The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center has released its August- projections for unregulated runoff into Lake Powell for Water Year 2019, and, in keeping with recent drought-inspired trends, the outlook isn’t pretty.
The Forecast Center — which provides Colorado River data to the federal Bureau of Reclamation for its crucial August 24-Month Study — foresees an inflow of 8.1 million acre-feet of runoff into Lake Powell. If accurate, that “most probable” inflow represents about 75 percent of the 30-year average of inflow into the great Colorado River system reservoir.
That estimate of 8.1 million acre-feet is down 100,000 acre-feet from the Center’s estimate of a month ago when its modeling projected 8.2 million acre-feet.
The skill level on such longer-range projections is generally low, given the lengthy time period involved and the wide number of variables.
Not the least of those variables is the uncertainty of the region’s upcoming snowpack-season and resulting runoff. The Forecast Center attempts to incorporate a range of possibilities for the coming season’s climatic conditions.
Predictably, snowpack is a big factor in those range of possibilities. But soil-moisture conditions also factor in heavily. And, soil-moisture conditions going into the approaching snowpack season are expected to be drier than normal.
In addition to its “most probable” projection, the Center’s modeling projects a “minimum probable” inflow of 4.8 million acre-feet (44 percent of average), and a “maximum probable” projection of 15.6 million acre-feet (144 percent of average).
A Water Year runs from October 1 of each year to September 31 of the following year.
The unregulated runoff modeling projections come on the eve of the Bureau of Reclamation’s much-anticipated August 2018 24-Month Study.
The August projections are used by the Bureau and the Lower Basin States, among other things, to determine whether Lake Mead may fall to levels that could trigger a shortage declaration.
Last month’s 24-Month Study projected Lake Mead’s end-of-2018 elevation to be just above 1,077 feet. While the troubled reservoir’s water levels have inched downward toward the shortage-triggering level – that being an elevation below 1,075 feet – previous modeling results indicate that Lake Mead should remain above that critical level for Water Year 2019.
The modeling, which employs simulations using the Colorado River Simulation System, or CRSS, is updated and maintained on a continuous basis by the Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper and Lower Colorado Regions.
Conservation efforts have had a great impact on keeping Lake Mead from falling into a “Tier 1” shortage.
In 2017 alone, over seven feet of elevation was added to bolster Lake Mead by its water suppliers and users in the Lower Basin States.
The orange plume flows through the Animas across the Colorado/New Mexico state line the afternoon of Aug. 7, 2015. (Photo by Melissa May, San Juan Soil and Conservation District)
The civil complaint states that plaintiffs in New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Colorado were forced to stop using water from the San Juan River for crop irrigation, livestock watering and household purposes due to contamination from mine waste released on Aug. 5, 2015.
Group members claim crop harvests were lost due to the lack of irrigation and that livestock were unable to graze or drink water from the river. In addition, several ranchers sold livestock at a reduced price due to a decline in the animals’ quality.
The 114-page complaint was filed Aug. 3 in U.S. District Court of New Mexico. It seeks approximately $75 million in damages.
Along with the federal agency, the complaint lists as defendants Environmental Restoration LLC, Kinross Gold Corp., Kinross Gold USA Inc., Sunnyside Gold Corp., Gold King Mines Corp., Weston Solutions Inc., Salem Minerals Inc. and San Juan Corp., which the document describes as either EPA contractors or mine owners…
Kate Ferlic, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a press release today that farmers and ranchers used various resources to try to save their crops and livestock, but to no avail.
“They trucked in water, they hand-carried gallons of water down long dirt roads, some even tried to use their tap water. The spill was a very real crisis for the Navajo people,” Ferlic said.
She added that while each of the 295 plaintiffs filed administrative claims with the EPA, the agency still has not acted on those requests…
Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye and tribal council Speaker LoRenzo Bates weighed in on the litigation in the press release.
Begaye said the spill was a disaster for the tribe and tribal members.
“The San Juan River has enormous cultural and spiritual significance for our nation in addition to its practical and economic importance. It is our lifeblood. Most of the farmers and ranchers have lived and farmed on these lands for generations,” the president said.
Bates said the spill resulted in farmers being unable to irrigate crops, causing a loss of the harvest, which is the sole source of income for many people.
While some farmers could save their crops by using other sources of water, a stigma developed about water contamination and crops grown in the area, resulting in people not purchasing produce from farmers, he added.
“Our people endured clear and significant losses, and I look forward to the court doing them justice by ordering the EPA and the other responsible parties to pay up for those losses,” Bates said.
Rafting experts in Fremont County along the Arkansas River say low waters haven’t hampered business, but the rafting experience has changed, especially when compared to past years.
Water levels on the Arkansas have been high the past three rafting seasons. Despite the lower waters, business remains steady.
“Our revenue numbers are about exactly the same that they were last year,” said Whitewater Adventure Outfitters Owner Tony Keenan. “[The low water level] affects business in some ways. I think the biggest effect is we had fewer people from the Front Range this year because they are a little more knowledgeable of snowpack numbers.”
The low waters are noticeable, and some of the guides say more boats are likely to tip over with shallower waters.
Many state agencies have taken notice, and have taken action.
Kennan says the state will add 10,000 acre-feet of water to the river during the summer months to help the rafting business. However, this past summer, various state agencies have added roughly an additional 16,000 acre-feet. Just last Tuesday, Colorado Springs Utilities donated 1,000 acre-feet to keep the waters higher through August.
The increase in water also helps keep the flow of the river moving at an acceptable rate for rafting. Officials say it’s been a struggle to keep the river at about 550 cubic feet per second; the preferred flow is about 750 CFS.
“Cooperation has been extraordinary this year to keep flows at a reasonable recreational experience and at a level that is manageable for our guides to get down river,” said Keenan.
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.”
Blado hung on there until his usual run, Clear Creek, was just too low. He relocated his school buses and bright blue rafts to the small Rocky Mountain town of Kremmling and now is trying to salvage the late season by persuading clients to drive the extra 72 miles to float a wide blue-green stretch of the Upper Colorado.
“With Clear Creek being cut short, everybody pretty much takes a pay cut,” Blado said.
This state boasts more headwaters than almost any in the country. Heart-stopping rapids, smooth tributaries and deep holes on the Colorado, Arkansas and the Animas rivers, among others, draw outdoors enthusiasts from around the world.
Last year, thanks to the winter’s heavy snows, outfitters served a record number of visitors. Conditions this year are far different – and far more in line with the pattern of recent decades. Since the late 1990s, three intense droughts have buffeted the state’s $193-million rafting industry.
Summer 2018 followed 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.
“Not just in Colorado, but U.S. wide and globally, we’re seeing this disturbing warming trend that is amplifying over the last few decades going back to late 1960s,” said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “It brings a lot more evaporation and makes semiarid areas like Colorado prone to quick-hitting droughts.”
As the 20th century ended, there were still quite a few mountain men in Austria—guides, farmers, and the like—who were not at all convinced that humans were causing the planet to warm. Theirs wasn’t a cynical ideological skepticism, but rather a pragmatic view of the world based on a close connection to the rhythm of nature in the mountains.
The mountains have always changed, they would tell you over a mug of beer and a shot of pungent schnapps brewed from the roots of mountain herbs. We are small, nature is great, they would say, nodding in respect toward the lofty crags of the Alps.
But 2012 marked a turning point. During a brutal summer heat wave, the summit cross on the 3,660-meter Grossvenediger threatened to topple over. Relentless heat thawed the permafrost that had held the giant marker steady for decades.
By the end of that summer there were few, if any, doubters remaining. Even the most grizzled old-timers started acknowledging that a steady build-up of greenhouse gas pollution was visibly reshaping their world within the span of a human life. Forests are moving uphill, glaciers are vanishing, and plants are blooming several weeks earlier than just 30 years ago.
Amy Haas, executive director, Upper Colorado River Commission (Source: Bureau of Reclamation via the Water Education Foundation)
From the Water Education Foundation (Gary Pitzer). Click through to read the whole interview, here’s an excerpt from the article:
Amy Haas recently became the first non-engineer and the first woman to serve as executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission in its 70-year history, putting her smack in the center of a host of daunting challenges facing the Upper Colorado River Basin.
Yet those challenges will be quite familiar to Haas, an attorney who for the past year has served as deputy director and general counsel of the commission. (She replaced longtime Executive Director Don Ostler). She has a long history of working within interstate Colorado River governance, including representing New Mexico as its Upper Colorado River commissioner and playing a central role in the negotiation of the recently signed U.S.-Mexico agreement known as Minute 323.
As executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, Haas is likely to play a major role in helping to address changing hydrologic conditions along the Colorado, drought planning and ongoing water conservation efforts, as well as tribal water rights among Native Americans and their impact in the Colorado River Basin.
The commission, created by the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact of 1948, is comprised of representatives from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, all of whom rely extensively on the Colorado River and its tributaries to support important agricultural economies and the demands of a growing urban sector. Among the commission’s duties is a key one: Ensuring the flow of the Colorado River at Lee Ferry, the dividing point between Upper and Lower Basins, does not drop below 75 million acre-feet for any 10 consecutive years as required by the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
That task is challenging because the two basins have many differences, not the least of which is geography. In the Lower Basin, Lake Mead sits above the big cities and farms and is the bank where conserved water is stored. Not so in the Upper Basin where Lake Powell sits below the majority of water users. Conserved water stored in Powell cannot be returned to users in the Upper Basin.
Haas talked with Western Water in July, shortly after she was named to her new position, about the Upper Basin’s challenges, including drought planning, climate change and tribal water rights. The transcript has been edited for space and clarity.
Gunnison River Basin via the Colorado Geological Survey
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
Ouray, Montrose, and Delta counties are all under fire restrictions. Up to date information for each county and details on the restrictions for each ‘stage’ of fire restrictions can be found here.
General Gunnison River Basin water level reports can be found through this late July article by the Montrose Daily Press. As always, the most up-to-date data and river levels can be found on our Gunnison River Basin website.
Read some of our curated water news archives:
Voluntary water efforts don’t always prompt users to save water as desired, but Paonia brought about water conservation with measured success.
North Fork Republican River via the National Science Foundation.
South Fork of the Republican River
Republican River Basin by District
The Republican River’s South Fork near Hale, Colorado, with the region’s seemingly endless fields. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Jeffrey Beall
More than 9,000 Landsat images provide vegetation health metrics for the Republican River Basin. Credit: David Hyndman
Republican River Basin
From the Republican River Compact Administration via The High Plains/Midwest Ag Journal:
The Republican River Compact Administration will hold its 58th annual meeting at 10 a.m. CDT on Aug. 21. The meeting will be hosted by the Kansas Department of Agriculture at 1320 Research Park Drive in Manhattan, Kansas.
The RRCA meeting will focus on water-related issues and activities, including compact compliance, within the Republican River basin in Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska.
In addition, RRCA will hold a work session to prepare for the annual meeting at 8 a.m. CDT Aug. 21, also at the KDA Manhattan office. Both the work session and the annual meeting are open to the public.
Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska entered into the Republican River Compact in 1943 to provide for the equitable division of the basin’s waters, remove causes of potential controversy, and promote interstate cooperation and joint action by the states and the United States in the efficient use of water and the control of destructive floods. The RRCA is composed of three commissioners representing Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska: Kansas Department of Agriculture, Division of Water Resources Chief Engineer David Barfield; Colorado State Engineer Kevin Rein; and Nebraska Department of Natural Resources Director Jeff Fassett.
Individuals who have questions regarding the meeting should contact KDA water management services program manager Chris Beightel at Chris.Beightel@ks.gov or 785-564-6659 for more information.
Glenwood Springs initiated Level 2 of its Drought Management Plan earlier this week rolling out the call for residents to lower their water usage drastically.
According to officials, stream flows in Grizzly Creek and No Name Creek, the city’s primary raw water sources, are at historically low levels.
Water personnel are concerned whether adequate water supply can be diverted to treatment facilities to maintain current demands if stream flows continue to drop.
Low stream flow conditions will likely persist until heavy and continuous rainfall occurs.
City officials are asking all water users to keep water usage at a minimum until water levels improve.
Specifically, the city is strongly encouraging all water users to avoid outdoor water irrigation from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. when temperatures and direct sunlight are high…
Additional water conservation information and drought management plans are available on the City’s website: http://cogs.us/196/Water.
Downtown Burlington (2014) via Wikipedia. FromThe Yuma Pioneer:
A public meeting will be held in Burlington on Monday to go over the state engineer’s Republican River Compact Use Rules.
The meeting will be 10 a.m. at the Burlington Community and Education Center, 340 S. 14th St. State Engineer Kevin Rein and staff will provide updates involving the rule making.
An advisory committee of volunteers met with the State Engineer’s Office monthly for a while to provide input. The committee has not met in quite some time as the state worked on various issues.
Republican River Water Conservation District General Manager Deb Daniel explained the formulation of these “basin rules” came about as the Republican River Domain is larger than the RRWCD boundaries.
The RRWCD was created through legislation in the Colorado Legislature early last decade, to assist the State of Colorado in coming up with ways to help bring the state into compliance with the 1942 Republican River Compact.
Well owners within the RRWCD pay an assessment fee annually to help fund augmentation efforts, such as the creation of the compact compliance pipeline located at far east edge of Yuma County right by the state line with Nebraska. Many wells also have been retired through the CREP program, and surface water rights purchased — all in an effort to get the State of Colorado in compact compliance.
Most of the wells located within the domain but outside the RRWCD are located south of Burlington and down into Cheyenne County.
The wells owners have not been subjected to the assessment fee, but Daniel explained the wells still are factored into compact compliance. Those wells do not have an augmentation plan.
Eventually, when these new rules are put into place with the Water Court, there possibly could be forced curtailment unless an augmentation plan is put in place. The wells could be brought into the RRWCD, and pay the annual assessment fee.
Daniel said efforts to have a bill carried in the Colorado Legislature to change the RRWCD boundaries to match the Republican River Domain have not come to fruition.
Any interested parties are invited to attend Monday’s public meeting.
