Amid 19-Year Drought, States Sign Deal to Conserve Colorado River Water

Probably a decade late, and really they need to desalinate underground water and add it to the river using wind power.

If we are serious about water conservation then we will end animal agriculture and eat plants. Everything else is a rounding error compared to that.

There was a plan seriously put forward in the early 1960s to dam off James Bay which sits at the bottom of Canada's enormous Hudson Bay thus making James Bay a freshwater lake from which water would be transported to a thirsty US. Simon Reisman who negotiated the original CAN US Auto Pact precursor to NAFTA was the major promoter. His idea did not catch on. He was clearly a man ahead of his time. Later Canada fought hard to have water excluded from the FTA and the NAFTA anticipating what was coming. But once the US needs water it will be inevitable. Water, faster than we think, will become the new oil - wars and all.

Just some facts for those blaming environmentalists for lack of new water infrastructure: 80% of water use in California is for agriculture. It is declining slightly with management, but still hugely wasteful. Most of the productive and economic dam sites (and many that are not) were tapped long ago. The "no damns in last 40 years" trope ignores the economic reality. The big dams (Hoover, Glen Canyon) were built by the federal government, and the water use is still subsidized by the federal government (your taxes and mine). Trying to build such dams today would be fought not just by "crazy enviros", but also by state governments, tribes with rights that are older than anyone else's, property owners, small government advocates, Presidents and Senators who don't wasn't to spend any money on California since it is a Democratic state, etc) The 50% of natural river flows that is not tapped for agriculture or domestic use is mostly (>50%) on the north coast rivers, distant and unconnected from the irrigated farms and cities in the southern half of the state. Building the infrastructure to move it south could start a civil war. Of the the 50%: some of it is needed to preserve the decimated commercial fishing industry, some is needed to stop salt water from intruding into the highly productive delta region--which would salivate highly productive ag lands, a bit is needed for recreation--including house boats/cruisers on Lake Shasta and others, not just hippies in kayaks.

details of agreement? who is cut back? how? how much? when?

...but "we" all know Global Warming is a Liberal hoax, right? Who are you going to believe, Trump, Fox, the GOP, Breitbart, Oil, Coal and Chemical companies...or your own lyin' eyes? Disastrous climate change is already here, from the Mid-West to Mozambique, from Indonesia to Houston, and unless we act to stop accelerating it, it will turn into catastrophic climate change, just as dystopic as a full-scale nuclear war.

When I see flood irrigation banned, or the green fairways of golf courses stop being watered, or sprinklers not being run in the hottest part of the day, or easterners, now westerners enjoying their lush green lawns being controlled, then I'll believe Arizona is getting serious. Not even mentioning hundreds of fountains evaporating millions of gallons a day, and uncovered swimming pools doing the same. Arizona especially but also California waste so much water. I hear some legislators think they're going to run a pipeline from the Great Lakes west to dig them out. Good luck with that.

The only real savior for the southwest is by taking the Columbia River water of the northwest; about one acre-foot per second; and diverting it to the southwest. Either through low pressure, sub Pacific piping, from the mouth of the Columbia, or gravity piping from further upstream.

We were warned long ago: "Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/22/us/study-finds-warming-trend-that-could-raise-sea-levels.html Link to the most terrifying graph I’ve seen, IPCC projections for precipitation this century in western N America. http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2013/drought-western-us-1900-2100.png

I commend the negotiators for their patience and persistence in reaching an agreement; such collaboration is heartening to see, and I hope that efforts to address this issue don't stop here. I hope that the press coverage helps draw more attention to the Colorado, as well as the other major river watersheds of the US (like the Chesapeake here in PA). Those who may be interested in further reading related to this issue (and all sorts of related aspects of conservation efforts, stakeholder input, etc. for the Colorado River) might enjoy a 5-part series put out by writers for the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies on this drought and the Colorado River: https://e360.yale.edu/series/crisis-on-the-colorado

I just yesterday read about how Rural America is dying. Seems like stopping farming where there really isn't enough water and increasing farming where there is more water and farming has been industrialized-away would be a step in the right direction, i.e. more in the midwest and the eastern US would be good. Beyond this: having lived half my life in Northern CA, I became frustrated with the huge tracts of land there that are unused while we import megatons of food. Land that is protected either by law or just by the wealthy hoarding their bit of land; it is a vast waste, led into decline by over-regulation and market forces. CA is a case in point, but I'm sure it is true in other areas of the US. We need to shore up and reintroduce family farms where there is water to do it.

