leave as much of it as they can in the river for the benefit of the fish,” said deVergie. “Until we get some moisture, the release is one of the last remaining options we have to help prevent extensive fish mortality in the White River.”
Through an agreement with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, CPW can release water from Lake Avery to help the Board meet their instream flow right of 200 cubic feet per second. The goal is protecting aquatic life in Big Beaver Creek downstream of Lake Avery, and the White River downstream to the confluence with Piceance Creek.
The terms of the agreement allow for releasing 20 cfs up to 120 days. CPW will monitor water-quality conditions and fish to gauge the effects of the additional water, adjusting the release from Lake Avery as conditions warrant.
Due to similar climate conditions at the time, CPW released water from Lake Avery in 2012. Per the terms of the agreement, the agency can release water from the reservoir only one more time prior to 2022.
CPW recommends honoring all voluntary closures, fishing at higher altitude or fishing early when it’s cooler. Anglers should consider using barbless hooks, land fish quickly and release them quickly. Wet your hands before handling and let them go immediately, preferably without removing them from the water.
For more information about conditions on the White River, contact CPW’s Meeker office at 970-878-6090.
For general information about fishing in Colorado, visit the CPW website.
In the state known as the “mother of rivers,” the third–warmest and driest period in more than a century is wreaking havoc on waterways that provide the economic lifeline for rural communities and high–alpine habitat for Colorado’s signature fish, the greenback cutthroat trout.
The extremes of temperature and precipitation – too much of one, too little of the other – have grounded rafting companies in places that usually offer white-knuckle rides. With water barely lapping over jagged rocks, some outfitters have moved operations to rivers fed by reservoirs higher up in the parched Rockies.
“Boats can get piled up and people can get hurt if they flip, and guides were having to use their backs to pull the rafts off of rocks,” said Alan Blado, owner of Liquid Descent Rafting, which is based about 40 miles west of downtown Denver. “We didn’t want them to get injured.”
[…]
Summer 2018 came after a rough winter in which some areas received 30 percent of what once was typical snowpack. A warm spring thawed drifts early, causing rivers to peak in May, weeks before the busy summer season. Severe to exceptional drought now covers two–thirds of Colorado, and some of the worst wildfires in state history have broken out.
The Rio Grande Valley of Texas is one of the fastest-growing places in the United States. Already hot and arid, and growing hotter, the booming, heavily Latino region depends almost entirely on the shriveling Rio Grande for water. Considered one of the most endangered rivers in North America, the Rio Grande provides drinking and irrigation water to 6 million people and 2 million acres of farmland on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. Droughts and heat waves in the Valley are becoming more intense, exacerbating water scarcity.
Despite opinion surveys showing that Valley residents are deeply concerned about how climate change is affecting them, local and state officials are paying little heed to their constituents. According to a 2013 federal study (pdf), even before accounting for climate change the region is expected to run a “staggering” water supply shortage of almost 600,000 acre-feet in 2060. At the same time, some Texas border cities have been at the forefront of water conservation, and the US and Mexico have found ways to cooperate on protecting the Rio Grande.
This nine-part collaboration between the Texas Observer and Quartz explores the complexities of border water in search of answers for how people can work together in a hotter, drier world.
FromColorado Public Radio (Nancy Lofholm). Click through to listen to the program:
Drink beer, help rivers. That’s the mission behind Many Rivers Brewing, a Western Slope craft beer operation that doubles as a conservation project. Many Rivers brews an amber ale and IPA, and 100 percent of the profits from those two beers goes to river improvement projects. The brewery has donated the boozy benefits to the Colorado Riverfront Commission, Mesa Land Trust, Roaring Fork Conservancy and others.
Tim Carlson, Many Rivers’ beer brewer and board president, talked to Colorado Matters about founding the eco-friendly brewery. Before picking up the pint glass, Carlson was an environmental engineer who spent more than 40 years cleaning up rivers.
Coyote crossing creek in Pennsylvania: The Trailcomologist
Coyote Albuquerque February 2015 photo by Roberto E. Rosales
Urban coyote photo via Coyote Yipps
You know that I can’t help but highlight my cousins! FromColorado Public Radio (Sam Brasch). Click through to listen:
The sounds of coyotes for travel for miles. And biologist say coyotes sing a particular songs once they have settle in an area. It’s called the group-yip-howl. In this episode, Mary Ann Bonnell, a park ranger in Jefferson County Open Space, introduces us to how coyotes broadcast their territory.
From the Environmental Defense Fund (Kevin Moran):
Lake Mead water users this week learned we once again narrowly avoided water cutbacks by the skin of our teeth.
A 24-month projection released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shows we skirted federal mandatory water cuts this year, but prospects for 2019 and 2020 do not look good. The forecast found Lake Mead water levels will end this month at 1,079 feet – a mere four feet away from the 1,075-feet threshold that would trigger a federal shortage declaration and mandatory cuts.
The report predicted Lake Mead will dip just below the threshold to 1,075 feet as early as May 2019 – in nine months. At the beginning of 2020, Lake Mead levels are predicted to be at approximately 1,070 feet and then predicted to fall to as low as 1,053 feet in the summer of 2020.
An official shortage declaration has been staved off until at least August 2019. That’s when the next key projection comes out, for January 1, 2020.
Graphic credit: USBR via the Environmental Defense Fund
How did it come to this, and where do we go from here?