Moderate rainfall was less common in this region than farther east, with 7-day rainfall exceeding an inch restricted to portions of southeastern Texas, west-central and southeastern Louisiana, southern and east-central Mississippi, eastern Tennessee, and small pockets in the western Oklahoma Panhandle and adjacent Texas. Large portions of western Tennessee, northern Mississippi, northeastern Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma (excluding the Panhandle), and interior Texas received little or no rainfall. As a result, dryness and drought improved across the northwestern Oklahoma and the northern Texas Panhandle, but persisted or intensified farther south and east. Small areas of D4 were introduced in central and southwestern Texas and southwestern Oklahoma (mostly based on large multi-month rainfall shortages and (in central Texas) depleted moisture in grass, shrubs, and even large trees that could serve as efficient fuel for wildfires). D3 expanded to cover a large area from southwestern to northeastern Texas, and smaller regions of D3 now cover several patches in northwestern Louisiana, along the Red River Valley, and in northwestern Texas. Across Texas, primarily outside the Big Bend and the northern Panhandle, mandatory water use restrictions have been imposed by 665 public water supply authorities according to the Texas Drought Preparedness Council, with a few mandating moderate to severe restrictions. Voluntary cutbacks have been requested by another 400 authorities. 90-day rainfall totals below two-thirds of normal are common in the D3 areas, and across the D2 regions of northwestern Texas. A few patches in southwestern and interior northeastern Texas recorded less than 25 percent of normal during this period. Substantial multi-month rainfall deficits are less widespread (scattered to broken in coverage) north and east of the Red River Valley…
Moisture deficits have been slowly increasing in northern parts of this region for the past several weeks. However, significant deficits are patchy and relatively short-term in nature, so only modest D0 and D1 expansion was brought into the drier parts of the Dakotas. Severe to exceptional drought is limited to southern parts of this region, primarily in south-central through western Colorado and parts of central and eastern Kansas. Drought conditions were essentially unchanged here, save for some small, spotty areas of improvement in eastern Kansas. Between these two areas, across southeastern Colorado and western Kansas, above-normal rainfall has been the rule for the past few months. 90-day rainfall totaled 4 to locally 10 inches more than normal here. To wit, broadscale improvement was assessed, eliminating dryness in much of southwestern Kansas, and leaving moderate to severe drought covering most of southeastern Colorado…
Periods of heavy rainfall have affected parts of New Mexico for several weeks now, sufficient to bring improvement into portions of central and west-central sections of the state. But despite these beneficial rains, exceptional drought (D4) still covers most of north-central and northwestern New Mexico. some west-central, south-central. In contrast, there was a palpable worsening of conditions along much of the northern tier of Montana, south-central Washington, southwestern and east-central Oregon, and a small area near the mountains of extreme northwestern Utah. Livestock progress and production has been seriously impaired by the drought, particularly in southern Oregon and part of northeastern Utah. Farther south, California was seasonably dry, and only isolated locales in Arizona and Nevada reported light rain. Dryness and drought remained essentially unchanged in these states…
Looking Ahead
For the next few days (through August 14, 2018), a broad area of moderate to heavy precipitation is forecast in central and southeastern Arizona, across southern and eastern New Mexico, and from northern and central Texas eastward to the Atlantic Coast. Rainfall totals exceeding an inch should be widespread, with two or more inches expected in the eastern half of the Carolinas and from southern Arkansas westward through the northern tier of Texas (excluding the Panhandle), part of the Big Bend, and southeastern New Mexico. Similar amounts (one to locally two inches) are expected in western and northern Maine. Heavy to excessive amounts (three to five inches) are forecast in western Texas in a region bounded by the Pecos, San Angelo, Wichita Falls, and Lubbock areas. In contrast, light rain at most is anticipated from the Lower Ohio Valley, the central Plains and Rockies, and northern Arizona northward to the Canadian Border and westward to the Pacific Coast, though a little more may fall on parts of the Great Lakes Region. Nationally, above-normal temperatures will cover most of the country. Daily nighttime lows should average near or slightly above normal across most of the Plains and Mississippi Valley, and at least 3°F above normal from the High Plains westward to the Pacific Coast, across the northern Plains and Great Lakes Region, and from the Appalachians through the Eastern Seaboard. But despite unremarkable minimum temperatures, daytime highs should average significantly below normal (anomalies -3 F or lower) where persistent rainfall is forecast, specifically in the swath from the upper Southeast and interior Lower Mississippi Valley westward through Oklahoma, central and northern Texas, New Mexico, and southern Arizona. Highs will average 6°F to locally 10°F below normal across southern Oklahoma, central and northern Texas, and eastern New Mexico. Meanwhile, anomalous heat will continue across areas from the central and northern Rockies westward through the Intermountain West. Daily highs averaging 9°F or more above normal are forecast in western Montana, the northern Intermountain West, and northern Great Basin.
Surplus precipitation is favored for the ensuing five days (August 14 – 18, 2018) in the Desert Southwest, southern Rockies, central Great Plains, Texas (outside the southeast tier), middle Mississippi Valley, Ohio Valley and adjacent Great Lakes Region, and central and northern sections of the Appalachians and Eastern Seaboard. All but the western and northern tiers of Alaska are also expected to record above-normal precipitation. Meanwhile, subnormal rainfall is favored in the South Atlantic States, central Gulf Coast, and in a swath from the northern Intermountain West eastward into the western Great Lakes Region. Enhanced chances for warmer-than-normal conditions cover much of the contiguous 48 states, with only the region north of the immediate Gulf Coast extending from the central and southern Appalachians westward through the lower Ohio Valley, middle and lower Mississippi Valley, most of Texas, and the southern Rockies excluded. Odds favoring abnormally cool weather are limited to areas from the southern tier of Arizona and New Mexico eastward through the Big Bend, central and northern Texas (excluding the Panhandle), central and eastern Oklahoma, and adjacent Arkansas.
More than 9,000 Landsat images provide vegetation health metrics for the Republican River Basin. Credit: David Hyndman
From the Kansas Department of Agriculture via The High Plains Journal:
The Governors and Attorneys General of Kansas and Colorado announced that they recently reached a settlement of claims regarding Colorado’s past use of water under the Republican River Compact. The Compact allocates the waters of the basins between the states of Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.
“This settlement is an investment in the basin to ensure a better future for Kansas water users.” said Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer. “Kansas and Colorado are committed to continuing to make the Compact work for the benefit of the citizens of our states, and this settlement recognizes the ties that bind our states together and is an important step for the economic development of the region.”
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt also expressed his approval. “The Kansas water team at the Department of Agriculture and our legal team at the Attorney General’s office have done an outstanding job of resolving years of past disputes without litigation,” Schmidt said. “This settlement going forward promises a more cooperative approach to what really matters—the best possible management of the water resources in the basin’s South Fork on both sides of the state line.”
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper agreed that “This settlement provides funds that could be used in the Republican River Basin within Kansas and Colorado and creates additional opportunities for cooperative water management between the States.”
Colorado Attorney General Cynthia H. Coffman also expressed her approval, saying the agreement “avoids the costs and uncertainty of litigation and furthers the principles of the Compact, including removing controversy and fostering interstate cooperation.”
The agreement resolves the existing controversies between the two states regarding Colorado’s past use of water under the Republican River Compact and allows them to continue to work collaboratively through the compact as part of an overall ongoing effort which also involves the state of Nebraska.
The settlement was signed by the governors and attorneys general of both states. A copy of the settlement is available at http://agriculture.ks.gov/RRCA.
Cows graze near the Crystal River, just upstream from the fish hatchery. The Crystal just downstream was running at around 8 cfs on Aug. 1, spurring action by state officials. Photo credit: Heather Sackett via Aspen Journalism
A voluntary afternoon fishing ban is in place for sections of the lower Crystal and Roaring Fork rivers, among others.
“When those flows drop, you reduce habitat space, and warm waters are extremely stressful for trout,” explained Liza Mitchell, Education and Outreach Coordinator for the Roaring Fork Conservancy (which is opening its new River Center at 11:30 a.m. Aug. 10). “It seems like there’s been pretty good compliance. It’s pretty cool when you have everyone in the industry working together.”
Mitchell sends out the Conservancy’s weekly streamflow report, which of late shows mostly red (meaning flows less than 55 percent of average) or only-recently-needed maroon (less than 30 percent). The one bright spot is the Fryingpan River, which is flowing at slightly above average thanks to an agreement that increases how much is released from Ruedi Reservoir, as well as the “Cameo call” on the Colorado River which has basically shut down diversions to the Eastern Slope in favor of senior water rights downstream.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board has also placed a call on the Crystal, but the junior water rights may not be enough to keep water in the river. Additionally, a recent agreement aimed at reducing agricultural diversions won’t be enacted this year.
Still, Mitchell sees efforts at conservation as a step in the right direction amid increasing aridity. She praised the Town of Carbondale’s decision to enact water restrictions on both treated and ditch systems, and encouraged individual residents to do what they can to reduce their use.
“It’s easy to become complacent, but it’s better to act than not act,” she said. “Any little thing you do shows that you’re invested in protecting our local waterways.”
“This year has been a particularly challenging year. Not the best of snowpacks and an extremely hot and dry spring and summer,” said Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, Manager, Rob White. It means the water level in the river could be at its lowest in decades for this time of year. The solution is supplemental water from reservoirs.
This week water from Colorado Springs Utilities reservoir storage is going into the river to help make it through next week. The middle of August typically ends the peak season along the river. “It looked like we may not have a large enough bucket to make it to the 15th,” said Echo Canyon River Expeditions, Owner, Andy Neinas, “That’s where the cooperation and coordination among so many water owners and water providers really came to save the day for many of us.”
The rivers natural flow is supplemented every summer through agreements with the Bureau of Reclamation. This year even more water was needed. Colorado Parks and Wildlife made a deal with Pueblo Water earlier in the summer.
Colorado Springs Utilities agreed to help this week. CSU will send water from storage at Twin Lakes to storage in Pueblo Reservoir.
It is good for rafting and also fishing. The fish population can be threatened when the water gets too low and too warm.
Residents who live in Fountain Valley southeast of Colorado Springs are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the perflourinated compounds which have contaminated their drinking water supplies.
The requests came during a two day “community engagement” event sponsored by the EPA.
“I think this is a big deal,” said Fran Silva-Blayney of the Sierra Club’s Fountain Creek Water Sentinels. “It’s a big deal in terms of bringing public awareness to the issue and in terms of the EPA recognizing that we need to take regulatory action.”
Silva-Blayney said the community wants the EPA to set “maximum contaminant levels.”
[…]
The contamination in the public water supplies of Fountain, Security and Widefield came from firefighting foam, which was used for decades at Peterson Air Force Base.
Health Impact
Several residents and former residents raised questions about the health impact of long-term exposure.
“My father died of kidney cancer last year,” said Mark Favors, a member of the Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition.
Favors told Denver7 that he was born and raised in the valley, and then moved to New York eight years ago.
“My cousin was here yesterday,” he said. “His grandson, at 14 years of age, had to have a kidney replaced, a transplant last year.”
“We would really like to know, do we have hereditary cancers, or do we have environmental cancers?” said Liz Rosenbaum, who founded the Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition.
“Summit was amazing”
Rosenbaum said she is encouraged by what’s going on.
“The community wants to be more actively involved,” she said, adding that it’s a way to stay informed.
“When you’re scared, you get angry,” she said, “and if you know what’s going on, you can develop solutions and ideas.”
State health officials say they don’t know yet how widespread the contamination problem is in Colorado.
So far, contamination has been found during tests of public wells in the Fountain Valley, Commerce City and at a fire station on Sugar Loaf Mountain in Boulder County.
“We’re in the initial stages of identifying potential sources in the state,” said Kristy Richardson, an environmental toxicologist with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “We’re looking at all those sources that have been used in industry and manufacturing.”
Advisory limit
The EPA’s advisory limit for Perfluorooctanesulfonic acids (PFOs) and PFAS is 70 parts per trillion.
Residents who attended the EPA’s meetings would like to make it a regulatory standard and much tougher than 70 ppt.
“We have a health advisory for two substances, in a family of 3,000… so we don’t know if we’re removing all of them,” Richardson said. “Residents are very concerned about getting them out (of the water) and making sure they’re not exposed to them anymore.”
The Colorado Springs meeting was the third of four community forums scheduled across the country this summer, each hosted by the EPA, to collect feedback from people on the ground dealing with PFAS contamination.
“Understanding and addressing emerging contaminants such as PFAS is difficult, but critically important,” explained Doug Benevento, administrator of EPA Region 8, which includes Colorado and other western states. “The experiences and perspectives shared by state and local officials as well as community groups today, in addition to the numerous members of the public, will be invaluable as EPA develops a plan to manage PFAS.”
PFAS contamination is a growing concern among public health and water management professionals nationwide, with at least 40 states experiencing some form of contamination, according to the Environmental Working Group. The EPA says it has identified the issue as a high priority, and is in the process of developing new rules to regulate contamination levels in drinking water…
“We need regulatory infrastructure in order to, number one, compel investigation and clean up, but also to promote a more consistent approach to addressing PFAS nationwide,” Tracie White of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment told EPA officials Wednesday.
Her concern was echoed by members of the public and by those responsible for managing affected drinking water systems, who urged the EPA to establish a legally-binding Maximum Contaminant Level, or MCL, for the chemicals.
“Health advisories have the same connotations and effect as maximum contaminant levels, but none of the support that an MCL provides,” said Brandon Bernard, water manager for Widefield Water and Sanitation.
For their part, EPA officials didn’t say whether an MCL would be forthcoming, but said the agency is looking at a range of options to regulate the chemicals, including listing them as “Hazardous Substances” under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, otherwise known as Superfund. Jennifer McLain, deputy director of the agency’s Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water, said she couldn’t give a timeline for any future regulatory decisions, but stressed that the agency is “moving as quickly as possible.”
Over the course of the two day forum, residents of Security, Widefield, and Fountain also shared their experiences with contamination in the area. Liz Rosenbaum, who has lived in Security and Widefield for 15 years, spoke on behalf of the grassroots group, Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition…
Many community members also said that they feel they’ve been left out of important discussions about the future of their drinking water, and haven’t been treated as stakeholders in the process.
Still, Rosenbaum said the community forum was a good first step, and that she was encouraged by the dialogue that took place. Going forward, she said she hopes the conversation can continue, so that the “community feels more connected in decision making processes” as the EPA and other agencies work to address the issue of PFAS contamination here in El Paso County and nationwide.
Over and over, residents and clean water advocates implored the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday evening to set enforceable drinking water standards for the toxic chemicals contaminating their water — and at tighter levels than the agency currently deems acceptable.
Their pleas came during the EPA’s third stop in a nationwide tour meant to help its leaders create a management plan for the toxic chemicals, called perfluorinated compounds. It marked the first opportunity in more than two years for people affected by the toxic chemicals to sound off to the EPA on the contamination of their drinking water.
Many argued that the EPA’s response was past due.
His voice cracking, Mark Favors, 49, listed several family members who drank the water most of their lives and have since died, many from kidney cancer. He read the obituary of one, Shelton Lee King, a retired master sergeant who served in Vietnam and died in 2012 of kidney cancer…
The EPA’s current process for regulating chemicals does not call for instituting any new drinking water standards for perfluorinated compounds until 2021.
Jennifer McLain, the agency’s deputy director in charge of groundwater and drinking water, said the agency is trying to accelerate that process, though she gave no timeline for when that might happen.
“We are working as quickly as we can,” McLain said.
So far, the EPA has only committed to evaluate the need for an enforceable drinking water standard for the two best-known types of perfluorinated compounds: perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.
The EPA also is seeking to propose that those two chemicals be classified as “hazardous substances,” easing the process for seeking Superfund cleanup funding. And it is seeking to develop groundwater cleanup recommendations for both chemicals.
In addition, the agency is working to set toxicity levels for two other types of perfluorinated compounds. Neither was included in a different agency’s recent list of possibly dangerous chemicals.
