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Environment & Access Imperfect Solution
| Imperfect Solution |
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| Written by Christian Knight |
| Saturday, 01 September 2007 00:39 |
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Snowpacks are dwindling. Land is going dry. Meanwhile, rivers are carrying the water supply away. Should we bottle them all up? Dave Riley should have been in bed, snoring into his wife’s ear. He should have been dreaming about powder runs and lift-ticket sales, his head cradled by a pillow of goose feathers. Two hours into a February 2005 morning, however, Riley was not where a vice president of Oregon’s Mt. Hood Meadows ski area should have been. He was standing on his ski area’s bunny slope, pleading into the sobbing sky like a prophet for the temperature to drop a few degrees. For the relentless rain to turn to snow. Just as the weatherman had assured him it would. But the air was warming. And the rain wasn’t about to stop. It continued for a day or so. Then came the warmth. Clear, blue skies. Sunbathers on the nearby Columbia River’s sandy beaches. Two straight weeks of record-high temperatures melted Meadows’ skimpy snowpack into the yellow grass. For the second time that season, Riley would have to shut down the ski area early, and tell all but a skeleton crew of workers to go home until further notice. He’d cut payroll by $3 million. Seven months and 20 miles downstream from Mt. Hood Meadows, John Buckley was sweating. The type that drains down the brow and pools in the brain. The circumstance plaguing the manager of the East Fork Irrigation District was sediment. Too much of it. And water. Too little of it. The Mount Hood snowpack he relied on to serve 1,000 clients and 9,600 acres of land every year never amounted to any more than 60 inches in 2005—29 percent of normal, according to the Oregon Natural Resources Conservation Service. And that had melted long ago. Now, with another month left in the irrigation season, Buckley was depending on water dribbling from the Newton-Clark Glacier. But that water was poisoned with 800 to 1,000 cubic yards of sediment per day. Enough to choke pear, apple, and cherry crops. So much sediment swirled through the East Fork that summer, Buckley had to hire a full-time worker to claw it out of the sandtrap with a crane, and dump it into a 10-foot-high, 300-yard-long wall. What Buckley was thinking as he watched water drain from another crane-load of silt is the same thing Riley was thinking back in February as another raindrop slid down his cheek: A reservoir could prevent all of this. Warm Snow The Pacific Northwest winter of 2004-05 was a preview, climatologists say, for what climate change might look like in the West. It was a little drier—33 percent less precipitation accumulated in the Hood River Basin. But mostly, it was warm. So what precipitation did come to the land of the Little White Salmon and White Salmon Rivers, fell as rain, not snow. And on a gradual, but increasing level, that has been the trend in the Cascades since the Truman administration, according to a 37-page paper by Alan Hamlet and the Climate Impacts Group from the University of Washington. “Our best estimates of April 1 snow water equivalent in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State indicate a substantial (roughly 15 to 35 percent) decline from mid-century to 2006, with larger declines at low elevations and smaller declines or increases at high elevations,” says the report Has Spring Snowpack Declined in the Washington Cascades? Some Cascade Range snow stations, Hamlet says, have revealed 50- to 80-percent losses in snowpack. All this from a temperature increase amounting to one-half of one degree Celsius since the dawn of civil rights. “That doesn’t seem like a big amount,” Hamlet says in an interview. “But in snow, that’s a huge amount.” Especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the mountains are low—4,000 to 8,000 feet—and the mild weather that originates in the Pacific quite often falls as warm, wet snow in the mountains. Skiers call it “Cascade Concrete.” “Trends will probably not continue as they are,” Hamlet says. “They will probably accelerate. By the 2040s … we’re expecting temperatures to be 1.7 degrees Celsius [three degrees fahrenheit] warmer. In the Cascades as a whole, we’ll see reductions in snowpack of 60 percent compared to 20th-century statistics.” Even more alarming is this: Eight years ago we entered a new 30-year period in our geologic history that should be cool and wet, due to a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. But even this cooling in the North Pacific Ocean Basin has not slowed human-influenced warming in the West and might have actually increased precipitation since 1999, according to a paper entitled “Spring Arriving Earlier in Western States,” published in the January/February 2007 issue of Southwest Hydrology. The likely result for the West Coast, the paper says, is a kink in extreme weather patterns that would manifest itself in smaller snowpacks, less frosts, more heat waves, more flooding in winter, earlier and less dramatic peak runoffs in the spring, and much drier summers. Researchers showed peak spring runoff is already arriving one to three weeks earlier than it was 60 years ago in 90 percent of the snow-fed basins they analyzed from the Rockies west to the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. For paddlers, these warmer winters and earlier springs are inconvenient at worst—more days boating under the gloom of winter, less in the glory of spring and summer. But they greet farmers and irrigation districts like a prophecy for an agricultural apocalypse. Less water to last through increasingly long summers. One of the solutions to this water shortage might just