Located nearly 25 miles from the Las Vegas Strip, Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the U.S. and supplies 40 percent of Arizona’s water. Factors like population growth, declining snowpack and rising temperatures have made drought the norm and are stretching this vital source of Colorado River water to the limit.
The latest Lake Mead forecast comes a week after a 40-member steering committee in Arizona held its second meeting to craft agreements between Arizona water agencies and water users that would enable the state to sign on to the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) – a plan developed by Arizona, California, Nevada and the federal government to reduce risks in the Colorado River system. The precariously low Lake Mead water levels projected this week make this steering committee’s work more important than ever.
Developing intra-Arizona conservation and water sharing agreements and gaining approval by the Arizona legislature next year will hopefully be among the last steps in a multi-state effort to address the decline in the water elevation of Lake Mead, which also supplies water to California, Nevada and two states in Mexico. It’s time for Arizona to fully acknowledge the region’s grim hydrology and implement plans to create a more sustainable future.
Reaching an agreement on the Lower Basin DCP is critical to Arizona’s long-term water security and to the state’s economic future. Failing to adopt a plan could result in federal agencies stepping in to impose mandatory cuts overnight.
We need collaboration to avoid potential catastrophe
Environmental Defense Fund is participating in the Arizona steering committee to ensure that Arizona reduces its withdrawals from Lake Mead to create a more sustainable Colorado River water system. My colleagues and I believe the near-term solution – to operate under a Lower Basin DCP agreement with our neighbors – should emphasize conservation and water sharing agreements among Arizona water uses.
Leaders in Arizona need to collaborate to take bold actions and expand the use of proven conservation strategies like the “system conservation” agreement reached last year. This multi-agency agreement compensated the Gila River Indian Community to leave 40,000 acre feet of water in Lake Mead – the amount used by approximately 100,000 people in a year.
Lake Mead bathtub ring Mark Henle Arizona Republic
Some innovative ideas already on the table
The good news is that the Arizona steering committee is off to a promising start.
At its first meeting on August 9, the committee created a smaller working group to focus on one of the biggest challenges – a mitigation plan for Central Arizona agriculture, which could be heavily affected by cuts. Options on the table include using some of the water stored by Central Arizona Project in Lake Pleasant or creating a fund to purchase mitigation water from higher priority water users.
Several members of this Central Arizona agriculture mitigation working group have already been meeting over the past several months and, with this head start, I am hoping they will bring some promising ideas to the full steering committee at its next meeting on August 23.
I am cautiously optimistic that the steering committee can succeed in hammering out intra-Arizona plans for increased conservation and water sharing agreements by the end of this year.
With those plans in hand, we would have the support we need to convince the state legislature to pass a concurrent resolution (as required by Arizona law) to authorize the Department of Water Resources to sign the Lower Basin DCP.
It’s time to face the reality of the situation
Arizona is running out of time to figure out new ways of conserving and creatively sharing an increasingly scarce water supply. We need to collaborate now in order to avoid catastrophic and economically destabilizing impacts in the very near future.
Adapting successfully to the new water realities in our region – reduced Colorado River supplies and increased uncertainty and risk – will require increased agility, collaboration and innovation. The success of the Arizona economy and health of our ecosystems depend on it.
A vital reservoir on the Colorado River will be able to meet the demands of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest for the next 13 months, but a looming shortage could trigger cutbacks as soon as the end of 2019, officials said Wednesday.
A forecast from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation echoes previous warnings that a nearly 20-year trend toward a drier regional climate coupled with rising demand could drain so much water from the Lake Mead reservoir that cutbacks would be mandatory.
The report increases the pressure on seven U.S. states that rely on the river to finish a long-delayed contingency plan for a shortage.
“If these projections materialize, we’re very quickly going to lose control of how to manage the deteriorating conditions on the Colorado River,” said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves 2.1 million people, including the city of Las Vegas.
The Colorado River system — including the giant Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs — serves about 40 million people and 6,300 square miles (16,300 square kilometers) of farmland. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming rely on the river, along with native American reservations and northwestern Mexico…
The Bureau of Reclamation forecast says all the users will get their usual share through September 2019. But the report projects that by October 2019, the surface of Lake Mead could fall below 1,075 feet (330 meters) above sea level, the agreed-upon point that would trigger an announcement of cutbacks that would occur sometime in the following 12 months…
The chances of a shortage in late 2019 remain at 52 percent, the same odds the bureau announced in May, he said. Lake Mead has never had a shortage and if next winter provides enough snow in the mountains that feed the river, it could be averted, Duke said.
The operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead in this August 2018 24-Month Study is pursuant to the December 2007 Record of Decision on Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead (Interim Guidelines), and reflects the 2018 Annual Operating Plan (AOP). Pursuant to the Interim Guidelines, the August 2017 24-Month Study projections of the January 1, 2018, system storage and reservoir water surface elevations set the operational tier for the coordinated operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead during 2018.
Consistent with Section 6.B of the Interim Guidelines, the Lake Powell operational tier for water year 2018 is the Upper Elevation Balancing Tier. With an 8.23 million acre-feet (maf) release from Lake Powell in water year 2018, the April 2018 24-Month Study projected the end of water year elevation at Lake Powell to be above 3,575 feet and the end of water year elevation at Lake Mead to be below 1,075 feet. Therefore, in accordance with Section 6.B.4 of the Interim Guidelines, Lake Powell operations shifted to balancing releases for the remainder of water year 2018. Under Section 6.B.4, the contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be balanced by the end of the water year, but not more than 9.0 maf and not less than 8.23 maf shall be released from Lake Powell. Based on the most probable inflow forecast, this August 24-Month Study projects a balancing release of 9.0 maf in water year 2018.
