[env-trinity] Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Drought Settles In, Lake Shrinks and West's Worries Grow

Mon May 3 15:15:45 PDT 2004

Jay Glase
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                      John Wullschleger                                                                                                      
                                               To:                                                                                           
                      05/03/2004 03:24         cc:       (bcc: Jay Glase/Omaha/NPS)                                                          
                      PM MDT                   Subject:  Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Drought Settles In, Lake Shrinks and West's Worries    
                                                Grow                                                                                         

Western drought in the New York Times:

Drought Settles In, Lake Shrinks and Wests Worries Grow

May 2, 2004
 By KIRK JOHNSON and DEAN E. MURPHY

PAGE, Ariz. - At five years and counting, the drought that
has parched much of the West is getting much harder to
shrug off as a blip.

Those who worry most about the future of the West -
politicians, scientists, business leaders, city planners
and environmentalists - are increasingly realizing that a
world of eternally blue skies and meager mountain snowpacks
may not be a passing phenomenon but rather the return of a
harsh climatic norm.

Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800
years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the
relatively wet weather across much of the West during the
20th century was a fluke. In other words, scientists who
study tree rings and ocean temperatures say, the
development of the modern urbanized West - one of the
biggest growth spurts in the nation's history - may have
been based on a colossal miscalculation.

That shift is shaking many assumptions about how the West
is run. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico,
Utah and Wyoming, the states that depend on the Colorado
River, are preparing for the possibility of water shortages
for the first time since the Hoover Dam was built in the
1930's to control the river's flow. The top water official
of the Bush administration, Bennett W. Raley, said recently
that the federal government might step in if the states
could not decide among themselves how to cope with
dwindling supplies, a threat that riled local officials but
underscored the growing urgency.

"Before this drought, we had 20 years of a wet cycle and 20
years of the most growth ever," said John R. D'Antonio, the
New Mexico State engineer, who is scrambling to find new
water supplies for the suburbs of Albuquerque that did not
exist a generation ago.

The latest blow was paltry snowfall during March in the
Rocky Mountains, pushing down runoff projections for the
Colorado River this year to 55 percent of average. Snowmelt
is the lifeblood of the river, which provides municipal
water from Denver to Los Angeles and irrigates millions of
acres of farmland. The period since 1999 is now officially
the driest in the 98 years of recorded history of the
Colorado River, according to the United States Geological
Survey.

"March was a huge wake-up call as to the need to move at an
accelerated pace," said Mr. Raley, assistant secretary of
the interior for water and science.

Losing Water at Lake Powell

Some of the biggest water
worries are focused here on Lake Powell, the vast blue
diamond of deep water that government engineers created in
one of the driest and most remote areas of the country
beginning in the 1950's. From its inception, Lake Powell,
the nation's second-largest artificial lake, after Lake
Mead in Nevada, was a powerful symbol across the West. Some
saw it as a statement of human will and know-how, others of
arrogance.

Powell, part of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area,
has lost nearly 60 percent of its water and is now about
the size it was during the Watergate hearings in 1973, when
it was still filling up. White cliffs 10 stories high,
bleached by salts from the lake and stranded above the
water, line its side canyons. Elsewhere, retreating waters
have exposed mountains of sediment.

The tourist economy here in Page has been battered. The
National Park Service, which operates the recreation area,
has spent millions of dollars in recent years just to lay
concrete for boat-launch ramps that must be extended every
year, a process that one marina operator here called
"chasing water."

Daniel C. McCool, a professor of political science at the
University of Utah and director of the American West
Center, says Powell is the barometer of the drought because
what has happened here is as much about politics, economics
and the interlocking system of rules and rights called the
law of the river as it is about meteorology.

Part of the lake's problem, for example, dates to a
miscalculation in 1922, when hydrologists overestimated the
average flow of the Colorado River and locked the number
into a multistate agreement called the Colorado River
Compact. The compact, along with a subsequent treaty with
Mexico, requires Lake Powell to release 8.23 million
acre-feet of water each year below the river's dam, Glen
Canyon, no matter how much comes in.

Because the river's real average flow was less than the
1922 compact envisioned, Powell very often released more
than half of the water the Colorado River delivered. But it
did not really matter because the upper basin states were
not using their share. Now, communities from Denver to Salt
Lake City and Indian tribes with old water rights in their
portfolios are stepping forward to stake their claims. Lake
Powell, which has been called the aquatic piggy bank of the
upper West, is overdrawn.

If water levels continue to fall, Powell will be unable to
generate electricity as early as 2007 or sooner, some
hydrologists say. And it would be reduced more or less to
the old riverbed channel of the Colorado River not long
after that. Even now, the lake's managers say, it would
take a decade of historically normal rainfall to refill it.

"If we're only in the middle of this drought, then Lake
Powell might be very close to some very dramatic problems,"
said Dr. John C. Dohrenwend, a retired geologist for the
Geological Survey who lives near the lake.