The EPA’s management plan is due out by the end of the year.
Water managers for the El Paso County communities of Security, Widefield, Stratmore Hills, and Fountain have been working to rid their drinking water systems of Perfluorinated Chemicals since 2016. The contamination, discovered that year, traces back to firefighting foam used at nearby Peterson Air Force Base.
“Fifty years from now, 100 years from now, the Widefield Aquifer will still be contaminated if we don’t figure out a way to clean it,” said Fran Silva-Blayney, chair of the Sierra Club Fountain Creek Water Sentinels. “Is remediation even possible?”
Silva-Blayney was one of a handful of community stakeholders invited to speak at a listening session organized by the Environmental Protection Agency. Her comments and others carried the same message: the EPA isn’t doing enough.
“We are past the point of evaluating, proposing and recommending,” Silva-Balyney said. “People’s lives have been compromised. It’s time to regulate, enforce and remediate.”
In a statement, EPA Regional Administrator Doug Benevento said the community listening session would “inform our path forward in addressing PFAS in communities here in Colorado Springs and across the country.” Regulations are under consideration that would create an enforceable drinking water standard for two of the most common PFCs — mainly PFOS and PFOA.
Right now, EPA has an advisory in place, which isn’t enforceable. Water districts in the area have chosen, voluntarily, to make sure drinking water has no more than 70 parts per trillion of the chemicals. The agency could also classify certain PFCs as hazardous, and they’re developing groundwater cleanup recommendations if contamination is found.
Click here to go to the NOAA website. Here’s an excerpt:
The contiguous United States had its 11th warmest July on record
The July 2018 contiguous U.S. temperature was 75.5°F, 1.9°F above the 20th century average. This tied with 1998 as the 11th warmest July on record. Much-above-average temperatures stretched across the West, Northeast and parts of the South. California had its hottest July and hottest month on record at 79.7°F, surpassing the previous record set in 1931. Near- to below-average temperatures were observed across the central U.S. For the year-to-date, the national temperature was 53.1°F, 1.9°F above average, also the 11th warmest on record. Of note, the last three month-period, May through July, ranked as the warmest such period on record with a national temperature of 70.9°F, 3.4°F above average. This surpassed the previous record of 70.6°F in 1934.
The July precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 2.80 inches, 0.02 inch above average, and ranked near the middle value in the 124-year period of record. Above-average precipitation was observed for parts of the Southwest, East Coast and Great Plains. Record precipitation fell in parts of the mid-Atlantic where Pennsylvania had its wettest July on record with 176 percent of average precipitation. Below-average precipitation was observed in the Northwest and parts of the northern to central Rockies, Midwest and South. The year-to-date precipitation total for the Lower 48 was 18.65 inches, 0.56 inch above average, ranking near the middle value in the record.
This monthly summary from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides to government, business, academia and the public to support informed decision-making.
July Temperature
Above-average July temperatures stretched from the West Coast to the Rockies, through the South and into parts of the Northeast. Seventeen states had July temperatures that were much-above-average, including California which was record warm. The monthly average July temperature for Death Valley, California, was 108.1°F, making it the hottest monthly temperature on record for any station in the world, according to NCEI’s data holdings. This surpassed the record of 107.4°F set just last July in 2017 at Death Valley.
The warm and dry conditions across the West created ideal wildfire conditions. Numerous large and destructive fires burned across the region with many continuing to burn into August. These included, but were not limited to:
The Spring Creek Fire in Colorado burned over 108,000 acres and destroyed 251 homes. This was the third largest wildfire on record for Colorado.
The Carr Fire in California burned over 164,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 residences and was responsible for at least seven fatalities. This marks the sixth most destructive fire in terms of property loss on record for California.
The Ferguson Fire in California burned over 94,300 acres, was responsible for at least two fatalities and forced the closure of parts of Yosemite National Park.
The Mendocino Complex Fire in California burned over 283,800 acres and marked the largest wildfire on record for the state, surpassing the Thomas Fire that burned 281,000 acres in late 2017.
Near- to below-average temperatures stretched from the Great Plains into parts of the Midwest and Southeast. In the central U.S., maximum temperatures, or afternoon highs, were particularly cool during July. Above-average precipitation in parts of the region contributed to the below-average temperatures.
The Alaska July 2018 temperature tied with 2016 as the fifth highest since statewide records began in 1925. Parts of the Alaska Panhandle were record warm, including Juneau and Annette. Each of those locations also observed their warmest month of any month on record. Ketchikan had its second warmest July. The warm conditions contributed to a fish kill near Petersburg, Alaska.
July Precipitation
Above-average precipitation was observed across parts of the Southwest, Great Plains and along the East Coast. In the Southwest, an active monsoon season brought heavy thunderstorms to the region. In the East, record and near-record precipitation was observed for much of Pennsylvania and parts of Maryland. Pennsylvania had its wettest July on record with 7.37 inches of precipitation, 3.18 inches above average. Maryland had its second wettest July with 8.72 inches, 4.55 inches above average.
Below-average precipitation fell across much of the Northwest and in parts of the northern to central Rockies, Midwest and South. Idaho had its sixth driest July on record with just 0.24 inch of precipitation, 0.59 inch below average. Much of Alaska was also drier than average, particularly the central regions and the panhandle.
According to the July 31 U.S. Drought Monitor report, 34.1 percent of the contiguous U.S. was in drought, up from 29.7 percent at the beginning of July. Drought conditions worsened in the Northwest, Central Rockies, Southern Plains, mid-Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes. Drought improved in the Southwest, Northeast and parts of the Central to Northern Plains. Outside of the contiguous U.S., drought worsened for parts of Hawaii, but abnormally dry conditions improved for parts of southern Puerto Rico.
Year-to-Date (January-July) Temperature
Above-average January-July temperatures were observed across the West, Southern Plains, East Coast and much of the Midwest. Nine states in the West and South had much-above-average year-to-date temperatures, including Arizona and New Mexico which were record warm. The Arizona statewide average temperature was 62.7°F, 4.0°F above average, and the New Mexico temperature was 56.5°F, 3.9°F above average. Near- to below-average temperatures were observed in the north-central contiguous U.S.
The Alaska statewide average temperature for the year-to-date was 29.9°F, 4.0°F above average, and tied 2014 as the sixth warmest on record. Above-average temperatures were observed across western and northern areas of the state, with near-average temperatures in southern Alaska.
Year-to-Date (January-July) Precipitation
Above-average precipitation was observed in the Northern Plains, Midwest and along parts of the East Coast. Record precipitation was observed across parts of the mid-Atlantic, where Pennsylvania was record wet with 34.08 inches of precipitation, 9.01 inches above average. Six additional states in the East were also much wetter than average.
Below-average precipitation was observed for locations across the West and Southern to Central Plains. Colorado had its 12th driest year-to-date on record with 8.79 inches of precipitation, 2.38 inches below average.
The lower Crystal River was running at 8 cfs near the state fish hatchery on Aug. 1, 2018. Lows flows on the Crystal have spurred action from the state, including curtailment and a call for instream flows. Photo credit: Heather Sackett via Aspen Journalism
Extremely low flows on the Crystal River have led to action by state officials, including turning down a diverter’s headgate and placing a call for water.
On Friday, the Colorado Water Conservation Board placed a “call” on the Crystal River, asking Division of Water Resources officials to administer an instream flow right on the river. The CWCB has an instream flow right on the Crystal for 100 cubic feet per second between Avalanche Creek and the confluence with the Roaring Fork River from June 1 through Sept. 30 each year.
The CWCB used the river [gage] near the state fish hatchery in Carbondale to determine that flow conditions were too low. As of Friday morning, the Crystal at that location was running at roughly 8.8 cfs.
Instream flow rights are owned and used by the state to help preserve and protect the natural environment, ecosystems and aquatic life, especially fish.
These rights, however, are junior to most agricultural and municipal rights in Colorado, which means the call may not do much to leave more water in the Crystal. The CWCB’s right on the Crystal dates to 1975.
Cows graze near the Crystal River, just upstream from the fish hatchery. The Crystal just downstream was running at around 8 cfs on Aug. 1, spurring action by state officials. Photo credit: Heather Sackett via Aspen Journalism
The goal, Bassi said, is to make sure future augmentation plans take into account instream flow rights.
“We have a duty to protect these water rights that we hold for the people of the state and we take it seriously,” said Linda Bassi, stream and lake protection chief at the CWCB. “It’s useful to have a record of when instream flow is not being met.”
Not having enough water in the lower Crystal River has been a concern in recent years. The 2012 drought left a section of the Crystal between Thompson Creek and the state fish hatchery dry during the late summer irrigation season. Several large diversions, including Town of Carbondale ditches, are located on that section.
This year conditions are approaching a similarly dry state, despite a goal of the 2016 Crystal River Management Plan to leave an additional 10 to 25 cfs in the river during moderate drought.
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” Bassi said. “There’s nothing we can do to make more water appear in the river.”
Sprinklers irrigate land on the east side of the Crystal River (in foreground), which is facing one of its driest years in recent history. Low flows on the Crystal have spurred action from the state, including curtailment and a call for instream flows. Photo credit: Heather Sackett via Aspen Journalism
Waste curtailed
On July 23, amid rapidly dropping flows on the Crystal, District 38 Water Commissioner Jake DeWolfe made the decision to turn down the headgate of the Lowline Ditch.
The diversion point for the Lowline is located on the Crystal River just north of the KOA campground, and has two water rights: one from 1902 for 19 cfs and one from 1936 for 21.5 cfs. The ditch irrigates land on the west side of Highway 133 roughly between River Valley Ranch Golf Club and Sustainable Settings.
At issue was a “tail ditch,” which is used to return water to the stream after it is used for irrigation. The amount of water in a tail ditch can vary during the irrigation season, but if irrigators are being efficient, in theory, not much water should be returned to the stream.
“There was excess water coming out of one of the tail ditches,” DeWolf said. “If there is an excess, we can go ahead and turn (the headgate) back down and leave the water in the river.”
DeWolf said they first turned the Lowline’s headgate down by about 5 cfs on July 23, then again the next day for a total reduction of about 8 cfs.
“There have been a couple of years when we asked the irrigator to turn it down themselves,” DeWolf said. “We did not even give them the opportunity in this case. We have the option to go ahead and curtail the ditch, which is what we did this time.”
The problem, Wolfe said, was not that the Lowline was diverting more than its decreed amount of 40.5 cfs; in fact it was diverting slightly less. The problem was that the Lowline Ditch was violating the newly implemented state guidelines regarding wasting water.
An internal guide to understanding waste, approved in June 2017 by the Colorado Division of Water Resources, defines “waste” as diverting water when not needed for beneficial use or running more water than is reasonably needed for application to beneficial use.
So how much is too much water in a tail ditch?
The guidelines say it is a judgement call that should be made on a case by case basis, but that “if the water commissioner can make adjustments to a diversion with no risk of depriving the irrigated land of the water necessary to accomplish the consumptive use of the plants being irrigated, then the amount of water at the tail end of the ditch is not reasonable and is waste.”
These new guidelines are a departure from the age-old Colorado water law doctrine of “use it or lose it,” which encourages water users to divert their full decreed amount, lest their water right be considered abandoned.
“With our new direction, (curtailment) is become more common,” DeWolfe said.
Because of diminishing flows on the Crystal, Wolfe said the Lowline Ditch was diverting roughly half the volume it was running at after it was curtailed July 23, which was about 19 cfs as of Friday.
But in a dry year like 2018, the Crystal River flows, not the state, will dictate if and how much diverters can take. There is so little water, in some cases senior water rights holders are having trouble getting enough water into their headgates, DeWolf said.
“There might be some ground to go unirrigated in this second cutting,” he said.
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is collaborating with The Aspen Times and the Glenwood Springs Independent on coverage of water and rivers. This story appeared in the Aug. 6, 2018 print edition of both papers.
Map of the Roaring Fork River watershed via the Roaring Fork Conservancy
Colorado has agreed to pay Kansas $2 million in a settlement resolving claims regarding Colorado’s past use of water under the Republican River Compact.
Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer said in a news release Friday that the settlement is an investment in the basin to ensure a better future for Kansas water users…
Under the provisions of the settlement , Kansas agreed to pursue “a good faith effort” to spend the money Colorado paid for the benefit of the South Fork of the Republican River Basin within Kansas.
Colorado also agreed to pursue an effort to spend an additional $2 million by 2027 in the basin within Colorado.
Folks in SE Colorado! 🤠Join us next week, Thurs, Aug 16, 6:30pm, Las Animas Community Center, for a free local showing of the newly released documentary – “The Arkansas River: From Leadville to Lamar”.
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. Read the draft agenda here, then hurry and reserve your spot today. Seats are limited!
The Colorado Water Trust began releasing 15 cubic feet per second of water into the river July 14. That’s about the equivalent of 15 soccer balls worth of water rolling by per second, said Zach Smith, an attorney at the Colorado Water Trust.
New funding sources have allowed the Water Trust to purchase more water and increase the releases to 25 cfs. The additional water brings the total acre-feet intended to be released into the river from 600 acre-feet to 1,800 acre-feet.
“That’s actually a huge help for the river,” said Kelly Romero-Heaney, water resources manager for the city of Steamboat Springs. “If we can get some additional flow to the river, that increases the available habitat for the aquatic life, in addition to helping to bring down the stream temperatures, so it’s really important given how dry and hot the summer has been.”
The boost could help the Yampa River meet criteria to re-open the river to recreation within city limits. The magic numbers to lift the voluntary closure are a flow consistently greater than 85 cfs at the Fifth Street Bridge and a water temperature below 75 degrees. Managers also consider the levels of dissolved oxygen in the water. Conditions in the Yampa don’t meet these criteria right now.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife has also instituted a voluntary closure of the river from Chuck Lewis State Wildlife Area to the western edge of Steamboat. The agency recently lifted a second, mandatory fishing closure of the tailwaters of Stagecoach Reservoir.
The closures are intended to protect fish, riparian plants and other life that depends on the river. Trout are cold-water fish that have evolved to function best in water temperatures around 50 to 60 degrees, according to a Parks and Wildlife news release. When temperatures exceed 70 degrees, they often stop feeding and become more susceptible to disease.
“We’ve worked closely with partners up there, including Colorado Parks and Wildlife, to determine that this is an appropriate increase in flows and will create some real benefits for aquatic life and recreational users up there,” said Mickey O’Hara, a water resources engineer at the Colorado Water Trust. “It sounds like that reach below Stagecoach Reservoir, since it opened back up, has seen some significant use, and these flows should help fish especially through that region all the way down through the city.”
Colorado River Basin in Colorado via the Colorado Geological Survey
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Dennis Webb):
The Colorado River District has agreed to boost water levels to help fish in the Roaring Fork River watershed while also conserving water for use by local irrigators later in the season and improving the chances for boosting flows this fall for endangered fish.