Consistent with Section 2.B.5 of the Interim Guidelines, the Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS) Surplus Condition is the criterion governing the operation of Lake Mead for calendar year 2018.
The August 2018 24-Month Study projects the January 1, 2019 Lake Powell elevation to be below the 2019 Equalization Elevation of 3,655 feet and above elevation 3,575 feet. Consistent with Section 6.B of the Interim Guidelines, Lake Powell’s operations in water year 2019 will be governed by the Upper Elevation Balancing Tier, with an initial water year release volume of 8.23 maf and the potential for an April adjustment to equalization or balancing releases in April 2019. Consistent with Section 6.B.4 of the Interim Guidelines, an April adjustment to balancing releases is currently projected to occur and Lake Powell is projected to release 9.0 maf in water year 2019.
The August 2018 24-Month Study projects the January 1, 2019 Lake Mead elevation to be above 1,075 feet. Consistent with Section 2.B.5 of the Interim Guidelines, the Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS) Surplus Condition is the criterion governing the operation of Lake Mead for calendar year 2019.
The 2019 operational tier determinations will be documented in the 2019 AOP, which is currently in development.
Current runoff projections into Lake Powell are provided by the National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center and are as follows: Observed unregulated inflow into Lake Powell for the month of July was 0.123 maf or 11 percent of the 30-year average from 1981 to 2010. The forecast for August unregulated inflow into Lake Powell is 0.165 maf or 33 percent of the 30-year average. The preliminary observed 2018 April through July unregulated inflow is 2.602 maf or 36 percent of average.
In this study, the calendar year 2018 diversion for Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) is forecasted to be 0.941 maf. The calendar year 2018 diversion for the Central Arizona Project (CAP) is forecasted to be 1.466 maf. Consumptive use for Nevada above Hoover (SNWP Use) is forecasted to be 0.277 maf for calendar year 2018.
Due to changing Lake Mead elevations, Hoover’s generator capacity is adjusted based on estimated effective capacity and plant availability. The estimated effective capacity is based on projected Lake Mead elevations. Unit capacity tests will be performed as the lake elevation changes. This study reflects these changes in the projections.
Hoover, Davis, and Parker historical gross energy figures come from PO&M reports provided by the Lower Colorado Region’s Power Management Office, Bureau of Reclamation, Boulder City, Nevada. Questions regarding these historical energy numbers can be directed to Eric Carty at (702) 293-8129.
Today’s release of the Bureau of Reclamation’s August 24-month study is what in my old newspaper days we would have called “a great news peg”. It’s been clear for a while that we’ll likely have a first-ever federal shortage declaration in the Lower Colorado River Basin in 2020, and that chance is growing. But in the interests of never letting a good Colorado River shortage news peg go unused….
A shortage on the Colorado River, which would force water supply cutbacks for users in Arizona and Nevada, is likely in January 2020, according to a new analysis from federal scientists released Thursday.
In the Bureau’s “most likely” scenario – essentially the median of a bunch of model runs reflecting various hydrologic scenarios under the current rules – Lake Mead would end 2019 at elevation 1,070.35. Anything below 1,075 and Arizona and Nevada have to reduce their use of Colorado River water.
This will happen even though Lake Mead is forecast to get more “bonus water” in 2019 – water released from Lake Powell above and beyond the Upper Basin’s legal compact delivery obligations* of 8.23 million acre feet. The current projected release is 9 million acre feet, but despite that bonus water, Lake Mead is projected to drop 9 feet next year.
I’m in the midst of a book chapter diving into this stuff, so let me obsessively share numbers because I spent all day staring at them, and they might shed some light on where the problem lies. That “bonus water” delivered by the Upper Basin is a big clue.
The Upper Basin has only been using ~4-4.5 million acre feet of water a year, well below its Colorado River Compact entitlement of 7.5maf.
Since 2000, the Upper Basin has delivered 9.7 million acre feet above the amount required under the current rules (8.23 million acre feet per year). So the Upper Basin is a) using less water, and b) delivering more to the Lower Basin. (Brad Udall, who’s been helping me think about all these numbers, sent me the graph above showing the accumulating surplus.)
By the time next year is over, the Lower Basin will have gotten 10 million acre feet of “bonus water” in the 21st century. 10 million acre feet more than the Colorado River Compact requires. Yet Lake Mead keeps dropping. It’s pretty clear where the “supply-demand imbalance” lies here. Looking at you, my Lower Basin friends.
Everyone can plausibly argue that they’re living within the rules here, but if we keep defending our actions with “But the rules say it’s OK!” the Colorado River system is going to crash.
The feds are imploring Western states to do more now to cut water use.
A U.S. Bureau of Reclamation forecast issued Wednesday for water in the Colorado River — an over-subscribed lifeline for 40 million people — anticipates declaration of a shortage in September 2019 that would trigger the reduced water releases from federal reservoirs in “lower basin” states including Nevada and Arizona.
Colorado and other “upper basin” states Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico would face increased scrutiny of flows from headwaters into the Lake Powell reservoir. On Wednesday, Lake Powell measured 49 percent full and Lake Mead measured 38 percent full.
“Water stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell has blunted the impacts of the ongoing drought and helped ensure consistent, reliable water and power,” said Brent Rhees, the bureau’s regional director for the upper basin. “We must continue to work to protect water in the basin. Completing drought contingency plans this year will provide better certainty. …. We can’t afford to wait for a crisis.”
