Farms, Cities and Rivalries Flourish Along Vital Colorado River : For the Source of Life in West, Demand Is Overtaking Supply

From glacial trickle to sluggish ditch, the Colorado River is a 1,440-mile spine of life. Everything it touches thrives and prospers. Everything else is sagebrush and sand.

It is the American Nile, more precious than coal or timber or gold. Puny compared to the miles-wide Mississippi or the mighty, muddy Missouri, the Colorado sometimes acts more creek than river. But its history is linked with two of the world’s wonders--the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam.

Today the Colorado River gives sustenance to nearly 15 million people and countless cows. Seven Western states--Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and California--and Mexico raid the river for their legal share, quarreling over every drop.

California, the biggest guzzler on the river, has always been Arizona’s archrival for water. Arizona challenged the Colorado River compact of 1922 three times before the Supreme Court--the final ruling in 1964 ended 11 years of lawsuits that cost California and Arizona $5 million in legal fees.

The court upheld the agreement, which arbitrarily parceled out the river to the seven Western states long before air conditioning and irrigation triggered a Southwestern population explosion.

That compact has kept neighbor states constantly at odds with each other, but it also united them in their opposition to Mexican claims on “their” river.

Is there enough water flowing between the Colorado River’s narrow banks to keep up with the West’s needs?

No, say most experts. At least not the way it’s being used now, with almost 90% of its water earmarked for agriculture. Farmers fear that the Sun Belt’s urban expansion will reach out from the megalopolises to snatch away their convoluted, long-cherished water rights. Power in America rests with the numbers.

Phoenix and Tucson have the numbers. They’re 200 miles east of the Colorado River, on higher ground, but their politicians have found the water for their constituents by going back to the age-old source that’s synonymous with the West.

Out here, it is said, water runs uphill, toward money. Water means power. Power means the ability to get more water.

In the waning days of December and the dawn of the new year, the power brokers plan to turn on what will probably be the last big faucet on the finite Colorado River.

The Central Arizona Project is an engineering feat that lifts water over mountains. It has been a century in the dreaming stage, on Congress’ plate for four decades, under construction the last 12 years.

Its foes call it a pork-barrel boondoggle and environmental disaster. Its champions call it a godsend that will make central Arizona blossom.

Gov. Bruce Babbitt says the water project is “Arizona’s last water hole.”

On paper, the Colorado River is already overcommitted by the mistakes Uncle Sam made with the 1922 Compact. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency mainly responsible for water development in the West, predicts that demand will outstrip supply by 2000. California water officials believe the Colorado River’s point of no return comes in 1990.

Without its water, the cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Denver would be gasping for a drink.

Without its water, the lettuce in New York delicatessens, the beef on Kansas City plates, the carrots in San Francisco shopping carts would become Epicurean delights for the rich.

Without its water, the Sun Belt would have fewer golf courses, swimming pools and suburban sprawl.

” . . . A very mighty river, which ran so great a fury of a storm that we could hardly sail against it,” wrote Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcon in his ship’s log when he first journeyed up the Colorado from the Gulf of California in 1540.

Now this silty, salty artery, whose name means “rusty red” in Spanish, is a vast, gurgling plumbing system. From its birth 14,000 feet high in the Colorado Rockies to its death at sea level in Mexico, dams, canals, tunnels, pipelines and reservoirs divert, discharge or hoard at the flick of a switch, the push of a computer key.

Its dams provide electricity for nearly 6 million people, and 13 million Americans play in or near its channel annually. Its waters irrigate 15.2% of this nation’s produce, and 15% of America’s livestock are succored by it.

‘Controlled River’

“Try as anyone will, it cannot be characterized other than a fully controlled river . . . “ said Arleigh B. West, a Bureau of Reclamation regional director, in 1968. “The river’s flow can be manipulated in the same fashion as the garden hose on the tap outside your home, and is.”

Not quite. In 1983, heavy Rocky Mountain snows and quick spring thaws left Lakes Powell, Mead, Mohave and Havasu--all created by damming the Colorado--full.

The Bureau of Reclamation was forced to release water rapidly all along the lower Colorado River basin south of Lees Ferry, Ariz. The result was seven deaths and millions of dollars in property damage in the United States and Mexico.

In the 1970s there was drought. In the 1980s, so far, there have been floods. That’s the unpredictability of Western water.

By the end of this century, if the clout of the state’s politicians holds, the Central Arizona Project will propel water from the Colorado River all the way to Phoenix, central Arizona, Tucson and beyond, almost to the Mexican border.

