The 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near 19 Road in Grand Junction is home to four species of endangered fish. Garfield County is leasing some of the water it owns in Ruedi Reservoir to help bolster flows during late summer and early fall. Photo by Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism.
WESTMINSTER — Through the release of water it owns in Ruedi Reservoir, Garfield County will help endangered fish species in an often-depleted section of the Colorado River.
Garfield County will lease 350 acre-feet of water annually over the next five years to the Colorado Water Conservation Board under the CWCB’s instream-flow program. The water will bolster flows July through October in the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to the endangered humpback chub, bonytail, razorback sucker and Colorado pikeminnow. The CWCB board approved Garfield County’s offer at its meeting last week in Westminster.
Garfield County owns 400 acre-feet a year of Ruedi water as a backup source for the county, municipalities and other water users within its service area. Since the county does not immediately need the water, it will lease the water to the CWCB for five years at $40 an acre-foot for the first year and $45 an acre-foot for the second year. The price would go up in years three through five by 2% annually. The maximum price the CWCB would pay for the water is $14,000 in 2020 and $78,915 over the five years of the lease.
Water from Ruedi Reservoir flows down the Fryingpan River and into the Roaring Fork, which flows into the Colorado River at Glenwood Springs.
“We are really appreciative that Garfield County stepped up and offered to lease the water,” said Linda Bassi, CWCB’s stream- and lake-protection chief. “You never know what kind of water year we are going to have, so it’s great to have an extra supply to send down to the reach for those fish.”
Garfield County is leasing 350 acre-feet of water it owns in Ruedi Reservoir to help bolster flows in the Colorado River for endangered fish. A section of fish habitat known as the 15-mile reach often has low flows in late summer because of two large upstream irrigation diversions. Photo by Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism.
Preserving Fryingpan fishing
Late summer, flows in the 15-mile reach are often lower than what is recommended by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for healthy fish habitat mainly because of two large upstream irrigation diversions: DeBeque Canyon’s Grand Valley Project, known as the Roller Dam, and Palisade’s Grand Valley Irrigation Canal.
Gail Schwartz, who represents the Colorado River mainstem, Fryingpan and Roaring Fork region on the CWCB board, reminded staffers of the need to coordinate flows out of Ruedi to preserve conditions for anglers. When flows exceed about 300 cubic feet per second, it becomes difficult to wade and fish the Fryingpan’s popular Gold Medal Fishery waters. At critical wading flows of 250 to 300 cfs, Colorado Parks and Wildlife recommends releases be capped at 25 cfs to avoid dramatic changes for anglers.
“We want to support the economy and the recreation on the Fryingpan and we want to support the success of the 15-mile reach for the species,” Schwartz said.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Water from Ruedi Reservoir flows down the Fryingpan River and into the Roaring Fork, which flows into the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs. Map by Colorado Water Conservation Board.
More fish water
At its March meeting, the CWCB board will consider another lease of Ruedi water for endangered fish. The Ute Water Conservancy District, which provides water to about 80,000 people in the Grand Junction area, is offering to renew its lease of 12,000 acre-feet of water it stores in Ruedi Reservoir. The CWCB could lease the water at $20 an acre-foot for 2020, at a total cost of $240,000.
Aspen Journalism collaborates with The Aspen Times and other Swift Communications newspapers on coverage of water and rivers. This story was published in the Feb. 6 edition of The Aspen Timesand Aspen Journalism.
This is the second of a two-part series. For part 1, click here.
Residents at Eagle River Village say the water is undrinkable at the 381-unit park, which is home to more than 2,000 lower-income and mostly Hispanic residents. Local and state government officials say they feel they don’t have the tools or the regulatory teeth to get the park’s owners to improve the water.
EDWARDS — At a recent water-quality meeting with six residents of the Eagle River Village mobile-home park, a woman asked a simple question: “What is the motive for asking us about this? The water has been bad for so many years, and it never changes. What is the point of this?”
Her frustration, in many ways, matches that of local and state government officials who say for years they’ve felt they don’t have the tools or the regulatory teeth to get the park’s owners to improve the water, despite legislation aimed at enforcing mobile-home park regulations passed last year.
Some say state and county officials might be hesitant to use the new authority granted in that law to call for tougher regulations for fear that park owners could pull out and communities will lose crucial workforce housing. And it’s unclear whether the new law could improve water quality in the Eagle River Village park.
Rep. Julie McCluskie, a Summit County Democrat, was a prime sponsor of last year’s legislation that opens up mobile-home park owners to tougher enforcement. She would like to see park owners take more responsibility for upgrading valuable rental assets. Photo by Vail Daily.
‘Fix the fricking water’
State Rep. Julie McCluskie, a Dillon Democrat who was a prime sponsor of last year’s legislation, has introduced a follow-up bill this session.
McCluskie recognizes the value of mobile homes as low-income and workforce housing in high-dollar real-estate regions such as the ski resort counties of Summit, Eagle, Pitkin and Routt. And she would like to see park owners take more responsibility for upgrading valuable rental assets.
“If you’re a mobile-home park owner and you want to make your life easier, then fix the fricking water,” McCluskie said. “Why leave it to the state to have to craft policy to make you take care of your residents?”
The six Eagle River Village park residents at the meeting, who did not want to be identified because they feared retribution and possible eviction from management, said little has changed at the 381-unit park, which is home to more than 2,000 lower-income and mostly Hispanic residents. Officials at Ascentia, the Littleton-based company that owns the park, counter that they’ve been taking numerous actions, including Spanish-language outreach on water quality.
Thorough testing last fall revealed well water that meets minimum federal safety standards but is high in sodium and other total dissolved solid minerals such as calcium and magnesium. It’s safe to drink but tastes salty, tests confirmed, and the company’s own survey of nearly 300 people found that the majority of residents don’t drink the park’s well water.