The action also could help protect water quality in the case of anticipated ash in waterways due to expected flooding and debris flows resulting from the Lake Christine Fire near Basalt.
The river district is releasing water from Ruedi Reservoir above Basalt to boost flows in the Fryingpan River and Roaring Fork River to help reduce water temperatures to benefit trout. Low flows and warm temperatures in western Colorado have led to Colorado Parks and Wildlife urging anglers to avoid fishing later in the day on numerous western Colorado waterways due to the stress trout currently are facing.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation approved the river district releases last week. They are expected to range between 50 and 100 cubic feet per second.
River district spokesman Zane Kessler said the water to be released is owned and managed by the river district’s enterprise…
The water technically is being delivered downstream for Grand Valley irrigation needs but is creating environmental benefits on its way there. The water otherwise would have been delivered from Green Mountain Reservoir south of Kremmling.
Kessler said the Ruedi releases will allow for conserving a part of what’s called the historic users pool at Green Mountain Reservoir for use later in the season, which would benefit Grand Valley irrigators. The releases also increase the chances that, despite it being a dry year, that pool can be declared to have a surplus. That surplus could then be delivered in September and October to what’s known as the 15-Mile Reach, a stretch of the Colorado River in the Grand Valley where the flows would benefit endangered fish.
“This has never been done before,” Kessler said of the flow agreement. “But we’ve rarely seen river levels like this before either.”
The potential for easing the impacts of ash flow also could be felt in the Grand Valley. There is concern that ash flows could force the Clifton Water District to suspend use of Colorado River water. Area water providers have an agreement to help each other in meeting short-term water needs should that kind of emergency situation arise, but doing so this year would further deplete drought-stressed supplies.
Kessler said retaining some Green Mountain Reservoir water for release later in the year also could benefit recreational uses of the Upper Colorado River.
Meanwhile, the river district is taking another step aimed at helping ensure that benefiting fish in the Roaring Fork Valley doesn’t harm fish on the Colorado River upstream of the Roaring Fork confluence. The district is currently delivering what Kessler called “fish water” from Wolford Reservoir north of Kremmling into the upper Colorado River because it is having to lower the reservoir’s water level in preparation for doing some work on the dam there.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced that whitewater boaters and the fishery in the Arkansas River will get a late-season boost in river flow, effective Tuesday.
Colorado Springs Utilities has agreed to move 1,000 acre-feet of water from Twin Lakes Reservoir to Lake Pueblo in support of the Voluntary Flow Management Program (VFMP), according to a press release.
Springs Utilities’ water customers will not be impacted by the release because the water will be collected in the utility’s storage account in Lake Pueblo…
The transfer also will provide cool relief for trout, which have been struggling with unseasonably warm temperatures, Josh Nehring, senior aquatic biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Southeast Region, said.
“This water should help to reduce and stabilize water temperatures into mid-August,” Nehring said, noting it will help the trout survive until cooler weather arrives in a few weeks…
White said it a great example of what the voluntary flow program is all about – river partners managing their water requests to the benefit of everyone.
“Early in the summer, Pueblo Water released over 2,650 acre-feet of water in support of the VFMP,” White said. “Then the Bureau of Reclamation, in cooperation with the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, released 13,100 acre-feet of water. Now we are getting an additional 1,000 acre-feet of water from Colorado Springs Utilities.”
Parts of the globe are experiencing “one of the most intense heat events ever seen”, according to climate scientists.
Climate scientists are worried after several locations in the northern hemisphere saw record high temperatures over the past week.
Meteorologist Nick Humphrey said in a blog post that the extreme spell of hot weather amounted to “a true roasting”, writing: “It is absolutely incredible and really one of the most intense heat events I’ve ever seen for so far north.”
The mercury hit 30.1C in Castlederg in Northern Ireland on June 29 – a new record – while temperatures in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Yerevan, Armenia, rose this week to 40.5C and 42C respectively.
In the US, the Washington Post reports that heat in Denver, Colorado soared to an all-time high of 40.6C on June 28.
Guinness World Records has said that in the town of Quriyet, Oman, on June 26, the lowest temperature over the 24-hour period was a sweltering 42.6C – making a new record for highest “low”.
Deaths linked to a heat wave in Canada’s Quebec province reached 33 on Thursday, health officials said after the region’s largest city Montreal recorded its record high of 36.6C on July 2.
In the UK the heatwave pushed mean temperatures for last month up to 14.8C, making it provisionally the third warmest June since records began in 1910.
According to Humphrey, who interpreted a heat map from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, even northern Siberia “has been getting blowtorched” with maximum temperatures of above 32C.
Click here to use a celsius to fahrenheit calculator.
FromAspen Journalism (Brent Gardner-Smith) via The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent:
Like children, every water year is different, but 2018 is now hanging out with some of the most notorious low-flow years in history.
This year started with a thin snowpack that ran off early and now has found trouble in a hot and dry summer.
The Bureau of Reclamation determined this week that 2018 had produced the fifth-lowest amount of runoff from the Colorado and Green rivers down to Lake Powell, between April and the end of July. That puts 2018 behind only 2013, 2012, 1977 and 2002, the low-water mark.
And locally, this year is now revealing dry reaches in the Roaring Fork and Crystal rivers not seen since 2012 or 2002.
Friday just before noon, the upper Roaring Fork River was dribbling through Aspen at 9.12 cubic feet per second, well below the environmental flow level of 32 cfs set by the state.
Also Friday morning, which saw some rare rain to the valley, a section of the lower Crystal River just above the state fish hatchery outside of Carbondale was barely running at 8.86 cfs.
The state’s environmental flow level in that reach of the Crystal is 100 cfs, and the 2016 Crystal River Management Plan set a less-ambitious flow target of 40 cfs for the reach.
Hunter Creek in Aspen was “flowing” at 0.48 cfs at its confluence with the Fork on Friday. That’s less than even half-a-basketball full of water in the stream bed.
“It’s a bad year,” said Alan Martellaro, a division engineer with the Colorado Division of Water Resources who manages water in the Colorado River basin above Grand Junction. “It’s not 2002, I don’t think, but it’s up there.”
This year already has a bad reputation on Colorado’s Western Slope, and especially in the southwest corner, which remains under exceptional drought conditions.
“Hydraulically, 2018 is stacking up across western Colorado as, potentially, depending upon your specific location, the driest year on record,” said John Currier, the chief engineer for the Colorado River District.
Another indicator of how dry 2018 is shaping up to be is the gage on the Roaring Fork River at Stillwater Road, just east of Aspen.
The gauge showed the Fork on Friday was flowing at 28 cfs, without any significant upstream diversions dropping the flow. The lowest flow on Aug. 3, in 53 years of record-keeping, was in 2002, when the river was flowing at 31.7 cfs.
A similar indicator can be found on the Crystal River at the gage that measures the river’s flow below Redstone, and above a series of diversion structures on the lower river.
Friday morning, that gauge showed the Crystal flowing at 68.5 cfs. The lowest flow on Aug. 3, in 62 years of record keeping, was in 1977 when the river was at 64 cfs.
In response to such low flows in the region, the River District on July 27 started releasing water it controls out of Ruedi Reservoir into the Fryingpan River, something it has not arranged to do since 2002.
By increasing flows by about 80 cfs up to 200 cfs in the lower Fryingpan, which runs into the Roaring Fork in Basalt, the District’s water helped cool the warm water in the Fork down to its confluence with the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs.
The water then also helped boost flows in the Colorado River near Grand Junction, where senior water rights known as “the Cameo call” are still calling for more water.
Such calls are often met by releasing water from Green Mountain Reservoir, south of Kremmling. But the River District and other water managers want to keep as much water as they can in Green Mountain until September, and the water released from Ruedi helps with that.
There was the added incentive this year to add water to the Fork and Pan to dilute the still-expected flow of ash and mud from Basalt Mountain in the wake of the Lake Christine Fire and the next heavy rainstorm.
There’s no easy way, however, to add water to the nearly-dry sections of the upper Roaring Fork and the lower Crystal rivers.
On Friday, for example, no water was being diverted upstream off the top of the Fork via the Twin Lakes/Independence Pass diversion system, and a related 3,000 acre-foot allotment of water that can be used to bolster flows already has been sent downstream.
In response to the low-flows, the city of Aspen has dropped its diversions into the Wheeler Ditch, which takes water from the Fork near the Aspen Club, from a potential maximum diversion of 10 cfs down to 0.5 cfs.
On the Crystal, a non-diversion agreement between the Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch, which diverts water from the Crystal, was not implemented this year, despite the dry conditions.
The agreement was meant help boost moderately low flows in the Crystal of around 40 cfs, not to help bring the river up from, say, 10 cfs to 25 cfs, which may not help the environment that much.
“If it’s not going to have an ecological benefit, it is not worth irrigators making the sacrifice,” said Heather Tattersall Lewin, the watershed action director at the Roaring Fork Conservancy.
On Thursday evening, Jim Kravitz, the naturalist program director at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, took note of the distressing lack of water in the upper Fork and lower Hunter Creek.
“I didn’t think flows were going to get this bad locally,” he said after walking up a dry Hunter Creek. “It’s eerie to hike up with no sound from the creek.”
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is covering rivers and water in the Roaring Fork and Colorado river basins for The Aspen Times. More at http://www.aspenjournalism.org.
Eric Kuhn has retired as manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, but he believes he has an important message about the Colorado River. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
A time of big pivots for Colorado water — with yet another reckoning to come
Eric Kuhn is now retired as general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, but he may be working on the most important project of his career, a book.
In that book, working with John Fleck of Albuquerque, he’s trying to make the case that science should not be ignored in figuring out how to manage the Colorado River during the 21st century—as it was when Congress approved the 1922 compact governing allocations among the seven states, Indian tribes, and, somewhat more fuzzily, Mexico.
Kuhn was honored recently in Glenwood Springs by his staff and others from around Colorado for his 37 years of work.
Trained as an electrical engineer, Kuhn had been a naval office on a nuclear-powered submarine before pursuing a career in nuclear power plants. But even in 1981, he could see that nuclear power wasn’t going in the right direction. When he noticed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal for a position at the Glenwood Springs-based water district, he applied.
Obviously, he got the job, moving from energy to water, from California to Colorado.
It was sharp pivot in Kuhn’s life. And Colorado since 1981 has also pivoted hard in very fundamental ways in its conversations about water.
Tom Alvey, who grows fruit and operates a packing shed in Hotchkiss, credited Kuhn with providing transparency and “getting the facts right” during his time as general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, beginning in 1996.
Bill Trampe, who owns a ranch that sprawls between Crested Butte and Gunnison, lauded Kuhn for having “the foresight to see where we were headed and what we needed to do to be effective in protecting water for the Western Slope.”
Peter Fleming, the river district’s general counsel, testified to Kuhn’s “highly intellectual approach to negotiations.” As arguments and counterarguments were waged at one session, said Fleming, he observed Kuhn scribbling into a notepad. Peering over his boss’s shoulder, he said, he saw numbers. What did they represent? “He was calculating complex integers,” Fleming discovered. In that scribbling could be seen a larger lesson.
“He wasn’t disinterested in what was going on,” said Fleming. “He just knew that the timing wasn’t right for him to offer what would inevitably be a good solution.”
Denver Water’s Jim Lochhead was also at the gathering in Glenwood, just a few blocks from where he had for many years staffed the “Aspen office” of one of the state’s leading law firms. Lochhead drew attention to Kuhn’s influence beyond Colorado’s traditional Eastern Slope versus Western Slope schisms to the broader seven-state Colorado River Basin. There, Kuhn’s voice about preparing for a warming climate has become influential.
“He is collaborative. He is innovative. He thinks about different solutions. He listens. He tries to find the common ground,” said Lochhead, now chief executive of Denver Water, an agency that provides water to 25 percent of all Colorado residents.
A time of pivots
Nobody, however, spoke directly to the giant pivots in water politics, policies and problems in the 37 years since Kuhn arrived in Colorado.
One of the largest pivots had already begun in 1981. The federal government had spent most of the 20th century building the giant dams, canals and other hydraulic infrastructure in the West. In Colorado, the greatest ambition was evident in the gigantic transfer of water from the Colorado River headwaters near Grand Lake to the benefit of farmers in northeastern Colorado. It’s called the Colorado-Big Thompson Project.
The transfer—some would call it a heist — was opposed on the Western Slope, of course. One result of the compromise was a 1937 state law that created the river district and charged it with “conservation, use and development of water in the Colorado River and its principal tributaries in Colorado.” It covers 15 counties, including Pitkin, Garfield and Eagle. Southwestern Colorado has a similar district.
Another outcome was federal construction of Green Mountain Reservoir, on the Blue River north of Silverthorne. The dam had immediate benefits to the Western Slope, helping regulate flows to the benefit of farmers around Grand Junction. Much later, the regulated flows were crucial to providing water for endangered fish species in the Colorado River.
Green Mountain Reservoir, on the Blue River between Kremmling and and Silverthorne, was built for Western Slope interests. Photo/Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District via The Mountain Town News.
A later enterprise, the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, hewed to the same template: It diverts water from the Roaring Fork drainage to farmers in southeast Colorado. For this, the Western Slope got Ruedi Reservoir. It was completed 50 years ago.
More projects were proposed, but in 1977 President Jimmy Carter announced they wouldn’t get funded. Westerners bristled and ridiculed Carter as a peanut-farmer in rain-drenched Georgia who didn’t understand the West. Ronald Reagan, arriving at the White House in 1981, was heralded as a Westerner who would right things. He only went half-way: Locals would have to come up with half the money for their dams and diversions. For most projects, it wasn’t nearly enough.
The Colorado River originates in Rocky Mountain Natonal Park and soon descends into the bucolic loveliness of Middle Park. Photo/Allen Best
Kuhn noted that during his time, two of the five projects on Carter’s hit list in Colorado were eventually built, if not to the sizes originally envisioned. One of them, Ridgway Reservoir (originally called Dallas Divide), provides hydroelectricity that is part of Aspen Electric’s 100 percent renewable portfolio.
Altogether, however, the river district during Kuhn’s time had a hand in building five smaller-size reservoirs. Wolford Mountain Reservoir near Kremmling, by far the largest, is two-thirds the size of Ruedi. It was built in co-operation with Denver Water.
The River District under Kuhn also worked with Denver Water on other projects. But when Kuhn started work in Glenwood Springs, the relations were rocky. Denver wanted to build a giant dam in the foothills southwest of the city. Two-thirds of the water behind the Two Forks Dam was to have come from the Western Slope, primarily Summit County. Water was to go to Denver’s fast-growing suburbs.
Kuhn had been assigned to represent the river district on a task force appointed by then-Gov. Dick Lamm, to help sort through the controversy. The Western Slope task force aligned with the environmental community and together they conceded need for a small Two Forks as well as expanded diversions from Winter Park area for an enlarged Gross Reservoir west of Boulder. In exchange, the task force said, Denver needed to commit to greater water conservation. Denver Water’s leaders, confident of their rightness to the point of cockiness, refused.
