In the right light, Jeff Dollente seems to make the sun rise. Standing over a canal, he cranks a wheel as the sun ascends and the sky yawns off the dark.
Mr. Dollente doesn’t deliver the morning, but in southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, his job is just as big. He delivers Colorado River water – a vital resource at risk – to farms that feed the rest of the United States.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Metropolitan or MWD) has hired Brown and Caldwell to study alternative water conveyance options to provide supply diversity to the region during severe droughts.
MWD’s mission is to ensure a safe and reliable water supply for the 19 million people in Southern California in the face of climate change and extended drought.
The immediate question before the seven states that use rapidly vanishing Colorado River water is not how to renegotiate the century-old agreement and accompanying laws that divvy up the supply.
California and other states will have to grapple with that problem soon enough, and it won’t be easy.
The ongoing dispute over Colorado River water comes down largely to math: How much water should each state and region lose as reservoir levels continue to decline?
California has one interpretation of how to divvy up the cuts, and six other states that depend on the river have a different formula.
With the federal government poised to force Western states to change how they manage the alarming shortfall in Colorado River water, there is one constituency with a growing interest in the river’s fate that’s little known to some: Wall Street investors.
Private investment firms are showing a growing interest in an increasingly scarce natural resource in the American West: water in the Colorado River, a joint investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel has found. For some of the farmers and cities that depend on the river as a lifeline, that interest is concerning.
Across the sun-cooked flatlands of the Imperial Valley, water flows with uncanny abundance. The valley, which straddles the U.S.-Mexico border, is naturally a desert. Yet canals here are filled with water, lush alfalfa grows from sodden soil and rows of vegetables stretch for miles.
Within this grid of greenery, near the desert town of Brawley, Mark McBroom grows 6,000 acres of hay crops, like alfalfa, and fruit orchards, all irrigated by water imported from the Colorado River.
Alex Jack says he’s not charged enough for the water he uses at his Imperial Valley farm. Because the Colorado River water shared by him and his neighboring farmers who make up the vast agricultural economy in the middle of the desert is so cheap, he says, farmers have little incentive to conserve.
Facing demands from the federal government, California water agencies offered today to cut back the amount of water they import from the Colorado River starting in 2023.
After months of negotiations, water agencies wrote to federal agencies today offering to reduce California’s water use by 400,000 acre-feet every year through 2026. That amounts to 9% of the river’s water that California is entitled to under its senior rights.
The mighty Colorado River isn’t so mighty anymore. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced Tuesday steps will be taken to protect the increasingly fragile source of water.
“The worsening drought crisis impacting the Colorado River Basin is driven by the effects of climate change, including extreme heat and low precipitation. In turn, severe drought conditions exacerbate wildfire risk and ecosystems disruption, increasing the stress on communities and our landscapes,” said Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau.
In late April 1996, Lake Powell sat at an elevation of 3,673 feet — just 27 feet below its maximum capacity. At that time of plenty, Arizona lawmakers worried that the state wasn’t using its full share of Colorado River water.
Instead of potentially ceding those flows to California, the state opened a kind of liquid piggy bank, storing away a share of its water for an uncertain future.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