Eagle County Manager Jeff Shroll says the company that owns Eagle River Village doesn’t need to go to the expense of hooking into the local water system. He doubts counties will jump too eagerly into the regulatory fray. Photo by David O. Williams/Aspen Journalism
‘Who’s going to pull that enforcement trigger?’
Still, the company does not plan on spending the millions of dollars needed to connect to the Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority system, and state and local government officials say there is little they can do to force the issue — even with a new state law in place, which sets up a complaint-arbitration process, grants county governments more regulatory authority and increases eviction notices from 48 hours to 30 days.
At a meeting in Eagle last fall, Maulid Miskell, program manager of the state’s newly created Mobile Home Park Act Dispute Resolution & Enforcement Program, said his agency does not have jurisdiction over water issues but would refer complaints to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which does have jurisdiction.
CDPHE officials said the agency does “not have the regulatory tools to require a reduction in sodium” in a park’s well-water system. It recommends under-sink filter systems and contacting a doctor if a resident is on a low-sodium diet.
It’s also unclear whether counties will use the new law’s regulatory authority to call for tougher water regulations at the local level.
“From a resource standpoint, though — now that there’s a state program in place — I’m guessing a lot of (counties) will say it’s great that we can do it, but we’re not going to have the resources to do it, so let’s let the state handle it,” Miskell said of tougher county regulations.
Eagle County Manager Jeff Shroll, who has been working with Ascentia to improve conditions at Eagle River Village, said the company doesn’t need to go to the expense of hooking into the local water system, and he doubts counties will jump too eagerly into the regulatory fray.
“I kind of want to wait and see who’s going to pull that enforcement trigger and what’s that lawsuit going to look like,” Shroll said. “Because I don’t think your Ascentias of the world are going to go down quietly. I don’t know if it’s going to be Ascentia, but there’d be some other mobile home parks (filing lawsuits).”
But Shroll acknowledges that state lawmakers are going to keep after parks to improve conditions.
“The legislature is going to start pounding on them every session with something,” Shroll said. “Some (regulations) are going to get challenged at the constitutional level, but traditionally there’s not been a lot of tools in the shed for any kind of a government, a county or a town to go, ‘You will fix this or you will do this.’”
Shroll suggested various nonprofits and other quasi-governmental agencies might be able to step in and help with smaller-scale fixes such as replacing faulty or aging pipes, water filters or water heaters when residents don’t have the necessary resources.
Former Eagle County Commissioner Jon Stavney, now executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments, said his organization has replaced numerous water heaters at Eagle River Village but has done so using grants for energy upgrades, not water-quality problems.
Having served as a commissioner, he understands the county not wanting to push too hard. He said mobile-home parks in resort areas are “cash cows” sitting on very valuable real estate.
“Do we go after them with environmental health and have them just say, ‘Yeah, for the cost of that, I’m just going to close down and no longer rent that unit,’ or if you nail (them) for enough that (they) have to do a major investment — new well, new infrastructure — are they basically just going to one way or another, displace a bunch of people — either through redevelopment or selling it or getting rid of the people who are doing the complaining?” Stavney said.
The Eagle Valley Community Foundation and local rotary groups have offered to raise funds for infrastructure fixes for individual mobile homes.
But half the battle, which Ascentia officials said they’re trying to cope with, is getting residents to speak up and ask for help. The dozen or so residents interviewed over the past several months say they still fear stepping forward and complaining. McCluskie’s legislation may help fix that.
“One of the areas that we’ll tackle in this follow-up legislation is retaliation because currently there’s no protections against retaliation for efforts that a community might undergo to try and improve their park,” McCluskie said.
Contact information
Ascentia urges residents of Eagle River Village mobile-home park who have water-quality or water-pressure issues to call Eagle River Village community manager Maria Cisneros at 970-446-8646.
Residents can also reach out directly — and, if they wish, anonymously — to the Ascentia home office in Littleton by email at contactus@ascentia.us or by phone at 303-730-2000.
Residents can also contact CDPHE’s Water Quality Control Division by email at cdphe.commentswqcd@state.co.us or by phone at 303-692-3500.
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism collaborates with the Vail Daily and other Swift Communications newspapers on coverage of water and rivers. This story ran in the Feb. 13 edition of The Vail Daily and was published by Aspen Journalism on Feb. 13.
This story was supported by The Water Desk using funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
But residents of Edwards park say water remains undrinkable.
Eagle River Village, a critical low-income working-class neighborhood off U.S. 6 in west Edwards, has more than twice the population of Minturn and houses about 3.5% of Eagle County’s total population. Ascentia, a Littleton-based company, bought the park in 1985. Photo by Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily.
This is the first of a two-part series. For part 2, click here.
EDWARDS — In the seven months since the Vail Daily published a three-part series on water-quality issues at the Eagle River Village mobile-home park, the company that owns the park has been busy conducting surveys, testing water, upgrading equipment and launching an outreach campaign to assure residents that the park’s well water is potable and safe to drink.
But one thing the Littleton-based company, Ascentia, won’t be doing is spending the millions of dollars necessary to connect the populous park — more than 2,000 people in 381 mobile homes — to the Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority system despite ongoing complaints from residents that the well water tastes, looks and smells bad.
“The premise is that the water that we have now is not somehow bottle-quality water, but … the first question is: Is our existing system serving its purpose? And the answer is ‘Yes,’” Ascentia president and CEO John Eberle said in a meeting last fall with the Vail Daily and Eagle County officials. “So we have a Ford that’s working just fine. Do we want to go buy a Maserati? No, I don’t need to buy a Maserati.”
Eagle River Village, a critical low-income working-class neighborhood off U.S. 6 in west Edwards, has more than twice the population of Minturn and houses about 3.5% of Eagle County’s total population. Ascentia bought the park in 1985.
The well water at Eagle River Village is regularly tested and in compliance with the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act as administered by the Water Quality Control Division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Officials there confirmed they have been working with Ascentia to further improve water quality. But sodium levels are still high, making the water taste salty and leading residents to buy bottled drinking water.