It is a distance of 330 miles--uphill all the way. Fourteen pumping stations are planned to lift the water to a level 2,909 feet higher at its final destination, the San Xavier Indian reservation south of Tucson, than at its beginning, Lake Havasu behind Parker Dam.

Municipal and industrial users have first crack at the water, along with Indian farmers who already are receiving some while engineers test the flow through concrete tunnels and aqueducts.

The project’s cost is estimated at $3.5 billion, making it the most expensive water project in U.S. history, although about 70% of the federal money is supposed to be repaid through the sale of water and electricity and through property taxes.

‘An Absurd Project’

Project foe Francis Welsh, a former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employee who now heads Citizens Concerned About the Project, calls it “an absurd project . . . its purpose was to develop the West, and God knows the West is developed.”

Opponents have succeeded in halting construction of one dam, and are now fighting an alternative dam in part because its floodwaters will disrupt and, in one instance submerge, the nests of bald eagles. Only about 18 pairs of bald eagles remain in the Southwest, say National Audubon Society officials, and they say the project will disturb five of those pairs.

More lawsuits are expected to slow down the next link in the chain as the cement snakes southward from Phoenix toward Tucson. So far the project is only 43.4% complete and has cost $1.2 billion.

“The CAP has simply been the most dominant federal-state issue (in Arizona) since the early years of the 20th Century,” Gov. Babbitt has said.

In 1869, John Wesley Powell made his historic boat trip down the previously uncharted Colorado River and later said:

“The West is an arid land, hostile to farming, and will never be settled . . . unless the government dams the rivers and saves up the winter and spring runoff in artificial lakes and reservoirs.”

Ever since, generations of Westerners have dreamed of siphoning Colorado River water to make their desert bloom and themselves wealthy.

In 1896, at the Fifth National Irrigation Congress in Phoenix, Nebraska delegate A. G. Wolfenbarger described the West as “a country destined to become at some future time the very Garden of the Gods, the home of intelligence, learning, riches, philanthropy, everything that can measure the power and greatness of a great nation . . . millions of people are waiting to be led out into these great plains waiting to welcome them to a home that will make them absolutely independent.”

All the homesteaders needed was water.

1902 Reclamation Act

On June 17, 1902, Congress passed the Reclamation Act, creating a new arm of the bureaucracy to harness the West’s untamed rivers in the cause of Manifest Destiny. The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation became one of the strongest political forces in this nation, literally reshaping the landscape by what it does or does not do.

Today the Colorado River and its tributaries drain 242,000 square miles in the United States and another 2,000 square miles in Mexico.

The Bureau of Reclamation, guardian of the river, operates 333 reservoirs, 345 diversion dams, 990 miles of pipeline, 230 miles of tunnels, 188 pumping plants, 50 power plants, 14,590 miles of canals and 35,160 miles of smaller laterals.

“Every drop of water that runs to the sea without rendering a commercial return is a public waste,” proclaimed Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in the early 1920s. No doubt Hoover would be pleased to know that today, every drop of Colorado River water is used at least three times.

Water Use Schemes

Mostly the water is used for agriculture. Long before tourism and retirement communities created a land boom and population explosion in the Sun Belt, enterprising immigrants lent their muscle to all sorts of schemes to get Colorado River water to do their bidding.

Using mules and mustered-out soldiers from Ft. Yuma, J.E. Ludy dug a trench and incorporated the Irrigation Land and Improvement Co. on Feb. 26, 1900. He thereby inaugurated the first permanent irrigation project on the Colorado River. For posterity, Ludy told Yuma’s Arizona Sentinel:

“I started in to dig this ditch and she is dug, do you understand? They made fun of this canal proposition when I first started in on it, but they don’t anymore, do you see? The ranchers in this valley will have no cause to squeal about the lack of water any more; I’ll make them hollar enough!”

Eventually Ludy’s Canal became the catalyst for Laguna Dam, the Colorado River’s first barricade. Reclamation engineers completed Laguna Dam in March, 1909. Finally, the desert bloomed.

Irrigated Crops

From Wyoming to California, farmers and ranchers began sucking Colorado River water to grow their vegetables, cotton, citrus and the millions of tons of hay needed by the West’s burgeoning cattle industry.

Therein, say environmental critics and reclamation project foes, lie the roots of a looming water shortage that experts predict could cripple the West by the end of this century.