scare some paddlers into action. The reservoir Buckley has been dreaming about wouldn’t be huge. Something that could hold a month or two’s supply of water. Water he would skim out of the East Fork during the winter floods and spring runoffs and pump into orchardists’ fields during the critical months of July and August. “To me,” he says, “it’s a win-win. Because we’d be leaving a certain amount of water for fish.” If he doesn’t need the reservoir now, he’ll certainly need it as the Newton-Clark Glacier up on Mount Hood continues to melt and drag even more sediment into the East Fork. Global warming is coming, too, the reports say. “I’d give anything to have a reservoir right now,” he says. “I think if farmers are going to survive here, we have to have one. I see a lot of problems coming on. A lot of problems.” Five-Year Drought Especially in drought-ridden Colorado, where demographers predict the state’s population will double to 9 million by 2030; and water-supply experts warn municipal water needs will fall short of demand by 20 percent. That’s not counting the six other states to whom Colorado is bound by compact to supply 15 million of the Colorado River Basin’s 18 million acre feet of water. “Not only do we not have enough water to meet our own needs, we don’t have enough to meet their needs,” says Nathan Fey, American Whitewater’s stewardship director for the Colorado River. Colorado Republicans’ 2003 answer to this was the same Riley and Buckley have been pondering since 2005: Reservoirs. It came to residents in the form of Referendum A, a $2-billion bond that would have accomplished two things: create a pot of cash from which desperate ranchers and irrigation districts could borrow for the construction of water storage, and more importantly, sever the bureaucratic harness that impedes those kinds of projects. “The threat to recreational paddlers is this: “We’re going to flood all these fantastic rivers, skim the peak flows—which are the best times for paddling—so we can capture this water to meet the needs,” Fey says. Ultimately, Colorado’s voters shot down Referendum A. With the exception of some ambitious proposals, such as the $45-million plan to transport water from the Yampa River Basin over the Front Range to Denver, Colorado’s response to the referendum’s failure has been to expand existing reservoirs and continue building storage on smaller rivers. “We’ve got Animas-LaPlata (Durango), Rueterhess (Castle Rock). We’ve got three or four reservoirs under construction,” says Randy Seaolm, chief of water supply protection for the Colorado Water Conservation. “We just completed Elkhead. I would say we’ve got maybe another two or three that are in some serious state of planning.” The Elkhead River project doubled the size of the existing reservoir from a capacity of 12,000 acre-feet to 24,000 acre-feet. The price tag: $31 million. Expensive, yes, but a fraction of the $512 million for the new construction of the 120,000-acre-foot Animas-LaPlata reservoir, which will serve the Ute Indian tribe and the city of Durango. “It is expensive,” Fey says. “But we’re talking water. Nothing’s too expensive when it comes to water.” The Sierra Tub Arnold Schwarzenegger is proving that with his $5.95-billion response to the dwindling snowpack of the Sierra Nevada—snowpack that provides two-thirds of California’s drinking water and that human-influenced warming would decrease by 40 percent in the next 40 years. Senate democrats ultimately rejected the plan—which called for the building of two dams on the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers—in April, but Schwarzenegger continues to push for the dams that, combined, would store 3.1 million acre-feet of water. His two most prominent justifications, according to his 41-page plan: Global warming and population increases. The Department of Ecology and Bureau of Reclamation in Washington State, too, announced the sites for three off-channel reservoirs within 10 miles of the Columbia River. Combined, these three dams would store 4.8 million acre-feet of water that would normally makes its way to the Pacific. Enough to cover the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island with a foot of water. End of the Big-Dam Era These are enormous projects. Mostly, however, they are anomalies in this new millennium because earlier dams, such as Glen Canyon and Lake Powell, have already consumed most of the nation’s usable sites for reservoirs of this size. And because the public’s heightened environmental consciousness wouldn’t allow them. That’s why many of the nation’s water managers have turned their attention to smaller streams. “Smaller reservoir construction has been at a pretty steady pace in Colorado since the end of the big dam era,” says Seaolm, Colorado’s chief of water supply. “And it will continue. While we’ll still have a lot of fights with the environmental community, we’ll certainly pursue the construction of additional reservoirs.” Deep in Drought The drought that has scourged Colorado’s South Platte Basin since 2002 began in the fall of 1999, after one of the wetter springs and summers on recent record, according to researchers from Colorado State University. The rains came in spring and summer, but the snow was mostly absent that winter. It was even more devoid in the winter of 2001. By 2002, much of Colorado’s soil was crumbling, barren, and hot. Corn and sugar beet crops shriveled and died. Hay wouldn’t grow. And what did was too expensive. Cattle ranchers began selling off their herds. To compound the desperation, the Colorado Supreme Court invoked a 1969 law that ordered farmers to replenish the South Platte after drawing water from an aquifer that supplied the river. By 2006, the drought was beginning to ease. Its impacts, however, were escalating. “I’ve been through it all my life,” 