The 21 October 2007 New York Times Magazine 's cover story is "The Perfect Drought" by Jon Gertner. It's about Western USA water, mainly (but not exclusively) from the viewpoint of the Colorado River Basin, Patricia Mulroy, and Peter Binney, a water manager for Aurora, CO (the 60th largest city in the USA). Peter Gleick is also in there, along with Richard Seager, Bradley Udall, and others.
Gertner starts with Bradley Udall of the Western Water Asessment (WWA), who proffers this cheery news at a U.S. Senate hearing:
Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”
From then on, it's all downhill.
Gertner also spoke with climatologist Roger Pulwarty of NOAA. Here is what he said regarding predictions:
“You don’t need to know all the numbers of the future exactly,” Pulwarty told me over lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant. “You just need to know that we’re drying. And so the argument over whether it’s 15 percent drier or 20 percent drier? It’s irrelevant. Because in the long run, that decrease, accumulated over time, is going to dry out the system.” Pulwarty asked if I knew the projections for what it would take to refill Lake Powell, which is at about 50 percent of capacity. Twenty years of average flow on the Colorado River, he told me. “Good luck,” he said. “Even in normal conditions we don’t get 20 years of average flow. People are calling for more storage on the system, but if you can’t fill the reservoirs you have, I don’t know how more storage, or more dams, is going to help you. One has to ask if the normal strategies that we have are actually viable anymore.”
Mulroy, of the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) is featured prominently. Gertner interestingly notes that Mulroy has no real counterpart in the Eastern USA, although the closest analog might be Robert Moses, the (in)famous New York City planner who built the massive infrastructure in the NYC metropolitan area, mainly by thumbing his nose at politicians, the public, and anyone or anything else who stood in his way.
Binney, of Aurora Water, comes across as innovative and refreshing. It's nice to hear from someone besides the "usual suspects". He is responsible for the "Prairie Waters" Project, which will cost Aurora $750M and use its treated wastewater, dumped into the South Platte River, for drinking water. The city will buy agricultural land along the river about 20-30 miles downstream, install wells to filter river water, then pump it upstream to Aurora where it will be treated to drinking-water standards. Download a fact sheet here:
Download prairie_waters_fact_sheet.pdf
One thing Binney said really resonated with me. When Gertner asked him if our desert civilizations would last, here is what Binney said:
"Not the way we've got it set up. We've decoupled land use from water use. Water is the limiting resource in the West. I think we need to match them back together again."
Binney also mentioned that soon we would be talking about our "water footprint" as much as our "carbon footprint". He went on the explain the connection between water and energy.
Let me ask a question that I suspect is not being addressed: is there any planning at the regional or federal level about what to do when the s**t hits the fan? I'm not talking about some people upset because they can't water their lawns. I'm talking about when the reservoirs go dry and the West's social fabric unravels. One water wonk used the word "apocalypse". That is heavy-duty stuff.
This is a very good article. It's also nice to hear from some fresh faces. But regardless of who spins it, the tale has not improved.
"You can't call it a drought anymore, because it's going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought." -- Richard Seager, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, commenting on the 'Western USA drought'
The southwest has long had drought spells, and climate change. This is not an issue about global warming. This IS an issue about use and the demands that states like California and Arizona have brought, on the Colorado basin, etc. California is the biggest contributor to the lowering of the Colorado River and the Hoover Dam project....that state has allowed more and more irrigation and water demands to come to their state, without batting an eye. Look at the crops grown in those states, that aren't even conducive to those areas, because of their climate. Yet they are growing them there anyhow. Supply and demand will be the key issue to a drier southwest, not global warming.
Posted by: Kerri Tang | Thursday, 05 June 2008 at 06:11 AM