ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: 2017: the Year Albuquerque Went Dry

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

2017: the Year Albuquerque Went Dry

By Kevin Bean
President, Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly
    As early as 1997 there was proof we were living on borrowed time. Water planners warned the region was grossly in debt, but it was an invisible deficit, occurring underground and easy to deny.
        We pretended that conservation and legal guarantees would suffice, knowing that the real problem was bigger than that. The Hopi might call it koyanisqattsi: Life out of balance.
        No one wonders these days when the "big drought" will arrive. Call it climate change, variability, a "ragged transition to a drier climate regime," or just plain fate — something certainly altered the range of conditions we had come to expect. What people took for normal — especially during those gung-ho years between 1971 and 2000 — was in fact an extraordinarily wet interlude across the arid Southwest.
        The feds added to that apparent affluence by punching a hole through the Continental Divide and diverting a portion of the Colorado into the Rio Grande.
        Every living thing capitalized on that surplus moisture. Populations mushroomed. A sense of entitlement ruled the day. And we lost sight of a terribly important caveat to settling in the desert: The more there is, the less you need; the less there is, the more you are at risk.
        The first problem — once climate refused to live up to our expectations — was that all our eggs were in the "holding back snowmelt" basket, and suddenly there was damn little snow. Nevertheless, we were obligated to send water down the river, even if it meant turning off the tap in the central valley.
        Then things really got bad. For three years, there was almost nothing in the way of moisture.
        In 2016 the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District curtailed 1,000 freaked-out water bank irrigators for the first time ever. That was the summer the National Guard trucked water to thousands of valley homeowners whose wells bottomed out and Albuquerque's San Juan-Chama diversion had nothing to suck but sediment.
        Soon the water brokers couldn't supply all those faraway subdivisions, couldn't spare the water nor afford to pump it uphill. But hands down, the most frightening manifestation of this new reality was the wildfires.
        The mountains burned first. One after another, their unhealthy densities were reduced to ash.
        Next it was the valley we obsessed about. Urban wildfire crews patrolled from January to November, hoping to avert disaster. It wasn't enough.
        At 11:30 a.m. on the first day of March, 2017, a 70-mph wind whipped one tiny, anonymous flame through the paper-dry grass beside the inert river. By three o'clock, it had Hoovered through a mile of strip malls on Coors Boulevard and launched its offspring into the cheek-by-jowl tract homes on the unfortunate West Side. When the smoke finally cleared, more than a billion dollars of real estate lay in ruins.
        The fallout from the "Summer of Seventeen" was epic. With rumors flying that the state engineer planned to foreclose on thousands of acres of non-Indian farmland to free up more water, senior water right-holders mounted an airtight "takings" case against the state. The ensuing shortages forced municipalities to limit water to subsistence uses. Grass, save soccer fields, was the first loser. Urban trees came shortly behind. Shocked by the desert's return, many human transplants fled to better-watered pastures.
        As unlikely as it might have seemed in the days of the silvery minnow, a revolutionary view of farmland as the backbone of regional sustainability brought environmentalists piling into the fray. With their agrarian allies they stormed the Legislature demanding an end to bogus pumping permits and insisting that ecosystem needs, once and for all, take precedence over speculator greed. To ice that enormous cake, a federation of mid Rio Grande pueblos, acting with a prudence born of centuries of surviving in the desert, decided it was wiser to grow food than to lease their water for development, and the sound of shattered municipal illusions could be heard up and down the valley.

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