by John Fleck
Elmore’s beef was about the damage to his property. But his legal strategy created an opportunity that led to a fundamental shift in the political alliances among California water managers that lingers to this day. Rather than claiming that the irrigation district’s practices were harming his land, Elmore argued instead that the district was violating state law by wasting water, rather than putting it to beneficial use.17
This created an opportunity for the Metropolitan Water District. Desperate for water because of the failure of a scheme to bring more water to municipal Southern California from the north, Met was again looking east, toward the Colorado River. Elmore and his attorneys suggested that the Metropolitan Water District pay for the systemic improvements needed to reduce water wasting in IID’s canals, in return for the saved water. It was the first glimmer of the sort of “water market” that economists had long dreamed of to improve the efficiency of California’s water allocations, assembled through a very odd packaging mechanism that didn’t look much like a market at all.
Rather than being on its heels fighting a losing battle, the Imperial Irrigation District saw the opportunity to become what one of the agency’s leaders called the “new water market brokers of the Southwest.”18
The initial phase of the deal looked straightforward: Los Angeles and its neighbors on the Southern California coastal plain would pay to line irrigation canals, a $260 million estimated cost at the time, in return for the saved water. But the community politics of Imperial County clouded the deal. Any effort to move water from the rural desert communities to the city raised reminders of the Owens Valley, where Los Angeles bought up water rights and moved water from a rural area in a way that still provokes bitterness a century later. In California, the words “Owens Valley” signify dangerous political ground. “Local people are understandably paranoid,” one Imperial Valley water manager explained.19
For a time, paranoia won out over the opportunities to be the new water brokers, and Imperial Irrigation District leaders chose to fight rather than deal. The California State Water Resources Control Board in 1984 ruled in Elmore’s favor, but the District launched a series of legal challenges that dragged the issues into the courts for most of the 1980s. In the end, the irrigation district lost, but by that time negotiations were well under way between the big farm district and Southern California water agencies that opened up room for a collaborative agreement that would benefit everyone. By 1989, the first agreement had been signed. It accomplished simple things like getting canals lined and automating irrigation gates, but also things that were more sophisticated, like payments by the Metropolitan Water District for efficiency improvements in IID’s water-scheduling system. By 1990, water had begun moving from the Imperial Valley toward Southern California.20
The Sea Suffers
Despite the hard political slog, a series of agreements followed that further reduced water use in the Imperial Valley, moving ever more water to Southern California, especially to the San Diego County Water Authority. But eventually they bumped up against a very different problem from the one that brought John Elmore into court back in the 1980s. Instead of too much water going into the Salton Sea, by the late 1990s elevations began to decline, bringing the new problem of too little water going to the sea.
Any deal that brings efficiency to agriculture runs a hidden risk. What we think of as “inefficiency”—flood irrigation seeping down past a crop’s root zone, or tailwater flowing out the bottom end of a field—is not water lost forever. Frequently it is water that plays a beneficial role wherever it goes next.
Most often, that role is aquifer recharge, with groundwater eventually flowing, hidden, back into rivers. Sometimes, tailwater ends up diverted into rivers directly, agricultural “waste” becoming a freshwater supply for downstream users. And in the Imperial Valley, that “waste” was what was propping up the Salton Sea. Drainage from Imperial Irrigation District farms has long flowed into the sea, in enormous quantities—an amount by some estimates equivalent to nearly 10 percent of the entire flow of the Colorado River. Reducing that “waste” of water has always seemed like just about the most important low-hanging water-conservation fruit in the Colorado River Basin. But water planners knew that if things in the Imperial Irrigation District got too efficient, the Salton Sea could simply dry up.
When Tina Shields began working for the irrigation district as a young engineer in 1992, the district was building dikes to hold back the rising water. By 2015, when she had risen to become the agency’s water manager, one of her primary jobs was fighting the sea’s decline.21
The “death” of the Salton Sea is a complicated problem. Some argue for simply letting it go, pointing to the accident of its creation in 1905 and saying it simply never should have existed to begin with. Writing it off completely could save a lot of water. But it provides one of the last remaining stops for migratory birds on that stretch of the Pacific flyway, invoking both environmental laws and values in any discussion over its future. More important is the health of the communities that surround it. Given the potentially toxic dust that would be left behind on barren salt flats, ready to be lofted by the next windstorm into a region that already has notoriously poor air quality, that was an unacceptable side effect for the people of the Imperial Valley.22
Thus the great dilemma posed by efforts to encourage water conservation in the Imperial Irrigation District to help reduce California’s overuse of Colorado River water. Water conservation projects in the district, by reducing the amount of infiltration and runoff from the valley’s farms, inevitably reduce flows to the Salton Sea.