Colorado Water Conservation Board Director Rebecca Mitchell said “there’s no doubt” managing the river presents challenges. “Realistic predictions on the Colorado River are for increasing demand and decreasing supply,” Mitchell said.
Declaration of a water shortage along the Colorado River would be unprecedented. Federal officials are committed to waiting until the water level in Lake Mead drops below the elevation of 1,075 feet above sea level. Then they’d cut deliveries, first targeting Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
The water level on Wednesday: 1,078 feet.
“We’re within three feet. We’re not going to declare a shortage in 2019,” agency spokesman Marlon Duke said. “There’s a 52-percent chance we will have to declare a shortage in 2020. … We cannot just sit back and think the river is going to provide all the water we need, especially as our cities continue to grow. It all depends on what Mother Nature sends us next year.”
[…]
“We see this train coming, and we’re trying to get ready for it,” said James Eklund, Upper Colorado River Basin commissioner for Colorado, who negotiates river matters with commissioners from the other states, including California.
“Right now we’re OK. If they declare a shortage in the lower basin, it is going to pull more water out of Lake Powell. That would mean we are going to have to put more water into it,” Eklund said.
“The ‘shortage’ is like a yellow traffic signal that says, ‘Hey. Watch out. You’ve gotta be mindful of demands exceeding supply to such a degree that our system doesn’t work.’”
[…]
“We see this train coming, and we’re trying to get ready for it,” said James Eklund, Upper Colorado River Basin commissioner for Colorado, who negotiates river matters with commissioners from the other states, including California.
“Right now we’re OK. If they declare a shortage in the lower basin, it is going to pull more water out of Lake Powell. That would mean we are going to have to put more water into it,” Eklund said.
“The ‘shortage’ is like a yellow traffic signal that says, ‘Hey. Watch out. You’ve gotta be mindful of demands exceeding supply to such a degree that our system doesn’t work.’”
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman has warned states they must act. Burman demanded “drought contingency plans” by the end of the year. The publication of the Colorado River forecast covering the next two years is expected to spur planning, if not immediate smarter use of water.
Federal government scientists have concluded that climate change is creating conditions in the Colorado River Basin that are more variable with more extreme precipitation and more extreme drought. Scientists say precipitation increasingly will come from rain, rather than snow, as temperatures increase. The reservoirs constructed along the river have become increasingly important in easing the impact during a dry period that began 18 years ago and ranks among the driest periods in 1,200 years.
The forecast says river flows into Lake Powell from Colorado and other upper basin states, from snowpack, probably won’t exceed 75 percent of average next year. It says 8.23 million acre-feet of water will flow from Lake Powell to Lake Mead in 2019. That’s more than the amount expected to flow into Lake Powell.
Colorado, Wyoming and Utah depend heavily on mountain snowpack and have been delivering water to Lake Powell as required under the Colorado River Compact. The efforts in these states to develop a plan for conservation should a shortage be declared reflects a common interest of states in managing the river cooperatively — avoiding a federal intervention to control flows into and out of reservoirs.
That plan will be done by the end of the year, Eklund said.
“We in the upper basin face water shortages every year because the nation’s two largest reservoirs sit below, not above, us. We have to work with whatever falls from the heavens. Anytime we have to administer water under our priority system, someone in the upper basin is taking a shortage. That happens every year,” he said.
“We have ways to use less water. We fallow fields. We take water out of pipelines. We conserve. But we have less snow to work with than in the past and more people than ever reliant on the Colorado River system,” Eklund said…
Water advocacy groups embraced the forecast as evidence the West’s water challenges are reaching a critical point.
People in the seven southwestern states “must learn to live with less water,” said Kim Mitchell of the Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates. “Unless we take decisive, proactive steps now, major water users, farmers, cities, businesses, and the environment all will lose water. … Leaders at all levels throughout the basin must understand that more water is being pulled out of the Colorado River than is being replaced and the problem is compounded by a long-term drought and climate change.”
Despite another dry winter on the Colorado River, Lake Mead and the millions of people who rely on it will avoid a water shortage for at least one more year.
According to new projections from the Bureau of Reclamation, there will be just enough water in the reservoir east of Las Vegas at the end of 2018 to stave off a first-ever federal shortage declaration that would trigger mandatory cuts in Nevada and Arizona.
But without a significant change in the weather — and additional human intervention — shortage could be unavoidable in 2020.
Forecasters now expect Lake Mead to finish the year with a surface elevation of 1,079 feet above sea level, four feet above the trigger point for a shortage. That’s actually an improvement in the near-term forecast since last month, when officials were predicting a lake elevation of 1,077 by year’s end.
Meanwhile, the outlook for next year has worsened somewhat, with a projected lake level of 1,070 — well below the shortage line — by Jan. 1, 2020.