“The water meets all water quality regulations, but there are high sodium levels in the water,” CDPHE officials said in a written statement. “Appropriate amounts of daily water consumption are foundational to human health, so we encourage Ascentia to do everything possible to improve the taste of the water.
“While the state doesn’t have regulatory tools to require a reduction in sodium, we will continue to provide technical assistance to Ascentia, with the goal of residents having access to safe and clean-tasting water.”
The original Vail Daily series was based on complaints from numerous residents of the park — most of them translated from Spanish and offered anonymously out of fear of retribution from park management — that the well water is unfit for consumption. For many years, residents have been purchasing bottled water.
Ascentia officials say that since last summer, they’ve informally surveyed nearly 300 residents about the water and found only three or four trailers with discolored or smelly water, which they attributed to infrastructure problems in the trailers such as bad pipes and aging water filters or hot-water heaters. They are also systematically replacing water risers — the pipe that connects each home to the main water system — to improve water pressure.
But nothing much has changed in the past seven months, according to a group of six residents who spoke to Aspen Journalism in mid-January. All six residents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution or possible eviction, said they had not been contacted by park management about water quality.
“A Ford?” one resident said of the well water. “It’s more like a bicycle.”
They added that the water pressure, despite the replacement of some water risers, has not improved noticeably in recent months.
County officials, who had offered $1.2 million in water rights as part of a $4.4 million deal to connect the park to the UERWA system — a deal that fell apart last spring — agree that the park’s well-water system is adequate and Ascentia does not need to “buy a Maserati.”
“Are they going to spend $4 million to $7 million and tie into the (UERWA) water? No,” Eagle County Manager Jeff Shroll said. “I don’t think they need to.”
Consultant Tom Day of Colorado Water Systems said the mobile-home park doesn’t need any additional water rights and has a system that’s inexpensive to run, with operable wells that are chlorinated. He advised Ascentia to do the deal last spring if the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District — the local water provider that contracts out to the UERWA — would assume liability for the well-water system at Eagle River Village.
“If Eagle River Water and (Sanitation District) was willing to take over your infrastructure, your pipes and everything in the community, that would be a huge, good thing for you guys,” Day told Ascentia. “(ERWSD officials) weren’t willing to do that. So then what’s the big upside for Eagle River mobile-home park? When they asked me, I said I don’t really see a big upside.”
In a blind taste test conducted for the Vail Daily and county officials, five samples of water were provided — three from Eagle River Village and two from Eagle River Water and Sanitation District sources in Avon and Cordillera. Due to elevated sodium levels, the Vail Daily identified the three samples from the park on the first try. The water did not look or smell bad.
Why the ongoing complaints?
“I asked the same question last time: Why did this come up if everything looks OK?” said Eagle County Commissioner Kathy Chandler-Henry, who has attended multiple tastings. “And I think when you went through the science pieces of it, that was helpful.”
Chandler-Henry was referring to an Eagle River Mobile Home Park Water Assessment conducted in September for Ascentia by Lamp Rynearson, an engineering company with offices in Lakewood and Fort Collins. The test showed water within U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended levels in 39 of 40 contaminant-testing categories, excluding sodium.
“I was pretty convinced after last time here that it’s a taste and film issue,” Chandler-Henry said. “And I think some of the comparison data that you have with your water and Eagle River Water and Sanitation (District) water was interesting, because it shows a quality comparable except for those secondary pieces on the taste.”
Ascentia also cites a 2018 Consumer Confidence Report filed with the state showing favorable comparisons to ERWSD water.
In that report, the trailer park’s well water tested at 115.4 milligrams per liter (mg/L) of sodium. State officials said EPA guidelines recommend levels below 60 mg/L in general and below 20 mg/L for people on a low-sodium diet. For those people, they recommend contacting a doctor and installing an under-sink filtration system.
“Aesthetics matter so much. The last message we want to send is that it doesn’t matter,” said Marko Vukovich, Ascentia’s vice president of asset management. “We’re on a well … and we don’t claim to be Fiji (Water) by any means. There are and have been opinions for a long time regarding the taste or preference of well water, but that’s very different than danger.”
Vukovich said the majority of the residents surveyed in recent months told the company they cook with and bathe in the park’s water but don’t drink it.
So Ascentia has launched an information-outreach campaign in English and Spanish to convince residents the water is safe to drink, cook with and bathe in. Company officials say some of the communication issues stem from cultural differences in the predominantly Hispanic park.
“Tests show that Eagle River Village water is high in TDS (total dissolved solids),” reads a fact sheet. “TDS includes minerals such as sodium, calcium and magnesium. These minerals are naturally occurring and don’t pose a health risk, but they can affect the taste of the water.
“So what does it all mean? While your water is potable and safe to drink, higher mineral content can cause water to taste salty. We are committed to ongoing testing and maintenance of our water system and appreciate your continued feedback.”
Ascentia’s Eberle said he thinks the misconception that the park’s water is undrinkable has spread by word of mouth for many years, from social media to local dentists who tell patients to avoid drinking the water.
“And some in the Hispanic community say, ‘We just don’t drink water from a tap. We buy water. That’s just what we do because that’s what we’ve always done,’” Eberle said.
Asked whether the Mexican heritage of the majority of the park’s residents plays into their reluctance to drink the water, as suggested by Eberle, the six residents pushed back on that notion.
“Of course not!” one woman said. “They think we like carrying around the big, heavy jugs that cost a lot of money?”
Another resident recently had family visiting from Mexico and they all drank the water because they hadn’t been told to avoid it. She said they all got sick.
Faviola Alderete, the community health strategist for Eagle County Public Health who attended a taste-testing, said she moved to Eagle County from Chihuahua City — where many local residents are from — and her first home was renting a room from a family in Eagle River Village. When she first moved into the park in 2000, Alderete said she was told not to drink the water.
“I felt that this was a seed that was planted a long time ago and it has been perpetuating from generation to generation,” Alderete said. “So people keep saying the water is bad. That’s what I believed. I didn’t want to bathe my newborn baby with the water from here because I was told it was bad water.
