“””the Bureau of Reclamation will release an additional 500,000 acre-feet (616.7 million cubic meters) of water this year from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream on the Wyoming-Utah border that will flow into Lake Powell.”””
Per the article, sounds like they also have about 80% of that in an artificial lake that they’ll not release for now.
As someone who’s lived his entire life in the southwest: this is bad. The importance of water to life can’t be understated but can go unrealized if you’re “in the land of plenty” of water. Lack of water has felled societies and started wars throughout history. “People will say they’re going to war for all sorts of reasons but ultimately it’s for of water, food, or resources.” (Paraphrasing)
Further, the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move. That’s not a solution for the number of people at stake. Further, this is some of the most renewable energy rich land in the US. Solar panels and some pipes could probably push water in from the oceans reliably enough-levels of renewable energy.
Anyone who wants to know more about the situation on the colorado river should read Science Be Damned: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River [1]. The Tl;DR is that water is doled out by a multi-state compact that used several years of historically high water flow as it's basis. Over time, normal river flow rates were bound to deplete the reservoirs.
The first thing to point out is that some like to hijack the water shortage as being related to climate change. It isn't. It's based simply on inaccurate projections of how much water would flow in and increased usage. That's it.
What I find infuriating is:
1. Water rights for agriculture are a particular problem. As if we don't subsidize agriculture enough (eg [1]);
2. There really should be more water restrictions and there should've been for years already; and (this is the big one)
3. We're making consumers (further) subsidize agriculture by funding and paying for expensive desalinated water.
What do you mean "It isn't"? Yes, the projections were inaccurate, but the reason they were inaccurate is that they climate change has and will continue to decrease the amount of water that falls in the region.
While you are absolutely correct that there are plenty of problematic issues around water management in the West that would have created a problem like this eventually even in a world without climate change, it is absolutely the case that aridification of the region, caused by climate change, is exacerbating the issue.
This is similar to the issue regarding forest fires in the West cost. A huge factor is mismanagement of controlled burns in the forests. However, years of record drought absolutely do increase the probability of a forest fire.
Rather than falsely say "it isn't", it's better dismiss the false narrative that this is completely unavoidable because of climate change. With much better water management we could have postponed the impact of climate change quite a while.
The bigger issue is that climate change is being used as an excuse to mask decades of mismanagement of water resources in this region. I also agree with your point that the real conversation should be entirely "what are we going to do about agriculture in deserts and regions that are soon to be deserts?"
> It's based simply on inaccurate projections of how much water would flow in
This ignores the fact that both projections and actual flow are trending downward. If the problem were just bad data, we would be just as likely to have a surplus as a deficit.
Three books anyone interested in the Colorado River generally or Glen Canyon Dam specifically should read are
Cadillac Desert. A history of how all the dams came to be.
The Emerald Mile. Things got pretty perilous at Glen Canyon Dam owing to it being too full at the wrong time of the year. In the midst of this, three guys decide to take advantage of flow levels we're unlikely to see again in our lifetimes to set an all time record for running the Grand Canyon. This is on my personal list of the greatest true stories ever told.
Down The River (or anything else by Edward Abbey, really). The titular essay is about a trip down the Colorado. Abbey was an ardent critic of Glen Canyon Dam for flooding Glen Canyon. Better known for writing The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but Down the River more specifically deals with the Colorado.
To add an interesting fiction book: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi focuses on a hypothetical future where individual militias and municipalities/states in the South/South West fight and engage in near hidden warfare over access to the dwindling Colorado River. The wealthy are able to live in compounds where enormous amounts of water are recycled in a self contained system, while the less well off have to fend for themselves in what is a veritable super desert. It's quite dark, but a troubling possible future written in a clear hard sci-fi voice.
"In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink."
The movie Chinatown was also about California and water.
"The film was inspired by the California water wars, a series of disputes over southern California water at the beginning of the 20th century, by which Los Angeles interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley"
Growing up in Southern California, it was always maddening to me why water restrictions weren't always in place, it's a desert!
Somehow we would get lots of rain or snow fall in the mountains, then state lifts water restrictions, and we end up with low reservoirs again.
Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher.
(edit:Typo)
2nd Edit: Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector (since it accounts for ~80% water consumption), that wasn't very clear in my original comment.
I did a calculation to get a sense of the enormity of these numbers and to consider what it would take to replace this water release with desalination. The release is 500,000 acre-feet, or about 163G gallons (326/000 gal/af). According to Wikipedia, the Keystone Phase III pipeline can deliver 700,000 barrels/day, or 29.4M gallons/day (oil barrels are 42 gallons). Setting aside the 7% flow rate differences between water and oil, an equivalent pipeline would take over 5,500 days, or over 15 years to deliver that much water.
Or to put it another way, the 7.5M acre-feet per year deliverable in the Colorado River Compact would take over 225 pipelines to achieve the same flow rate.
So, for desalination to have any significant impact, we would have to build a huge number of desalination plants and pipelines and provide massive power for the plants and the energy to pump all that water uphill.
In Utah (home of lake powell) 80% of our water goes to agriculture, which in turn provides.... 1.6% of state GDP. The overwhelming majority of that state GDP goes to cattle and the feeding of cattle. Not just meat, but the most water intensive form of meat you can eat.
If anyone wants to dive deep into the water rights and history of hydrology + politics in the Colorado River Basin, I highly recommend Where the Water Goes by Davin Owen. The books starts at the headwaters near Rocky Mountain National Park and follows the river down to the Gulf of California. It addresses every major issue, water right and major construction project along the way.
1. This doesn't seem to have been done out of any natural conservation considerations, but rather electricity generation considerations. Not saying the latter isn't important, but it's still sad that that seems to still be the only considerations that matter.
2. This is literally a debt in clean water that will be repaid by generations to come, as the article mentions. What is being done to make sure it can be repaid? Not just the first year or so of water restrictions, but a sustainable plan to reduce consumption.
Overall this reads like they just kicked the can upstream, down the road.
John Wesley Powell warned us about this more than 140 years ago [0].
I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.
They could be doing something about the water shortage. A good thing to do would be to erect solar panels over the surfaces of all the reservoirs involved to cut evaporation, and supply power from those when they are producing instead of draining more water out.
Build out enough solar panels, and they can pump water back up at peak times.
Desalinating water and pumping it up would be a bigger project involving a lot of pipe. Before that, put up solar panels to shade the canals, and desalinate water for where the canals lead to.
* Watering of non-native grass lawns should outright be banned
* Unsustainable agriculture, like growing baby spinach in the desert during winter, should be forced to pay unsubsidized rates for water, which should be transferred to the consumers of the product
* People living in the desert should have to pay unsubsidized rates for water for consumption
> Some experts say the term drought is inadequate because it suggests conditions will return to normal.
One or two hundred years does not normal make. The fact is, this area is now returning to normal. The dams, water supply, etc. were all based on overly optimistic / false assumptions.
If gov / leadership don't have the wherewithal to break this down for the masses, we're never going to get honesty and transparency about climate change.
__Lake Mead, formed by Hoover Dam in the 1930s and crucial to the water supply of 25 million people, has fallen so low that a barrel containing human remains, believed to date to the 1980s, was found in the receding shoreline on Sunday.__
>"One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year"
Did anybody else find this number astounding? That's 3370 litres PER DAY per household. Assuming this numberis accurate, this is not people living in condos. This is people watering their lawn daily, filling their backyard pools, liberally washing their cars every week. I think the water crisis will be an easy fix as soon as the immediacy of the problem causes people to accept higher pricing. No other incentive will eliminate the lunacy which is watering lawns and every-backyard pools in the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and Southern California.
> Amid a sustained drought exacerbated by climate change
This is a religious statement, same as writing "god is great" after a statement. Climate change, sure I'm on board and I think we need to act to address it. News articles just throwing in these random "praise the lord"s in their writing serve nobody, make any case for action weaker, and undermine the credibility of the reporter and news service.
If you're reporting on a study about that fine, if you're just writing about how the reservoir is low, no need to add some hallelujahs to your article.
