Wet Winter Might Just Be an Anomaly

By Hazlehurst, John

Runoff from this year’s snowpack has brought a welcome break from years of drought and near-drought in the Colorado River basin.

The river’s principal tributaries, such as the Yampa and the Elk, are near flood level, many reservoirs are at or near capacity and rafting companies anticipate a record season.

Even Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which store much of the water that sustains Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, have benefited from this winter’s heavy snowfall in the Colorado Rockies.

“The National Weather Service is projecting this year’s spring runoff into Lake Powell will be 122 percent of average,” according to the Bureau of Reclamation. “That will raise Lake Powell, currently at elevation 3,591 feet above mean sea level, approximately 50 feet by mid-July, to its highest elevation in six years. Powell is currently projected to end the calendar year almost 40 feet higher than it is today.”

At the end of May, both reservoirs were at less than 50 percent of capacity. By year’s end, the bureau predicts that Powell will be at 63 percent and Mead at 48 percent.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that conditions in the Colorado River basin have returned to those of the 1980s, when cool, wet winters provided enough water to supply all of the river’s users, and fill both Powell and Mead.

Not so fast

Despite the wet winter, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego concluded during February that “there is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead, a key source of water for millions of people in the southwestern United States, will be dry by 2021″ because average yearly drawdowns from the reservoirs exceed inflows by 1 million acre-feet.

“Without Lake Mead and neighboring Lake Powell, the Colorado River system has no buffer to sustain the population of the Southwest through an unusually dry year, or worse, a sustained drought,” said research marine physicist Tim Barnett and climate scientist David Pierce. “In such an event, water deliveries would become highly unstable and variable.”

Officials at the bureau, which is responsible for managing the reservoirs and implementing measures for dealing with shortages, disputed those conclusions, arguing that Barnett and Pierce were giving undue weight to worst-case scenarios.

Ounce of prevention

But throughout the southwest, regional water managers appear to be preparing for such eventualities, rather than praying for rain — or, in this case, for snow.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa has unveiled a plan to implement a range of water conservation measures which would cost more than $2 billion. As well as restricting most outdoor water use, including landscape irrigation, the plan calls for new storage, for cleaning contaminated groundwater in the San Fernando Valley and for controversial wastewater recycling projects once derided as “toilet to tap” schemes.

In Denver, water officials announced new conservation efforts, aimed at reducing customer use from 211 gallons per person daily to 165 gallons by 2016, a 22 percent cut.

Colorado Springs, at 174 gallons of potable water daily (196, including non-potable consumption) is already close to meeting Denver’s 2016 targets.

But the combination of conservation-minded residents, who have reduced residential water consumption by 32 percent since 2000, and a slumping real estate market, has caused financial damage.

Lower consumption and fewer tap fees from new construction could force Colorado Springs Utilities to raise rates and reduce costs.

And even at present levels, there may be room for further major reductions. The city of Perth, Australia, which has experienced a severe, multiyear drought, intends to cap residential per capita use at 40 gallons per day, and is already close to meeting that goal.

Las Vegas, which depends upon the Colorado River for more than 90 percent of its water supply, has joined 15 other western cities, including Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver and Aurora in the Western Urban Water Coalition. The coalition and seven other national organizations issued a statement May 20 calling upon Congress to “to consider water resources as a key element in upcoming climate change legislation.”

The other green

The organizations said that they “serve the vast majority of U.S. water and wastewater customers.”

Coalition spokesman Guy Martin said that the statement was intended as “a wake-up call.”

“The national discussion about climate change has been all about carbon — carbon caps, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases,” he said. “But to us in the West, water is the central issue.”

Martin said that western water managers are happy to be experiencing a wet year, but that “these are very long-term trends and the long-term direction is clear. There’s not a (coalition) member who isn’t planning for a situation in which there will be less water, and increasing demands.”

Western cities, he said, are light-years ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to water conservation.

“They’re used to scrambling for water, and planning for shortages, so they’ll do what they have to do,” he said. “And if all the forecasts are wrong, and the wet years continue, they’ll be delighted. But they’re planning for a dry future.”

Credit: John Hazlehurst

(Copyright 2008 Dolan Media Newswires)

(c) 2008 Colorado Springs Business Journal, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.