“We, as Hispanics, rely a lot on word of mouth. So my neighbor who has been living here for five years before I got here, of course, I am going to believe what they’re saying,” she said. “So I think it’s just the mistrust and the lack of education on water.”
Contact information
Ascentia urges residents of Eagle River Village mobile-home park who have water-quality or water-pressure issues to call Eagle River Village community manager Maria Cisneros at 970-446-8646.
Residents can also reach out directly — and, if they wish, anonymously — to the Ascentia home office in Littleton by email at contactus@ascentia.us or by phone at 303-730-2000.
Residents can also contact CDPHE’s Water Quality Control Division by email at cdphe.commentswqcd@state.co.us or by phone at 303-692-3500.
For someone like me who reports on the politics of water and the challenges of climate change in the arid Southwest, pilgrimages to places like Abiquiu Lake, with its reflection of Cerro Pedernal and backdrop of the Jemez Mountains, are a necessary rite of summer. If I want to keep ahead of despair, stave off cynicism — and remain present with the issues I write about — I need to submerge myself, often and diligently, in water that is cool and transformative.
This summer, I lugged two new books to my secret swimming spot and found that immersing myself in both fiction and nonfiction helped me make sense of the world we’re facing today, as climate change demands that humans make better decisions — and as it’s become entirely too easy to indulge fears of a dystopian future. Kimi Eisele’s novel, The Lightest Object in the Universe, and Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, by Eric Kuhn and John Fleck, are both powerful books. Kuhn and Fleck examine how politics exacerbated today’s problems with the over-allocated Colorado River, which supplies more than 40 million people. And Eisele carries us into a future in which we see what happens when we refuse to heed the warning signs and commit to a more resilient path.
Together, these writers show what happens when we give urgent problems the side-eye and slink off down the road, hoping someone else will devise a solution. They also urge us to reconsider what we think we know about the past, what we want to believe about the future, and what we need to decide — and accomplish — right now.
In The Lightest Object, her first novel, Eisele envisions a post-collapse United States. The economy has tanked, the electrical grid has failed, and people are left without governments and global food systems. The illusion that people can thrive independently of their neighbors — holed up and binging on Netflix and GrubHub — is gone.
The Lightest Object in the Universe
Kimi Eisele
321 pages, hardcover: $26.95
Algonquin Books, 2019.
She shows us how people survive this new world through her main characters, Beatrix and Carson, who long for one another — from opposite sides of the country — after everything falls apart. An organizer, Beatrix throws in with her neighbors, people she knew only casually before the collapse. They work together, try to protect and teach one another. And they aren’t looking back; there’s no reason to try to figure out what went wrong or how things might have gone differently. Surviving today and figuring out ways to thrive tomorrow are all that matter. Carson, meanwhile, embarks on a trip across the landscape, hoping to reach Beatrix. His journey enables Eisele to show the reader a smattering of what’s going on in the region the coastal media once dismissed as “flyover country.” He encounters bands of hungry kids, towns decimated by flu, and people willing to share what little food they have with a stranger, frightened by rumors and at the same time fueled by hope.
Whether in the city — where Eisele doesn’t spend much time — in small communities or in rural places, people need one another, intimately. Only together can they eat, trade information, fix problems and start telling new stories. Not everyone’s intentions are good, of course. There are crooks, creeps and charlatans in Eisele’s world. And two characters leave the makeshift community Beatrix and her neighbors have cultivated to embark on a journey toward The Center, the promised land hocked by a charismatic radio personality who regales his listeners with tales of ice cream, utopia and redemption.
Eisele’s writing shines most when she’s exploring landscapes — no surprise, since she’s a geographer as well as an artist — and the emotional pull between Beatrix and Carson.
Through Carson in particular, Eisele considers the natural world. “The morning brought dampness and more aches,” Eisele writes. “Carson didn’t want to move. He opened his eyes as a large crow flew overhead. The birds were so fortunate. They could see the sprawl and order of cities. They could take in a long strand of coastline, the blur of white waves crashing. They could drift over the green-gold quilt of farmland. If only he could have that view of the landscape, a more coherent geography, to see clearly where he was going, where he had been.”
But even when that is the case — when we have at our fingertips everything from paleoclimatic reconstructions to snapshots of the planet from the International Space Station — we human beings still ignore the facts.
Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River
Eric Kuhn and John Fleck
264 pages, hardcover: $35
The University of Arizona Press, 2019.
In Science Be Dammed, Kuhn and Fleck remind us of that, taking us back to the early 20th century, when seven Western states and the federal government divided the waters of the Colorado River between farmers and cities from Wyoming to California, in the grand bargain known as the Colorado River Compact of 1922. (It took two decades more to negotiate with Mexico over the river’s waters.) The common narrative has been that the compact’s signatories over-allocated the river’s waters because they’d tracked its flows during an unusually wet period almost a century ago. The poor schmucks, the story goes, just didn’t know better.
That’s the tale we’ve told ourselves, over and over again. It’s not an accurate one.
Kuhn is the now-retired general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, while co-author Fleck directs the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico. Both are keen and active observers of what’s happening today, as the seven states that rely upon the Colorado work to provide all the river’s users with water even as they grapple with a drought contingency plan meant to address its declining flows.
In their book, they point out that multiple studies in the 1920s showed flows that were significantly lower than the 17.5 million acre-feet parceled out at the time.
This means that the river’s deficit isn’t a baffling, unforeseen problem: The natural flows of the Colorado were even in the early 20th century less than the amount of water promised to users. And men consciously decided to use up more water than the river actually carried, rather than heed studies based on U.S. Geological Survey stream gauges, drought data, and some limited paleohydrologic studies. One hydraulic engineer in particular, Eugene Clyde LaRue, repeatedly warned commissioners and politicians about over-allocation.
