Water is going to get more expensive.
It’s a matter of supply and demand:
Clean, easily accessible water is dwindling across Arizona, while those who rely on it aren’t going anywhere. That means we’ll all pay more for the thing that no desert dweller can live without.
A man in Arizona sees a glimpse of a potentially frightening future. A future where the planet is hotter, the soil is drier, and our most precious resource is evaporating.
His job is delivering water. And his job is getting harder.
John Hornewer is now having to drive hours farther each day to fill his truck, which, in turn, fills the subterranean tanks at homes in an area outside Phoenix.
At the end of last year, the seven states in the Colorado River Basin committed to once again work together and negotiate a consensus framework for making significant cuts to water use, an attempt to stabilize the nation’s two largest reservoirs and avoid an even deeper shortage crisis.
The states recommitted to considering a consensus deal, by Jan. 31, after several deadlines passed in 2022 — with seemingly irreconcilable differences over how to make painful cuts in a watershed relied upon by 40 million people who use the river for drinking water and agriculture.
Water from the Colorado River covers more than a third of Arizona’s total water usage, but the state is increasingly losing access to that supply.
The state is no longer in what Terry Goddard, the president of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Board of Directors, called “a fool’s paradise.” Arizona had maintined a surplus of water since the mid-1980s, but that’s not the case today. Now, it’s losing water, and it’s losing it fast.
The grass beneath the palm trees at the Foothills has no function other than to look lush and inviting for people driving up to the gated community’s entrance. The homeowners’ association there, like many that govern such developments dating to the 1980s and 1990s, was still sprinkling Colorado River water on about 50,000 square feet of turf this year.
The outskirts of Kingman, Arizona, used to be a place where pilots would train and recreationists tested their all-terrain vehicles. The dry and empty landscape has since morphed into something much more green that supports pistachio and almond orchards, and garlic and potato fields in a climate similar to California’s Central Valley. The crops are fed by groundwater that also serves the city of Kingman.
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly is calling on federal officials to halt funding for California’s Salton Sea project until the state gives up more of its Colorado River Water, a letter from the senator said Tuesday. The letter, sent to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, said that the Department of the Interior needs to step in to secure the river’s water and ensure that the 40 million people who rely on its waters don’t go thirsty.
The federal government is designating $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for drought mitigation work in the Colorado River basin.
On Wednesday, the Department of the Interior announced that total, indicating that $500 million will go to efficiency upgrades in the river’s Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Another chunk of IRA money will be set aside for direct payments to farmers and ranchers to forgo water deliveries from Lake Mead in the river’s Lower Basin, primarily in Arizona and California. Federal officials are not specifying how much money will be available for that first round of payments.
NASA satellite photos show how drastically the water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead have receded in just the past few years. They demonstrate the severity of long-term drought and the challenges Arizona will face to conserve and enhance its precious water supply. Susanna Eden is the research program manager for the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona.
If you want to cross the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, anytime between October and July, you probably won’t need a boat, a bridge, waders or even waterproof shoes. During most of the year, the river is an arroyo, a curvy strip of dry sand that holds no more than the memory of water: braided serpentine patterns in the sand, erosion-smoothed stones, debris wrapped around the trunks of the few hardy deciduous trees.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
