Great New York Times article by Joe Gertner - think of this as a new chapter in Cadillac Desert. Gertner interviews heavyweight climatoligists and water engineers and finds they all share a common belief: The American Southwest built its water supply systems on anomalous data from the 20th Century - and, combined with its phenomenal growth, the region is now on a path to catastrophe Steven Chu, the Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Nobel laureate tells Gertner that "there's a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster, and that's in the best scenario."
The problem Gertner illuminates is known to every serious water professional - the Colorado River is over-allocated (when it was divided it was assumed to have 17 million acre-feet of flows, it averages around 13.5 million), and what we thought was a long drought back in the 1950's, was, relatively speaking, a dry spell. The Southwest has had 60 year droughts on several occassions. Add two more factors to the mix, hypergrowth and climate change, and the systems we have in place look doomed.
In fact, Bradley Udall, head of the Western Water Assessment explained, "as we move forward, all water-management actions based on 'normal' as defined by the 20th Century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets."
The article has good detail on the allocation of water in the West, the improbability of Lake Mead every becoming full again, and the phenomenally costly approaches cities are taking. Examples of the latter - Aurora, Colorado investing $750 million to pump water out of the same river it dumps effluent into and pump that water back to the city for direct injection into the water system, and Las Vegas' $330 million payment to Arizona for banked water and its multi-billion dollar pipeline plan to import groundwater from east-central Nevada to Las Vegas.
To read the entire article, click on the title of this post.
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