That commissioners chose to ignore the facts isn’t necessarily surprising, given the pressure they felt from powerful interests, both agricultural and political. In the introduction, Kuhn cites Rolly Fischer, his predecessor and mentor at the Colorado River Water Conservation District: “One of Fischer’s favorite sayings about the river was that the tried-and-true method to solve disputes on the Colorado River Basin was to promise the combatants more water than was available in the river, then hope a future generation would fix the mess.”
We don’t even have to look to Eisele’s imagined future to know that doesn’t work.
“Before the Compact Commission even began its meetings, the path had been chosen,” write Kuhn and Fleck. And LaRue wasn’t the only one who “put commissioners in a tight spot” by pointing out the facts.
Kuhn and Fleck note that three different estimates prior to the compact’s signing pegged the river at somewhere between 14.3 million acre-feet and 16.1 million acre-feet annually. (Annual flows have dropped even further, thanks to warming, and a 2017 study showed that between 2000 and 2014, they averaged 19 percent below the 1906-1999 average.)
But commissioners preferred to listen to those who told them what they wanted to hear, and, the two authors write, “they saw no advantage in asking too many questions about whether the numbers were right.”
Kuhn and Fleck write:
There was now credible science that the river’s long-term flows might be much lower than they assumed. Yet in the short term, conditions on the Colorado River remained wet. Pushed by U.S. commerce secretary Herbert Hoover and Colorado lawyer Delph Carpenter, the commissioners chose to either ignore this information or challenge the credibility of the messenger. Ultimately, a review board of distinguished engineers and geologists would endorse LaRue’s view that the water supply was insufficient, but by that time there simply was too much momentum for ratification of the 1922 compact and the authorization of the Boulder Canyon Project.
The decisions men like Hoover made in the 1920s killed off native species of fish; inundated canyons, sovereign lands and archaeological sites; favored the powerful over the vulnerable; and sucked the Colorado River dry. They also set the stage for how future “water resources” would be managed.
This isn’t just another tale of the West’s unenlightened past: We’re still dealing with its fallout, and that shortsightedness threatens to repeat itself today. In New Mexico, for example, the future of an important tributary of the Colorado River, the Gila, is uncertain. The state’s plans to build a diversion on the river, just downstream of where it flows out of the nation’s first wilderness area, are outside the scope of Science Be Dammed. But it’s hard not to connect the willful ignorance of science with what’s happening in the Colorado River Basin today.
Yet there are always ways to pry ourselves loose from the narratives that bind us to our past mistakes. Kuhn and Fleck remind us we can excavate the past and hold decision-makers accountable, in part by making sure that science isn’t ignored, diminished or squelched altogether. And Eisele shows us why it’s worth deciding now to create a future that doesn’t damn future generations with the consequences of our mistakes.
Note: This story has been updated to correct the number of people who depend on the Colorado River.
Laura Paskus is a reporter in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her book At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate is forthcoming from UNM Press in 2020.Email HCN at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor.
The Trump administration is proposing to redefine a key term in the Clean Water Act: “Waters of the United States.” This deceptively simple phrase describes which streams, lakes, wetlands and other water bodies qualify for federal protection under the law.
Government regulators, landowners, conservationists and other groups have struggled to agree on what it means for more than 30 years. Those who support a broad definition believe the federal government has a broad role in protecting waters – even if they are small, isolated, or present only during wet seasons. Others say that approach infringes on private property rights, and want to limit which waters count.
I study rivers, and served on a committee that reviewed the science supporting the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Water Rule. This measure, which defined waters of the United States broadly, is what the Trump administration wants to rewrite.
The Trump proposal goes completely against scientists’ understanding of how rivers work. In my view, the proposed changes will strip rivers of their ability to provide water clean enough to support life, and will enhance the spiral of increasingly damaging floods that is already occurring nationwide. To understand why, it’s worth looking closely at how connected smaller bodies of waters act as both buffers and filters for larger rivers and streams.
Ephemeral channels like upper Antelope Creek in Arizona flow only after rain or snowfall, but are important parts of larger river systems. Ellen Wohl, CC BY-ND
Parts of a whole
The fact that something is unseen does not make it unimportant. Think of your own circulatory system. You can see some veins in your hands and arms, and feel the pulse in your carotid artery with your finger. But you can’t see the capillaries – tiny channels that support vital processes. Nutrients, oxygen and carbon dioxide move between your blood and the fluids surrounding the cells of your body, passing through the capillaries.
And just because something is abundant does not reduce each single unit’s value. For example, when we look at a tree we tend to see a mass of leaves. The tree won’t suffer much if some leaves are damaged, especially if they can regrow. But if it loses all of its leaves, the tree will likely die.
These systems resemble maps of river networks, like the small tributary rivers that feed into great rivers such as the Mississippi or the Columbia. Capillaries feed small veins that flow into larger veins in the human body, and leaves feed twigs that sprout from larger branches and the trunk.
A conservation biologist explains how the wetlands and backwaters of Oregon’s Willamette River system were critical to rescuing the Oregon chub, one of this valley’s most endangered fishes, from near extinction.
Microbes at work
Comparing these analogs to rivers also is apt in another way. A river is an ecosystem, and some of its most important components can’t be seen.
Small channels in a river network are points of entry for most of the materials that move through it, and also sites where potentially harmful materials can be biologically processed. The unseen portions of a river below the streambed function like a human’s liver by filtering out these harmful materials. In fact, this metaphor applies to headwater streams in general. Without the liver, toxins would accumulate until the organism dies.
As an illustration, consider how rivers process nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which are essential for plant and animal life but also have become widespread pollutants. Fossil fuel combustion and agricultural fertilizers have increased the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus circulating in air, water and soil. When they accumulate in rivers, lakes and bays, excess nutrients can cause algal blooms that deplete oxygen from the water, killing fish and other aquatic animals and creating “dead zones.” Excess nitrogen in drinking water is also a serious human health threat.
