Trailer Park Water Fight

In a drought year like this, competition for water is getting fierce. This was in the Police Dispatch section of the local Tucson Weekly:

A dispute involving a man and a neighbor who said he was only trying to help the man with his rainwater-harvesting efforts ended with the neighbor getting bashed on the head with an empty garbage can, according to a Pima County Sheriff's Department report.
Deputies who were called to the scene interviewed the man, who said he collected rainwater runoff from the roof of his trailer in garbage cans. He said the neighbor came over, ostensibly to help him, but overturned one of the cans almost directly on top of him.
The neighbor said he had noticed a mud stain in one of the garbage cans and wanted to help by cleaning the can with a hose, but he accidentally sprayed the man with water. That's when the man picked up the empty garbage can and struck him, the neighbor said.
After a witness to the incident backed up the neighbor's story, the rainwater-collecting man was taken to jail on suspicion of assault with a garbage can.

Let's try to keep it civil out there people.

Might be time to try a little forebearance

I've been too busy to post anything on the recent announcement by Reclamation that a shortage declaration on the lower Colorado River is likely by 2016.  But when I spotted this (pdf) on the agenda for the most recent board meeting of the Central Arizona Project, it seemed like a good time to chime in.

The fallowing and forebearance agreement between CAP and the Yuma Mesa Irrigation and Drainage District (YMIDD) is a first step to developing a relationship between water users in Arizona along the River and in the Central part of the state to try to forestall shortages to CAP customers. 

Some quick updates

As expected, an environmental organization has filed suit against the state over the approval of a large development in the Sierra Vista area (I discussed this in a previous post in March).  Earthjustice issued a press release yesterday (it also includes a link to their complaint) announcing their suit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court.  I've only skimmed the complaint and it looks pretty straightforward.  I look forward to the response from the state.

I was also alerted recently to a report recently issued by the Columbia University Water Center and Veolia Water titled "America's Water Risk: Water Stress and Climate Variability".  It looks at relative risk of water scarcity in each county in the U.S.  They employ a statistical methodology that looks at past climate data to assess the likelihood of a severe drought that could exhaust available water storage in each area.  As you might expect they find significant risk in places where long-term storage is not part of the supply - mostly in the east - and places that are highly reliant on vulnerable sources from considerable distance - i.e. Southern California.  I was happy to see that Arizona is not among the places at greatest risk.  That's cause we live with scarcity all the time and plan for it.

There was also some water management related excitement here in Tucson this week as the city council looked at setting criteria (pdf) for allowing 3rd parties to hook into a pipeline that carries CAP water to a recharge facility south of the city.  This relates to a couple of proposals by entities in the Green Valley/Sahuarita-area, which is upstream along the Santa Cruz river, who would like to take delivery of existing allocations of Colorado River water via the CAP system to be put in the ground as mitigation for their large-scale pumping of groundwater over many years.  One of the potential recipients of such an arrangement could be a company called Rosemont Copper, who wants to construct a large copper mine in the mountains south of Tucson.  Many in the city are opposed to the mine and think that if they deny Rosemont the ability to offset their groundwater pumping with recharge of CAP water they will be less likely to get their permits approved.  It's a long shot, but getting the Forest Service to deny a permit for a hard-rock mine on federal land is always a long shot.  I'll have a longer post on this issue probably next week, because there is a lot of nuance to it.

More bad news on climate change effects on surface water flows

The Christian Science Monitor has a blog on their website called Discoveries, that had a post yesterday summing up the recent Scripps study on the possibly dire future of the Colorado River watershed (discussed in my previous post here).

If you have followed the news this week the story has been pretty inescapable. The gist of it is that with or without the effects of climate change, the Bureau of Reclamation will be unable to meet the existing water delivery obligations in the lower basin almost half the time by the middle of this century because of overallocation of the river. This is primarily due to the fact that the amount of water divided up by the Colorado River compact was based on anomalous weather during the 20th century according to records reconstructed from tree-ring data. If average flows on the river over the past 1300 years or so are an accurate indication of reality, the river is currently over-allocated by as much as 4 to 5 million acre-feet per year.

These reports are on top of the recent announcement by the Bureau that the level of Lake Mead is expected to drop below 1,100 feet at some point this summer. That is a level not seen since Lake Powell was being filled upstream in the 60s and would be perilously close to the level that would initiative provisions of the recently completed shortage-sharing agreement(pdf) under which the basin states agreed to divvy up any shortfalls on the river during prolonged shortages.

The Discoveries post also mentions a recently completed study that shows declining flows in 2/3 of the large river basins in the world over the second half of the 20th century. The only places where flow is increasing is in rivers fed primarily by melting glaciers in places like the Arctic. That's some really ominous data there.

Keep an eye on developments on the Colorado and watch what is occurring in Australia with the Murray-Darling River Basin. If these predictions come true for the Colorado, what is currently occurring in Australia will be an important lesson for planners and policy-makers here.