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Friday, February 25, 2011
Authority Head: Water Conflict Looms
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
The Western United States lacks the tools to deal with looming water conflicts as growing demand outpaces shrinking supplies, one of the region's most prominent water managers said during a talk Thursday in Albuquerque.
In switching to water imported from the Colorado River Basin for its municipal supplies, Albuquerque has joined what is, for better or worse, an integrated regional system, said Pat Mulroy, who heads the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
The network of dams, pipes and canals stretches from Wyoming in the north down the Rockies to Denver and Albuquerque and west to Los Angeles and San Francisco. "We created the largest artificial watershed in the world," said Mulroy, the keynote speaker at the 16th Annual Water Conservation/Xeriscape Expo. "That has created an environment of extreme interdependence."
The problem, according to Mulroy, is that we do not have the political institutions and policies in place to manage the vast plumbing system we've created, leaving a risk of shortages and litigation.
Mulroy's agency provides Colorado River water to the greater Las Vegas, Nev., metropolitan area. It has been the most directly impacted by a decadelong drought on the Colorado River, as dropping water levels on one of the river's two main reservoirs threaten to leave water intake structures stranded above the water line.
But in her talk Thursday, Mulroy said the region's water problems go far beyond her agency's near-term problems.
As flows on the Colorado River decline after 11 years of drought, water in Nevada and Arizona face the looming prospect of the river's first shortage declaration within the next few years. Meanwhile, there is a risk that Arizona, Nevada and California could end up in court trying to force New Mexico and other states in the upper Colorado River watershed to reduce their consumption in order to send more water downstream for rapidly growing, thirsty Sunbelt states.
Those potential conflicts exist, Mulroy said, because we have no established system in the West for sharing the limited water as demand rises while supplies decline.
"We have a shortage system in the West that's broken," she said. "It can't work."
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