Essay by Ed Quillen
water – October 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
When we moved from Kremmling to Salida in the spring of 1978 and I began working at The Mountain Mail, I felt some degree of relief because I figured I would never need to write another water story. Salida, after all, was on the Arkansas and the Eastern Slope, and thereby on the receiving end of water projects. Now I lived in a basin that was a destination for water, not a source, and so there would be no need to write stories about threats to the local water supply.
I had been writing plenty of them. Kremmling was on the banks of the Colorado River on the Western Slope. The Western Slope gets about 60% of Colorado’s precipitation, but has less than 20% of the state’s population. And that part of the Western Slope, Middle Park, was the closest to the cities of the Front Range — the Denver-Fort Collins strip was just 50 miles away as the crow flies.
Thus Middle Park exported considerable water: 234,000 acre-feet a year through the Adams Tunnel of the Colorado-Big Thompson project; 58,000 acre-feet through the Moffat Tunnel for Denver; 12,500 acre-feet from the Williams Fork through the Gumlick Tunnel; 83,000 acre-feet from the Blue River through the Roberts Tunnel for Denver.
Colorado was growing in those days, so there was always talk of more. Put in some collector canals on the east flank of the Gore Range above the Blue River, and run the water to the Vidler Tunnel under Argentine Pass. Expand the Williams Fork collection system. Build a reservoir at Windy Gap just west of Granby and pump the water up to Granby Reservoir so it could flow through the Colorado-Big Thompson diversion system.
The justification for Windy Gap was that the cities of the northern Front Range — Fort Collins, Loveland, Greeley, Longmont, etc. — were growing, and thus might start buying up agricultural water. But they wouldn’t need to do that if Windy Gap were built.
That was the explanation we got one night in Hot Sulphur Springs from Larry Simpson, general manager of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which operated the Colorado-Big Thompson project that had been built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
Since we all need to eat, and an acre-foot of water would grow a lot more food in Weld County than in Grand County, Simpson’s explanation that he was saving ag water mollified much of the potential opposition to the Windy Gap project.
The construction surveys for Windy Gap were just starting when I left Grand County. The project was duly built, and the water was duly transported to the Eastern Slope. It did not save agricultural production. Instead, it went to cool the Rawhide Power Plant, which supplied some of the municipal electric utilities. Weld County farmers didn’t want the coal smoke from the power plant, but Larimer County took it, providing that it sat near the county line where the prevailing wind blew the smoke into Weld County.
Colorado’s economy went into the tank shortly thereafter (remember those wonderful Reagan years?). There was no demand for the electricity. What saved Rawhide was the trauma of the Fort St. Vrain nuclear power plant between Denver and Greeley. Public Service Co. couldn’t get anything close to capacity from Fort St. Vrain, so it needed to buy power — and there was Rawhide.
And Rawhide was cooled with water that was supposed to have been used for “preserving agriculture.” After that adventure of listening to Larry Simpson lie about why Northern wanted the water, I realized that “water journalism” in Colorado is a treacherous field where money, politics, and law all intersect. You can trust no one, because everybody has an agenda. You have to question your own assumptions constantly. And you’ve got to look past the popular sayings like “preserving Colorado agriculture” and try to figure out what they’re really saying.
That’s hard work that doesn’t make you any friends. The prospect of avoiding such toil in the future made Salida and the Arkansas River Basin look quite attractive, from a journalistic standpoint, back in the spring of 1978 when I was 27 years old and didn’t know any better. Not long after I started at the Mail, I was working on stories about some Colorado Springs or Pueblo plan to get more water out of the upper Arkansas, via the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, and the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District was being organized to oppose such proposals, and I realized that as long as I lived and wrote in Colorado, water would be part of the work. There would be no escape.
Especially this year, now that we’re in a serious drought. Previous years have been relatively dry, so there wasn’t much groundwater, and reservoir storage was lower than average, on Oct. 1, 2001, when the water year began. All would have been well if Colorado had received a healthy snowfall last winter, but it didn’t. Snowpacks statewide were about 20% of normal this spring, and it hasn’t rained enough to matter this summer.