Insufficient water for the Glen Canyon Dam turbines would
be only the beginning. At that point, much of the lake
bottom would be exposed, creating a vast environment for
noxious weeds like tamarisk and thistle. The next step in
the spiral would come at what is called "dead pool," where
decades' worth of agricultural chemicals at the lake bottom
would begin mixing more actively with the reactivated
river. The question then, environmentalists say, is what
would happen to the Grand Canyon, just south of the dam.

An Issue That May Go to Congress

"Americans won't stand
for the Grand Canyon being endangered," said John Weisheit,
the conservation director for Living Rivers, an
environmental group in Moab, Utah, that advocates removing
the dam at Glen Canyon and allowing the river to return to
its natural course. "In another year, they're going to be
talking more seriously about Powell in Congress."

But the fact is, no one knows: the weather could change
tomorrow. Many past Western droughts have ended suddenly,
with a bang of precipitation. But some dry spells persisted
for generations. From about 900 to 1300, scientists say,
periodic drought in the West was the norm. Only a few times
during that period, according to tree-growth measurements,
was precipitation anywhere near the relatively high levels
of the 20th century.

"What is unusual is not the drought periods, but the
above-average wet periods," said Dr. Robert Webb, a
hydrologist with the Geological Survey who specializes in
the Colorado River.

The uncertainty has local, state and federal officials
along the 1,450-mile river scurrying to secure water
allotments while also preparing for the worst.

Already in Las Vegas, the regional water agency is removing
the equivalent of a football field of grass every day from
front lawns, playgrounds and golf courses to save on
outdoor watering. Farther downriver, Arizona officials are
pumping billions of gallons of water into aquifers to save
for an even less rainy day.

Electricity has become a concern. The Western Area Power
Administration, the federal agency that distributes power
from hydroelectric projects in the Rocky Mountain West,
plans to reduce by about 25 percent the amount of
electricity it can promise in future years.

Conserving on a Large Scale

In Los Angeles, a
representative from the West's largest urban water agency,
the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is
among a group of Western water officials dusting off plans
to help limit evaporation from reservoirs, which could save
billions of gallons. One idea is to pour a nontoxic
substance over the reservoirs to form a water-trapping
barrier.

The group, which has been holding meetings, is even looking
at far-off solutions like raising the height of Hoover Dam
so that more water could be collected and saved during wet
times.

"We understand we have a problem and we are working on it,"
said the Los Angeles representative, Dennis Underwood, a
former head of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which
oversees dams and reservoirs in the West.

There are also worries downstream from Powell at Lake Mead,
which serves Nevada, Arizona and California. It could drop
low enough as early as next year to force officials to
declare a drought emergency. That would hurt the booming
southern Nevada economy through significantly higher water
rates and outright bans on things like new swimming pools,
said Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern
Nevada Water Authority.

Mr. Raley of the Interior Department said he wanted the
states to consider a water bank, in which unused water
could be leased or sold across state lines. Some previous
efforts to create banks, with federal oversight, have been
contentious because they were seen by smaller states as a
means to funnel more of the river to water-guzzling
California.

But the notion of cutting private water deals on the
Colorado is gaining broader acceptance, in large part
because of the drought. The most celebrated example was a
deal last year to sell irrigation water in the Imperial
Valley of Southern California to the urban water district
in San Diego.

Some advocates for agriculture fear that
water-to-the-highest-bidder could ravage ranches and farms
if owners were induced to sell their irrigation rights. But
private-market supporters say the truth, like it or not, is
that farmers own most of the West's water, and ultimately
there will be fewer of them.

There is some concern that if the Colorado River goes into
crisis, the ensuing tangle of litigation over water rights,
endangered species and border disputes could undo the
system of Western water law that has evolved over the last
100 years.

Some say that would be a good thing.

"The law of the river is hopelessly, irretrievably
obsolete, designed on a hydrological fallacy, around an
agrarian West that no longer exists," Professor McCool at
the University of Utah said. "After six years of drought,
somebody will have to say the emperor has no clothes."

Water officials in Arizona and Nevada say they would also
like to rethink the law of the river to put their states on
a more equal footing in sharing the Colorado River. But Mr.
Raley said such talk invites disaster and chaos, especially
during a drought.

"This isn't the time to plunge into chaos," he said.

Other people who live here on the fringe of Lake Powell say
that the West's great reservoirs have, in their very
decline, proved their value in stretching out limited water
resources and underlined the difference between past
civilizations here that anthropologists say were wiped out
or displaced by drought.

"Those people back then had nothing to catch and save their
water - now we do," said Ronald W. Thompson, district
manager of the Washington County Water Conservancy District
in southwestern Utah.

"I'm a believer that history repeats itself - long-term
drought could return," Mr. Thompson said. "But I suspect
our civilization can weather this."

Kirk Johnson reported from Page, Ariz., for this article
and Dean E. Murphy from Grand Canyon National Park.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/national/02DROU.html?ex=1084618857&ei=1&en=ff744441d61adc0f

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