82-year-old Charlie Brewer told the Colorado Springs Gazette in June 2006 after selling off 74 head of his cattle herd so that 15 could survive. “This is the poorest time I’ve ever had in my life.” By July 2007, 4,000 of the state’s 9,000 wells were idle, according to a July 9 story in the Rocky Mountain News. And all the while, most of the Colorado’s 3.2 million acre-feet of water was flowing out of the state. The reason: Not enough storage. “It (building reservoirs) certainly makes sense from an engineering perspective,” says Hamlet, the hydrologist from the Climate Impacts Group. “The proponents of this want to build storage anyway and this is a good argument for it. But what’s been found across the West is that building storage is almost universally the most expensive option in terms of the environment and getting supply and demand in line. The cheapest form is conservation.” Southwest Solution In the Southwest, which is in the throes of a 10-year drought, researchers have discovered their own challenges. Snowpack there is still out of climate change’s reach, due to the 9,000 and 10,000 peaks that store it. But when the rain does fall, the parched soil along riverbanks gulps it up, turnng slight decreases in rainfall or snowmelt into extreme reductions in streamflow. “It would have to be a pretty desperate situation to start building reservoirs,” says Gregg Garsin, a climatologist with the University of Arizona-based Climas Group. “There’s a lot of resistance to that.” Instead, water managers are opting for conservation, desalination, recycling effluent. Personal Sacrifice Conservation is a tedious choice. It scrutinizes generations-old irrigation infrastructure, leaves toilets unflushed, automobiles dusty, and turns green lawns brown. Results are stubborn. Twenty years ago, the managers of Hood River’s Farmers Irrigation District opted for this philosophy—as opposed to expanding their own reservoir. When an earthquake destroyed their century-old irrigation flume during a heat wave in July 2004, district managers replaced the rickety wooden structure with pressurized piping that improved efficiency by eliminating spillage and evaporation, and by allowing the district to deliver a precise amount of water to their 1,600 clients and 5,800 acres. They invested in micro-sprinklers, which distribute water more accurately, and soil-moisture monitors to tell them when the land truly needs water. So far, says its manager Jerry Bryan, the district has invested $60 to $80 million into conservation. And it has cut in half the amount of water it delivers to its customers. “Reservoirs are a short-sighted way of dealing with life in the world. It’s an unsustainable band-aid. The only true solution is to stop consuming. Stop driving. Buy carbon credits. Use public transportation. Change our lifestyle habits. I don’t know what it takes to change that in every one of us.” Unquantifiable Value The value of free-flowing water is something the world’s best economist will never fully comprehend. Primarily because it’s something he can’t measure in numbers or dollars. And because that value is so intangible, so unquantifiable, paddlers and environmentalists often find the need for free-flowing rivers is impossible to express with words. But as outdoor adventure emerges into the mainstream of our American culture, paddlers have slowly, quietly created for themselves a spot at the roundtables. And they’ve achieved this with something every pro-business decision-maker can understand: spending power. In the Mountain States, for example, water-based recreation annually generates $40 billion in sales, $8 billion in taxes, and creates 600,000 jobs, according to the Fall 2006 edition of The Active Outdoor Recreation Economy. Agriculture, by contrast, generated $5 billion in the same region. “And yet 86 percent of the water goes to agriculture,” American Whitewater’s Fey says. Of course only a small percentage of Americans paddle rivers. And all Americans—even the type that roam from one put-in to the next—eat food. So the water allocation is somewhat understandable. But agriculture gets nearly the same disproportionate share of representation on Colorado’s Interbasin Compact Committee, the statewide think tank created by the state’s House in response to the drought and failure of Referendum A. Meanwhile recreationists have to share a spot at the table with environmentalists. “Kayakers’ needs are always on the backburner,” Feys says. “Now with this basin roundtable, they have a chance to voice how much they need free-flowing rivers. If kayakers don’t participate in this process, we will never have another chance to voice our needs.” The reservoir for which Dave Riley had planned to supply his 40-gun snowmaking system on Mt. Hood Meadows was miniscule. One million gallons inside a 30-foot-high, 78-foot-wide tank. To fill it, Riley asked the Oregon State Water Source Department for permission to divert 1.1 cfs from the East Fork of the Hood River. He even promised he wouldn’t take water when the East Fork’s level dropped below average flows. But an environmental group named “Friends of Mount Hood” didn’t like that the $2 million-plan required the removal 10 old-growth mountain hemlocks, the installation of two miles of piping, and scarring from a mile-long trench dug through the mountain. Nor did they like that the tank would sit squarely in a sensitive wetlands 100 yards from the East Fork, or how Riley had tried to shut the public out of the decision-making process by unsuccessfully claiming a Categorical Exclusion. So they fought him. Ultimately they compromised with him. Three months after Riley announced his ambition to build the snowmaking system, he announced his intention to abandon them. Originally Published, Paddler September-October 2007 |
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