The drama was cut short in 1991 when the administration of President George H.W. Bush vetoed the project, which was to be on federal land, based on environmental impacts.
Kuhn points out that the levels of conservation the Western Slope and environmentalists asked of Denver were much less than what has actually occurred. Denver Water now uses the same water for roughly double the number of people it did in 1990. The default expectation of ever-more water supplies has been shattered.
“You have this decoupling of municipal growth and water use, and we really didn’t see that coming in the early 1980s,” Kuhn said in an interview last week.
Denver, Aspen and other communities have been part of a national trend of declining per-capita use of water that may be far from over. It’s a simple matter of economics. Wringing the sponge of water conservation is cheaper. More expensive is buying water from farms on the Great Plains, but it’s still cheaper than developing new supplies.
The Colorado River wends its way through southern Utah and, at Glen Canyon, is impounded into Lake Powell. Photo/Allen Best
Still being debated is how much water Colorado has to develop out of its entitlement, under compacts governing the Colorado River. As with Two Forks, a notion that the solution to water shortages is to build more dams and divert more still lingers. It assumes water remains available. A state report issued several years ago concluded that Colorado had as much as 1.5 million acre-feet of water in the Colorado River to develop.
Kuhn scoffed at that estimate. He said then that no more than 150,000 acre-feet remained—and, quite possibly, not even that. Even allocations for existing water uses are questionable because of the dangling uncertainty of the warming climate.
After rummaging around climate change science beginning in about 2000, Kuhn became increasingly vocal through published papers and other work about the need to recognize the profound implications of a warming climate on water supplies in the Colorado River and the demands.
“I was just reading some of the work that was coming out in the early 2000s, and it’s largely proven to be generally correct,” he said last week. “I am surprised how quickly it has come on, because there is so much noise in the system,” he added, referring to the inherent variability of weather, both temperature and precipitation. “Even from one year to the next there can be a lot of noise.”
A cloudy crystal ball
What this means exactly for Colorado is still hard to say. There’s still too much uncertainty about impacts to justify significant infrastructure investments at this time, according to even Denver Water. Kuhn agrees.
“It will take a long time to see how that pattern (of change) sets up,” he said.
Climate modeling suggests—but with low confidence—less snow and precipitation for southern Colorado and more for northern Colorado. The Elk Range between Aspen and Crested butte can be seen as a divide between that wetter and drier future.
“If I were in the southwest, in Durango, I would be a heck of a lot more concerned than if I were in Steamboat Springs, based on what we know now—but it’s still a guess,” he said.
Just inside the Mexican border, at San Luis Rio Colorado, nothing remains of the Colorado River except for its sandy bed. Photo/Allen Best
For the broader Colorado River Basin, though, Kuhn expects less water in the Colorado River as it flows into the Grand Canyon past Lees Ferry. In this, last winter was a harbinger of the future. There are profound implications for how the seven states of the Colorado River Basin – plus Mexico—move forward.
And that is the big idea for the book now being written. In it, he and Fleck point to a report issued before the Colorado River Compact was formally adopted by Congress in 1928. The framers of the compact had assumed 16.4 million acre-feet average flows in allocating the waters among the seven basin states — with more yet due Mexico. In fact, flows during 20th century proved to be somewhat less, about 15 million acre-feet. The report provided accurate evidence of lesser flows beginning in 1875 and, more circumstantially, to 1850.
In other words, it was wishful thinking to assume so much water — and based on what is known about global warming, it’s fair to assume even less water in the 21st century. Through the first 14 years of the century, according to the research of Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck, flows have declined 19 percent.
“It’s a story about ignoring inconvenient science,” Kuhn said of the book. “If you had accepted the science, it would have made the political job [of apportioning the waters] much more difficult.”
It’s a story from a century ago, he said — but one fully relevant going forward.
For more of Kuhn’s thinking about the future of the Colorado River, see brief white paper: “Tne Upper Basin is Watching.”
NCEI supports services that help businesses and economy
When weather events happen, economic repercussions usually follow. Consumer behavior as well as supply and demand for a product or raw material can be affected. Energy demand soars during heatwaves; insurance claims rise after hailstorms; snow slows in-store shopping but can increase online sales; and grain prices spike during drought.
Using NOAA’s data archive at NCEI, a broad array of third-party services are meeting the practical needs of companies and their customersUnderstanding how those impacts affect the U.S. economy has spurred a growing demand for analysis of weather and climate data. Using NOAA’s data archive at NCEI, a broad array of third-party services are meeting the practical needs of companies and their customers.
NOAA Data Support Weather Service Providers
Today, more than 250 weather service providers support businesses with information that helps answer how weather and climate affect economic outcomes. For many parts of the U.S. economy, third-party weather vendors are stepping in by analyzing data based on sector-specific issues. The vendors, also known as weather service providers or decision support providers, tailor applications to weather-related questions based on a wide range of needs.
By combining NCEI data with business-specific information, third-party weather vendors are taking the guesswork out of potential market changes. Many businesses use third-party services on a regular basis to study consumer behavior, logistics, weather patterns, and much more. Economic sectors include energy producers, retailers, seasonal maintenance crews, transportation, law firms, and insurance companies.
An increasing number of companies are faced with the need to adapt their business models based on weather volatility. Weather alone can cause the gross domestic product (GDP) to fluctuate 3 to 6 percent a year, or as much as $1.3 trillion, based on a National Weather Service analysis. Demand for value-added weather services is projected to grow by 10–15 percent a year, according to a new study for NCEI that illustrates the important uses of data by leading third-party service providers.
NCEI Weather and Climate Data Lay the Foundation
As the chief repository of NOAA data, NCEI houses a wealth of environmental data that weather service providers use in product and service development. Weather service providers apply NCEI’s data in many ways. Providers, such as The Weather Company, WeatherBELL Analytics, Baron, and AccuWeather, use NCEI’s data a step beyond developing weather forecasts.
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Energy traders develop consumer-demand forecasts when weather is expected to impact a region
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Transportation providers determine where to build facilities so that fog, snow, or other weather factors pose fewer challenges to logistics
Retailers analyze how seasonal patterns can affect merchandising and operations
With NCEI data, tailored services are poised for continued growthThe third-party weather service industry, currently valued at $7 billion, creates customized products such as maps, charts, graphics, and reports, or software tools and dashboards based on user specifications. Providers often accompany products with consultation services. With NCEI data, tailored services are poised for continued growth.
FromThe High Country News (Elena Saavedra Buckley):
West of Phoenix, Arizona, where cooling towers billow steam into the air, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station churns out more carbon-free energy than any other power producer in the country. But, in the light of a controversial ballot measure meant to steer Arizona towards renewable energy, Palo Verde’s fate has been caught in the crossfire of a battle between state utilities and environmentalists.
Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona, a committee backed by former Californian hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, drives the initiative. They submitted over twice the amount of signatures needed to get on the ballot. If successful, the measure would constitutionally require Arizona utilities to use 50 percent renewable resources by 2030, holding them accountable for certain percentages each year. But Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, funded a lawsuit filed last week against the initiative. The political action group that filed the suit claims most of the signatures are fraudulent, which the initiative denies. The utility has bigger worries than the signatures, though — they’re worried the measure would force Palo Verde to close in six years. An oversupply of solar, they say, would render the plant useless.
“A clean energy future is something we support,” the utility’s spokesperson Jenna Rowell said, “but you get there through a flexible plan.” The utility owns about a third of the plant, which they licensed to operate until the 2040s.
Palo Verde is the nation’s largest power-producing plant. A new ballot initiative could threaten its longevity. Photo credit: By Cuhlik – Own work, Public Domain, ttps://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11039169
In Nevada, an identical, Steyer-backed measure is already on the ballot. If the measures pass in November, the two states will join California as the West’s most ambitious examples of renewable commitment. Whether the measure succeeds will determine a step in the West’s path towards cleaner energy — and whether nuclear power, the country’s stronghold of carbon-free power, will be along for the ride.
On its face, the fight between the Clean Energy initiative and utilities is about the price tag. The Arizona utility claims that customers would see a $1,200 average annual uptick in their bills were the initiative to pass. That prediction is based on estimates done by the utility for solar infrastructure and maintenance costs between now and 2030, Rowell said. The Navajo Nation, whose coal generating plant is on shaky ground, also opposes the initiative because of its rumored rate hikes.
The Clean Energy committee disputes the $1,200 figure, saying solar would be cheaper for customers. Wesley Herche, an energy researcher at Arizona State University, released a study that found no correlation between renewable standards and rate increases in U.S. states. He said that solar prices have dropped more than four times what they were in 2006, when Arizona first committed to a renewable standard of 15 percent by 2025.
The two sides agree on little about the measure’s possible effects. Herche said that it’s difficult to convince old-guard utilities, especially those with financial stakes and decades-long commitments to plants like Palo Verde, to pivot to fast-changing renewables technology.
“If you’re a company that operates one way, and you’ve always operated that way, it’s hard to all of a sudden to ask them to change, to be nimble, to be Silicon Valley-like,” he said.
As the lawsuit stymies the ballot measure, Palo Verde’s future is a loose end. Arizona Public Service says the plant will shut down if the measure succeeds. If it closes, thousands of employees would lose their jobs. But the Clean Energy group points to predictions that say the plant could stay open even if the measure passes.
Beyond Arizona, nuclear energy’s place in the carbon-free future of the West is an open question. In California, whose renewable goal is already 50 percent by 2030, nuclear plants have closed decades before their licensed expiration dates, struggling to compete with cheaper natural gas and solar. Whether nuclear plants should stay open as a stable alternative to fossil fuels divides environmentalists. Amanda Ormond of the Western Grid Group, which promotes incorporating clean energy into the grid, thinks nuclear power is an obstacle to a functional renewable future.
“Transitions have costs, and this is a huge transition,” Ormond said of the ballot measure’s proposals. “Palo Verde might close anyway. It’s an inflexible, expensive resource, and it will face the consequences of any resource.”
In the meantime, a utility regulator has proposed an alternate clean energy plan to the Arizona Corporation Commission, the organization that regulates the state’s utilities. Commissioner Andy Tobin wants to require utilities to meet an 80 percent target, including nuclear, by 2050. “The one thing I know about energy right now is that everything is uncertain,” Tobin said. He wants his plan to push clean energy without amending the constitution.
Time and legislative obstacles stand in the way of the Clean Energy initiative. But even if it fails, numbers show that Arizona voters are ready for renewables — in two recent polls, Arizonans wanted their state to prioritize solar power over all other resources. “We’re moving to renewable energy,” Ormond. “The question is how fast.”
Elena Saavedra Buckley is an editorial intern at High Country News.
On Aug. 5, 2015, Environmental Protection Agency workers at the long-abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado, accidentally released 3 million gallons of acidic water. The orange plume, laden with iron, zinc, cadmium and arsenic, flowed into the Animas River, then on into New Mexico and Utah (“Silverton’s Gold King Reckoning,” HCN, 5/2/16). Those two states and the Navajo Nation filed lawsuits seeking to recoup millions of dollars in cleanup costs from the EPA.
Cement Creek aerial photo — Jonathan Thompson via Twitter
FOLLOWUP
In late July, the EPA filed a motion to dismiss the combined lawsuits. The agency says that court intervention is unnecessary because it’s already working on cleaning up the mess — the Gold King and 47 other mine sites got Superfund status in 2016. The EPA ran out of room for storing the sludge waste from water treatment, and in mid-June, workers began moving it to a controversial new site northeast of Silverton. Critics say that location endangers fish, and in early July, a sludge truck crashed, spilling 9 cubic yards into a creek. The EPA is still working on a long-term cleanup plan for the Superfund sites in the Upper Animas watershed.
As of July 25, the San Juan River is currently flowing at 73.2 cubic feet per second (cfs).
According to Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC) Senior Hydrologist Greg Smith, his- torically, the San Juan River is usu- ally flowing around 150 or 160 cfs.
“That’s kind of the mid-range, that’s kind of the median value, historically. So, I mean, we’re less than half that,” Smith said.
The San Juan River is above flows that were recorded back during the drought of 2002, Smith added later.
During the 2002 drought, cfs levels were around 45-50, Smith explained.
“Still, it’s kind of in the bottom few years, you know, the current flows,” Smith said.
These low river flows stem from the “dismal” winter season that Archuleta County had with poor snowpack conditions, Smith added further.
“And then, of course, we entered the spring somewhat dry as well, which didn’t benefit things. And you still have draws on the river from ir- rigation, especially as you go further downstream,” Smith explained.
This year, Smith described, was the “perfect storm” for low river flows.
Additionally, the seasonal spring runoff volume is currently at 71,000 acre feet (AF) for the San Juan River in Pagosa Springs, Smith added.
“It’s probably not going to be a lot more than that when it’s all to- taled up, the April through July for this year,” Smith said. “And that’s going to be, probably, it looks like to me, the third lowest on record.”
The lowest recorded spring run- off volume was recorded in 2002 with 23,000 AF flows, Smith noted.
The CBRFC has records for spring runoff volumes for the San Juan River dating back to 1936, Smith added later.
“Kind of the only hope we have at this point is if we can just get enough active monsoon weather to at least give us some additional runoff from rain flow,” Smith com- mented.
“The bulk of what you get comes from snow melt. You can get some pretty good stream flows due to the monsoon, due to thunderstorms, but they’re short-lived,” Smith said later.
Public perception
When the public sees such low cfs numbers for the San Juan River, Smith explained that educating the public depends on what its uses are for the river.
“I mean there’s concern for everybody when you get real low flows, you know, from people get concerned about the fisheries and the amount for irrigation,” Smith explained.
A lot of the general concern for the public is if this current year is a low-flow year for the river, what will happen next year, Smith noted.
“Right now at least we have a benefit from how wet last year was,” Smith described. “You know, Navajo Reservoir managed, as you get further downstream, to have some pretty good storage carry over from last year.”
Some of that storage is “saving people” this year, Smith noted.
Another dry year could create some significant concerns among the public, Smith added later.
“There’s been enough water, at least below, for folks below the reservoir. As my understanding this year that they didn’t have re- ally serious shortages,” Smith said.
Low in-stream flows can affect recreational activities as well as irrigation, Smith explained.
However, because of last year’s wet season, Smith notes that there is some optimism to be felt.
“It is cause for concern when you get flows that low. But, you know, this year, again, I think we benefited from last year being so wet. So, it could have been so much worse this year, especially as you get further downstream below the reservoirs,” Smith explained.
Next year will be a year that the CBRFC watches closely, Smith stated.
“Because we could be in a tough situation next year if we had an- other year like this,” Smith said.
Unfortunately, low river flows are a problem that just can’t be solved physically, Smith later com- mented.
“You’re just kind of at the mercy of what happens. Below reservoirs you have a little more control of course in maintaining certain levels for fisheries or for irrigation needs as long as you have the wa- ter source,” Smith said. “But when you’re away from that, when you’re up in the higher elevation headwa- ters, you’re pretty much just at the mercy of mother nature.”
