An enthusiastic crowd wandered the top of Elephant Butte Dam on Jan. 7, celebrating, with good reason, the structure’s role in New Mexico history. But it must have been hard to ignore the distance down to the water on the dam’s upstream face.
When they are brimful, with their outlets roaring, big dams like Elephant Butte are triumphal. But the big empty behind the dam, like we see this January in what looks like is shaping up to be a second consecutive year of drought on the Rio Grande, taunts our frailty.
I was reminded of the brimful optimism by a box of old pictures my photographer colleague Greg Sorber, who shot pictures at the Jan. 7 open house, brought in last week.
Greg’s grandparents lived in San Marcial, a riverside town upstream from the Butte that is no more. His grandparents took a trip to the dam early in its life – circa 1925, Greg thinks, which would have been in its first decade of operation – and his grandma, Helen Sorber, sent pictures back to the folks in Kansas.
Dam builders love numbers, and here are Elelphant Butte’s: 301 feet high, 1,674 feet from end to end (including the spillway on the west end), and my favorite number, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation – 618,785 cubic yards of concrete.
History has dimmed the magnificence of what was one of humanity’s first great concrete dams, which enabled farming downstream by taming floods in wet years and storing water for use when it got dry. Today we’ve got far larger dams to gawk over. We’re jaded.
But Helen Sorber was brimful as she meticulously described the great spectacle of Elephant Butte Dam in captions for the home folk. One of my favorites shows water roaring out the downstream side of the dam. “The little house is the power room,” she explained in a handwritten caption on the back. “The water on this side is dark green and on the other side the darkest blue you ever saw.”
There’s something endearing about the exquisite precision with which Reclamation measures how little water sits in the reservoir. The day of the centennial festivities, its surface was 4,323.47 feet above sea level. At 85 feet below full pool, Elephant Butte Reservoir started the year 12 feet lower than a year ago, the lowest start to a year since 2005.
“We’re not any better off right now than we were last year,” Gary Esslinger, manager of the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, told me last week when I ran into him at a water meeting in Albuquerque. Earlier in the week, he and the other Lower Rio Grande water managers had gathered to go over the numbers on how much water currently sits in Elephant Butte, and how much fresh flow we can expect in 2012.
The numbers don’t look good. Esslinger’s farmers got just a fraction of their normal allotment in 2011. From the vantage point of the Jan. 1 runoff forecast, this year looks only marginally better, but with a largely snowless January so far in the mountains to the north, the numbers are heading in the wrong direction.
It could easily be worse. A persistent December storm track dumped enough precipitation across southern New Mexico to push Elephant Butte up 6 feet. Elephant Butte typically rises in December, but 6 feet is unusual. “The December storms were very helpful,” said Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, Rio Grande Basin manager for the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.
Esslinger’s voice had none of the exuberance I detected in the captions Helen Sorber jotted on the back of those old black-and-white photos. Between the drought and a pitched battle over how to divide up the water that sits in Elephant Butte, and who gets what once it is released downstream, it’s been a tough year for his irrigation district.
New Mexico has sued the federal government over the question, and by the time the briefs have settled, it looks like most of the major water users on the river will be involved, either directly or indirectly, in the litigation.
It’s the combination of the lawsuits and the dwindling reservoir that makes Greg’s old photos especially endearing. In one, you can see high water behind the dam. In another, Helen Sorber, standing atop the dam, is absolutely beaming.
The captions, of course, miss the fractious history – of Nathan Boyd, the physician who wanted to build a dam in the area himself and was usurped by the federal effort that led to the dam we have today, of the legal battles over that issue that literally linger in the courts today. I’ve no way of knowing whether Helen knew any of it. But the pictures make it look like a happy, hopeful time.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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