Colorado River expert John Fleck said water users in Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico have “put off the inevitable” so far with water conservation measures that have reduced some strain on the over-taxed system…
Once a shortage is declared, Nevada will have to reduce its annual Colorado River use by 4 percent, while Arizona takes an 11 percent cut. Shortage cuts are not expected to directly impact water users in Southern Nevada, at least not at first…
The valley gets 90 percent of its water from the Colorado River by way of Lake Mead. Southern Nevada Water Authority officials say the community has already conserved more than enough to easily absorb a 4 percent cut to its river allotment, but prolonged shortages and deeper cuts could make it hard to meet future water demands as the community continues to grow…
The worst winters
From April to July, the Colorado River swells with snow melt from the mountains of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. But dry winters generally lead to below-average flows. Here are the 10 lowest April-to-July flows on the Colorado over the past 50 years by their percentage of the long-term average:
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
Summary
The week was drier than normal across northern portions of New England, and wetter than normal in the southern parts of the Northeast. D0 was trimmed from western Suffolk County on Long Island where 90-day precipitation was above normal, but otherwise no changes were made to the drought depiction in the Northeast. D0-D1 continued in the northern portions. In Maine, dry conditions were affecting wells as groundwater levels continued their slow decline over the summer. According to August 12 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports, 31% of the pasture and rangeland in New Hampshire was in poor to very poor condition, and 43% of the topsoil and 45% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture; 88% of the topsoil and 87% of the subsoil in Vermont was short or very short of moisture. As summarized by the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), water restrictions or water shortages were reported in communities in New York and Massachusetts…
Most of the South was wetter and cooler than normal this week. Heavy rain fell from central Texas to southeast Oklahoma and much of Arkansas. Reports of 4 inches or more of rainfall were common. The rains missed other portions of the region, especially coastal Texas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, the worst drought areas of southwest Oklahoma, and parts of Louisiana. D0-D3 contracted across much of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and northern Louisiana. But D0-D4 expanded in parts of Texas and Mississippi which missed the beneficial rains. The resulting pattern of D0-D4 in Texas reflected dryness at several time scales. Based on a crucial drought indicator, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), it was dry at the 30-day time scale in the Trans-Pecos, northern panhandle, and Gulf coast; dry at 60 days in the Trans-Pecos and northern tier counties; dry at 90 days from the southern Rio Grande, across central Texas to the north central and northeast areas; the 120-day timescale is similar to 90 days except there was more severe dryness and includes the Trans-Pecos; 6 months has dryness mostly in west to central Texas, with a spot over the Gulf coast; 9 months is the 6 month pattern except lots drier; 12 months is like 6 and 9 months; 24 months has some spotty dryness mostly central to north central and northeast. When soils are parched from dryness of these timescales, a one-week rainfall of 4 inches is helpful, but not a drought-buster. As summarized by the NDMC, water restrictions or water shortages were reported in Waco and other Texas communities, specifically media reports that recent rain did not improve water supplies in Waco where 50 million gallons on average were used daily this summer. Voluntary water restrictions were taking effect in other central Texas cities like Robinson. By early August, drought impacts in many parts of Texas included pastures and rangeland in poor to very poor condition or declining condition, forage production has stopped, stock ponds receding or low water supplies for livestock, and, in central Texas, total loss of all dryland crops. The rains this week were helpful, but not for the crops that were already lost. According to August 12 USDA reports, 36% of the corn crop and 57% of the pasture and rangeland in Texas were in poor to very poor condition, and 71% of the topsoil and 76% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture; 29% of the pasture and rangeland in Louisiana was in poor to very poor condition, and 43% of the topsoil was short or very short of moisture; 45% of the pasture and rangeland in Arkansas was in poor to very poor condition, and 50% of the topsoil was short or very short of moisture…
Above-normal rains from the upper-level low reached parts of Kansas by the Tuesday morning data cutoff time, but the rest of the region was much drier than normal, with little rainfall reported. D0-D2 were contracted in central and southern Kansas, but the northeast part of the state was still drier than normal for the week. D2-D4 expanded in northeast Kansas, and D0-D1 were expanded in southeast Nebraska, to reflect dryness at the 3 to 9-month time scale. D0-D1 expanded, and D2 was introduced, in the Dakotas. A weaker-than-normal monsoon, coupled with record 1-month evaporative demand due to high temperatures, have stressed vegetation and lowered streamflows in Colorado. D0 was trimmed slightly in eastern Colorado where it has been wet, but D2-D3 expanded in the northwest to central region where precipitation deficits mounted and stream levels were low. According to August 12 USDA reports, 59% of the pasture and rangeland in Colorado was in poor to very poor condition, and 42% of the topsoil was short or very short of moisture; 35% of the pasture and rangeland in Kansas was in poor to very poor condition. As noted by the South Dakota State Climatologist, the lack of rain and high evaporation accompanying hot temperatures have taken a toll on crop conditions in the central and north central regions. Impacts include soybeans, which are in a critical time for grain fill, are flipping their leaves to reduce water use/loss, corn is turning brown and dead in places, and stock ponds are at very low levels. Statewide, according to USDA reports, 16% of the pasture and rangeland in South Dakota is in poor to very poor condition and 38% of topsoil and 39% of subsoil is short to very short of moisture…