River ecosystems are full of microbes in unseen places, such as under the roots of trees growing along the channel; in sediments immediately beneath the streambed; and in the mucky ooze of silt, clay, and decomposing leaves trapped upstream from logs in the channel. Microbes can efficiently remove nutrients from water, taking them up in their tissues and in turn serving as food for insects, and then fish, birds, otters and so on. They are found mainly in and around smaller channels that make up an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the total length of any river network.
Water does not necessarily move very efficiently through these small channels. It may pond temporarily above a small logjam, or linger in an eddy. Where a large boulder obstructs the stream flow, some of the water is forced down into the streambed, where it moves slowly through sediments before welling back up into the channel. But that’s good. Microbes thrive in these slower zones, and where the movement of dissolved nutrients slows for even a matter of minutes, they can remove nutrients from the water.
Flood control and habitat
Other critical processes, such as flood control, take place in small upstream river channels. When rain concentrates in a river fed by numerous small streams, and surrounded by bottomland forests and floodplain wetlands, it moves more slowly across the landscape than if it were running off over land. This process reduces flood peaks and allows more water to percolate down into the ground. Disconnect the small streams from their floodplains, or pave and plow the small channels, and rain will move quickly from uplands into the larger channels, causing damaging floods.
These networks also provide critical habitat for many species. Streams that are dry much of the year, and wetlands with no surface flow into or out of them, are just as important to the health of a river network as streams that flow year-round.
Marvelously adapted organisms in dry streams wait for periods when life-giving water flows in. When the water comes, these creatures burst into action, with microbes removing nitrate just as in perennially flowing streams. Amphibians move down from forests to temporarily flooded vernal wetlands to breed. Tiny fish, such as brassy minnows, have waited out the dry season in pools that hold water year-round. When flowing water connects the pools, the minnows speed through breeding and laying eggs that then grow into mature fish in a short period of time.
The Arikaree River in eastern Colorado is an intermittent stream that supports brassy minnow, a species of concern in the state. Ellen Wohl, CC BY-NC
Scientific sleuthing with chemical tracers has shown that wetlands with no visible surface connection to other water bodies are in fact connected via unseen subterranean pathways used by water and microbes. A river network is not simply a gutter. It is an ecosystem, and all the parts, unseen or seen, matter. I believe the current proposal to alter the Clean Water Act will fundamentally damage rivers’ ability to support all life – including us.
My mother grew up on a tiny farm on the outskirts of Bakersfield in the 1960s. When I was little, she told me stories about the Basques who sheared their sheep, and described a childhood spent wandering among the family’s fruit and nut trees. It was a bucolic picture of California’s Central Valley, the type of picturesque image that journalist Mark Arax, in his sprawling new treatise on water and agriculture in the Golden State, is quick to undermine: Today, small family farms are vanishing, agribusiness is expanding, the earth is sinking, aquifers are emptying, rivers run dry, and laborers toil for a pittance.
In The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, Arax roams the state and plumbs its history to reveal the causes and consequences of its current water crisis. He reports on farms and the pipelines that supply them, interviewing fieldworkers and billionaire landowners, and interjecting tales of his family’s own agricultural forays and failures. His scope is impressive: He describes the cultivation of specialized grapes with the same clarity and finesse with which he unravels the state’s great mass of dams, aqueducts and complicated water rights. The result clearly depicts “the grandest hydraulic engineering feat known to man” — “one of the most dramatic alterations of the earth’s surface in human history.”
This engineering feat is at the center of the book’s most urgent questions. Despite recurring drought and a rapidly changing climate, each year the Central Valley produces another bountiful harvest. “How much was magic? How much was plunder?” Arax asks. The region accounts for over a third of the country’s vegetables, over two-thirds of our nuts and fruit; it boasts a million acres of almonds alone. Stewart Resnick of The Wonderful Company, the biggest grower of them all, shuttles 400,000 acre-feet of water per year to his 15 million trees, mostly almonds, pistachios, pomegranates and citrus. (The city of Los Angeles, for perspective, consumes 587,000 acre-feet annually.)
The bounty is largely plunder, of course, not magic. The plunder is as embedded in the state as the dream that made it possible. Arax traces this history from the Spanish colonial subjugation of Indigenous peoples to the conquering of the territory by U.S. forces, to the excavation of mountains for gold, to Los Angeles’ theft of the Owens River, to urban sprawl and suburban tracts — an unending cycle of supply and demand. Restraint was never an option. “No society in history has gone to greater lengths to deny its fundamental nature than California,” he writes. “California, for a century and two-thirds now, keeps forgetting its arrangement with drought and flood.”
The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California
Mark Arax
576 pages, hardcover: $30
Knopf, 2019.
Time and again in The Dreamt Land, we watch farmers ignore the certainty of drought, planting “to the absolute extreme of what the water could serve.” When farms in Tulare and Kern counties exhausted their local rivers, they drained the San Joaquin, which also proved insufficient. Such excessive planting and pumping, paired with the natural pendulum of flood and drought, perpetuated the fast disappearance of water. This “gave rise to both the need and ambition of a system”: the immense Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, which mine Northern California’s rivers and redistribute water to the Central Valley and the urban centers of the south.
Both projects were largely constructed between the late 1930s and early 1970s and designed to allow farmers to grow in both wet and dry years. But “the System,” as Arax methodically shows, was based on the flawed, idealized theory of an average year of weather; it presumed to deliver a constant, predictable supply, as if wild variations in precipitation did not exist or could be evened out by mathematics.
In reality, “the actual water captured and delivered (by the System) fell short of the normal or far beyond it.” When it fell short, which happened frequently, farmers were forced to confront the nearly 2 million-acre-foot difference. When the floods arrived, they again forgot the dry years and sowed new fields. Cities did the same and boomed. Then true drought set in, as it always does, and everyone scrambled to survive: The cities grabbed from the System; the government supplied subsidies to farmers; some farmers dug new wells and watched the ground sink beneath them; still others fallowed their land and sold their water to the highest bidder. As climate change accelerates, the cycles of drought and flood and the severity of their effects have only been exacerbated.