When state officials agreed in 2003 on the “Quantification Settlement Agreement” needed to bring California into compliance with its 4.4 million acre-foot Colorado River allocation, it was understood that fallowing land and improving irrigation efficiency would reduce flows into the Salton Sea. If nothing was done, the sea’s decline was inevitable. Fears about the impact of reduced flows to the Salton Sea threatened to blow up the entire deal. So to save the agreement, California state government made what to the communities of the Imperial Valley felt like a promise: you folks take care of the water conservation and transfer programs needed to reduce California’s Colorado River use and transfer water from farms to cities, and we (state government) will take care of the sea. The promise included vague notions of an engineering fix, perhaps dikes to fence off a portion of the dry lakebed and a network of canals to preserve habitat and provide water to mitigate dust. It included some up-front money and a promise of studies to come up with a long-term fix.23
Imperial Irrigation District farmers did their part, reducing water use from 3.15 million acre-feet in 2002, the year before the “Quantification Settlement Agreement,” or “QSA”, as the deal is known, was signed, to 2.48 million acre-feet in 2015, a 21 percent reduction. It is by far the largest conservation project in Colorado River Basin history. But the state of California has failed to keep up its end of the deal, barely starting the steps needed to keep its promise of an engineering solution to make up for the loss of farm runoff to the sea. It is an example of the risks in large, multiparty water-management agreements. They depend on everyone keeping their commitments, and the state’s failure created the risk by the early 2010s that the biggest water-conservation agreement in basin history could fall apart.
“We’re pretty good at hiring attorneys over the QSA,” Shields, the Imperial Irrigation District’s water manager, told the audience at a water law conference in the spring of 2015.24
Productivity Keeps Rising
Imperial County farm-community members will tell you that all this cooperative conservation effort was undertaken with a gun to their heads, and they are right. Hovering over these agreements was always the fear that if the Imperial Irrigation District didn’t deal, the federal government might try to come in and take the water by legal force, without benefit of compensation to the community. But in the face of that, the valley’s agricultural community ha
s shown remarkable resilience. Even as the water diverted from the Colorado River to Imperial County’s farms declined, the region’s farm income just kept rising. In 2013, the federal government estimated the county’s total agricultural revenue at $2.3 billion, in inflation-adjusted terms 40 percent above what it was in the early 2000s, when water supplies were at their peak.25 Water use was down 20 percent, yet farm revenues were booming.
How to explain this? It is an example of the point that agricultural economist Bob Young, talking about Arizona a half century before, made about the resourcefulness of farmers adapting to scarcity as their water supplies declined. They shift their cropping patterns, make more efficient use of water, and generally adapt such that farm income, even in the case of declining water supplies, keeps going up. In Imperial County, all you have to do is look at the lucrative vegetable business, the same thing that turned Yuma into such a powerhouse. From 1997 to 2012, even as water supplies were declining, total vegetable acreage went up by nearly 50 percent.
Acreage devoted to alfalfa, one of the lowest dollar-per-gallon crops, meanwhile, declined, dropping 25 percent in the five years after implementation of the Quantification Settlement Agreement began. Other low-value feed crops, such as bermuda grass and sudan grass, also declined.
Farmers know where to put their water to get the biggest economic bang per gallon.
CHAPTER 10
Emptying Lake Mead
IT WAS EARLY 2000 WHEN Terry Fulp saw the first glimmer of the problems to come. The hydrologist was part of a team doing the math on a proposal to change the way the federal government operated Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two big reservoirs on western North America’s iconic Colorado River.
In 2000, Lake Mead was full, water lapping at Hoover Dam’s spillway gates. The full reservoir was a reassuring sight for the residents of the farms and cities dependent on the Colorado’s supply. But gathered in a nondescript Southern California office park going over calculations with a team of technical experts, Fulp realized that things would not always be this way.
The team had been working “all hours of the day and night” on the final numbers needed for a federal report. As they sat down over pizza and beer one evening, one of the bosses asked a question: “If you could put something on a bumper sticker about what we’ve learned, what would it be?”
Fulp’s answer was simple: “Lake Mead will go down.” At a time when Lake Mead had been going up year after year, it was counterintuitive. But Fulp could see in the numbers a reality that would come to dominate his life, and the lives of Colorado Basin water managers and users, in the decade to come.
Lake Mead, depleted by years of downstream water use (© John Fleck).
Fulp’s group had been working with complex computer models used to simulate the operation of the river and its reservoirs as part of a major federal study, but Fulp did the calculation that finally convinced him on a sheet of paper.
Hydrologists call it a “mass balance calculation” and it’s pretty simple, like balancing your checkbook: How much water do you already have in the system? How much flows in each year? How much flows out? Fulp started by scribbling on the piece of paper. “If we get 8.23 . . .”
Bound up in history, the number “8.23” is freighted with meaning. Under the river’s operating rules, it is the required minimum delivery of water, in millions of acre-feet, from the basin’s great upstream savings bank, Lake Powell, into the other, Lake Mead.
If you live in the states of the upper part of the basin—Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico—Lake Powell is your savings account. As long as those Upper Basin states have enough water in Lake Powell to release 8.23 million acre-feet of water each year, sending it downstream toward Lake Mead, they have met their obligation under the legally contentious web of rules known as the Law of the River. There is no consensus that “8.23” is a legal mandate, but as long that much water is moved downstream from the Upper Basin’s savings account to the Lower Basin’s, as a practical matter no one will put up a fight.
