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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
State's Future Banks on Colorado River
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
Marty Hoerling sounds a bit like a bank regulator as he explains what scientists know and don't know about the future of the Colorado River.
He talks about risk profiling and prudent reserves in the giant savings accounts backed up behind Glen Canyon and Hoover dams.
It's a discussion people here need to pay attention to.
There was a time when Albuquerque could leave such problems for cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nev., which depend to some extent on the Colorado for their water.
No more. That changed in December, when the Albuquerque area began shifting to water imported from the Colorado River Basin as the primary source of its drinking water. Santa Fe is soon to follow.
Trying to follow the science of climate change and the Colorado River, it would be easy to throw up your hands. Very smart scientists (Hoerling among them) have come up with very different answers about how climate change might affect the Colorado over the next half-century.
Estimates over the past few years have varied from a modest 5 percent decrease in the river's average annual flow by 2050 to an alarming 45 percent decline.
OK, even a 5 percent drop in the Colorado's average annual flow ought to alarm you. "With over 27 million people relying on the Colorado River for drinking water in the United States, and over 3.5 million acres of farmland in production in the basin," U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials wrote in a recent report, "the Colorado River is the single most important natural resource in the Southwest."
It would be easy to get frustrated by the uncertainty, even after new studies have reduced the range of uncertainty to a decline of between 5 percent and 20 percent.
Welcome to real science, where nature offers up answers only grudgingly, not like the tidy answers to settled questions you find in textbooks.
While scientists agree on the general trends in climate change, including overall rising temperatures and a general drying trend in the Southwest, the details remain uncertain. And in determining the flow in the Colorado River, the details matter a lot.
In particular, 80 percent of the Colorado's runoff comes from snowfall in high mountains that make up 20 percent of the river's watershed, and scientists are not sure what will happen to that snow.
New studies are aimed at resolving some of those questions, Hoerling said. But in the meantime, what are the planners who manage the Colorado supposed to do?
That is the problem on the desk of Terry Fulp, whose office is in Boulder City, Nev., midway between the water-sucking metropolis of Las Vegas, Nev., and Hoover Dam.
Deputy director of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Lower Colorado Region, Fulp is the closest thing we have to a guy with his hand on the tap that controls the vast plumbing system built over the past century to distribute the Colorado's waters. Whether the Colorado's flow drops 5 percent or 45 percent matters a great deal to Fulp.
"Obviously, we're going to need to reduce the range of uncertainties," Fulp said in a recent interview.
But there is no hint of frustration in Fulp's voice. Planning in the face of uncertainty is a way of life for Western water managers.
Fulp is working with Hoerling and others on reducing the forecast uncertainty. That is how we know now that the range of uncertainty is 5 percent to 20 percent, rather than 5 percent to 45 percent.
Meanwhile, Fulp and his colleagues have focused on the things on which the scientists agree to develop an operating plan that gives them more flexibility to store water during wet years in what is always an up-and-down cycle.
"It's sort of like the banks," Hoerling said. "The banks are in trouble because they didn't build up enough reserve. They took on more risk than they knew. And now they don't have enough money in the bank to cover their risk now that their risk has come due."
Small steps now to leave more water in the reservoirs can pay off big dividends down the road as climate change eats into our supply, Hoerling said, and would be far less painful than the deep cuts necessary if we wait until climate change-induced droughts hit.
"You want to have water in the bank so that if the system becomes dry for a prolonged period, you can pull it out of the bank and cover your ... depositors."
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach John at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com.
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