I mean... really? Is this what we're doing to discredit researchers now? I can understand the argument that the general term "climate change" is problematic as a catch all term for a lot of complex climate systems all changing at once because of one macro input changing, but "a religious statement"? Do you not realize that these changes are predictions made by researchers related to falsifiable hypotheses? Do you understand how empiricism works?
Market forces anyone? Scrap the historical allotments, and have the potential users bid for water. Pay to play seems like the best medicine here. The actual price for a gallon will round to nothing for a consumer, but the ag users will have to figure things out that they should have figured out long ago.
Farmers keep planting more and more almond groves in places that cannot naturally support anything but grazing. At some point there will have to be a reckoning over water rights, although I don't expect it to be pretty.
From an ops point of view, the unforeseen technical difficulties in dealing with this problem are pretty stunning. eg, there is "plenty" of water in a bunch of upstream reservoirs which can't be released - either because it's in the dead pool, or because dropping the levels causes other problems.
The Navajo reservoir has 800,000 acre-feet of water which can't be released due to the high placement of an intake pipe. If that intake is exposed, water to several small cities and part of the Navajo reservation (unfulfilled decades-long promise, still in-process) ceases to flow.
Apparently it's a design flaw made in the name of cost-savings.
> One acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters), is enough water to supply one or two households for a year.
This is mind-blowing. Is this true? Each house in American (roughly) uses this much water? I assume it's certainly not an issue in, say, Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25 - but there's just no way this is sustainable in places out west prone to drought, right?
Am I over-appreciating this seemingly large number?
> "We are never going to see these reservoirs filled again in our lifetime," said Denielle Perry, a professor at Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability.
The average American uses about 29,930 gallons of water per year[1]. The figure of 326,000 gallons is enough for 3 families of four people. However, water usage varies wildly in the US by region and housing type.
If you take the US average of 138 gallons per day and take that out to a year 1 acre-foot is about 6.5 households but out west you probably get more water usage for lawns and things like cooling which is more likely to use swamp coolers than the rest of the US so it's possible.
I had a city issued smart water meter at my last residence with 5-6 residents. I set a text message alert at 400 gallons per day, as that was a very unusual event that might warrant attention. I had high efficiency showers, toilets, and washers. I only ever hit it, and well exceeded it, when I did something like water the lawn a few times a year. A high watermark estimate (har har) would be 400 x 365 = 146000. I suppose two households is plausible, but I'd guess more like three to four for 326000.
Where I live, in a very wet part of ther United States, water is still too expensive for watering the lawn regularly. This is usually because the meter reading is used to assess charges for sewer as well. Those who do have irrigation systems request second meters to avoid sewer charges or even tap into the gray water supply.
Water supply planners estimate that a typical household needs 0.4 -0.5 acre feet of water per year (approximately 150,000 gal) to satisfy the demands of a home and landscape.
Be a bit aggressive and assume the number is 365,000 gallons - that means 1000 gallons per day. Statistics from a perfunctory Google search seem to indicate around 300 gal/day/household, so it seems about right if a bit on the high side.
That's ~900 Gal/Day which sounds pretty high for 1 or 2 households but I suppose if they are large and have large lawns or something it could be reasonable. I would naively think it is closer to 5 to 10 households.
That does seem like an astonishingly high number, but I guess there is quite a range of water requirements across the country.
To put this in context, it's 10x the water we use in our house in the UK, and I don't think we're particularly low in our water usage (we work out to be around 300 litres a day).
> Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25
My sewer bill in Seattle is over $120. That isn't for water, that is just the price of getting the water out of my house! (My water bill is half that, go figure!)
This was winter/spring, so just this is just laundry, showering, and doing dishes.
People use far more water than they should and water is much cheaper than it should be. $25 in water could very well be this much, you'd have to check your bill to see what volume you use.
[+] [-] ianai|3 years ago|reply
Per the article, sounds like they also have about 80% of that in an artificial lake that they’ll not release for now.