Monsoon showers gave southern Arizona drenching rains, but most of the West was drier than normal, with no rain falling across most of the Pacific Northwest and California. The Arizona rainfall improved the percent of normal statistics for the last 1 to 9 months, but there was still significant dryness at the 12-month time scale, and this region has experienced on-and-off drought for much of the last several years. D3 was pulled back in southwest Arizona, and the nearby D4 was deleted, where the heaviest rains fell. D0 expanded in Idaho and Montana, D1 extended down the coast in northern California, D1 expanded in Idaho, D1-D2 expanded in Oregon, and D3 was introduced in southwest Oregon. Lowering streamflows and reservoir storage, and increased fuel load (for wildfires) caused by unusually warm temperatures, increased drought stress in western Idaho. In Oregon, during years with poor winter snowpack and hot and drier-than-normal summers, the water systems for the smaller communities are stressed and run out of water. These water systems are stretched even in good years. As noted by the Oregon State Climate Office, a town in Baker County is running out of water and imposing fines on watering, and getting water shipped in. According to August 12 USDA reports, 63% of the pasture and rangeland in Oregon was in poor to very poor condition, and 90% of the topsoil and 88% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture (dry to very dry); in southwestern Oregon, many ranchers reported pastures one half of normal production, creeks dried up and several were reported at lower levels than observed in previous drought years. As noted by the NDMC, the dry summer in the Pleasant Hill, Oregon, area has taken a toll on saplings and prevented even mature Christmas trees from growing much; Washington residents reported unusually high numbers of dead and dying Douglas-fir trees to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources this spring and summer as drought and bark beetles ravaged the trees; and water restrictions or water shortages were reported in eastern and northern Utah and northwestern Oregon. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, over 100 large wildfires were burning across the U.S. on August 13. These were concentrated in the West, especially northern California to southwestern Oregon, Arizona, western Colorado to northeast Utah, northern Oregon to central Washington, and western Montana into adjacent Idaho. According to August 12 USDA reports, 65% of the pasture and rangeland in Washington was in poor to very poor condition, and 90% of the topsoil was short or very short of moisture; 27% of the pasture and rangeland in Idaho was in poor to very poor condition, and 72% of the topsoil and 67% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture; 63% of the pasture and rangeland in Montana was in poor to very poor condition, and 90% of the topsoil and 56% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture; 61% of the pasture and rangeland in New Mexico was in poor to very poor condition, and 74% of the topsoil and 77% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture; 47% of the pasture and rangeland in Utah was in poor to very poor condition, and 68% of the topsoil was short or very short of moisture; 30% of the pasture and rangeland in Nevada was in poor to very poor condition, and 65% of the topsoil and 60% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture; 35% of the pasture and rangeland in California was in poor to very poor condition, and 70% of the topsoil and 70% of the subsoil was short or very short of moisture. According to USDA reports, last week 98% of the pasture and rangeland in Arizona was in poor to very poor condition. The rains this week improved pastures and rangeland to 88% poor to very poor…
Looking Ahead
Since the Tuesday morning cutoff time of this week’s USDM, heavy rain has fallen across some of the drought areas in Missouri, with additional rain over Kansas; rain was moving across Nebraska and South Dakota in the Plains and into the Ohio Valley and across parts of the Northeast; and monsoon precipitation had overspread parts of the Southwest. For August 16-20, dry weather will continue across the Far West and much of Texas; monsoon showers will bring a few tenths of an inch to locally over an inch of rain to the Southwest; and fronts and low pressure systems will bring over an inch of rain to a large area stretching from the central and northern Plains, across the Midwest, to most of the Southeast and Northeast, with up to half an inch to an inch across the Rockies to High Plains. Less than an inch of rain is expected for parts of the Great Lakes, Florida, and the Mid-Atlantic. Temperatures are expected to be warmer than normal across the West and cooler than normal in the Great Plains, with near-normal temperatures east of the Mississippi River. For August 21-29, odds favor below-normal precipitation across the Pacific Northwest to northern Plains, and above-normal precipitation for the Southwest to Southeast, Ohio Valley to Great Lakes, Northeast, and most of Alaska. There is a higher probability for warmer-than-normal temperatures in the West, along the Gulf of Mexico coast, along the East Coast, and in much of Alaska, while cooler-than-normal temperatures are favored to dominate the Plains to Midwest.
Denver Water and three other organizations are seeking to overturn a state order that directs Denver to adopt a strict new treatment protocol preventing lead contamination in drinking water.
Denver is not in violation of the federal law that governs lead, but it has been required to monitor and test its system regularly since 2012 after lead was discovered in a small sample of water at some of its customers’ taps.
In March of this year, after Denver completed a series of required tests and studies, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) ordered the utility to implement a treatment protocol that involves adding phosphates to its system. It has until March of 2020 to implement the new process.
Denver, which serves 1.4 million people in the metro area, has proposed instead using an approach that balances the PH levels in its treated water and expands a program replacing lead service lines in the city. Old lead service lines are a common source of lead in drinking water.
Treating lead and copper in water systems is a complex undertaking governed by the federal Lead and Copper Rule. In Denver, for instance, there is no lead in the water supply when it leaves the treatment plant. But it can leach into the supply via corrosion as water passes through lead delivery lines and pipes in older homes. Denver has 58,000 lead service lines in its system. Lead has continued to appear in samples it has taken at some customers’ taps, according to court filings, though not at levels that would constitute a violation of the federal law.
Eighty-six samples taken since 2013 have exceeded 15 micrograms per liter, including one tap sample which measured more than 400 micrograms per liter, according to court filings. The 15-microgram-per-liter benchmark is the level at which utilities must take action, including public education, corrosion studies, additional sampling and possible removal of lead service lines.
In response to the state’s order, the City of Aurora, the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District and the nonprofit Greenway Foundation, which works to protect the South Platte River, sued to overturn it, concerned that additional phosphates will hamper their ability to meet their own water treatment requirements while also hurting water quality in the South Platte. Denver joined the suit in May.
Because Denver Water services numerous other water providers in the metro area and participates in a major South Metro reuse project known as WISE, short for Water Infrastructure and Supply Efficiency, anything that changes the chemical profile of its water affects dozens of communities and the river itself.
