These days, when we talk about water, we aren’t talking about “drought” — we’re talking about a new and enduring climate scenario. Despite fluke flooding like the Las Vegas Valley experienced Thursday night, we must act accordingly.
In the 100 years since the Colorado River Compact was negotiated, the amount of water in the river has declined and the amount of people living in the West has exploded.
There is simply not enough water in the West to sustain the level of water consumption we currently demand. And there likely won’t be. Ever.
Groundwater and investments in massive infrastructure projects like the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams bought us some time, but as the bathtub ring around Lake Mead shows every day, the clock is ticking on long-term solutions grounded in fact and science, not politics and aspirations.
When the Colorado River Compact, also known as the “Law of the River,” was first negotiated 100 years ago, it was a time of abundance. The snowpack was deep, the rivers and underground aquifers were full, and the West was largely empty.
Yet, as readers will discover in the deep dive into the Colorado compact in this issue, even in the time of abundance they got it wrong and massively overestimated the amount of available water when drawing up the initial plans 100 years ago.
Today, as we prepare to renegotiate the compact for the next century, it is a time of scarcity and uncertainty. The snowpack is decreasing, the temperature is rising, and sleepy towns on the western trails have become massive cities — fully 40 million people depend on the shrinking Colorado. The natural environment cannot meet our demand for water, and the amount of water is dropping, fast, everywhere in the West.
As of this week, the water level at Lake Mead is 188 feet below its peak.
To put that in context, the amount of water missing from the lake could cover the Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Los Angeles in a pool as tall as the Fremont Hotel. And that’s not counting the water missing from underground aquifers that has led much of California’s Central Valley to drop nearly a foot due to subsidence.
It’s worth remembering that the idea of turning on the tap and getting water is relatively recent in America. Nationwide access to indoor plumbing is less than 100 years old here — our oldest citizens and some of our grandparents can remember when in rural America’s water had to be fetched by hand. Now, with thousands of wells failing each year across the West, some small communities in California already have lost the “modern miracle” of indoor plumbing and must truck in water. That trend will expand.
This is our challenge. It’s a long-term problem that requires all stakeholders to come to the table and negotiate long-term solutions.
Scientists and Indigenous tribes have raised red flags about the problem for years. But tribes that acted responsibly, taking well below their legal water allotment, despite having the most senior water rights, spent decades without a seat at the table.
Meanwhile, state governments often took more than their legal allotment.
At one point California took so much water from the river that it was threatened with federal action. And just last year, St. George, Utah, used more than three times the amount per person as Las Vegas.
In the West, land and water are core animating issues in regional disputes. The health of the Colorado River, however, requires us to be better than we have in the past.
The new agreement must include tribes, it must use real data from scientists, and it must be governed by the river itself – changing and evolving to reflect the actual water levels of the river in any given year rather than the idealistic creative accounting of politicians a century in the past.
The original compact allocated 15 million acre-feet of water to the seven states, plus 1.5 million to Mexico. Subsequent negotiations increased the southern states’ allocation by 1 million acre-feet, bringing the total to 17.5 million.
But as the pact was being drafted, forward-thinking hydrologists raised alarms: Those estimated flows were based on a couple of extremely wet years. Even 100 years ago, they warned us that the river couldn’t sustain those levels of use.
The result was that from the moment federal and state governments began drawing water from the river, we were already beginning to deplete it.
For the West to survive, any new agreement will require everyone to make sacrifices.
Those of us who have cut our water use in the past, like Las Vegas, must agree to not begrudge or otherwise penalize those who have not. Simultaneously, while we hope those who have not yet cut their use enjoyed the benefit of our generosity (we’re talking to you, St. George), the time for exceptions is over.
The states in the upper Colorado watershed, such as Colorado and Utah, must agree to play fair with the states in the lower watershed — Nevada, California and Arizona. California, in turn, must end its cavalier attitude about water. Meanwhile, the cities that contain the most votes in Western states must be extremely sensitive to the needs of strained agriculture and vote to provide financial assistance to farmers changing to low-water crops and farming techniques. If we don’t work together, chaos will break out.
All parties to the agreement must be expected to cut per-capita water use down to a shared, normalized and sustainable level.
This will likely mean that certain water-intensive crops will no longer be able to be grown in the West and that certain sectors of the economy will have to adapt to be more sustainable. The exceptionally water smart approaches used by Strip resorts demonstrate that this can be done profitably. And these times will almost certainly mean that the aesthetics of landscaping in the West will be required to change for everyone, even the Los Angeles Basin. No agreement should ever allow aesthetics or profits to be put above basic human needs of clean, reliable drinking water.
We’ll be exploring these and other options to address the water crisis in future articles and editorials of the Sun.
But for now, it is sufficient to say that we are approaching a moment in history in which future generations will look back and judge us.
If we rise to the occasion, set aside our sense of personal entitlement and find a sustainable agreement, this generation will be looked upon as heroes of the West. But if we don’t, future generations will visit the dry, abandoned, hollowed out husks of once-great cities and wonder, “What happened?”
It’s up to us to decide what our narrative in the history books will be.