“Someday water is going to be like oil is now,” says Bob Steele of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma office. “We’ll look back and reminisce on the ‘good old days’ when water was cheap and we took 15-minute showers, washed our cars and even watered our lawns.”

It currently takes 4,200 gallons of water in the field to put one pound of beef on the table; 300 gallons are needed to grow enough wheat to produce a loaf of bread.

Feedlot for Livestock

“Very simply, in terms of the largest amounts of water consumed and land used, (the West) is a vast feedlot for livestock,” wrote Philip Fradkin in his book “A River No More.”

Fradkin predicts a Western water crisis in the next decade, but adds: “As long as there’s water coming out of the tap, most people don’t worry about it.”

Fradkin, who spent 10 years researching his Colorado River book, believes the priorities for the water will wrench the West apart.

“This has been a period of unparalleled harmony. . . . That harmony will very quickly become unraveled when it becomes readily apparent that there will be shortages, and you’ll see water wars like you’ve never seen,” Fradkin said.

From the beginning of the white man’s use of the river there has been bickering and deceit. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 allowed seven states to stick their straws into the liquid lifeline. The federal government also arbitrarily divided the river into two geographic areas at Lees Ferry, in northern Arizona. The Upper Basin consists of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. The Lower Basin is made up of Nevada, California and Arizona.

Unfortunately, when the government divied up the Colorado’s spoils, the sum of the seven parts was based on inaccurate flow data taken with primitive, faulty gauges, during the wettest period known in the river’s history. The compact pegged the annual flow at 15 million acre-feet; the actual average flow is about 13.5 million acre-feet.

Acre-feet is the yardstick of the compact, a term coined by irrigators to measure large amounts of water. One acre-foot is the amount of water needed to flood an acre to a depth of one foot--about 325,851 gallons. One acre-foot will supply a family of five with water for a year.

Division of Water

Today, Colorado River water is divided up this way on paper:

--7.5 million acre-feet allotted to Upper Basin states: Colorado (51.75%), Wyoming (14%), Utah (23%) and New Mexico (11.25%).

--7.5 million acre-feet allotted to Lower Basin states: California (58.6%), Arizona (37.3%) and Nevada (4%).

--1.5 million acre-feet given to Mexico by Congress in 1945.

--1 million acre-feet reserved for Western tribes following Indian lawsuits that cited a 1906 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing reservations sufficient water.

--2 million acre-feet or more lost annually through evaporation.

That’s a total of 19.5 million acre-feet. Remember, the actual average flow is 13.5 million.

Crunch to Come

The predicted shortages have not yet arrived because not everyone who’s entitled to the water is using his full share. However, when the Central Arizona Project comes on-line, when Colorado’s Front Range expansion from Colorado Springs through Denver north to Wyoming begins to hook on more pipes, and when Indian agriculture increases, the crunch will come.

“Between 1995 and 2000, everybody will be using their allocation--and that’s barring future development,” says Bernard A. Silverman, head of the Bureau of Reclamation’s weather modification and research program. “There isn’t enough water in the river for everybody right now.”

The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that by 2000, the population in the seven-state Colorado River Basin will increase by 12.5 million, to 48.2 million people.

Larry E. Hunt, director of the Yuma Department of Public Services, thinks a lot about the future.

His town of 50,000 full-time residents on the Arizona-California border just a few miles north of Mexico is the last American spout on the Colorado River.

Sometimes Hunt worries about being at the end of the line, downstream from all the man-made leaks that supply all the cities and towns and farms and ranches greedily lapping up the river’s flow.

“I can’t see them shutting off the river,” says Hunt. “They would have to violate the treaty with Mexico. Would they do it? Who knows? We have to hope that the legal means will stop the political means. Still, Congress made the contract. Congress can change the contract.”

Profile of Yuma

Yuma is a microcosm of the Sun Belt’s explosive growth and subsequent need for water. The town, one of the hottest places in America during the summer when temperatures climb to 115 degrees and above, is on the east bank of the Colorado River. It is surrounded by hundreds of square miles of agricultural lands that exist only because of heavy irrigation. Its permanent populace is growing.

And each winter when the winds howl up north, Yuma is invaded by more than 20,000 “snowbirds,” people who have followed the sun south in their recreational vehicles to spend six months staying warm.

Last February, the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce reported that occupancy of mobile home and recreational vehicle parks was 99.6%. Motel occupancy was running more than 70%.