Column by George Sibley
Water – August 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Water on the brain. It’s on everyone’s brain, of course, this being the driest year in Colorado in decades, or maybe a century, or maybe since before there was a Colorado — it depends on where you are in Colorado.
As I write this, our stalwart legislature is going into a special session to see what the power of democracy can do about the drought. They will almost certainly consider the idea of indebting us for the foreseeable future for some set of water storage projects; there is already a lot of talk around the state about that — not that such talk ever stops, but a dry spell gives it a lot more oomph.
And talk about water storage projects almost always ends up focussing on the Upper Colorado and Gunnison Rivers, which together — after their Grand Junction junction — provide the only really major “leakage” from the tidy cartographic box that is the State of Colorado. And God forbid that Coloradans should ever think outside of that box!
No water that is legally “ours” by interstate compacts escapes to Nebraska or Kansas via the South Platte, Republican or Arkansas Rivers. In fact, we are often in court with one state or the other, or both, for not letting enough water leave the state via one or another of those rivers (currently the Republican).
But more than a million acre-feet of water that is “ours,” according to various Colorado River compacts, flows west into Utah in an average water year. And even in this driest of years, Colorado will lose some water that way.
So where and how can Colorado keep that water “inside the box”? And more to the point — how can we get it to where it is needed? Which isn’t down on the Utah border where no one lives, but over in the drier eastern half of the state where most of us are.
The burgeoning southern suburbs of the metropolitan area are beginning to experience real problems with the aquifer under the Denver Basin, and those cities are reaching far out into Eastern Colorado to buy up agricultural water. They look with ever hungrier eyes at that million-plus acre-feet of water that’s flowing west into Utah even though it’s legally “ours.”
The logical solution, which is being trotted out once again, is “more high-altitude storage.” But in a year like this, someone naive in the ways of western water might be inclined to ask: why build more expensive storage for water that isn’t there?
The logical answer is that you build it to store water in years of plenty — presuming that we ever have another one. Then the water will be there for years like this. But the logic is not as straightforward as it sounds.
One big distinction that has to be made is between “use” and “consumptive use.” Colorado water users are obviously not consuming that million-plus acre-feet of water that leaves the state. But all of that water has probably been used two or three times — by users with solid rights to it — by the time it gets past the orchards and fields of Fruita, west of Grand Junction, and that repeated usage doesn’t necessarily include the fish, fishermen, rafters and other in-stream users.
The biggest gap between “the right to use water” and “consumptive use” comes with agricultural irrigators — especially those who still irrigate fields by flooding them. No matter how efficiently an irrigator uses his water, some of it filters back into the stream from whence it came. This return-flow water is then used by users downstream, and so on down through Fruita and into Utah. Municipal users also put a lot of water back into the streams and rivers — every time we flush a toilet, take a shower, or do a load of wash.
This presented a problem for the proposed Union Park high-altitude storage project which would have located a reservoir high up in the Upper Gunnison watershed. Despite the fact that a lot of Gunnison River water is clearly leaving the state at the Utah border — probably more than is leaving via the Upper Colorado — the water judges found that there wasn’t enough unappropriated water high up in the watershed to begin to fill the proposed reservoir.
But they also found that after the water from the Upper Gunnison, Tomichi, and other tributaries had been used and reused, a lot of it flowed back into the streams and entered Blue Mesa Reservoir, just west of Gunnison, where there was as much as 240,000 acre-feet in an average year available for junior appropriation!
So an idea that doesn’t work at “high altitude” might work just a couple of thousand feet lower and fifty miles farther west, and here in Gunnison we are assuming that pretty soon someone will propose a pipeline and pumping stations to suck water out of Blue Mesa for the cities of the Arkansas and South Platte basins (and so our flat-water visitors, like those at Dillon Reservoir this year, can have a quaint little lake with a quarter mile of muddy beach).
This is probably going to be the problem that most high-altitude storage reservoir proposals are going to encounter. Even in a fat year, there is not a lot of water high in the drainages that isn’t already committed to uses farther downstream. A fair amount of that million acre-feet of water may literally not be available until it gets close to the Utah border. Used again and again, it’s hardly pristine, but at least it’s unconsumed and therefore available.
And for that nice story about storing it up in the fat years for release during the lean years: suppose we find out that water rights have already been created that require a reasonably fat year to really meet them all?
What if there is really nothing left over from an “average” year for more rights to be created?
These are interesting times.
George Sibley will direct the Western Water Workshop in Gunnison July 31-Aug. 2.