People are seeing flows that are certainly among the lower ones that have been on record for this type of year, Smith added later.
“If folks are saying ‘Wow, I haven’t really seen this,’ then, you know, they probably haven’t,” Smith explained.
“It’s amazingly low. Hopefully we’ll get some monsoon moisture here to push us through the rest of the summer.”
Swim class on the San Juan River. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
At the intersection of bluegrass & carbon ranching in Colorado
TELLURIDE, Colo. – If both lie within Colorado, eight hours apart by car, Telluride and Lamar would seem to have little in common.
From Lamar, it’s 35 minutes to Kansas, too far away to see even the faint outline of the Rocky Mountains. It was on the Santa Fe Trail and has lots of interesting history. But today it’s a just-getting-by farming town where the politics run red. In the last presidential election, 70 percent of voters in Prowers County voted for Trump, 24 percent for Clinton.
It’s almost exactly opposite in Telluride and San Miguel County: 24 percent voted for Trump and 69 percent for Clinton. The setting is different, of course. Telluride is a place that can cause jaws to literally drop if people arrive for the first time when a rainbow is arching at the end of the box-end canyon on a summer evening. Oprah sprang $14 million for a house a couple years ago. Other billionaires fly on private jets in and out of the airport on a nearby mesa. Those less well-heeled arrive by car for the nearly non-stop festivals that run through the summer.
Now, these two physically and demographically disparate places in Colorado have become connected financially through a carbon offset program.
That relationship came into sharper focus in June as 15,000 people gathered at the 45th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Most of the “festivarians” come from Colorado, particularly Denver and other Front Range cities, but 20 to 25 percent fly to Colorado. Every state is represented and about 10 foreign countries. This sort of thing can be tracked both in post-surveys but also in on-line registrations.
Festival organizer Planet Bluegrass has long been conscious of the festival’s role in generating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Steve Szymaski, who has been with Planet Bluegrass since 1988 and is vice president, says the company began making efforts to offset the carbon emissions its causes in 2003. “It’s really a philosophy of wanting to understand that that everything has impacts, and that there are ways to encourage renewable energy.”
Planet Bluegrass has invested in both renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets, two parallel but different financial devices.
In the early years, Planet Bluegrass purchased renewable energy certificates for wind, solar and hydro. Most of the money went to wind farms, including one in Minnesota. For three years the money went to a methane-reduction project at a dairy in the Central Valley of California. For two years, money went to a methane-capture project at landfill in Colorado’s Larimer County.
Planet Bluegrass has expanded its accountability over the years. Electricity—produced mostly by burning coal and natural gas—represents just 1 percent of electrical use associated with the festival. lodging represents another small component. Travel—trucking equipment, by performers, even shuttles during the festival—represents the lion’s share. Largest of all is travel by the attendees, 87 percent of the festival’s carbon footprint. The festival last year generated an estimated 2,100 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Photo via TellurideValleyFloor.org
This year, the bluegrass festival took a new tac. Keeping the dollars local or at least semi-local was important. Telluride’s Pinhead Climate Institute offered an appealing opportunity in a package deal.
The Town of Telluride is also participating for five years, offsetting operations of the in-town bus shuttle, called the Galloping Goose. Mountainfilm last year participated, and a program involving jet travel from the mesa-top Telluride Regional airport, highest in the county to offer commercial service, is also being assembled.
Shepherding the program is Adam Chambers, one of the three co-founders of the climate offshoot of the Pinhead Institute. He has worked extensively in carbon offset programs elsewhere in the country, from the Carolinas to California. “If I were to characterize myself as anything, it would be as a carbon accountant,” he says.
The Pinhead’s carbon offset work got launched through a $50,000 grant from the Telluride Foundation’s program designed to foster innovation. To get the grant, the idea had to get strong community support. It did. Telluride has vowed to become a carbon-neutral community. The sign at the entrance to town says so.
Why not just avoid carbon in energy use? Not likely any time soon, at Telluride or other mountain resort towns. Chambers says that residents of Telluride, Mountain Village and San Miguel County altogether have double the national carbon footprint. This estimate may skew conservative, as it makes no attempt to take responsibility for how its visitors get there or get home except as it may involve sale of fossil fuels locally. The mesa-top airport sells 500,000 gallons of aviation fuel annually. Most guests arrive at other airports outside the county.
There’s only so much switching out of lightbulbs possible. Electricity for Telluride still comes primarily from coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, so even if the town had electric buses they would have a carbon footprint. Jets burn gas—and lots of it. This energy transition is far from complete.
Along the Santa Fe Trail
That’s where the 14,500-acre May ranch near Lamar comes into the picture. Its native sod has never been turned by a plow. That’s a rarity on the Great Plains.
The ranch lies near the Arkansas River. Traders on the Santa Fe Trail wheeled their carts along the river in the 1830s and 1840s, stopping at Bent’s Fort. In late 1864, just a few years after the founding of Denver 200 miles to the northwest, Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians had taken shelter along Sand Creek, at a site north of today’s ranch. The promises were broken when soldiers under the command of John Chivington, the hero of a Civil War battle in New Mexico, whooped down with guns blazing at dawn. Today, the Sand Creek Massacre is observed by Native Americans and Anglos both each year the day after Thanksgiving.
Greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes and smoke stacks have occupied much of the attention of the environmental movement. They’re not everything, though. The Environmental Protection Agency in April said that 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from farms and deforestation.
The May Ranch near Lamar, Colo., has never been plowed. Photo/Ducks Unlimited via The Mountain Town News
Most of the attention usually goes to logging of rainforests in Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere. But the plowing of the Great Plains, the world’s most productive farm region, also ranks high—and, some say, higher.
The great plow-up continues. The World Wildlife Fund, in an October 2017 report called “Plowprint,” estimated 2.5 million acres of grassland on the Great Plains of the United States and Canada had been plowed the prior year. The organization worries about the grasslands being an “absolutely underappreciated ecosystem,” in the words of Martha Kauffman, of the non-profit office in Bozeman, Mont.
Native grasslands sequester carbon as they grow grass. That’s the key to this new connection between Telluride and the May Ranch. Plowing releases carbon into the atmosphere. That makes keeping the land unplowed worth something in the fledgling market of carbon offsets.
Owners of the ranch, the May family, are being paid essentially to stay the course, to do nothing different.
That’s a tricky concept to absorb, kind of like negative numbers. This is how Chambers explains the concept:
“You are saying to farmer Dallas May, ‘You have a stock of carbon in your carbon bank account, and you are agreeing to keep that carbon forever in your bank account without pursuing other crop options that would allow you to deplete that carbon stock. You are not a regulated entity, so you can emit to the atmosphere without any negative repercussions. So, nice work on being a carbon shepherd. You are forgoing plowing the soil to grow soybeans or some other crop. But this carbon farming might be more predictable than commodity prices.”
Spare the plow?
How the ranch came to spare the plow for so long is not clear. What is clear, according to the testimony of Ducks Unlimited, a key partner in preserving its unbroken character, is that there have been threats from every direction. A large diary operation was interested in plowing the native vegetation to plant feed crops with center-pivot irrigation. Next to the ranch, on other property, 2,400 acres of prairie were plowed up in just one month several years ago.
This statistic comes from Billy Gascoigne, an economist and environmental markets specialist for Ducks Unlimited. Based in Fort Collins, Colo., he previously worked in the Prairie Potholes region in the Dakotas. That’s where Ducks Unlimited negotiated the first large carbon transaction in 2015.
Now, the same principles and protocols for determining value have been applied to the 14,500-acre ranch in Colorado.
Billy Gascoigne. Photo credit: The Mountain Town News
Using protocol established by the American Carbon Registry, Ducks Unlimited determined that plowing the native grasses to grow corn or wheat would release around 8,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year for the next 50 years. Conserving these grasslands equates to removing the annual emissions of 50,000 cars, according to the calculations of the registry.
The ranch is “literally surrounded on all four sides by cropland and had many offers to plow up the grasslands,” says Gascoigne. “We worked with our partners in the land trust community to get ahead of the plow and make sure that carbon stays in the belowground soil.”
The owner of the ranch, the May family, had been on the property for 30 years and only recently had purchased it. Dallas May, the patriarch of the ranch family, wanted to find a way to preserve the ranch, and hence begin reaching out to conservation organizations to explore options that would not damage the wildlife habitat and would allow continued livestock grazing to occur.
May had come to appreciate the value of the property as wildlife habitat. The Audubon Society has designated the ranch as an area of significance for birds as well as an essential corridor link between two populations of lesser prairie chickens. It also has ducks.
More common
Carbon offsets have become more common. They represent the act of reducing, avoiding, destroying or sequestering the equivalent of a ton of greenhouse gas in one place to “offset” an emission taking place somewhere else, as GreenBiz explained in 2009.
The market remains a voluntary one in Colorado and most places. The Disney Corporation, Shell, Chevrolet and others have used the device to offset emissions.
Another major multi-national corporation will soon announce another offset project involving land in eastern Colorado, says Chambers.
Colorado Green, located between Springfield and Lamar, was Colorado’s first, large wind farm. Photo/Allen Best
This is a voluntary market. Only California has a price on carbon emissions among U.S. states. As relates to prairie ecosystems, there are two protocols for establishing the value of the offset. But because the market for offsets remain small, values are still being determined.
Planet Bluegrass’s Szymanski says his company paid $30,000 this year to offset the impacts of the festival in Telluride. Other years, he says, he has paid as little as $10,000. “This is a small drop in the bucket compared to what Fortune 500 companies can do,” he says. “But we were there at the start.”
The Pinhead Institute wanted to keep it “local,” and Colorado fits within that definition. Other places, closer to Telluride, could in theory work. But getting small plots of land, such as conservation easements on hillsides that might otherwise be carved up into estates, is impossible to do. “The numbers just aren’t large enough to pull it off,” says Gascoigne.
Planet Bluegrass was happy to keep the money local, too. “We feel it was important to get behind this because it was new and they were hungry,” says Szymanski.
The most important point, says Gascoigne, is you don’t have to go preserve a rain forest on another continent to do good work. He believes he is doing very consequential work just eight hours from Telluride.
Avon photo via Jack Affleck and the Mountain Town News.
Click here to view the announcement and to register. Here’s an excerpt:
The Color of Water: Exploring the Spectrum October 9 -11, 2018 Westin Riverfront Resort – Avon, CO
FEATURED PRESENTER: ANTHONY POPONI
In a galaxy far, far away in another lifetime Anthony was a watershed professional and worked on rivers and creeks in the Gunnison Valley for several years. During his professional career Anthony has always been a communicator and favored roles where he either entertains or educates and occasionally he even does both. Anthony loves connecting dots in both simple drawings and in complex settings where his inner-networker brings together individuals to catalyze collaboration and patnerships. He does it all with an authentic personality and always weaves in humor into everything he touches. Laugh and learn along the way with Anthony.
The plan calls for 2020 fuel-efficiency standards to be frozen in place through 2026 while sorting out what a new rule could look like, as well as ending California’s ability to set its own, more stringent standards. The end result will be a huge uptick in carbon emissions.
The Obama rules were made in 2012 after consultation with the auto industry and would have increased car fuel-efficiency standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by model year 2026. The new proposal—announced by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation—would freeze efficiency standards at 43.7 mpg through model year 2026.
California has the ability to set even stricter standards for auto emissions, thanks to a waiver the EPA granted the state in 2013. There are a dozen other states that follow those standards as well. Revoking that waiver, despite the EPA commitment to “cooperative federalism,” is an, uh, odd move.
Robbie Orvis, an analyst with policy research group Energy Innovation, told Earther that revoking California’s waiver is “not in the spirit of the Clean Air Act, and the way it’s been implemented in the past.”
On an existential front, the new rule proposal will commit a hell of a lot more carbon to the atmosphere. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that it will result in an extra 130 million metric tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere in 2030. That’s the equivalent of adding 30 coal-fired power plants to the grid.
Because people are likely to hang onto their cars for many years, the impacts would continue to play out beyond 2030. An analysis by Energy Innovation found that by 2035, U.S. transportation emissions will be 11 percent higher than they would be if the Obama-era standards and California’s waiver were kept in place.
The move will also put the U.S. behind the curve globally. While our weirdo climate-denying president obviously doesn’t care about the atmosphere or having a habitable planet, other countries do. And they’ve responded by putting in place stringent fuel efficiency standards, including many based on those in California.
The rollback ensures that the U.S. will be spinning its wheels on climate while the rest of the world forges ahead. That could have very real impacts on the fate of U.S. automakers viability and profits as they produce a wider range of cars. It could also inspire countries to be less ambitious.
“The top vehicle standards in the rest of the world are in line with existing standards,” Orvis said, referring to the Obama-era standards. “Undoing this will make U.S. automakers less competitive with automakers in other markets who are moving ahead making more efficient vehicles. It’s moving us in the wrong direction and making us less competitive with the rest of the world.”
Stanford researchers map out groundwater at stake in the wake of a court decision that bolsters Native American rights to the precious resource across an increasingly arid West.
California’s Coachella Valley may be ground zero for a new chapter in water rights for Native American tribes, according to a new Stanford study published in the journal Science.
Local water agencies have pumped so much water from aquifers to supply homes, farmland and resorts in the Coachella Valley that the land is sinking. The Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, created in 1876, runs in a checkerboard pattern in the area of Palm Springs. (Image credit: Tim Roberts Photography / Shutterstock)
Better known for lush golf courses, glittering pools, a popular music festival and temperatures topping 120 degrees, this inland desert is also home to the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, which has fought since 2013 for federal courts to affirm its right to groundwater beneath its reservation. Lower courts ruled in the tribe’s favor, and in late 2017 the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal.
Observers immediately recognized that the decision could set a powerful precedent for tribal groundwater claims, which have suffered murky legal status for more than 100 years. But how much groundwater is at stake as tribes assert this newly bolstered right – and where these claims may clash with nontribal users in an increasingly arid West – remained uncharted until now.
Sizing up water rights
The study reveals that court decrees and settlements have resolved or proposed rights for tribes in western states to use more than 10.5 million acre-feet of surface water and groundwater annually. To put that in perspective, this would be nearly enough water to irrigate all of the alfalfa, almond and rice fields in California for a year. “It’s a major volume,” said lead author Philip Womble, a PhD student in environment and resources in the Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).
Most unresolved Native American claims to groundwater exist in areas where there’s reason to believe major aquifers could yield significant amounts of groundwater, including in some places where nontribal wells already dot the landscape and increased pumping by tribes might disrupt their production. (Image credit: Philip Womble)
Before the Agua Caliente ruling, the study shows, tribal rights exclusively for groundwater made up a small portion – 4 percent – of all tribal freshwater rights in 17 western states. Now, more tribes will likely seek to resolve their rights to control and use water from the aquifers beneath their land, according to Womble and his co-authors, who include Water in the West executive director and Woods Institute of the Environment professor Leon Szeptycki, as well as Water in the West non-resident fellows Debra Perrone and Rebecca Nelson.
