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Drought
may pit cities against country,
and hasten the demise of ranching
By
Patricia Nelson Limerick and William Travis
for Headwaters News
The
humid Southeast and the arid West have more in common in 2002 than
either would like.
Both areas face drought conditions that have brought tough times
to farms and restrictions on water use to some cities. Georgia and
South Carolina have been struggling with drought since 1998, and
North Carolina’s governor is considering statewide water restrictions.
Over the past year, the Northeast has also coped with low levels
of precipitation; Maine had its driest year in a century in 2001,
and water wells in various parts of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont
and New York went dry.
Drought maps show that the largest area of affected territory is
in the West, in a belt from Montana to Arizona, a territory where
water supply has long been a subject of uncertainty and conflict.
At the start of June, the statewide snowpack in Colorado was 2 percent
of normal. The reservoir system that supplies Denver is less than
70 percent full. Wetlands are shrinking; ranchers are selling off
their cattle; fires find abundant dry fuel in forests; and enthusiasts
for dambuilding, silenced for a couple of decades, are speaking
out again on the need for more reservoirs to store more water.
Still,
they don’t make drought — or societies — the way
they used to. In the years since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the
impact and immediacy of drought have been considerably buffered
and deflected. The great majority of Westerners, urbanites and suburbanites,
are inconvenienced but hardly driven to desperation by this drought.
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Cities
beg, buy and burrow for water
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
July 31, 2002
Ranchers and cities are proving to be each other's
salvation this summer along Colorado's Front Range, although for
each, it's making the best of a bad situation.
Some cities, such as Lafayette, Aurora and Boulder, don't have enough
water for status quo supply of their growing populations, and some
farmers don't have enough irrigation supplies to sustain a crop.
Lafayette
officials are leasing area farmers' water for the summer. City
residents get to water their lawns and farmers get an income that
approximates an average year.
One farmer this month sprayed Roundup on his shriveling corn, and
turned over 70 acre-feet of his irrigation water to Lafayette officials.
The city got a year's worth of supply for about 70 households, and
the farmer got $15,000.
Last month, city officials bought 167 acre-feet of water from farmers
and other sellers, about 6 percent more water than the city had
available then. In early July, the city bought another 23 acre-feet.
After years of delicate negotiation, Broomfield
city officials are finalizing a deal to issue $43 million in
bonds to buy 2,000 acre-feet of water from an area irrigation district,
water that farmers had seen as extra, and to build a new reservoir.
The water will cost about $23 million and give the city permanent
rights to shares of the Colorado Big Thompson project, a consortium
of growers.
About $16.5 million is earmarked for a new 320-acres reservoir that
would hold 5,000 to 6,000 acre feet of water. Until the 1990s, the
city relied on its Great Western Reservoir, an impoundment about
half as big as the one proposed, but quit drawing drinking water
out of concern about toxic runoff from the abandoned Rocky Flats
nuclear-weapons facility.
The city will repay the bonds out of revenue it expects to take
in from new-connection fees and, officials say, the "new"
water will be funded entirely by growth.
Albuquerque's growth may hinge on a water
project more than 200 miles away, on the border with Colorado,
where the Rio Blanco disappears into a huge pipe and is sent through
the Continental Divide and down 26 miles of underground concrete
tunnels into Abiquiu Reservoir.
Albuquerque officials plan to release 94,000 acre-feet into the
Rio Chama which empties into the Rio Grande well above the city,
then divert as much as 47,000 acre-feet into the city's system with
an inflatable dam.
The $198 million project would provide enough water for Albuquerque
and its expected growth for four or five decades, and it would wean
the city from its dependence on its aquifer.
Beginning the late 1980s, a series of studies concluded that continued
pumping of ground water would cause widespread subsidence, and parts
of the city would sink.
"I told them they were running out of cheap water," said
a former city expert who conducted some of the studies. "You
don't have to be a geologist to see that."
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