Last Friday, the New York Times ran a news analysis titled “How the West Overcounts its Water Supplies” that was first published in longer format in ProPublica as part of their “Killing the Colorado” series. It can serve as a primer on some important features of the water cycle. While it deals with the dwindling water supplies in California and Arizona, where the message is urgent, it has relevance for other places.
The article, by Abrahm Lustgarten, offers a clear, pragmatic, geographic look at the interconnectedness of water supplies—in particular, surface water and groundwater. It spotlights the folly of counting these as two different water bank accounts. In some places, due to the underground rock configuration and soil makeup, drawing from a river and a well really is a matter of putting two different straws into the same drink.
PAUL MATUSKA is the closest thing the American West has to a water cop, and his beat includes Needles, Calif., a beleaguered desert town midway between Flagstaff, Ariz., and Los Angeles. About 4,800 people live in Needles, on the western bank of the Colorado River where it cuts a swath in the mud between California and Arizona. The old railroad town is the gateway to the farmland of the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation across the river. Mr. Matuska, a hydrologist, is one of about a dozen accountants for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which controls water distribution along the lower half of the Colorado River. His job is to count the water used by cities like Needles and the farms around them — lands close to the essential Colorado — and make sure they don’t take more than their share of the river. As it happens, Needles gets most of its water from underground — pumping an average of about 700 million gallons a year from four wells it has drilled into the local aquifer. In recent years, such withdrawals have taken on more importance in the West, particularly in California and Arizona, as streams shrivel, rivers are fought over and reservoirs run dry. About 60 percent of California’s water now comes from underground, according to estimates by NASA researchers. Arizona, staring down imminent rationing of Colorado River water, pumps nearly half its supplies from aquifers. But in allowing their residents to tap underground resources this way, regulators and legislators in those states have ignored a basic truth about how much water is actually available. In many places, groundwater in aquifers and surface water in rivers and reservoirs are not separate supplies but interconnected parts of the same system. What this means is that there is even less water than people think in a region already afflicted by a prolonged drought that has led to water rationing and fears for the future. How much less, and exactly where the overlaps exist, are not fully known. But the Needles example suggests that the overlap could be enormous. Mr. Matuska knows that the water drawn up from the wells in Needles comes from the Colorado River, fed by snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. Technically, that water has already been allocated, with strict budgets allowed for each of the states along the river under a compact among the states. And so to avoid overcounting the valley’s resources, Mr. Matuska subtracts the groundwater Needles uses from the total amount that California is allowed to pump from the Colorado River into its canals and ship to Los Angeles and elsewhere each year. The reason Mr. Matuska is counting water supplies so carefully in Needles is because the town falls within the slender slice of countryside that immediately adjoins the Colorado. The federal government has the authority over the water there, and it enforces what has long been accepted as scientific fact and prudent strategy: Surface water and groundwater are one. How can this be? If you were to slice a knife through the earth and look at the cut, a cross section would generally show bands of solid rock bent over like a bell or bent up like a bowl. When it rains, water soaks into the earth, through soil and rock, saturating porous areas and running over the buried topography until it is blocked by an impermeable surface. There, the water can sit, trapped beneath the bell or pooling in the bowl. Needles sits above one of those shallow bowls, a subterranean valley packed with porous gravel that is easily filled with water. And so a funny thing happens when Needles pumps its water from underground: No matter how much the city uses, the water level in the local groundwater wells never drops. Instead, water is sucked out of the Colorado River bed, underground, toward the wells, filling any subterranean void. Because the earth is especially porous along the Colorado, the water essentially spills out the river’s bottom, unseen, filling a geologic bathtub beneath Needles and its nearby terrain, and refilling the aquifer. There are lots of ways water in the West is being mismanaged: farming subsidies for water-intensive crops; arcane laws encouraging waste; leaky infrastructure. But none may be more significant than refusing to accept the fact that the West’s water resources are interconnected. Willingly overlooking that fact amounts to a fundamental failure of water management that has left states more vulnerable to drought and less prepared to adapt to the effects of climate change. Moreover, it has left them blind to an honest accounting of their total supply. How can anyone plan for the future if there isn’t agreement about something as basic as how much water there actually is?
The explanation of the reality is so straightforward it kind of makes you want to roll your eyes and say “duh,” but because of silos in thinking and acting in places like California, these two kinds of water resources are accounted for and managed as if they are entirely separate.
And while intimately connected topography varies from place to place such that some water supplies are protected from direct intermingling, there is nonetheless an overarching message.
Let’s say you have two typically fat bank accounts you draw from to meet the basic needs of your family. You might like to think of them as Bank Account A and Bank Account B. Maybe one holds income from a lucrative rental property and one is where your more-than-adequate paychecks are deposited, and maybe you pay for household expenses out of one, and vacations and car payments out of the other, without penny pinching or worry in either case.