This shift comes at a time when questions of who owns the aquifer and how they can use the water holds increasing urgency, as western states face the likely prospect of demand outstripping the supply of legally available freshwater in most western watersheds by 2030.
“Indigenous communities in several countries have struggled to gain rights to their natural resources,” said study co-author Steven Gorelick, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford Earth and director of the Global Freshwater Initiative. Almost half of all homes on Native American land lack adequate access to drinking water or waste disposal facilities, compared to less than 1 percent for U.S. homes overall. The Agua Caliente ruling, Gorelick said, “is a very important step forward in restoring balance to those injured Native American tribes.”
Competing for a precious resource
In the Coachella Valley, the Agua Caliente tribe has for decades purchased water from local agencies, which have pumped so much water from the region’s aquifers that the land is sinking. Now, as the next phase of Agua Caliente’s lawsuit unfolds in federal court, the tribe is seeking to have judges put a number on its groundwater rights, establishing how much water it can pump from the Coachella Valley aquifer – potentially before most other users are entitled to a single drop.
Before the Agua Caliente ruling in late 2017, tribal rights exclusively for groundwater made up a just 4 percent of all tribal freshwater rights in 17 western states. (Image credit: Philip Womble)
Today, the study shows, fewer than 60 tribes in the western U.S. have this level of legal certainty around their rights to fresh water from any source – whether from lakes and rivers on the surface, or from aquifers underground. Many more tribes have unresolved rights: According to the study, as many as 236 tribes in the western U.S. have lands with groundwater rights that have not been finally quantified in court or in settlements. In all, the research suggests, tribes control at least some water from so many aquifers across the West that any plan to sustainably manage water in the region would be incomplete without considering their role.
These unresolved groundwater claims span large swaths of Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Utah, and smaller clusters can be found in all other western states except Colorado. Most of them exist in areas where there’s reason to believe major aquifers could yield significant amounts of groundwater, including in some places where nontribal wells already dot the landscape and increased pumping by tribes might disrupt their production.
Ripple effects for laws and markets
“Court disputes usually focus on the specific facts of a given case,” said Womble, who specializes in water policy in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford Earth. He is also an attorney. His team has captured a bigger picture that could help inform decisions about groundwater management throughout the U.S. and in other countries that recognize indigenous community water rights, including Australia, Canada, Chile and New Zealand.
“Even though a U.S. court decision clearly isn’t binding in another country,” Womble said, “it could provide a persuasive precedent that courts confronting this issue in other nations might look to.” Historically, he said, courts in Canada and Chile have adopted some terminology and approaches from U.S. water law.
Already, Gorelick added, the study results suggest that the creation of market-based systems for renting water rights could work to indigenous communities’ advantage. “With this ruling,” he said, “Native American tribes with higher priority rights are now in the driver’s seat to potentially benefit from participating in water markets.”
Steven Gorelick is also Stanford’s Cyrus Fisher Tolman Professor and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Additional co-authors are from the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Washington Law School and Harvard Law School.
The research was funded by the Switzer Foundation and the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s and excerpt:
Summary
Early in the drought week, moderate precipitation fell along the East Coast with the heaviest rains falling in the eastern Carolinas and central Pennsylvania. Much-needed rains fell in a swath of area covering eastern Wyoming, much of Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, eastern Colorado and the majority of New Mexico. The northern Plains, Midwest and South saw lighter precipitation amounts. Central and south Texas saw little to no precipitation during the week while the dry pattern continued for much of the West. For the month of July, preliminary statewide temperature data suggest much of the U.S. was warmer than average. The West, Southwest, South, and Northeast were among the warmest third of historical records which date back 124 years. Total precipitation amounts for the month of July were below average for much of the Midwest and Northwest. Also during the month of July, above average precipitation fell in the Mid-Atlantic States to Northeast, Southwest and parts of the High Plains…
Much-needed precipitation fell across most of Oklahoma and west central Arkansas, prompting the contraction of drought in some locations. Anywhere from a half inch to nearly 3 inches fell mostly north of I-40 in Oklahoma and south of I-40 in Arkansas. There was a precipitation surplus in parts of western Oklahoma stretching into north Texas, prompting the further contraction of drought and abnormal dryness there as well as in the central part of Oklahoma. In northeast Oklahoma, abundant precipitation the past 30 days prompted the removal of D3. Drought/dryness continued for much of Texas. Precipitation departures mounted, with precipitation approaching 10 percent of normal at the 30-, 60-, and 90-day time periods in much of south and east Texas. Exceptional drought was added to some locations in the south central part of the state where the dryness is the worse as well as in north central Texas along the Oklahoma border. Moderate to severe drought was contracted in southwest Arkansas where moderate rains fell…
A swath of light to moderate precipitation fell in an area roughly covering north and east Wyoming, east Colorado and much of Nebraska and Kansas. The heaviest precipitation fell in western Nebraska, Kansas and eastern Colorado where amounts of 2 inches were widespread. Despite the rains, long-term drought was hardly effected. There was a slight improvement in southeast Colorado, and D1 was removed in southwest Kansas where short term indicators have rebounded. Despite the monsoon season ramping up, dryness continued in west central Colorado where D3 was expanded. Moderate drought was expanded in southwest Wyoming where it remained dry during the period. There was also a slight expansion of D0 and D1 in North Dakota while D0 was contracted in southeast North Dakota into northeast South Dakota…
A swath of light to moderate precipitation fell in an area roughly covering north and east Wyoming and east Colorado. Monsoon rains continued to provide drought relief for some areas of the Southwest. Southern New Mexico saw the greatest improvements as drought was roughly reduced by 1-category in many areas. The heaviest rains have yet to reach east central New Mexico where extreme drought was expanded. The Northwest remains dry as precipitation during the past 6 months was 50-75 percent of normal across much of the region. Wetness prevailed in much of southern Montana. Abnormal dryness (D0) was expanded in Idaho where short-term deficits exist. Based on preliminary data, July ranked as one of the ten driest July’s on record in Idaho. The dry season continued in California and typically no changes are made there this time of year. However, some indices were showing greater drought than what is currently depicted. If negative impacts start to come in, then perhaps degradations would be needed. Wildfires continue to burn in the West. Of those, the Goose Creek fire in Nevada has burned more than 120,000 acres and the Carr Fire, outside of Redding, California, has burned more than 110,000 acres…
Looking Ahead
During the next five days, moderate to heavy precipitation is projected to fall along the East Coast with amounts generally totaling up to five inches. The heaviest rains are forecasted to fall in the Southern Appalachians and the Panhandle of Florida. Much of the South is forecasted to remain dry during the next five days but average temperatures are expected to remain near normal. Temperatures could be as much as 10-20 degrees F below normal for parts of the Midwest early in the period along with 1-2 inches of precipitation. Temperatures in this area are expected to rebound later in the period. The Southwest Monsoon is expected to continue, producing beneficial rains for New Mexico and parts of Arizona. The Climate Prediction Center expects the greatest odds of above normal temperatures in the Southern Rockies stretching into the High Plains and in the Northeast during the next 6-10 days. The greatest probability of below normal precipitation during this period is centered in the High Plains.
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
USE MEAD AS A BATTERY?
A proposal to use Lake Mead to store energy by pumping water into it from downstream using solar power and then releasing the water through the dam’s hydropower plant to meet peak energy demands has generated excitement and controversy. This Nevada Independent article sums up the potential and the complications of implementing such a plan.
Building a pipeline from Lake Nighthorse to Farmington could cost between $83 million and $173 million without calculating the cost of acquiring right of way access, a consultant to the San Juan Water Commission told the group today.
Rick Cox, a senior engineer for the engineering firm AECOM who also serves as a consultant for the San Juan Water Commission, targeted that figure while delivering a presentation for the water commission during its monthly meeting here.
The commission spent about $20,000 on a study to look at three alternatives that could help local water users if another mine spill occurred in Colorado and dumped toxic material in the Animas River. Those alternatives included building a small-diameter pipeline from Lake Nighthorse, building a large-diameter pipeline from Lake Nighthorse and building additional storage reservoirs.
The lake is a storage facility located in a recently annexed portion of the city of Durango, Colorado. It stores water from the Animas River for several member entities including the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Southern Ute Tribe, the city of Durango and the San Juan Water Commission.
Building shallow ponds to increase the storage capacity by 50 million gallons at the lake was the least expensive of the three options cited during today’s meeting. Cox said it would cost about $18 million. The additional 50 million gallons of storage would last about 14 days.
The San Juan Water Commission represents Aztec, Bloomfield, Farmington and rural water users in San Juan County. Cox said not all of those water utilities would require additional storage capacity if another mine spill takes place.
He explained that some water utilities, such as the Lower Valley Water Users, already have enough storage capacity. Other water users, such as the city of Bloomfield, could benefit from additional storage capacity, Cox said.
Pipeline could provide water during drought
While the additional water storage capacity would help local water users if another mishap like the Gold King Mine spill of August 2015 occurs, it would not provide much help during drought conditions, Cox said.
A large-diameter pipeline could provide the water users with water for up to 114 days during drought, Cox said.
The commission is considering having a more extensive feasibility study conducted on the three alternatives presented by Cox. San Juan Water Commission executive director Aaron Chavez said that would cost about $250,000…
The San Juan Water Commission has rights to 20,800 acre-feet of water stored in Lake Nighthorse. During a drought, the water commission can call upon the Animas-La Plata Operations, Maintenance and Replacement Association, which oversees Lake Nighthorse operations, to release water for San Juan County water users. Currently, the only way to get that water from Lake Nighthorse to the water users in New Mexico is to release it back into the Animas River. A pipeline would ensure all the water released from Lake Nighthorse reaches water users in San Juan County.
Animas-La Plata Operations, Maintenance and Replacement Association general manager Russ Howard warned commissioners not to rely on Lake Nighthorse. Howard said it could take years to refill the reservoir after water is withdrawn. He warned if there was a multiple-year drought, Lake Nighthorse could only be an option for one year.
From the University of Colorado (Molly Phannenstiel):
Jessica Ghent has had an eventful summer.
As part of a nine-week research internship at CU Boulder, the Front Range Community College student is studying the topography of Colorado’s Mount Princeton to find the ideal placement for ground control points, which are physical markers that drones can follow to create a digital map of the area.
Ghent will use the drone images to make a 3D digital elevation model of the area to understand how to help prevent debris flows, which are fast-moving masses of rock that can destroy towns and homes in a matter of minutes.
She wants to find out how debris flows start and how to improve early-warning systems in the future.
Ghent is one of 11 students participating in the Research Experience for Community College Students (RECCS) program hosted by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).
Now entering its fifth year, RECCS gives Colorado community college students hands-on research opportunities as they look ahead in their careers.
“The RECCS program is amazing, and it’s so beneficial,” Ghent said. “We all go into something lacking confidence and feel like we don’t know enough, but it’s cool to be around a lot of different people with science backgrounds and learn more about things that you wouldn’t have necessarily come into contact with.”
Sean Will, a student at the Community College of Denver, is studying beaver habitats by looking at water properties and soil permeability to study how this might affect droughts. The research will help reveal whether beaver dams can efficiently manage a limited water supply.
“The research experience is very valuable, not just if I continue on with the research career track, but even if I go back into business or something, I can take a lot of the skills from the RECCS program,” Will said.
RECCS Director Anne Gold and Program Manager Renee Curry Minaya say the program teaches community college students valuable skills that will help them in their careers.
“Being part of a professional research group gives a lot of skills: multitasking, organization, professionalism, interpersonal professional communication skills and how to set goals realistically and work towards them,” Gold said.
Students are assigned a research question to answer on their own while they work alongside their faculty mentors to answer big picture research questions. At the end of the program, they present their findings to their peers, their mentors and the general public.
With RECCS funded for two more years via the National Science Foundation, Gold and Curry plan to continue expanding the program’s reach.
“We are trying to reach more rural community colleges, because for them, the lack of access to resources is even stronger than Front Range community colleges,” Gold said.
Their efforts are already beginning to push past the Front Range. Susannah Rozak, a member of this year’s RECCS class from Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs, has always been passionate about research and the program has been a perfect way to expand her knowledge.
“There’s so much about the world that we don’t know yet and so being able to take part in finding things out and discovering things and sharing those discoveries is really fun,” said Rozak, who is studying student engagement in climate change. “I feel like RECCS has helped me grow a lot and be more confident.”
Ghent hopes to transfer to CU Boulder in the fall, possibly continuing her research into debris flows under her faculty mentors.
“I’ve gained experience in really tangible ways that I’ll be able to take to my future career,” Ghent said.
In the lower levels of the Denver Botanic Gardens, the nonprofit’s herbarium holds more than 70,000 plant specimens as well as fungal samples and plant DNA. The plants are pressed in blotting paper to remove water and preserve the specimen.
Christina Alba, a research associate at the Gardens, has been working since April to collect a small portion of the samples from the High Line Canal trail system. The project will span into September to collect plants from all seasons.
“These collections are living data,” she said. “It’s not just dusty old stuff stuffed away. People are actively using it.”
The herbarium at the Botanic Gardens, 1007 York St., is mostly concentrated on plant samples from Colorado, Alba said. Her recent project with the Denver-based High Line Canal Conservancy will help create a better picture of what plant life lives along portions of the 71-mile trail system…
Alba and a team of 10 volunteers have been collecting samples from every plant along the canal to take back to the Botanic Gardens herbarium. From there, botanists can use microscopes to indentify the plant. Then, the Botanic Gardens will research that plant and whether it’s native to Colorado.
The data being collected by the Botanic Gardens across Colorado is not being hoarded in the herbarium for only scientists to see, Alba said. The organization has been digitizing its archives and making them available online for people to research plant trends and species data.
“People 20 years from now can search the High Line Canal and link to the species list that we generate,” Alba said.
The amount of plant life along the trail depends on the area and how much water it gets. Human interaction in the area has also changed the types of plants growing there. In some spots, residential gardens are directly next to the trail. Plants from those gardens have traveled across the path and down toward the canal itself.
“There’s a lot of influence onto the corridor,” Alba said. “There’s that native ecosystem, or the original ecosystem, and what kind of plants were there, but now there’s that human imprint laid over that.”
Plant counts will help bring data back to the Highline Canal Conservancy, which is working to build a new master plan for the canal’s future.
The master plan will also look at landscaping around the trail, including drought-tolerant plants and using storm water. Josh Phillips, manager of community initiatives with the conservancy, said Denver Water will stop delivering water to the canal in the next few years. The conservancy’s master plan is looking into retrofitting the canal to use storm water for other properties.
“We really want to understand how the ecology of the canal might change as storm water is introduced into the system,” Phillips said.
He added that retrofitting the canal for storm water use would be cheaper than building new storm water retention facilities. The conservancy is hoping that storm water will help keep the vegetation around the canal thriving.
The Colorado River District is working with state and federal water managers to increase flows in the Fryingpan River by as much as 100 cubic feet per second (cfs), helping trout in the watershed survive warm temperatures while supplying water for downstream irrigation needs in the Grand Valley.