These are the stories of a people who refuse to face the limits of their landscape, whose attempts at control end up dirtying their own beds, and whose production, for now, is remarkably inflated. “Highest mountain, lowest desert, longest coast, most epic valley — (California) made for infinite invention.” This multitude is both the source of the state’s bounty and the substance of its myth. The California Dream is the American Dream with a dash of rouge and citrus — just as tantalizing, just as exclusive. Arax throws back the curtains, but a deeper question endures: Does his audience rise and respond, or do they remain asleep?
Sean McCoy is a writer from Arizona and the editor of Contra Viento, a journal for art and literature from rangelands.
This story originally appeared on High Country News on December 9, 2019 and is republished here by permission.
The United Nations says that a million species across the planet are at risk of going extinct, including one-third of the world’s marine mammals. The vaquita, a small porpoise that lives in our backyard in the salty waters of the Upper Gulf of California, is poised to lead the way. Its total population is currently estimated at 12. We take you to San Felipe, Mexico and onto the waters of the Upper Gulf to see firsthand the efforts being made to save this creature and explore why, despite years of warnings about its fate, the vaquita population continues to decline.
Producer/Editor: Vanessa Barchfield
Shooter/Editor: Nate Huffman
This story was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
WESTERN WATER Q&A: Former journalist Nancy Vogel explains how the draft California Water Resilience Portfolio came together and why it’s expected to guide future state decisions
Nancy Vogel, director of the Governor’s Water Portfolio Program, highlights key points in the draft Water Resilience Portfolio last month for the Water Education Foundation’s 2020 Water Leaders class. (Source: Water Education Foundation)
Shortly after taking office in 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom called on state agencies to deliver a Water Resilience Portfolio to meet California’s urgent challenges — unsafe drinking water, flood and drought risks from a changing climate, severely depleted groundwater aquifers and native fish populations threatened with extinction.
Within days, he appointed Nancy Vogel, a former journalist and veteran water communicator, as director of the Governor’s Water Portfolio Program to help shepherd the monumental task of compiling all the information necessary for the portfolio. The three state agencies tasked with preparing the document delivered the draft Water Resilience Portfolio Jan. 3. The document, which Vogel said will help guide policy and investment decisions related to water resilience, is nearing the end of its comment period, which goes through Friday, Feb. 7.
In an interview with Western Water, Vogel acknowledged that every governor seeks to put their stamp on solving the state’s water resource issues. The hope with the Water Resilience Portfolio, she said, is that it can be a catalyst for progress because California’s next drought or flood is never far away and the time to act is now.
Western Water: How would you describe the purpose of the portfolio?
NANCY VOGEL: It’s a high-level policy planning document, much like the Water Action Plan was for the Brown administration. It sets forth our priorities and it’s the blueprint for state agencies working on water. I’ve been impressed with just how much time and energy people have put into providing us input and making sure that it’s on the scale we need.
WW: You have been presenting the portfolio around the state. What’s the response been?
VOGEL: Its generally positive. People say they feel as if they’ve been heard. A lot of people say ‘I can see my comments reflected in the Portfolio, but I’m going to send you another set of comments because I have a quibble with this or that or you forgot X, Y or Z,’ and that’s a good opportunity for us to take another look.
WW: The Sierra Club wrote that the document ‘suffers from an unprioritized list of actions and is ultimately a restatement of water policy depending heavily on a few large-scale and outdated water fixes.’ How do you respond to that?
VOGEL: We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. I do not think the draft portfolio depends on a few big projects. Our approach is diversified, as a portfolio should be. As for the criticism that this is a restatement, we have momentum coming out of the 2012-2016 drought and we want to continue to make progress without massive new mandates on local water districts or attempts at drastic reforms that would unleash uncertainty and stall progress.
WW: What’s the relevance of the portfolio to the average Californian?
Nancy Vogel, a former journalist, is director of the Governor’s Water Portfolio Program. (Source: Water Education Foundation)
VOGEL: We all need water and food and want our grandkids to experience spring-run chinook salmon and snow geese. Nobody wants a California where fellow residents lose their homes to flood or tap water to drought. It takes a lot of planning and investment to maintain water supplies and natural systems in a state with such big geographic and timing imbalances in its water resources. This is a document that tries to steer state resources and efforts toward helping the very diverse regions of California be ready for more extreme conditions — drought and flood — and to be able to supply water to communities, the economy and the environment into the future despite climate change and increasing population.
WW: How does the portfolio address the land use changes that are anticipated to occur as a result of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act?
VOGEL: The draft portfolio acknowledges that local planners face changes in their tax rolls, workforce and land uses, and the state can help local governments anticipate and adjust to those changes with funding and resources for planning. Land uses will change in some places, and that’s going to have a ripple effect on communities and county budgets.
Nancy Vogel Age: 52 Education: Bachelor of Science, Conservation and Resource Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Master of Arts, University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Previous jobs: Director of communications at the Resources Legacy Fund, from July 2017 to May 2019. Deputy secretary for communications at the California Natural Resources Agency from 2015 to 2017. Assistant director for public affairs at the Department of Water Resources from 2012 to 2015. Principal consultant for the California State Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes from 2008 to 2012. Staff writer for the Los Angeles Times from 2000 to 2008 and The Sacramento Bee from 1991 to 2000, where water was part of her assignment. Fun Fact: One of Vogel’s favorite places is the Knight Foundry in Sutter Creek in the Sierra foothills, a water-powered foundry that was a Gold Rush cradle of innovation – and is still operating, thanks to dedicated volunteers.
WW: The portfolio says a new emphasis on cooperation across state agencies and with regional groups and leaders is needed. How does that occur?