Reservoirs are depleted, wells have gone dry, hay is expensive if you can find it, ranchers are selling off their herds, whitewater rafting was down by 30% statewide — you know the stories, and you’ll see more of them.
And you’ll also see and hear a lot of statements about how Colorado should solve its water problems. Then you’ll have to figure out what they mean.
Consider one common statement that “Colorado needs to build more storage reservoirs so that we won’t suffer from droughts like this one.” The typical reservoir in Colorado holds spring run-off (the source of about 80% of Colorado’s surface water) for use later in the summer.
Within reason, that’s a sensible way to adapt this desert for habitation. But if there’s no spring run-off worth mention, as was the case this year, then what good would the reservoir do?
To handle a drought like this one, you’d need immense reservoirs that could store several years’ worth of water, like Powell and Mead on the Colorado River.
How immense a reservoir? Let’s figure a three-year supply. Colorado uses about 7 million acre-feet a year of surface water, so we need a reservoir of 20 million acre-feet — Powell and Mead each hold about 27 million acre-feet.
Where would we put it? It would need to be high, both to minimize evaporation losses and to serve every major basin in the state. My very rough calculations show that a 1,500-foot-high dam around Granite might do the job. Granted, it would cover most of Lake County, but it would be a convenient destination for diverted Western Slope water — it would be on the Arkansas, with the South Platte basin just across the Mosquito Range, and a gravity canal flanking the Sawatch Range could get water across Poncha Pass to the Closed Basin and the Rio Grande.
But there is the unstated assumption that there will be enough good water years to fill this reservoir to make it useful. And the assumption that there would be money to build it, and that it would pass environmental reviews (water quality could be a major problem when the reservoir sits atop one of the most mineralized areas in the world).
So, when you hear someone talking about how we should be building more reservoirs (the fashionable term at the moment is “vessel,”) ask where they should be. Where will the water come from? Where will it go? Who benefits?
And when they suggest building smaller reservoirs ask about costs, liabilities, dangers, and water rights. Often reservoir advocates get so carried away dreaming about fishing, boating and recreational opportunities, they fail to worry about whether they have enough money or surplus water — above their new reservoir where the water will be useful, rather than below it where it will be uncollectable — to launch a reservoir.
Another common statement is “We need to stop wasting water,” followed by examples that range from bluegrass lawns to flood irrigation.
You may already be familiar with this story, but indulge me anyway. My youngest surviving brother, Kurt, lives in Longmont, and his large yard (once at the edge of town) came with some water rights from a ditch. He noticed it on his property papers, found the ditch company and went to a meeting, and ended up its president for a while.
That’s sort of beside the point, but hey, I’m telling a story, so bear with me. I visited him one spring day in a dry year, and his yard looked like a rice paddy. “Use it or lose it?” I asked.
Indeed, he was irrigating partly to maintain his water right. But mostly, he conceded, he was “wasting water,” because “every gallon I waste is a gallon that can’t go to a new subdivision or shopping mall.” You could argue that he was using water to maintain his quality of life — and is that any more of a waste than taking a shower every day to maintain your quality of life, even though our ancestors managed with just a Saturday night bath?
So we need to look quite closely at alleged “waste.” The cottonwood trees that suck up water along streams and irrigation ditches aren’t cultivated, and they have no economic value that I can think of. So they’re an economic waste. But I like seeing them, and they’re certainly an aesthetic improvement on a bare landscape, so I suspect many people feel the same way.
And in a way, so do our water courts. Back about 1980, some entrepreneurs on the lower Arkansas calculated how much water those useless phreatophytic cottonwoods were wasting, cut the trees down, and filed a claim for that water in court. The court ruled that you cannot create a water right in Colorado by removing trees — a pleasing decision, perhaps, but I’d hate to have to prove that it was a logical one.
Another oft-cited “waste” is flood irrigation. The Gunnison Country is a classic example — grass hay might need three feet of water in a year, but the numbers show that there are 309,000 acres under irrigation in the Gunnison basin, and 2 million acre-feet of water is diverted for irrigation. That works out to 6.5 feet of water for each acre, for crops that probably need 3 feet at most.
