Water in the West

Discovering through lines west of the hundredth meridian

Through Lines

My junior year in high school, I had the opportunity to do a year-long research project and paper.

Growing up, my family had frequented Arizona and I was thinking about attending college there. I had long found beauty in the desert — but also wondered about the amount of water.

I was curious: was there enough water to support all of the growth in Phoenix? And Vegas? And Southern California? The green golf courses, palm trees and fountains sure made it seem like there was. And, maybe there was. Honestly, I kind of hoped there was because I loved the sun.

But still, I wondered.

And so I set out to learn what I could. My teacher was invaluable, introducing me to seminal works like Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, which chronicled John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the Colorado River, and Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, published after a decade of research. I read. I went to the library. I leveraged research and suggestions from a friend that had embarked on a related research effort the year before. The more I read, the more precarious it seemed.

In the end, as much as I loved the natural beauty of Arizona, I decided not to go to college there.

But this story isn’t really about college. It’s about curiosity and realizing deep truths about oneself.

Because, what I didn’t consciously realize until tonight is that, just as Norman Maclean wrote A River Runs Through It, there is a through line in my life about water.

Here are a few of the books I still have on my bookcase about water. I read the first two in high school. I bought some in college. I bought another in graduate school.

Last Friday evening, The New York Times published an article in its evening digest that caught my eye. Item number five was about the Colorado River. I read it and made this a gift link so you can, too. If you believe in “Go West, Young Man” or care about the American West, I would encourage you to spend a few minutes and read it.

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Water Math

It’s much more complicated than this but one simple bit of math is instructive. In 1922, the Colorado River Compact (Wikipedia) allocated 15 million acre feet¹ of water as follows:

• 7.5 million acre feet to the “States of the Upper Division,” meaning Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming

• 7.5 million acre feet to the “States of the Lower Division,” meaning Arizona, California, and Nevada

In addition, it provided the Lower Basin the right to increase its allocation to 8.5 million acre feet.

7.5 + 7.5 + 1 = 16.0 million acre feet of water

Seems pretty straight-forward, right? In 1944, the Mexican Water Treaty guaranteed Mexico 1.5 million acre feet.

16.0 + 1.5 = 17.5 million acre feet of water

All good, right?

But the premise that the river’s flow would average 17.5 million acre-feet each year turned out to be faulty. Over the past century, the river’s actual flow has averaged less than 15 million acre-feet each year. (NYTimes)

Uh, oh.

15.0 - 17.5 = (2.5 million acre feet of water). 

But wait, there’s more.

From 2000 through 2022, the river’s annual flow averaged just over 12 million acre-feet; in each of the past three years, the total flow was less than 10 million. (NYTimes)

12 is less than 15, which is less than 17.5. And now the flow is below 10 million acre feet of water. 

What to do?

The Interior Department had asked the states to voluntarily come up with a plan by Jan. 31 to collectively cut the amount of water they draw from the Colorado. The demand for those cuts, on a scale without parallel in American history….

“Think of the Colorado River Basin as a slow-motion disaster,” said Kevin Moran, who directs state and federal water policy advocacy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “We’re really at a moment of reckoning.” (NYTimes)

Tomorrow is January 31. Keep an eye on this one.

Until next time,

-bp

1. An acre foot of water is the amount of water to cover an acre of land in a foot of water.