VOGEL: Our approach to the draft Portfolio embodies cooperation — we asked for extensive input. We wanted to hear about local concerns and what water managers think the state can best do to support them as they address those concerns. I think it’s a mindset. Sometimes people forget how much [Integrated Regional Water Management] has accomplished in terms of the way we look at collaboration on a watershed scale. And it’s easy to focus on the things that IRWM isn’t doing or isn’t doing as well as we’d like. But we’re in a much different place now in 2020 than we were in 2000 because of IRWM and we want to build on that. There are lots of other ways for regions to collaborate on a watershed scale and we’re open to that and we want to support that too. But we don’t want to take everything that’s been accomplished and all those human relationships forged in the planning efforts under IRWM — we don’t want to just toss that aside and start over. We want to build on that. And we need to improve the way we coordinate at the state level, too.
WW: How do you make sure this just doesn’t end up another book on a shelf and that there is follow through?
VOGEL: That will take sustained, high-level focus from Secretaries [Wade] Crowfoot, [Jared] Blumenfeld and [Karen] Ross [from Natural Resources, Cal EPA and Food and Agriculture, respectively] and I know they’re committed to that. We also task ourselves with doing an annual update on progress, in which the public will hold us accountable for what we’ve accomplished and have yet to accomplish. We get the resources, the right people in the right places, and we make progress.
WW: How did your experience in journalism prepare you for this task and to be an advocate for this portfolio?
Vogel answers questions from members of the Water Leaders class. (Source: Water Education Foundation)
VOGEL: A journalist learns to listen and to absorb information quickly and to organize it. We had a lot of information coming in quickly as we began to prepare the portfolio and I think my experience with organizing information in a way that I could then disseminate to people who needed to make decisions helped. Journalists get to interview everybody who cares about an issue and so they end up with a unique perspective on a problem that’s valuable. And I felt like I got to do that in some ways as the person who was herding cats on the portfolio. I got to hear everybody’s concerns and that was a privilege. It’s hard to do justice to all the experience and knowledge and often conflicting but heartfelt values reflected in the input we got. We did our best. It was a team effort across the departments and the agencies. It’s been a lot of hours but so worthwhile. I just want to improve the document now and make it the best it can be.
Just outside Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, a year-round, mineral-rich spring turns the Little Colorado River a vivid turquoise. This final stretch, about 10 miles from the river’s confluence with its larger relative, is one of the West’s spectacular waterways, with bright water flowing below steep red-rock cliffs. But the view will change dramatically if a Phoenix-based company builds a proposed hydropower project. The two dams could alter the flow, discolor the water and flood a Hopi cultural site.
The project remains a long shot: It needs the approval of the Navajo Nation, whose leaders have been publicly skeptical. It also has to contend with varying river flows and the protected humpback chub, plus a remote location that will require building extensive transmission lines. The river’s beauty makes this particular project stand out, but it’s just one of a number of proposed hydropower projects around the West.
The structure of today’s energy market helps explain hydropower’s appeal, even for dubious projects like this one. As it stands, renewables struggle to match power supply to common patterns of demand (as revealed by solar energy’s “duck curve”). The result is a renewable energy bottleneck. If the U.S. is to meet global climate goals, an enormous, rapid shift away from fossil fuels is needed. This creates what one recent academic paper calls “green vs. green trade-offs,” exemplified in the West by the recent trend of proposed hydropower dams. Such projects destroy waterways and harm ecosystems — but they could also help purge the grid of fossil fuels.
Solar power works only during the day, and wind is inconsistent. To meet peak power demand, which tends to spike at night, utilities rely on coal, nuclear and — increasingly — natural gas. In order to rapidly increase and decrease supply to meet real-time demand, gas plants must run all the time. This limits the amount of solar and wind power the grid can accommodate, thereby prolonging fossil fuel use. States are already producing more solar and wind power than their grids can take.
The capacity to store the day’s excess solar and wind power for nightly use would solve the problem. Battery storage, while advancing fast, is years away from being both advanced enough to replace gas plants and fully integrated into power production, according to Suzanne Stradling, a University of New Mexico Ph.D. student who is studying the renewable transition. If we could meet peak power without natural gas, she said, “there’s no limit to the amount of solar we could bring onto the grid.”
But how do you manage without gas power? Coal is a greater pollutant, and nuclear waste is politically — as well as environmentally — toxic. That leaves hydropower. Like gas, hydropower can ramp up power generation almost instantly. Pumped storage dams, which are essentially enormous batteries, could meet peak power demand, allowing solar and wind energy to chase gas and coal from the grid. Fourteen of the 15 dams proposed in the West this year are designed for pumped storage, according to federal data. But many face obstacles similar to those confronting the Little Colorado project.
Some proposed Western dams would use existing infrastructure, not natural systems like the Little Colorado River. There is a move to transform an abandoned iron mine outside Joshua Tree National Park into a massive hydropower plant, for example, while Los Angeles wants to convert Hoover Dam into a pumped storage facility. But by the time new projects are permitted and built, “things in the energy industry are going to look entirely different,” Stradling said. This uncertainty can make it hard to attract investors. And in another region-wide trend, several multi-state transmission projects — the kind that will bring Wyoming’s excess wind power to other states — are already underway. Recent expansions to California’s energy imbalance market are another important step toward a true regional market. A more unified grid, combined with better battery storage, will reduce the need for hydropower projects.
Meanwhile, other hydropower projects are coming online. A $1 billion pumped storage dam will begin construction in Montana next year, and another hydropower project has been approved in California’s San Diego County. Both are near transmission lines and will help decarbonize Western grids.
But what sort of future are we committing ourselves to by building these dams? This question occupies University of Wyoming professor Tara Righetti. The infrastructure we build now, she said, will lock us into certain futures, while denying others. The enduring difficulty of accounting for 20th century infrastructure is apparent in behemoths like Glen Canyon Dam and the push for dam removal on the Snake River in southeastern Washington. Even after battery technology improves and the power grid supplies Nevada with Wyoming wind on a cloudy day, hydro storage dams will still exist. For there is a cost to not building them — our continued reliance on existing energy infrastructure and natural gas plants to keep the lights turned on.
“All power sources have an impact,” she said. “If there’s a human imperative to address climate change, that means finding the right spot to make these trade-offs.”