As someone who’s lived his entire life in the southwest: this is bad. The importance of water to life can’t be understated but can go unrealized if you’re “in the land of plenty” of water. Lack of water has felled societies and started wars throughout history. “People will say they’re going to war for all sorts of reasons but ultimately it’s for of water, food, or resources.” (Paraphrasing)
Further, the answer is probably not to tell people to simply move. That’s not a solution for the number of people at stake. Further, this is some of the most renewable energy rich land in the US. Solar panels and some pipes could probably push water in from the oceans reliably enough-levels of renewable energy.
[+] [-] ch4s3|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Science-Be-Dammed-Ignoring-Inconvenie...
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
What I find infuriating is:
1. Water rights for agriculture are a particular problem. As if we don't subsidize agriculture enough (eg [1]);
2. There really should be more water restrictions and there should've been for years already; and (this is the big one)
3. We're making consumers (further) subsidize agriculture by funding and paying for expensive desalinated water.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-10-10/colorad...
[+] [-] adgjlsfhk1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] time_to_smile|3 years ago|reply
This is similar to the issue regarding forest fires in the West cost. A huge factor is mismanagement of controlled burns in the forests. However, years of record drought absolutely do increase the probability of a forest fire.
Rather than falsely say "it isn't", it's better dismiss the false narrative that this is completely unavoidable because of climate change. With much better water management we could have postponed the impact of climate change quite a while.
The bigger issue is that climate change is being used as an excuse to mask decades of mismanagement of water resources in this region. I also agree with your point that the real conversation should be entirely "what are we going to do about agriculture in deserts and regions that are soon to be deserts?"
[+] [-] kokanee|3 years ago|reply
This ignores the fact that both projections and actual flow are trending downward. If the problem were just bad data, we would be just as likely to have a surplus as a deficit.
[+] [-] mauvehaus|3 years ago|reply
Cadillac Desert. A history of how all the dams came to be.
The Emerald Mile. Things got pretty perilous at Glen Canyon Dam owing to it being too full at the wrong time of the year. In the midst of this, three guys decide to take advantage of flow levels we're unlikely to see again in our lifetimes to set an all time record for running the Grand Canyon. This is on my personal list of the greatest true stories ever told.
Down The River (or anything else by Edward Abbey, really). The titular essay is about a trip down the Colorado. Abbey was an ardent critic of Glen Canyon Dam for flooding Glen Canyon. Better known for writing The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but Down the River more specifically deals with the Colorado.
[+] [-] beezlebroxxxxxx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imperialdrive|3 years ago|reply
"In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink."
[+] [-] chasd00|3 years ago|reply
"The film was inspired by the California water wars, a series of disputes over southern California water at the beginning of the 20th century, by which Los Angeles interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)
[+] [-] RationPhantoms|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pneumatic1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drums8787|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aaronstotle|3 years ago|reply
Somehow we would get lots of rain or snow fall in the mountains, then state lifts water restrictions, and we end up with low reservoirs again.
Another issue is that Los Angeles would issues fines for high water usage, that's not enough when wealthy people can pay the cost, the consequences for wasting water need to be much higher.
(edit:Typo)
2nd Edit: Water restrictions should be applied to the agriculture sector (since it accounts for ~80% water consumption), that wasn't very clear in my original comment.
[+] [-] dev_tty01|3 years ago|reply
Or to put it another way, the 7.5M acre-feet per year deliverable in the Colorado River Compact would take over 225 pipelines to achieve the same flow rate.
So, for desalination to have any significant impact, we would have to build a huge number of desalination plants and pipelines and provide massive power for the plants and the energy to pump all that water uphill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline
https://usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/faq.html
https://www.regoproducts.com/PDFs/liquid_flow_conversions.pd...
[+] [-] warcher|3 years ago|reply
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samschooler|3 years ago|reply
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317824/where-the-wa...
[+] [-] black_puppydog|3 years ago|reply
2. This is literally a debt in clean water that will be repaid by generations to come, as the article mentions. What is being done to make sure it can be repaid? Not just the first year or so of water restrictions, but a sustainable plan to reduce consumption.
Overall this reads like they just kicked the can upstream, down the road.
[+] [-] hyperion2010|3 years ago|reply
John Wesley Powell warned us about this more than 140 years ago [0].