If circumstances change so that one or both sources of deposit starts to dry up and the balance of one or both accounts becomes low, and then lower still, you will inevitably have to recognize that they serve the same function of supporting your family. At that point it won’t make sense to say, “Well, the account we use to pay for our cars and our vacations is still fairly full, so we will keep doing that and just forego food, clothing, and shelter.” Rather, you would start to reallocate and probably limit your expenditures.
The article discusses Needles, CA. You might know the name from Peanuts cartoons, as it is where Snoopy’s cousin Spike lives, in a large Saguaro cactus. I have stayed at a hotel in the sauna that is Needles, and because it can feel like a sauna it tends to be more of a stopping place than a staying place. As such, I didn’t even notice that it is directly alongside the Colorado River. This means the water allocations there are the province of the federal government, which apparently takes a no-nonsense approach. As the article states it: “The federal government has the authority over the water there, and it enforces what has long been accepted as scientific fact and prudent strategy: Surface water and groundwater are one.”
The first half of the Times version of the article appears below:
PAUL MATUSKA is the closest thing the American West has to a water cop, and his beat includes Needles, Calif., a beleaguered desert town midway between Flagstaff, Ariz., and Los Angeles.
About 4,800 people live in Needles, on the western bank of the Colorado River where it cuts a swath in the mud between California and Arizona. The old railroad town is the gateway to the farmland of the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation across the river.
Mr. Matuska, a hydrologist, is one of about a dozen accountants for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which controls water distribution along the lower half of the Colorado River. His job is to count the water used by cities like Needles and the farms around them — lands close to the essential Colorado — and make sure they don’t take more than their share of the river.
As it happens, Needles gets most of its water from underground — pumping an average of about 700 million gallons a year from four wells it has drilled into the local aquifer. In recent years, such withdrawals have taken on more importance in the West, particularly in California and Arizona, as streams shrivel, rivers are fought over and reservoirs run dry. About 60 percent of California’s water now comes from underground, according to estimates by NASA researchers. Arizona, staring down imminent rationing of Colorado River water, pumps nearly half its supplies from aquifers.
But in allowing their residents to tap underground resources this way, regulators and legislators in those states have ignored a basic truth about how much water is actually available. In many places, groundwater in aquifers and surface water in rivers and reservoirs are not separate supplies but interconnected parts of the same system.
What this means is that there is even less water than people think in a region already afflicted by a prolonged drought that has led to water rationing and fears for the future. How much less, and exactly where the overlaps exist, are not fully known. But the Needles example suggests that the overlap could be enormous.
Mr. Matuska knows that the water drawn up from the wells in Needles comes from the Colorado River, fed by snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. Technically, that water has already been allocated, with strict budgets allowed for each of the states along the river under a compact among the states. And so to avoid overcounting the valley’s resources, Mr. Matuska subtracts the groundwater Needles uses from the total amount that California is allowed to pump from the Colorado River into its canals and ship to Los Angeles and elsewhere each year.
The reason Mr. Matuska is counting water supplies so carefully in Needles is because the town falls within the slender slice of countryside that immediately adjoins the Colorado. The federal government has the authority over the water there, and it enforces what has long been accepted as scientific fact and prudent strategy: Surface water and groundwater are one.
How can this be? If you were to slice a knife through the earth and look at the cut, a cross section would generally show bands of solid rock bent over like a bell or bent up like a bowl. When it rains, water soaks into the earth, through soil and rock, saturating porous areas and running over the buried topography until it is blocked by an impermeable surface. There, the water can sit, trapped beneath the bell or pooling in the bowl.
Needles sits above one of those shallow bowls, a subterranean valley packed with porous gravel that is easily filled with water. And so a funny thing happens when Needles pumps its water from underground: No matter how much the city uses, the water level in the local groundwater wells never drops. Instead, water is sucked out of the Colorado River bed, underground, toward the wells, filling any subterranean void. Because the earth is especially porous along the Colorado, the water essentially spills out the river’s bottom, unseen, filling a geologic bathtub beneath Needles and its nearby terrain, and refilling the aquifer.
There are lots of ways water in the West is being mismanaged: farming subsidies for water-intensive crops; arcane laws encouraging waste; leaky infrastructure. But none may be more significant than refusing to accept the fact that the West’s water resources are interconnected.
Willingly overlooking that fact amounts to a fundamental failure of water management that has left states more vulnerable to drought and less prepared to adapt to the effects of climate change. Moreover, it has left them blind to an honest accounting of their total supply. How can anyone plan for the future if there isn’t agreement about something as basic as how much water there actually is?