Among the plaintiffs’ concerns is that phosphate levels in water that is discharged to the river have to be tightly controlled under provisions of the Clean Water Act. If phosphate levels in domestic water rise, wastewater treatment protocols would have to be changed, potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, according to a report by the Denver-based, nonpartisan Water Research Foundation.
From an environmental perspective, any increased phosphate in the South Platte River would make fighting such things as algae blooms, which are fueled by nutrients including phosphorous, much more difficult and could make the river less habitable for fish.
But in its statement to the court, the CDPHE said the state’s first job is to protect the health of the thousands of children served by Denver Water in the metro area.
“The addition of orthophosphate will reduce lead at consumers’ taps by approximately 74 percent, as opposed to the cheaper treatment favored by plaintiffs [PH/Alkalinity], which will only reduce levels by less than 50 percent,” CDPHE said in court documents. “This is a significant and important public health difference, particularly because there is no safe level of lead in blood…Even at low levels, a child’s exposure to lead can be harmful.”
How much either treatment may eventually cost Denver Water and others isn’t clear yet, according to state health officials, because it will depend in part on how each process is implemented.
Denver, Aurora and Metro Wastewater declined to comment for this story, citing the pending lawsuit.
The Greenway Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
In late July, all parties agreed to pause the legal proceedings while they examine water treatment issues as well as the environmental concerns raised by higher levels of phosphorous in Denver Water’s treated water supplies. If a settlement can’t be reached by Nov. 1, the lawsuit will proceed.
Jonathan Cuppett, a research manager at the Water Research Foundation, said other utilities across the country may be asked to re-evaluate their own corrosion control systems under a rewrite of the Lead and Copper Rule underway now at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The newly proposed federal rule is due out for review later this year or by mid-2019.
Cuppett said the changes may lean toward more phosphate-based treatment for lead contamination. In fact, the EPA issued a statement in March in support of the CDPHE’s order to Denver Water.
“Within the [Lead and Copper Rule] there are a variety of changes that may be made. Depending on what those changes are other utilities may have to evaluate their strategy again or more frequently. And if that is the case, we may see more of this issue where someone is pushing for phosphorous for control for public health, creating a conflict of interest with environmental concerns,” Cuppett said.
Colorado public health officials said they’re hopeful an agreement can be reached, but that they have few options under the federal Safe Water Drinking Act’s Lead and Copper Rule.
“The [Lead and Copper Rule] is a very prescriptive, strict rule,” said Megan Parish, an attorney and policy adviser to CDPHE. “It doesn’t give us a lot of discretion to consider things that Metro Wastewater would have liked us to consider.”
Here’s the release from the Bureau of Reclamation (Peter Soeth):
The projects will help develop innovative, cost-effective and efficient desalination technologies
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman announced that 16 entities will receive $3.5 million for laboratory and pilot-scale research projects as part of the Desalination and Water Purification Research Program. The DWPR Program works with Reclamation researchers and partners to develop more innovative, cost-effective and technologically efficient ways to desalinate water.
“Desalination is an increasingly important source of water for Western communities” Commissioner Burman said. “Investing in innovative technologies to make desalination more affordable and energy-efficient will help many communities across the United States.”
Nine laboratory projects and seven pilot-scale projects were selected for funding. A laboratory-scale study is typically a bench scale study involving small flow rates. They are used to determine the viability of a novel process, new materials, or process modifications. Research at this stage often involves a high degree of risk and uncertainty.
A pilot-scale project tests a novel process at a sufficiently large scale to determine the technical, practical, and economic viability of the process and are generally preceded by laboratory studies that demonstrate if that the technology works. The $3.5 million will be matched with $4.8 million in non-federal funding.
The nine laboratory projects are:
Argonne National Laboratory – Compressible foam supercapacitor electrodes for energy-efficient and low-cost desalination. $150,000
Colorado State University – Developing relationships between mineral scaling and membrane scaling and membrane surface chemistry to improve water recovery of inland brackish water desalination. $133,634
Fraunhofer USA, Inc – Plasma activated biochar for high-efficiency capacitive desalination. $72,173
New Mexico State University – Portable wind turbines for potable water through electrodialysis treatment. $150,000
Trussel Technologies, Inc. – Novel online surrogates to monitor reverse osmosis performance in reuse applications. $150,000
University of Arizona – Near zero-liquid discharge water reuse with a closed-circuit ozone-membrane distillation process. $146,361
University of California, Davis – Flow cytometric monitoring of waterborne pathogens to facilitate water treatment and direct potable water reuse. $149,178
University of Notre Dame – High performance biocatalytic membranes with cell surface display enzymes for improved concentrate management. $149,995
Vanderbilt University – Polyelectrolyte/Micelle multiplayer nanofiltration membranes with drastically enhanced performance. $150,000
The seven pilot-scale projects are:
Carollo Engineers, Inc – Pilot testing a two-stage, fixed bed biotreatment system for selenium removal. $279,246
Gradiant Osmotics, LLC – Counter flow RO – Innovative desalination technology for cost-effective concentrate management and reduced energy use. $400,000
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Pilot testing dynamic optimized, photovoltaic-powered, time-variant electrodialysis reversal desalination system. $400,000
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology – Geothermal membrane distillation for large-scale use. $200,000
New Mexico State University – Assessment and implementation framework for transboundary brackish groundwater desalination in south-central New Mexico. $399,353
The City of Daytona Beach – Tracking the occurrence and removal of microbial and toxic hazards during potable reuse through online monitoring and advanced analytics. $400,000
University of California, Riverside – Innovative water reuse systems harnessing chloramine photochemistry for potable water reuse. $200,000
The DWPR program is supporting the Department of the Interior’s priorities, including: creating a conservation stewardship legacy second only to Teddy Roosevelt, utilizing our natural resources, and restoring trust with local communities, among others.