Anticipated releases are expected to range between 50 cfs and 100 cfs and will be coordinated between the River District, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to increase flows in the Fryingpan and Roaring Fork rivers downstream from Ruedi Reservoir.
“This should significantly benefit flows below Ruedi Reservoir,” said John Currier, chief engineer for the district. “We expect that the supplement flows may also help to mitigate water-quality problems anticipated from fire-related ash and debris flows stemming from the Lake Christine Fire on Basalt Mountain.”
Technically, the water will be delivered downstream for Grand Valley irrigation needs while creating environmental benefits as it flows downstream. Green Mountain Reservoir releases will be reduced by an equal amount in order to conserve storage for late-season releases, which in turn will be needed to help endangered fish near Grand Junction.
The coordinated approach was given final approval by the Bureau of Reclamation on Monday. In order to boost Fryingpan levels while the plan awaited approval, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service implemented a 50 cfs release from its dedicated endangered fish pool in Ruedi on Friday. Those flows were supplemented by 30 additional cfs Monday, bringing the flow in the Fryingpan to 200 cfs.
Both Ruedi and Green Mountain reservoirs contribute water to the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. In this case, the changed water release plan will benefit trout below Ruedi while endangered fish still receive water from upstream Colorado River reservoirs.
Increased flows of cold water out of Ruedi should also help to alleviate some stress on trout fisheries in the watershed brought on by higher-than-normal water temperatures. Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced voluntary fishing closures earlier this month on sections of the Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers.
Looking west into the narrows after the Big Thompson Flood July 31, 1976
Big Thompson River near RMNP
Big Thompson Flood, Colorado. Cabin lodged on a private bridge just below Drake, looking upstream. Photo by W. R. Hansen, August 13, 1976. Photo via the USGS.
Here’s the Coyote Gulch 40th anniversary post from 2016. There’s a great passage from Allen Best who was part of the rescue effort back then. Click through for all the links to the Coloradoan and other online content.
If you live in Denver subscribe to The Denver Post. Their link for Allen’s article is still up. And since I”m pitching journalism here subscribe to Allen’s Newsletter.
Clovis, New Mexico. Photo credit: Clovis and Curry County Chamber of Commerce
Here’s the abstract from WorldScientific.com:
Municipal water demand has declined over the past several decades in many large cities in the western United States. The same is true in Clovis, New Mexico, which is a small town in arid eastern New Mexico, whose sole water source is from the dwindling southern Ogallala Aquifer. Using premises-level monthly panel data from 2006 to 2015 combined with climate data and additional controls, we apply a fixed effects instrumental variable approach to estimate municipal water demand. Results indicate that utility-controlled actions such as price increases and rebates for xeriscaping and water saving technology have contributed to the decline. Overall water demand was found to be price inelastic and in the neighborhood of −0.50; however, premises receiving toilet and washing machine rebates were relatively more price inelastic and premises receiving landscaping rebates were more price elastic, though still inelastic. In addition, the average premises receiving its first toilet rebate reduced water use by 8.4%, washing machine rebates lowered use by 9.2%, and the average landscaping rebate reduced water use by less than 5.0%. From the utility’s perspective, and assuming a 5.0% discount rate, levelized cost analysis indicates that toilet rebates are 34% more cost effective than washing machine rebates and nearly 800% more cost effective than landscaping rebates over their respective lives per volume of water conserved. While this research focuses on Clovis, estimation results can be leveraged by other small to mid-sized cities experiencing declining supplies, confronting climate change, and with little opportunity for near-term supply enhancement.
Here’s the release from the Bureau of Reclamation (Peter Soeth):
The Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled the annual public meeting to discuss the Ruedi Reservoir Water Operations for the 2018 water year.
The meeting will be held on August 9, 2018, from 6:30-8:00 p.m. at the following location:
Roaring Fork Conservancy River Center
22800 Two Rivers Road
Basalt, CO 81621
The meeting will provide an overview of Ruedi Reservoir’s 2018 projected operations for late summer and early fall, which are key tourist seasons in Basalt. Also, representatives of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will give a presentation on the upcoming implementation of the Ute Water Conservancy District lease of Ruedi Reservoir water to the Board for instream flow use in the 15-Mile Reach of the Colorado River. The meeting will include a public question and answer session.
For more information, please contact Tim Miller, Hydrologist, Eastern Colorado Area Office, by phone or e-mail: (970) 962-4394, or tmiller@usbr.gov.
Fryingpan-Arkansas Project via the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District
Click here for all the inside skinny and to register. From the website:
The risk of draining a half-full Lake Powell is real. The risk one-third full Lake Mead going lower and triggering big water cutbacks is real. Uncle Sam has told the states to develop drought plans or else the U.S. will do it for them. Speakers and panels from the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Upper Colorado River Commission, the Colorado River District and others will detail current conditions on the river and what the states plan to do about them. Whether you are a toothbrusher, ag producer, angler or rafter, there’s a lot to care about.
Cost is $30 and that includes lunch; $35 at the door. Students are free unless staying for lunch, which is $10
For information, call Meredith at 970-945-8522 or email mspyker@crwcd.org.
Speakers include:
John Entsminger, General Manager, Southern Nevada Water Authority
Amy Haas, the new Executive Director of the Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC) (invited)
Eric Kuhn, retired Colorado River District General Manager, adviser to the UCRC
Andy Mueller, General Manager of the Colorado River District
Brenda Burman, Commissioner, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (invited)
and more . . .
Click here to view the Twitter fest from last year (#crdseminar).
Rejecting a Trump administration request, the high court let the case proceed toward a trial that’s scheduled for later this year. The administration sought to block further progress on the three-year-old Oregon case until a federal trial judge acts on the government’s bid to throw out the lawsuit.
The justices’ order said the administration’s request was premature. The court added that breadth of the lawsuit’s claims was “striking” and the question of whether they can be decided by a court “presents substantial grounds for difference of opinion.” The justices said the trial judge should take those matters into account in considering whether to make a “prompt ruling” on other government efforts to end the lawsuit.
The group of mostly teenagers say government policies have exacerbated global warming in violation of their constitutional rights and those of future generations. They want the government to put in place a plan to phase out carbon emissions and stabilize the Earth’s climate…
The lawyers pressing the case said the government was trying to short-circuit the usual litigation process. They contended that “the harm to the climate system threatens the very foundation of life, including the personal security, liberties, and property” of the youths involved in the case.
The case is United States v. U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, 18A65.
The tamarisk, which was brought to the U.S. from Eurasia in the late 1800s for erosion control, windbreaks and decoration, is much detested. Since its introduction, tamarisk – also known as salt cedar – has been blamed for choking waterways, hogging water and salting the earth as its range expands, driving out such native trees as cottonwood and willows. In Palisade, Colorado, a state lab is breeding beetles whose sole purpose is to destroy tamarisk. At one point, the University of Nevada published a poster about the plant titled WANTED – Dead, Not Alive!
“There’s been a concerted effort to demonize tamarisk,” said Matt Chew, a historian of invasion biology at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences. But he thinks this war is aimed at the wrong enemy.
The tree, he said, is a scapegoat for our struggle with something much bigger and messier than weedy fields: our relationship with water in the West.
The tamarisk has a reputation for hogging water – but is it warranted?
“This is one of the constant counts against tamarisk – that it’s wasting water,” Chew said. “That particular idea got started in the late 1930s and early 1940s for a very particular reason.”
Back then, Chew says, the Phelps Dodge Corp. wanted to expand its copper mine in Arizona, but it didn’t have the water it needed for the additional mining and processing. All the water rights to a nearby creek and river had been allocated.
“What they needed was an excuse to say there was more water in the rivers so that Phelps Dodge could have more water,” Chew said. “So, where are they going to get more water?”
Phelps Dodge inspected nearby water sources and found lots of tamarisk growing along the banks, Chew said. Mine officials rationalized that if they could prove the tamarisk was draining river water, he said, the mine could potentially get the rights to the “extra” water available by killing tamarisk.
“Phelps Dodge did a bunch of experiments which were later picked up by the Agriculture Department,” Chew said, adding that Phelps Dodge ended up getting its water rights through other means, but the tamarisk’s image was destroyed.
As Chew writes in the “Journal of the History of Biology,” “with water shortages, economic development during the Depression and copper mining for national defense during World War Two, federal hydrologists moved quickly to recast tamarisks as water-wasting foreign monsters.”
Since then, researchers have shown that the tree doesn’t use more water than native riparian vegetation, including cottonwoods.
To make matters worse, big changes were occurring in the 1930s and ’40s in the way that water was being moved through the West. Dams and diversions were changing the patterns of flooding, patterns that used to be in sync with the reproductive cycle of more sensitive native plants, such as cottonwoods.
“To some extent, the way we were managing Western rivers actually created a giant tamarisk housing project,” Chew said. If the tamarisk is a monster, he said, it’s because we created it.
“If you want good, old-fashioned 17th-century riparian areas in the western U.S.,” Chew said, “you can’t take all the water out of the river. You can’t have big irrigated fields. You can’t have huge cities.”
Anna Sher, an invasive species biologist at the University of Denver and author of the book “Tamarix: A Case Study of Ecological Change in the American West,” agrees that Tamarix (the species’ genus) isn’t all bad.
Yes, Tamarix can create saltier surface soil that retards other vegetation, and its dense wood can fuel more intense fires. Sher even has heard that a boater drowned in Arizona because rescuers couldn’t get through the dense thickets of tamarisk crowding the shore in time to help him.
But, she says, “I certainly do not hate this plant.”
It provides nesting spots for the Southwestern willow flycatcher, for example, and she says it’s entirely possible for the trees to be a part of the landscape without completely taking over.
“It’s only behaving badly because of the way that we’ve managed our rivers,” Sher said.
Although the way we manage our rivers isn’t going to change anytime soon, Sher sees hope for restoring the landscape. It’s called the Field of Dreams hypothesis.
“The Field of Dreams hypothesis predicts that when you remove the invasive species, there’s an opportunity for the desirable species to come in,” she said.
Initially, Sher and other ecologists suspected the hypothesis was a pipe dream.
“But after doing surveys of hundreds of sites throughout the American Southwest, we can see that, on average, native species will come back and they’ll come back proportionally to how much tamarisk has been removed,” she said. “More tamarisk taken out, more native plants can come in.”
There are two conditions required for successful restoration. First, there has to be enough water in the rivers and streams to supply the new vegetation. Second, the public has to remain open to what native plants might come back. They might not be the cottonwoods and willows people hope for.
“It’s a new game now with Tamarix here and with the water needs that we have now,” Sher said, and humans will have to get used to plants that can handle the landscape as we’ve shaped it.
Those plants might be drought-adapted shrubs and grasses instead of picnic-worthy trees. And they will most certainly have a tamarisk or two as neighbors.
Hay prices are spiking this year, driven up by a drought-induced shortage of the crop. It’s affecting ranchers across the board, but horse owners in particular are feeling the pinch. Horses eat higher quality hay, so it’s harder to get. It’s forcing horse owners in Colorado to buy more hay from neighboring states like Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana and that’s driving the cost up even more.
Kathy Sherer had never set up a crowd-funding campaign before. But she had three hungry horses at her home in Durango, Colorado. Because of the drought in the southwest part of the state, she couldn’t find any hay to feed them. All her usual sources had dried up.
When she finally found a source, it was some three hundred miles away, and the trucking costs would increase the price by about a third. That was a crippling expense not only for herself but for everyone she knows who has horses, which is pretty much everyone in her community.
So she started a GoFundMe page in hopes of getting some donations to help defray the cost of hay for herself and her neighbors. She raised enough money to help get hay to several people in need, but then the funds ran dry. She said the local hay bank is a fall-back source of feed for animals in tough times, but even they didn’t have inventory…
It’s been hard for Patty Carlisle too. She keeps rescue horses and grows hay in Ignacio, Colorado. She usually supplies Kathy Sherer with hay. But she’s had to turn all her regular customers away this year.
Carlisle said she’s down below a third of her normal production level due to the heat, winds, lack of irrigation water, and zero rain. She says growers with better water resources, like irrigation rights from a river, might be better off…
Kent Gordon, a hay broker near Colorado Springs, said sourcing hay from big ranches with very strong irrigation rights is what enables him to keep going in drought years like this…
Gordon said last year he could find hay at five or six dollars a bale. “In those exact locations now,” he said, “we’re finding a lot of those are ten to twelve dollars a bale.” And, he said, “unfortunately it’s probably going to go up more during the winter.”
Gordon said even at these higher prices customers are rushing to stock up. He’s hoping he can keep with the demand but it’s a challenge. “We can have a semi come in seven or eight o’clock in the morning,” he said, “and by noon you know those seven hundred bales are gone.” He said that happens almost every day.
Gordon is happy to be busy. But he hopes for his customers’ sake that next year’s hay season might give them some relief.
Despite promises of a wet monsoon season, Colorado’s arid reality has spread into Summit, which is now part of the 60 percent of the state experiencing “severe drought.”
Nathan Elder, manager of raw water supply for Denver Water, said low water levels at the South Platte reservoir in Littleton created a need for a big draw from Dillon. Even though human consumption is Denver Water’s primary use, Elder said they do keep the marinas in mind.
“We are very concerned with how that affects the recreation industry and keeping marinas in the reservoir,” Elder said. “We plan to keep marinas operating from June to Labor Day, but this has been an exceptional year. The water levels won’t go back to normal this year, and what happens next year depends on the snowpack we get this winter.”
The U.S. Drought Monitor, which tracks drought across the country and assigns drought severity based on conditions, assigns dryness levels from D0 to D4. D0 is considered “abnormally dry” but not severe enough to be considered a drought, while D4 is considered an “exceptional drought” that means there is a serious water emergency that causes “exceptional and widespread” crop and pasture losses.
Summit County’s “severe drought” is at level D2. At that stage, crop and pasture losses are likely, water shortages are common and water restrictions are imposed.
Victor Lee is a hydrologist and civil engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Green Mountain Reservoir in Heeney. Lee said that the monsoon is kicking in late due to less-than-ideal weather patterns.
“One of the reasons the monsoon has been slow to start is the high pressure system that normally forms over the southwest needs to be closer to Texas than the four corners region,” Lee said. “The high pressure system we’ve been experiencing is more to the west, and that’s bringing in warmer air but not more of the moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.”
Combined with an early spring, that makes for a long period without significant precipitation. Lee said that there is no threat to water supplies for human consumption, yet. A few years of healthy precipitation has meant that reservoirs across the state have managed to keep healthy levels in reserve and have been steadily releasing water to keep rivers and streams flowing.
“Without the reservoirs in the system, the stream flows we would be seeing throughout the upper Colorado would be much more dire,” Lee said.
If this drought persists into yet another year, the reasons for worry will multiply and tough decisions will be made.
“These are critical times in Colorado and the southwest,” Lee said. “If the drought goes into another year, there won’t be the same amount of carry-over storage, and it will become a much more complicated issue.”
