There Will Be Drought: America's Water Situation Keeps Getting Worse

The Western US is running out of water.

It didn't have much in the first place, of course: it was a founding concern of the region. Planners overcame the arid environment early on by engineering vast networks of reservoirs and aqueducts, ensuring that nary a drop of rain or snowfall runoff makes it into an ocean without first passing through a lettuce field or human body. By the time the Colorado River, the Southwest's main source of fresh water, reaches the Mexican border and its last stretch before the Gulf of California, it's not much more than sun-baked dirt.

That sight of cracked, dead soil--pocked here and there with a rusted oil drum or tire--is a pretty familiar sight in the Southwest now, as reservoirs reach levels lower than ever imagined. McAfee Reservoir, Colorado's second-largest water stash, currently looks like a long snaking pond surrounded by salt flats. Arizona's Lake Mead currently sits at about one-third of its total capacity, the emptiest its been since being filled 75 years ago. This year, total inflows into Lake Powell, the 186 mile long reservoir in southern Utah, are about a quarter of normal.

Lake Mead is currently just shy of triggering emergency water shortage measures, which would limit the water allotment of the Lower Colorado River Basin states: big H20 spenders California, Arizona, and Nevada. This is according to a set of interim guidelines released in 2007 by the US Bureau of Reclamation setting the river's first ever drought condition contingency measures. Given that the great drought of 2012--really just an extension of a much larger drought that's been kicking for 10 years--doesn't show any signs of quitting, we can expect those measures to be triggered sometime before the slim salvation of spring seasonal runoff.

The drought situation looks to be another new normal, a coupling of climate change drying up the Rocky Mountains with some mistaken estimates made in the early days of the Colorado Basin reservoir system. The problem is that in the 1930s when the Colorado River was divied up by the various states it touches by the Colorado River Compact, the west was in a period of exceptional precipitation. So, while the law requires the river's Upper Basin states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming) to deliver a certain amount of water to the Lower Basin (New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada), that amount is based on abnormal water levels.

What that means is the upper states owe an "unfair" amount of water to the lower states, an amount that doesn't correspond to real-world river flows. More recent tree ring analysis show drought being a more typical situation than what was imagined when the Compact was signed in 1922: 16,400,000 acre feet then, versus around 14,000,000 acre feet now. Though actually that 14,000,000 acre feet is expected to drop even further as we approach the middle of this century and the effects of climate change settle in. Figure about 8 percent more, according to estimates from the Bureau of Reclamation.

Actually, the situation just gets worse. For a lot of the Compact's history, there was excess water (beyond the allocation requirements of the Compact). Some of it wound up in Mexico, but for the most part, California and its rapidly growing coastal cities were able to grab it up. A provision of the early deal was that that state could take anything leftover. But, as cities in Arizona and Nevada exploded, the surplus has disappeared, leaving no extra water for California. As a result of a series of court rulings in the early '00s, California's had to sharply cut back the amount of water it diverts from the Colorado. As a result, it's starting to get good at conservation. From [an article](http:// http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2103327,00.html) in Time last year:

Officials point out that 20 years ago, about two-thirds of its water was imported; today it's down to half. Total retail water demand in the region has also fallen from just under 4 million acre feet in fiscal year 1989–90 to 3.35 million acre feet in 2010–11, according to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. To further increase local supply — which is much cheaper than imported water — authorities are investing in water-recycling plants to capture more storm water before drains flush it into the ocean; they also plan to clean up contamination so more groundwater can be used. And they're putting more emphasis on conservation efforts, which helped water-use levels in the city of L.A. hit the lowest levels since the 1970s last year, according to the Department of Water and Power. The city has implemented a mandatory water-conservation program that includes measures like restricting sprinkler watering to two days a week.

Southwestern cities certainly haven't stopped growing. And populating the desert with many, many millions of people wasn't the most advisable move. But it's one we're kind of stuck with.

The "right" way to deal with the situation is clear enough and starts with conservation. Note that, as of 2007, residents of the US [used](http:// http://chartsbin.com/view/1455) an average of 1,550 cubic meters of water per year, compared to 212 in the UK and 735 in Mexico. Also helpful would be desalinization, waste and storm water recapture and recycling, new irrigation efficiencies (such as drip irrigation), and future GM crops that use less water.

Finding a better way to price water wouldn't hurt either. Currently, our sense of water's value is skewed in the wrong direction. Imagine if we paid for excess water use like we pay for extra gigabytes on a 3G plan. It water becomes a valued resource, it will become, well, valuable.

The solution isn't to continue as we have in the West for that past 100 years, which is just finding more water somewhere and engineering a way to get it to where it's needed (or desired). This is what China is doing right now with its South-North water transfer project. (Note that China uses an average of 414 cubic meters of water per capita per year, so it's a bit harder to put a value judgement on the $62 billion project.) The Great Lakes have under been enough pressure for long enough to divert fresh water to the western states, that the surrounding states passed a law, the Great Lakes Basin Compact, banning most exports.

This week, the Bureau of Reclamation is releasing a report outlining different strategies for easing stress on the Colorado River. According to a leaked document, one of those strategies is a pipeline to be built from the Missouri River to Denver, carrying around 600,000 acre-feet a year, or enough to keep about a million homes hydrated at current consumption levels. It'd cost billions of dollars to build, and a great deal more money than that to power the pumps neccessary to push that amount of water a mile up in elevation. The New York Times reports:

Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation, said that during the course of the study, the analysis done on climate change and historical data led the agency “to an acknowledged gap” between future demand and future supply as early as the middle of this century.

That is when they put out a call for broader thinking to solve the water problem. “When we did have that wake-up call, we threw open the doors and said, ‘Bring it on,’ ” she said. “Nothing is too silly.”

It won't happen, of course. The Missouri and Mississippi rivers are both suffering from the drought too. It's at the point already where water levels are so low that shipping traffic is threatened; it may be that the Mississippi will have to be dredged even deeper to keep goods flowing to the Gulf of Mexico.

And even in better times, one imagines that states like Kansas and Missouri that are having a hard enough time with the federal government offering health insurance exchanges would have troops along their rivers' banks before a pipeline got built, particularly if it involves the demon's den of California.

The Bureau of Reclamation knows this, of course. You might take their pipeline proposal more as a statement on the seriousness of the current situation. That's the polite approach.

The other approach is what happened to California: suddenly, literally overnight, there's just a lot less water. Deal with it.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.