To learn more about Reclamation’s Desalination and Water Purification Research Program and see complete descriptions of the research projects please visit http://www.usbr.gov/research/dwpr.
A hearing to determine whether 7,000 southern El Paso County residents can act as a class to sue chemical manufacturers over tainted water in the Widefield aquifer has been delayed.
David McDivitt, whose firm is representing the plaintiffs, said it could be fall before the issue is decided. If the federal court allows a class-action suit, the plaintiffs could argue their case as a group, rather than suing the chemical companies one at a time…
The suit, which targets chemical giant 3M and other manufacturers of a firefighting foam used by the Air Force, claims the firms knew or should have known that the foam contained harmful perfluorinated compounds. The chemical companies have denied the allegations.
The Air Force, which used the foam at Peterson Air Force Base, is not named in the suit, even though studies have shown the chemicals sprayed at the base wound up in the aquifer. The federal government is largely immune from lawsuits over the actions of the military.
The lawsuit has survived initial efforts to have it dismissed but remains years from resolution.
The acronyms read like a helping of toxic alphabet soup: PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFHpA.
They number in the thousands — each representing a different compound with the same chemical foundation as those contaminating the aquifer beneath Security, Widefield and Fountain.
But as the number of those chemicals known to researchers grows, a central question about the federal government’s plans for protecting residents from those chemicals remains unresolved.
Will the EPA widen its approach and focus on the thousands of perfluorinated compounds as a group? Or will federal regulators continue addressing only one or two at a time — part of a lengthy process that experts and clean water advocates say could last for decades, if not longer?
At meetings last week in Colorado Springs, advocates gave the EPA an earful about the agency playing “whack-a-mole” with the chemical — chasing down each variation for its own set of regulations.
“The solution is to regulate perfluorinated compounds as a family to protect our families,” the Sierra Club’s Fran Silva-Blayney told EPA bosses at their Wednesday gathering in town.
Perfluorinated compounds entered the local lexicon in 2016, when testing revealed that drinking water for thousands of households in southern El Paso County exceeded an EPA health advisory for the chemicals due to contamination in the Widefield aquifer. Millions of other Americans were affected, too.
Testing later identified a likely source for the local contamination: firefighting foam used for decades at Peterson Air Force Base that spread into the aquifer after it was sprayed on the ground in training exercises.
Since then, two other communities in Colorado have discovered the compounds in their drinking water. One site, in western Boulder County, appears to have been fouled by the same toxic firefighting foam, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Requests to approach all the perfluorinated chemicals as a group — and to regulate them with enforceable drinking water standards — were among the most prevalent voiced to the EPA regulators who visited Colorado Springs on Tuesday and Wednesday during the third stop of a nationwide listening tour.
They echoed similar requests made during the agency’s previous two stops in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, said William Cibulas Jr., acting director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s division of toxicology and human health services…
For years, the EPA has chosen a narrower route — issuing a health advisory for the two best-known types of chemicals on that list, but withholding judgment on thousands of others. Both chemicals — perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA — were found in the Widefield aquifer.
In recent months, the EPA has doubled down on that course — voicing a desire to possibly stiffen regulations on those same two chemicals, while possibly developing baseline toxicity values for two others.
At a meeting Wednesday, residents and clean water advocates said that the agency can’t afford to continue addressing the chemicals one by one…
Jennifer McLain, the EPA’s deputy director of groundwater and drinking water, said the agency was trying to take a broad-based approach to oversight of the chemicals. Still, details aren’t expected until the agency’s release of a management plan for the toxic chemicals, which is due by the end of the year.
“It’s not possible to do everything chemical by chemical, but it is also important to study some of these important chemicals one by one,” McLain said. “It’s something that we see as being necessary for the future of our understating — is to have an understanding of how these chemicals behave in classes, as well as getting a deep understanding of some of the specific chemicals we’re finding in the environment.”
The number of such chemicals — also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — is unknown, said Christopher Higgins, a Colorado School of Mines chemist who has studied the chemicals. Some scientists have estimated as many as 3,000 or 5,000 exist.
They’re all man-made. But the vast number of products that they have been used in — and the complex chemistry used in making them — have complicated researchers’ efforts to make a final count.
And some of the chemicals change in the environment — often into versions federal officials say appear most threatening to human health…
The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, opposes a group-based approach to regulation. The chemicals’ properties vary widely, along with their uses and benefits, said Jon Corley, a spokesman for the organization. He argued that not all such chemicals require “risk-based regulation,” and that lumping them together would ignore their vast differences.
“We don’t think that would be based on good science,” Corley said.
Still, some experts say anything less than addressing the chemicals as a group will only prolong the risks Americans face. At a time when thousands of other such chemicals are known to exist, the rationale for keeping a narrow focus is questionable at best, they say.
“They’re all chemically so much alike that you’d expect one to act like the other in a biological setting,” said Dr. Paul Brooks, a West Virginia physician who led the nation’s only large-scale study of a community whose water was contaminated by the chemicals.