What Fulp’s simple mass balance calculation showed was that 8.23 million acre-feet was not enough. The math is strikingly simple. California’s legal entitlement is 4.4 million acre-feet. Arizona’s is 2.8 million acre-feet. Nevada’s is 300,000 acre-feet. Under international treaty, we are obligated to send 1.5 million acre-feet to Mexico. Add those up and you get 9 million acre-feet. Nine million is bigger than 8.23 million. Under normal operating conditions, the basin’s books don’t balance.
Fulp’s calculation was a bit more complicated. There is extra inflow to consider from a handful of desert rivers that help add to the supply available in Lake Mead. But there is also evaporation and “system losses”—the basic inefficiencies in moving water through the complex plumbing of the Colorado River’s Lower Basin.
Once Fulp added in those pluses and minuses, the problem looked even worse. “I was just a hydrologist in the middle of trying to figure out what these models were saying, and did we believe it, were the probabilities making sense?” Fulp told me in an interview fifteen years later.1
In the years since, Fulp has risen from “just a hydrologist” to director of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River Region. If “Lake Mead will drop” has become one of the West’s central problems, it is now Fulp’s job to help solve it.
When Fulp told me this story, we were sitting in his office in the Bureau’s regional headquarters, a grandiose white building atop a hill in Boulder City, Nevada, surrounded by an expanse of lawn that is embarrassing in a desert city that averages less than six inches of rain a year. As he walked me to my car after talking for a couple of hours on a late winter day in 2015, we could look out over the great emptiness that has become Lake Mead. His bumper sticker slogan of fifteen years earlier had come to pass. Less than half full, Lake Mead’s surface elevation had dropped a staggering 125 feet since 2000, enough water lost to have supplied nearby Las Vegas for the next half century. The dropping reservoir left behind a thick white scar they call the “bathtub ring,” mineral deposits stretching to the high-water mark that offer a stark reminder of the problem.
The steps taken by water users downstream—cutting California’s allocation, reducing Imperial’s irrigated acreage, throttling back Arizona’s groundwater pumping, steps that had seemed so hard when they were taken and that had proven so successful—had not fixed the problem. Water users downstream kept taking more water out of Lake Mead each year than flowed in, and Lake Mead kept dropping.
The Geography
As Lake Mead dropped in the years that followed, the arguments among Colorado Basin water users over interpretations of the river’s operating rules had the look and feel of medieval scholars debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But the stakes were enormous, because as they dithered, water withdrawals continued unabated and Mead’s bathtub ring kept growing. If the problems were left unresolved, it was easy to see in Fulp’s calculation that communities dependent on Lake Mead would quite literally run out of water.
The dispute hinged on complex, unresolved legal questions about the Law of the River. But more importantly, it exposed a moral and political rift: should Upper Basin water users, suffering under drought, be asked to pay more while California was allowed to suck surplus water from the system?
This is one of those times where the sometimes confusing geography of the Colorado River Basin matters a great deal. Water-management conflicts often revolve around upstream-downstream disputes, and the challenges in the early twenty-first century were an upstream-downstream geographical doozy.
There is an old saying in western water management: “I’d rather be upstream with a shovel than downstream with a decree.”2 The idea is that upstream water users have a natural physical advantage because they have the physical opportunity to take their shovel, dig a ditch, and put the water to use before it ever has a chance to make its way downstream. The great watershed that feeds the Colorado River’s water into the river’s dee
ply carved Utah canyon country has always appeared to offer that advantage, and for most of the twentieth century the Upper Basin states used it, digging ditches to move water to farms along the Rocky Mountains’ west slope in Colorado, in valleys like Grand Valley, where the city of Grand Junction sits today.
To overcome the shovel/decree problem, the framers of the Colorado River Compact came up with a powerful rule. However much water those Upper Basin shovelers diverted into their ditches, they always had to leave enough in the Colorado River to meet downstream needs. The compact’s framers set a number on that amount: 7.5 million acre-feet a year measured at a point just downstream from Lee’s Ferry in a gorgeous red-rock canyon northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. The water would then flow through the depth of the Grand Canyon before it was caught downstream behind Hoover Dam in the great reservoir known as Lake Mead.
The rule was written to allow some wiggle room—it really compelled the delivery of 75 million acre-feet over any rolling ten-year period, to allow for wet years and dry years in the highly variable Colorado River Basin climate. Over-delivery in a wet year would allow under-delivery in a dry year.
Construction of Glen Canyon Dam in the 1950s and ’60s, just upstream from Lee’s Ferry near the point where the Colorado River crossed from Utah into Arizona and entered the Grand Canyon, simplified the problem. Now surplus from wet years could be stashed in the giant reservoir known as Lake Powell, a water-banking savings account to ensure that the Upper Basin states would always have enough water to meet their 7.5 million acre-foot payment.