I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28907254
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166
0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878
1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954
2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954
[+] [-] ncmncm|3 years ago|reply
Build out enough solar panels, and they can pump water back up at peak times.
Desalinating water and pumping it up would be a bigger project involving a lot of pipe. Before that, put up solar panels to shade the canals, and desalinate water for where the canals lead to.
[+] [-] exabrial|3 years ago|reply
* Watering of non-native grass lawns should outright be banned
* Unsustainable agriculture, like growing baby spinach in the desert during winter, should be forced to pay unsubsidized rates for water, which should be transferred to the consumers of the product
* People living in the desert should have to pay unsubsidized rates for water for consumption
[+] [-] ryantgtg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|3 years ago|reply
One or two hundred years does not normal make. The fact is, this area is now returning to normal. The dams, water supply, etc. were all based on overly optimistic / false assumptions.
If gov / leadership don't have the wherewithal to break this down for the masses, we're never going to get honesty and transparency about climate change.
[+] [-] willswire|3 years ago|reply
Imagine finding this on the shore!
[+] [-] loufe|3 years ago|reply
Did anybody else find this number astounding? That's 3370 litres PER DAY per household. Assuming this numberis accurate, this is not people living in condos. This is people watering their lawn daily, filling their backyard pools, liberally washing their cars every week. I think the water crisis will be an easy fix as soon as the immediacy of the problem causes people to accept higher pricing. No other incentive will eliminate the lunacy which is watering lawns and every-backyard pools in the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and Southern California.
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
This is a religious statement, same as writing "god is great" after a statement. Climate change, sure I'm on board and I think we need to act to address it. News articles just throwing in these random "praise the lord"s in their writing serve nobody, make any case for action weaker, and undermine the credibility of the reporter and news service.
If you're reporting on a study about that fine, if you're just writing about how the reservoir is low, no need to add some hallelujahs to your article.
[+] [-] scoofy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flerchin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sulam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oasisbob|3 years ago|reply
The Navajo reservoir has 800,000 acre-feet of water which can't be released due to the high placement of an intake pipe. If that intake is exposed, water to several small cities and part of the Navajo reservation (unfulfilled decades-long promise, still in-process) ceases to flow.
Apparently it's a design flaw made in the name of cost-savings.
https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520915847316836352 https://twitter.com/edmillard/status/1520914733674553344
[+] [-] ericmay|3 years ago|reply
This is mind-blowing. Is this true? Each house in American (roughly) uses this much water? I assume it's certainly not an issue in, say, Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25 - but there's just no way this is sustainable in places out west prone to drought, right?
Am I over-appreciating this seemingly large number?
> "We are never going to see these reservoirs filled again in our lifetime," said Denielle Perry, a professor at Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability.
[+] [-] ch4s3|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts.
[+] [-] rtkwe|3 years ago|reply
[0] 138 gallons per day is a little over 190k L/yr https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=138+gallons+per+day+to+...
edit: 138 figure from here. Just took the google knowledge box answer: https://www.watercalculator.org/footprint/indoor-water-use-a...
[+] [-] thedougd|3 years ago|reply
Where I live, in a very wet part of ther United States, water is still too expensive for watering the lawn regularly. This is usually because the meter reading is used to assess charges for sewer as well. Those who do have irrigation systems request second meters to avoid sewer charges or even tap into the gray water supply.
[+] [-] snarkerson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickphx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gernb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bumbledraven|3 years ago|reply
Water supply planners estimate that a typical household needs 0.4 -0.5 acre feet of water per year (approximately 150,000 gal) to satisfy the demands of a home and landscape.
[+] [-] foobarian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lost953|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeefWellington|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cesaref|3 years ago|reply
To put this in context, it's 10x the water we use in our house in the UK, and I don't think we're particularly low in our water usage (we work out to be around 300 litres a day).
[+] [-] com2kid|3 years ago|reply
My sewer bill in Seattle is over $120. That isn't for water, that is just the price of getting the water out of my house! (My water bill is half that, go figure!)
This was winter/spring, so just this is just laundry, showering, and doing dishes.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chemeng|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
These units seem to be deliberately obtuse.
[+] [-] mhh__|3 years ago|reply