That’s waste, right? Or is it really? I’ll grant that the water that evaporates, unless it falls nearby as rain, is “wasted,” in that it’s no longer available for “beneficial use.” But in the cool Gunnison Country, evaporation doesn’t amount to much. Most of that water sinks into the soil, and some of it is consumed by plants. But the rest essentially returns to the river (the “return flow”), where someone else can put it to beneficial use.
The water doesn’t just vanish. So despite appearances, there really isn’t much “waste” in high valley flood irrigation. And reducing irrigation to the amount actually needed by beneficial crops wouldn’t make more water available in the basin. On the contrary, at some point it might actually eliminate agriculture in the basin.
As water flows, it picks up minerals, generically called “salts” in this context. As long as there’s plenty of water, the salts flow with the water and become someone else’s problem downstream when too many salts have accumulated. If there isn’t “surplus” water to dilute the salts, then they stay in the ground, and eventually the soil ceases to be arable.
In this sense, the more “efficient” an irrigation system is, the sooner the soil becomes toxic. That “wasted water” when you see flood irrigation is actually serving a purpose — transporting salts so the ground isn’t poisoned.
There is the question of whether it makes sense to be growing hay where there’s a short season, or indeed whether Colorado needs all the agriculture that it has. What’s it mean when we hear that we need to “Save Colorado water for Colorado farms and ranches”?
Agriculture uses at least 85% of the water in Colorado. It accounts for about $5 billion in direct sales. Colorado’s gross domestic product is about $140 billion. So we’re using 80% of a scarce resource to generate 3.6% of our economic activity. That doesn’t sound like a sensible way to do business.
Granted, we need to eat. But do we need to divert water to grow crops that are already in surplus? There are a lot of questions that should be asked when you hear that it’s important to save agricultural water. Are we saving water for crops and meat that will end up on your table, or will those crops end up in a government warehouse somewhere?
Are we saving water for crops that could be grown more efficiently in a state with more adequate rainfall? Is the arid West the best place to grow perishable commodities that require vast fleets of trucks and boxcars to move them to higher population centers? Now that land prices are up and rail systems are eroding, is export agriculture a viable industry in the arid West, or merely an old habit?
“Protecting Colorado water” is another statement that sounds good, but often involves a hand in your pocket. Consider the Kansas-Colorado litigation on the Arkansas. Certain Colorado farmers on the lower Arkansas drilled wells and pumped from the basin. This diminished river flows and deprived Kansas farmers of water that was rightfully theirs. So Kansas sued and won. Colorado is supposed to pay $70 million from the state treasury.
But why should all of us pay? We’re not the ones that stole the water. Why should the state attorney general even have defended the case? If I drove to Dodge City and robbed a bank and brought the money back to Colorado, I doubt the attorney general would defend me on the grounds of “Protecting Colorado’s cash,” and I doubt that my fine would be paid from the state general fund.
This extends even to the local level, like conservancy districts. They frequently use tax money to litigate “to protect local water users.” And when you look closer, it’s usually one or two users. In other words, they’re using public money to litigate private property claims. This might seem more fair to me if there were a “copyright conservancy district” which employed attorneys at public expense to protect my copyright claims.
And in Salida, there was the claim that “we should be restricting water use.” But Salida’s wells were producing. As for surface water, the Harrington Ditch that serves the treatment plant has an 1868 water right. If there’s a call on the river by a senior right, Salida can release some of the 1,350 acre-feet it has in storage in the Frying Pan-Arkansas system.
In short, Salidans had no good reasons to be worried about water supply this summer, or any good reason to conserve water, as long as the treatment plant was getting its full supply. Any water that would be saved thereby would just flow into the river — and Salida couldn’t even get storage credit for it in Pueblo Reservoir, since the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District gives credit only for stored Frying Pan-Arkansas water.
You’re right. That’s complicated. That’s the sort of thing you have to work at if you’re practicing water journalism, which is why I generally prefer to be writing about something other than water. And if you think that’s complicated, then consider the argument that “California is taking Colorado’s water.”
The basis of this is the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which was adopted to prevent California from taking Colorado’s water.
