San Diegans get more than half of their water from the Colorado River. So why haven’t local leaders warned that Lake Mead has been reduced to minimal levels?
While bodies keep turning up and rotting boats in the nation’s largest reservoir, many other Southwest water agencies are rushing to draft an emergency agreement to reduce the river’s annual consumption by as much as 25 percent before Tuesday’s deadline.
His biggest fear is a “dead pool,” a situation in which Lake Mead recedes so low that water stops flowing out of Hoover Dam. By that time, the turbines that currently produce enough hydroelectricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes will have long since ceased to function.
Amid the fervor, however, the San Diego County Water Authority has remained calm, repeatedly stating that the region has no water shortage.
“I would get nervous when we got to dead pool status in Lake Mead,” said Jim Madaffer, who represents the water authority at California’s Colorado River Board. “That is a long way from happening.”
To its credit, the agency has positioned itself relatively well over the past two decades to navigate the river’s historic drought, which has reached a new level of urgency in the past three years. In addition to costly investments in desalination and dam storage, the agency signed a futures agreement for river water with Imperial Valley farmers.
June 7, 2022 At the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, large pipelines pump drinking water 10 miles east, where it is added to the county’s water supply.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
This agreement has not only limited San Diego’s reliance on California’s threatened snowpack, it has also placed the region at the end of the line of cuts on the Colorado River.
As a perfect storm of aggressive conservation and expensive projects has sent utility bills skyrocketing throughout the San Diego region, homeowners and businesses have faced relatively little pressure from local leaders to further limit water use, especially when compared to Northern California or the Los Angeles region.
“The investments we’ve made over the last 20 years are really paying off,” Madaffer said, adding, “…and while it’s not fair to other parts of the state, hey, we’re paying the price for that resistance.”
Meanwhile, powerful agencies—such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Imperial Irrigation District (IID)—are devising a plan to remove more urban lawns, improve irrigation systems, and, more controversial, paying farmers with preferential water rights to leave their land fallow.
In June, the federal government set the August 16 as the deadline for the seven basin states—led by California and Arizona—to reach an agreement to reduce water use by a whopping 2 million to 4 million acre-feet. Officials from the United States Bureau of Reclamation even threatened to unilateral water cuts if negotiations break down, a move that would almost certainly trigger a protracted legal fight.
Senior agency officials have acknowledged the dire situation.
“We are seeing the impacts of climate change in real time right here in front of us in the western United States,” Metropolitan CEO Adel Hagekhalil said at a recent board hearing. “The Colorado River has been very reliable for us, but we are seeing conditions that are unprecedented.”
Although San Diego is relatively well protected under current agreements, some fear rising temperatures and a worsening drought could wipe out a century of water rights in the river.
Outgoing IID board chairman James Hanks made a grim prediction during a recent public hearing on the issue.
“I don’t think we have a two-year window, as many people think, before we hit the water reservoir,” he said. “My personal opinion is that next year we could be there if something is not done.”
A World War II-era landing craft used to transport troops or tanks was revealed on the shore near the Lake Mead marina as the waterline continues to lower at Lake Mead National Recreation Area on June 30. 2022, in Boulder City.
(L.E. Baskow / Associated Press)
a fluid situation
The relative stability of San Diego depends largely on the success of ongoing negotiations between Metropolitan, IID, and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District.
The San Diego region currently imports about 280,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water per year in compliance with a long-term agreement with IID. The largely agricultural district has a strong financial incentive to keep supplying all of those resources to San Diego unless the federal government steps in and orders severe cuts.
In such a situation, the water authority could suffer percentage reductions equivalent to those imposed on IID by the Reclamation Department, according to agency officials. An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of depth or supply about two average California homes a year.
Water managers are confident they will have the outlines of a grand agreement Tuesday to reduce annual use by more than 2 million acre-feet. Details will likely need to be finalized before spring to avoid federal intervention, especially if mountains in Colorado and Wyoming experience below-average snowfall this winter.
“California and Arizona have gotten together and tried to bridge the gap,” said Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for Metropolitan. “I think we’re close.”
“We’re all nervous because regardless of what the feds say next week,” he added, “if next year is really dry, in practice, if we don’t have a deal, they may have to make cuts.”
Lake Mead’s water levels currently hover around 1,040 feet above sea level, down from 1,084 this time in 2020, according to federal records. Hydroelectric power stops at 950 feet, and the dead pool occurs at 895 feet.
Jorge Ponce, an irrigator, adjusts the flow of water from the ditch in a carrot field in the Imperial Valley in this 2008 photo.
(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
meeting point
The biggest challenge in the ongoing negotiations is ensuring that farming communities are not financially harmed by the cuts. This is an especially sensitive situation, as farmers in Southern California hold some of the most important water rights in the Colorado River and could abandon talks in favor of litigation at any time.
Farm leaders have so far been willing to engage in a collective solution that does not involve the courts. But that could change, especially if they start to see that urban areas are unwilling to make the same sacrifices.
“You drive through metropolitan areas and I still see a lot of green lawns,” said Stephen Benson, a third-generation vegetable farmer in the Imperial Valley and a former IID board member. “If I am going to leave my business, I need to see a lot of other proactive conservation measures. Development continues out of control, whether it’s in Phoenix, Las Vegas or Los Angeles.”
This tension is also why San Diego is in a relatively safe situation. The water authority’s agreement with IID helped fund the kind of conservation measures that many believe will be the linchpin of stabilizing the river.
Specifically, the largely urban wholesaler reached an agreement for the cement lining of the All-American Canal, creating nearly 80,000 acre-feet of conserved water enjoyed by San Diegans. The transportation system runs 82 miles from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley.
The other 200,000 acre-feet were released thanks to the agreement with the water authority with an initial agricultural fallow period, and have been maintained with investments in drip irrigation and other such technologies on farms.
The All-American Canal meanders through the Algodones Dunes in Imperial County, California, bringing water from the Colorado River to Imperial Valley farms and towns on October 18, 2002.
(David McNew / Getty Images)
The federal government is likely to want to promote such deals in the future, as evidenced by the recent inclusion of a staggering $4 billion for the Department of Reclamation in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, recently approved by the Senate.
The idea is to prioritize lining canals, improving irrigation, and almost certainly paying farmers not to farm, especially since agriculture uses about 80 percent of the water in the basin. Metropolitan already has a similar program with the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Riverside and Imperial counties, which releases water for cities.
“Intercity transfers are the kind of things we want to encourage for water sustainability,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, former CEO of Metropolitan. “In the pecking order, (San Diego) is going to be among the last to be cut.”
IID and other agricultural agencies acknowledge that fallowing will almost certainly be necessary to stabilize the river. However, it is an especially hard pill to swallow because taking land out of production creates myriad financial impacts downstream for communities that are often already struggling economically.
“When you let fields lie fallow, you lose business for the middlemen who buy and sell the hay,” said Tina Shields, IID water manager. “Irrigators are not hired. Sprinklers are not purchased. It’s a pretty big ripple effect in the community.”
The agency, in collaboration with the water authority, created a fund to help offset some of these types of impacts when it first reached its transfer agreement in 2003. The program had some success, although it was more complicated to administer than expected, Shields said.
Metropolitan and IID have reportedly set out to collectively cut some 400,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River by next year. That’s not a small amount, especially for the Imperial Valley, which relies solely on some 2.6 million acre-feet of river water a year.
Of all the inexpensive boats that float the Colorado River, the San Diego boat is relatively small and nimble. However, if the drought lasts much longer or if the ambitious agreement to reduce consumption fails, even the well-positioned water authority may end up stranded.