Western Water has provided
in-depth coverage of critical water issues facing California and
the West since 1977, first as a printed magazine and now as an
online newsroom. Articles explore the science, policy and
debates centered around drought, groundwater,
sustainability, water access and affordability, climate change
and endangered species involving key sources of supply such as
the Colorado River, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and more.
Western Water news is produced by a team of veteran
journalists and others at the Water Education Foundation:
The small, early 1900s powerhouse on the Colorado River in
western Colorado is on its last legs, crippled by chronic
mechanical problems, wildfires, floods and rockslides.
But this faltering facility just east of Glenwood Springs holds
something of immense value in the parched West: senior rights to
an estimated 845,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water a year.
Negotiators for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, the state of New
Mexico and The Nature Conservancy worked together remotely for
two years during the COVID-19 pandemic on an unprecedented pact
that would keep 200,000 acre-feet of water in the Colorado River.
The Fresno-area attorney has served as general manager, executive officer, consultant or a board member for at least a dozen agricultural water districts and local resource conservation agencies across the San Joaquin Valley.
What’s more, he was on an advisory committee that helped draft one of the most consequential pieces of water legislation in California history: The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, commonly referred to as SGMA, that for the first time regulated a much-overdrawn resource critical to the state’s economy and the livelihoods of its residents.
The midday sun is one of the more aggressive guzzlers of the
Colorado River. Between its high Rockies headwaters and its
Sonoran Desert delta, 1 to 2 million acre-feet of water
evaporates each year in the Colorado River Basin. That’s a big
gulp in a watershed where seven thirsty U.S. states and northern
Mexico skirmish for their share of an overallocated, shrinking
water supply. And the evaporation will only increase as the
Southwest grows hotter and drier.
Attempts to require enough water at the right time
and temperature to sustain fish and other aquatic life run
smack against a water rights system developed more than 150 years
ago for farmers, miners, industries and cities – but not
wildlife.
Though water quality concerns are the purview of federal, state
and county environmental agencies, they alerted the local South
Yuba River Citizens League, confident its volunteers could get to
the scene quicker and investigate the discoloration faster than
any regulator.
Most anywhere else in the West, basic water rights information
such as who is using how much water, for what purpose, when, and
where can be pulled up on a laptop or smartphone.
Water supplies have tightened to the point that Phoenix and the
water supplier for 19 million Southern California residents are
racing to adopt an expensive technology called “direct potable
reuse” or “advanced purification” to reduce their reliance on
imported water from the dwindling Colorado River.
The tribes are seeing the value of their largely unused river
water entitlements rise as the Colorado dwindles, and they are
gaining seats they’ve never had at the water bargaining table as
government agencies try to redress a legacy of exclusion.
The change is buried in a sweeping state budget-related law,
enacted in July, that also makes it easier for property owners
and water managers to divert floodwater for storage underground.
The Copco No. 1 dam on the Klamath River is slated for demolition in 2024. Photo by Stormy Staats/Klamath Salmon Media CollaborativeThe Klamath River Basin was once one
of the world’s most ecologically magnificent regions, a watershed
teeming with salmon, migratory birds and wildlife that thrived
alongside Native American communities. The river flowed rapidly
from its headwaters in southern Oregon’s high deserts into Upper
Klamath Lake, collected snowmelt along a narrow gorge through the
Cascades, then raced downhill to the California coast in a misty,
redwood-lined finish.
The maps provided by the California Department of Water Resources
for the first time pinpoint paleo valleys and similar prime
underground storage zones traditionally found with some guesswork
by drilling exploratory wells and other more time-consuming
manual methods. The new maps are drawn from data on the
composition of underlying rock and soil gathered by low-flying
helicopters towing giant magnets.
The unique peeks below ground are saving water agencies’
resources and allowing them to accurately devise ways to capture
water from extreme storms and soak or inject the surplus
underground for use during the next drought.
“Understanding where you’re putting and taking water from really
helps, versus trying to make multimillion-dollar decisions based
on a thumb and which way the wind is blowing,” said Aaron Fukuda,
general manager of the Tulare Irrigation District, an early
adopter of the airborne electromagnetic or
AEM technology in California.
But with the federal government threatening unprecedented water
cuts amid decades of drought and declining reservoirs, the Upper
Basin states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico are
muscling up to protect their shares of an overallocated river
whose average flows in the Upper Basin have already dropped
20 percent over the last century.
They have formed new agencies to better monitor their interests,
moved influential Colorado River veterans into top negotiating
posts and improved their relationships with Native American
tribes that also hold substantial claims to the river.
After years of planning, California this year is embarking on a
first-of-its-kind data-gathering mission to illuminate how
prevalent microplastics are in the state’s largest drinking water
sources and help regulators determine whether they are a public
health threat.
The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential Pacific storms
to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the Sierra Nevada at
a near-record pace while runoff from the foothills gushed into
the Central Valley, swelling rivers over their banks and filling
seasonal creeks for the first time in half a decade.
Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in one of the
state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an opportunity to
capture stormwater and bank it underground. Enterprising agencies
diverted water from rushing rivers and creeks into manmade
recharge basins or intentionally flooded orchards and farmland.
Others snagged temporary permits from the state to pull from
streams they ordinarily couldn’t touch.
Decades later, still armed with an obsession for extreme weather,
Schwartz has landed in one of the snowiest places in the West,
leading a research lab whose mission is to give California water
managers instant information on the depth and quality of snow
draping the slopes of the Sierra Nevada.
A century later, it’s clear the water they bet on is not there.
More than two decades of drought, lake evaporation and overuse of
water have nearly drained the river’s two anchor reservoirs, Lake
Powell on the Arizona-Utah border and Lake Mead near Las Vegas.
Climate change is rendering the basin drier, shrinking spring
runoff that’s vital for river flows, farms, tribes and cities
across the basin – and essential for refilling reservoirs.
The states that endorsed the Colorado River Compact in 1922 – and
the tribes and nation of Mexico that were excluded from the table
– are now straining to find, and perhaps more importantly accept,
solutions on a river that may offer just half of the water that
the Compact assumed would be available. And not only are
solutions not coming easily, the relationships essential for
compromise are getting more frayed.
Climate change is eroding the mountain snowpack that has
traditionally melted in the spring and summer to fill rivers and
reservoirs across the West. Now, less precipitation is falling as
snow in parts of major mountain ranges like California’s Sierra
Nevada and the Rockies in the West, and the snow that does land
is melting faster and earlier due to warming temperatures.