As California grew at the start of the 20th century, and began taking water from the Colorado River, the upstream states feared that their water doctrines might get taken seriously in interstate matters. That is, the first person to put the water to “beneficial use” would have the first claim on the water.
California was developing quickly, and the upstream states weren’t. California would have beneficial uses for the water that predated any uses that might develop upstream. Thus the upstream states, as they grew, would never be able to develop Colorado River water, since California would have the prior claim.
Thus there’s the Colorado River Compact, a circumvention of the Colorado Doctrine of Prior Appropriation. To simplify, after Mexico got a million acre feet, the downstream states (California, Arizona, Nevada) would get half the flow, as would the upstream states (Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah). Colorado was assigned 51.75% of the upstream states’ half.
Back in 1922, they assumed the long-term average flow of the Colorado was 15 million acre-feet. More recent reckonings put it at 13 million.
So, del Estada Colorado is entitled to 51.75% of half of 13 million acre-feet from del Rio Colorado, which works out to 3.36 million acre feet. But Colorado hasn’t contrived a way to use all of that water. Instead, up to a million acre-feet a year of Colorado’s share flows downstream toward California, where it gets used because it’s there (although California is supposed to be working on ways to reduce its Colorado River consumption).
The fear is that California will just keep using that water, and so Colorado had better find a way to use it so that it doesn’t end up in California’s eternal possession, no matter what the Colorado River Compact says. California, after all, has eight times as many people as Colorado and tons of money, so it would have the political power to break the compact if it felt like doing so.
Thus the argument to find more ways to use Colorado River water in Colorado: If we don’t use it, California will eventually get possession of it. In other words, we’d better build water projects, no matter how uneconomic, because we can’t rely on the Colorado River Compact to protect our rights.
But would having the projects protect our rights? If California needs the water and has the political and financial clout to get it, wouldn’t it be able to anyway, no matter what dams and diversions were in Colorado?
Obviously, we don’t trust the water system. That’s even more apparent when you look at recent water wars in the San Luis Valley. Gary Boyce proposed his “No Dam Water Project,” which would have tapped the deep closed aquifer under the Valley for about 150,000 acre-feet a year, presumably exported via pipeline to the Front Range.
Under state law, he would have had to demonstrate that this would not harm senior water-rights holders. But as matters developed, it appeared that no one in the Valley — at least no one who wasn’t on Boyce’s payroll — trusted the water court to protect their rights. Instead, the lobbying began for the feds to buy Boyce out, and now we’re getting a national monument expanded into Great Sand Dunes National Park.
Valley residents don’t trust the water court, no matter what state law says, and Colorado doesn’t trust California, no matter what the compact says, and no matter where you look in the realm of Colorado water, you find mistrust and suspicion — most of it for good reason.
The more you look into it, as Marc Reisner did in his excellent book Cadillac Desert that came out about 20 years ago, the more depressed you get. All these projects designed to benefit “family farmers” turn out to be corporate subsidies. Dams collapse because they were built on unstable soil at the behest of a congressman eager to deliver to his constituents. No matter how stupid a project is, it still has zealous supporters….
And you can get plenty confused along the way, because people delight in answering questions with platitudes about “Keeping Our Water,” or with long and complex explanations about how “We applied to change the point of diversion for two cusecs from Nonesuch Creek from the Oldtimer Ditch headgate to the Alamo Ditch, where we can store it and use some Major Diversion Project shares for augmentation.” You just have to keep asking stupid questions until you understand what goes where and you can get the numbers to add up, a process that can try the patience of even the nicest people in the water business if they have the misfortune to answer the phone when you’ve got questions.
It’s hard work and it’s depressing. I want it to rain. And then to snow. A lot. So much that we don’t have to think about water, let alone try to write about it, for a while.
Then I won’t have to find answers to some persistent questions: If Colorado has enough water for a million people, but not enough for four million, is it a drought? Or something else? And if we save lots of water, with low-flush toilets, fewer baths, shorter showers, and by planting cacti and succulents and eliminating lawns and making do with fewer trees, will Colorado just end up with ten million people and another crisis?
–Ed Quillen