Israeli water tech and ideas can help if states and their citizens are serious about confronting this issue head on to prevent a future catastrophe. Seth Siegel’s excellent work, ‘Let There Be Water’ is an excellent starting point.

As of now the lack of water conservation in residential areas of AZ is stunning. Sprinklers run in the hottest part of the day and water runoff is persistent. Locals do not express any concern about the effects of a warming climate on their daily lives. I fear they will be completely caught off guard by the increase in the discomfort of the rising temperatures and the increase in the expense of power to run AC units. Houses will lose value and may become difficult to sell in the near future. That’s a high price to pay for a head-in-the-sand attitude.

We Las Vegas residences are continually being told to preserve water, take out your lawns, don’t wash your cars because; the lake is running out of water and we need to save it. To what end? When we do save water, our water company makes money for its owners by selling this saved water, to California.

I thought this wasn't such a big deal since they finished the "third straw" in Lake Mead.

Hoover Dam, which created Lake Mead, was completed in 1936. The lake hasn't been full since 1983.

Didn't Lake Mead start to fill in the 1930s, not the 1960s?

The last time I was at Lake Meade the water level was just below the lower horizontal support beams of the intake towers. That was 15 years ago. Signing the "deal" ain't gonna bring the water back. Too little, too late.

Headline should read: “forced to face reality, states do the absolute minimum to prevent federal intervention.” The reality is the river is vastly oversubscribed, and we are entering a new period of drought. Welcome to the new normal

How many years until Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles are ghost towns?

Toured the dam and saw Lake Meade around 1999, the last time the lake was full. By 2009, the "bathtub ring" was apparent. I think this is all accurate, except for the statement that the lake started to fill in the 1960s. According to Wikipedia and my memory of my tour, the lake started to fill in 1935, and was full enough that power generation began in 1936.

Aren't there two other states with rights to the river? Baja California and Sonora. If we follow the idea of downstream rights, they should get priority over all of the states north of the border. (Don't mention this to the current administration of instead of all wall, they'll build a huge, beautiful dam.)

A good summary of the situation but a few important facts are missing: The Salton Sea is NOT a naturally occurring lake: it was formed by human folly when a poorly designed irrigation project to divert Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley went out of control in 1905 and the entire output of the river was dumped into the dry lake basin for 18 months to form the Salton Sea. The efforts to save the Salton Sea are pretty much doomed because of the increased salinity of the water (even with the addition of fresh water). We should simply let the Salton Sea revert to it's natural state (even though there will be environmental harm and economic harm to neighboring property). The original Interstate Compact between the 7 states in the Colorado River basin and the Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 divide the rights to the water based on an overestimate of the historic annual water flow of the river at over 16,000,000 acre feet. (Note that an acre foot is enough water to flood an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot and equals about 326,000 gallons.) The actual average flow rate is significantly less and is probably closer to 12,000,000 acre-feet. So even in the 1950s it was known that the legal entitlements to Colorado River water exceeded available supply. Global warming and persistent droughts in the Western U.S. have only made matters worse.

The aquifer replenishment is important, much of this Colorado River issue is subsurface.

Climate change is here and why did seven Western states wait until they are about out of water to start cutting usage and why make it voluntary? I lived in Marin County back in the 70's when we had a severe drought and cutting water usage was mandatory. I do not waste water today as a result of living for 10 months without much.

"The Imperial Irrigation District, California’s largest user of water from the river, threatened to derail the process when it demanded $200 million from the federal government to help restore the Salton Sea..." Please, tell me they at least blushed a little when making this demand. The sense of entitlement by these people, who are making their living farming in the desert using water delivered to them by God and government, is breathe-taking.

