Local Opinion: A reckoning for the Colorado River

By William Schmidt

Special to the Arizona Daily Star (Oct. 23, 2022)

William Schmidt is a former deputy managing editor and correspondent at The New York Times. He is a professor emeritus in the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona.

The Colorado River was raging, fed by record snowmelt from the Rockies. As rising waters pushed near the top of Hoover Dam, engineers opened the spillways to divert the flood, steering it into steep tunnels bored through hundreds of feet of rock. Far below, at the base of the dam, the torrent emerged with a thundering roar, as if shot out of cannons.

It was the early summer of 1983, and the Colorado was putting on quite a show.

As the New York Times correspondent assigned to the West, I was there — nearly 40 years ago — as floodwaters were sent crashing around dams to relieve swollen reservoirs, drowning some downriver towns. It was a season of high water difficult to reconcile with the bleak picture of the Colorado today.

In Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the vast reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams — water levels are so low they are near “dead pool,” an eerily dystopian term meaning there’s too little behind the dams to turn the turbines.

Many never imagined we would be in this place. This is the river that gave life to the Southwest, where a labyrinth of dams, reservoirs and canals turned the basin into a complex plumbing system, as the writer Philip Fradkin described it in his 1981 book, “A River No More.”

It was as if we were in control of nature. The great dams we built not only saved us from drowning in the floods that helped carve those magnificent canyons, but behind them we created enormous lakes to store all the water we imagined we would need.

But as our runaway climate has become hotter and drier, and those vast reservoirs have shriveled, there is not enough water there. More than 40 million people already live in the basin, and the 1922 Colorado River Compact — which apportioned the river among each of the seven basin states — is based on assumptions the river’s flow is greater than it is.

Meanwhile, our state’s groundwater resources are in the crosshairs again. In 1980, amid alarm over falling water tables and dry wells, Arizona adopted a landmark Groundwater Management Act, a moment of foresight intended to protect the ancient aquifers.

But if we can no longer rely on the river, are those protections strong enough to push back against developers keen to stick a straw in the ground, to get the water they want?

In rural Cochise County, for example, a plan to create a whole new town of 28,000 houses relies on the same groundwater source that nourishes the San Pedro River, one of Arizona’s last free-flowing streams. Environmentalists say the project imperils the river; Federal regulators have suspended the plan — for now.

Four decades after the great floods, the reckoning is here. The federal government says the states of the basin must reduce what they take from the river. Yes, California — the largest user — must do far more, just as Arizona needs to embrace more aggressive conservation strategies, beginning with agriculture, which takes 80% of the water.

The arid Southwest has historically defied the reality of its landscape, certain there will always be more water as long as there is pipe and concrete to move it. Even now, after two decades of drought, some imagine desert oases filled by giant oceanside desalination plants (requiring giant power plants to run them), or fed by fantastical cross-country pipelines, winding over mountains and plains.

Such is life in the desert, where mirages are not unknown. Back in the 1970s, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a think tank in California, had a plan too.

He proposed sawing off chunks of the Antarctic ice sheet, towing the icebergs north and parking them along the coasts, where we could shave off what we needed. Too bad our changing climate is melting that ice before we can lasso it.