Yes, climate change is a political issue, and not just in the Western states. Those of us who live in the West/Southwest for any length of time know that scarcity (even without factoring in climate change) is a part of life here--this is semi-arid desert. And yet, the way large numbers of people live in the West is as though water is nothing to be concerned about. It still amazes that many homes have swimming pools, residents hose down their concrete surfaces rather than use a broom; bathe for several minutes beyond what's needed, wash their cars much too often, water unnecessary lawns, or plant high water-using shrubs and flowers, wash dishes with appliances (relatively high water users) rather than hand-washing, use no devices for efficient water capture and recycling, and yes--buy bottled water rather than place a filter on their taps--many conservation measures that have all been available and needed to be in place for decades! It's our lifestyle that is at issue. There is an evident lack of political will by elected officials to make mandatory all manner of water conservation instead of leaving it up to the populace with tepid voluntary suggestions. Those days should be over. It's the way we live our daily lives that can make so great a difference in how much water is pulled from reservoirs such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

As the climate warms, rainfall is expected to increase (because warmer oceans evaporate more). Regional patterns may vary, but there is no reason to expect more drought.

Yet another (small) kick of the can down the road for the sake of political expediency. Whether the solution is increasing supply (desalination, more dams, etc) or decreasing demand (rationing, taxing, etc), or both, politicians need to pull their head out of the sand. And that will only happen when voters do it. Let's just hope it's not too late by then.

It might perhaps have been helpful to point out to readers the unusual nature of cooperation among all the seven states of the Colorado River Basin. The Colorado River Compact itself was the product of decades of negotiations and, since it was finalized in 1922, there has been a great reluctance to address the over-allocation of the river. Perhaps this might be explained by Arizona's four-decade long battle to get more water and California's long history of using more water than it is legally entitled to use when other states don't use their entitlements. Perhaps it is because no one really knows how much water will continue to be available in the Colorado as this century progresses. Judging by current flows, things don't look good. Yes, the Rockies are getting a normal, or even slightly above average, amount of snowfall this year. But that can't be expected to be a long term trend. The continued unsustainable growth of populations not only on the Front Range, but in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas, to say nothing of southern California, is not likely to be watered adequately by the Colorado. But aquifers feed the Colorado, too, and they are not refillable on any time scale relevant to humanity. So doing things the "Arizona way," under which aquifers get some modest protection in the law but, in fact, are drained to feed suburban growth, is not a smart strategy. This is a quick fix. Nothing more.

The end of the "Cadillac Desert" is upon us. Meanwhile, the big energy companies are busy snapping up water rights throughout the western U.S.

Yes we are approaching a point where the sources of water for the southern western states will be eliminated from the Colorado river. Yes California hasn't built new dams as they aren't PC and environmental approvals are impossible to achieve. Yes we let a lot of rain water runoff to the oceans but that is how previous generations engineered our cities. In my area we have achieved the capture and replenishment of the aqua-fur of rain water while others have started the processes. And yes as an Arizona land owner that a previous farmer placed a well on years ago and was sold to a Hedge Fund in New York that is cornering the water market in the desert south west as well the central coast (see NYT article on Harvard's investment in land for growing grapes in San Luis Obsipo) I see more than environmental forces at work. Its not just the misuse of water but the hedging of our precious supply by Wall Street that will lead the west to succumb to ever increasing water costs and limited supplies.

It should be growing in obviousness that the coastal cities and industry cannot continue using water one time, cleaning its bio content, and flushing it into the Pacific, nor can upriver cities and industry clean their waste water a little and flush it back into the river. We must begin investing in desalinization-type waste water purification and reusing the water. Populations are growing, industrial and agricultural water usage is growing. We need to use our precious water more than once. Sure, desalinization is expensive, simple plants, but lots of energy. No one is willing to pay for what water is worth to them, other than the people who buy bottled waters at their grocery stores. Government could fix this problem easily by increasing the cost of water to everyone. Simple enough: allow every human 400 gallons of water free per month, and charge enough on more water than that to pay for the investment and operations in desalination equipment. Combine these new plants with daytime operation with solar power. We need to start now. It will take years to implement such a system after we run out of water and reach a crisis situation.

California should not be part of this conversation. The state hasn't build any new dams in forty years, instead letting the runoff from their rainy season flow out to the ocean. Between the crazy environmentalists and multi billion dollar bullet train that will never be built, there just isn't time nor money allowed to take care of its citizens.