The Tarbabys Blog

Los Angeles Times

Drought isn’t just a Western U.S. problem. A severe shortage has hit the Northeast, too

Jennifer McDermott – August 15, 2022

Vermont farmer Brian Kemp is used to seeing the pastures at Mountain Meadows Farm grow more slowly in the hot late summer, but this year the grass is at a standstill.

That’s “very nerve-racking” when you’re grazing 600 to 700 cattle, said Kemp, who manages an organic beef farm in Sudbury, Vt. He describes the weather lately as inconsistent, which he attributes to a changing climate.

“I don’t think there is any normal anymore,” Kemp said.

The effects of climate change have been felt throughout the northeastern U.S. with rising sea levels, heavy precipitation and storm surges causing flooding and coastal erosion. But this summer has brought another extreme: a severe drought that is making lawns crispy and has farmers begging for steady rain. The heavy, short rainfall brought by the occasional thunderstorm tends to run off, not soak into the ground.

Water supplies are low or dry, and many communities are restricting nonessential outdoor water use. Fire departments are combating more brush fires, and crops are growing poorly.

Providence, R.I., had less than half an inch of rainfall during the third-driest July on record, and Boston had 0.6 of an inch in its fourth-driest July on record, according to the National Weather Service office in Norton, Mass. Rhode Island’s governor issued a statewide drought advisory Tuesday with recommendations to reduce water use. The north end of the Hoppin Hill Reservoir in Massachusetts is dry, forcing local water restrictions.

Officials in Maine said drought conditions began there in 2020, with occasional improvements in areas since. In Auburn, Maine, local firefighters helped a dairy farmer fill a water tank for his cows when his well went too low in late July and temperatures hit 90. About 50 dry wells have been reported to state authorities since 2021, according to the state’s dry-well survey.

The continuing trend toward drier summers in the Northeast can certainly be attributed to the impact of climate change, since warmer temperatures lead to greater evaporation and drying of soils, climate scientist Michael Mann said. But, he said, the dry weather can be punctuated by extreme rainfall events since a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which means that when conditions are conducive to rainfall, there’s more of it in short bursts.

Mann said there’s evidence shown by his research at Penn State University that climate change is leading to a “stuck jet stream” pattern. That means huge tentacles of the jet stream, or air current, get stuck in place, locking in extreme weather events that can alternately be associated with extreme heat and drought in one location and extreme rainfall in another, a pattern that has played out this summer with the heat and drought in the Northeast and extreme flooding in parts of the Midwest, Mann added.

Most of New England is experiencing drought. The U.S. Drought Monitor issued a new map Thursday that shows areas of eastern Massachusetts outside Cape Cod and much of southern and eastern Rhode Island now in extreme, instead of severe, drought.

New England has experienced severe summer droughts before, but experts say it is unusual to have droughts in fairly quick succession since 2016. Massachusetts experienced droughts in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021 and 2022, which is very likely due to climate change, said Vandana Rao, director of water policy in Massachusetts.

“We hope this is maybe one period of peaking of drought and we get back to many more years of normal precipitation,” she said. “But it could just be the beginning of a longer trend.”

Rao and other water experts in New England expect the current drought to last for several more months.

“I think we’re probably going to be in this for a while and it’s going to take a lot,” said Ted Diers, assistant director of the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services water division. “What we really are hoping for is a wet fall followed by a very snowy winter to really recharge the aquifers and the groundwater.”

Rhode Island’s principal forest ranger, Ben Arnold, is worried about the drought extending into the fall. That’s when people do more yard work, burn brush, use fireplaces and spend time in the woods, increasing the risk of forest fires. The fires this summer have been relatively small, but it takes a lot of time and effort to extinguish them because they are burning into the dry ground, Arnold said.

Hay farmer Milan Adams said one of the fields he’s tilling in Exeter, R.I., is powder a foot down. In prior years it rained in the spring. This year, he said, the dryness started in March, and April was so dry he was nervous about his first cut of hay.

“The height of the hay was there, but there was no volume to it. From there, we got a little bit of rain in the beginning of May that kind of shot it up,” he said. “We haven’t seen anything since.”

Farmers are fighting more than the drought: Inflation is driving up the cost of everything, including diesel, equipment parts, fertilizer and pesticides, Adams added.

“It’s all through the roof right now,” he said. “This is just throwing salt on a wound.”

The yield and quality of hay is down in Vermont, too, which means there won’t be as much for cows in the winter, said Vermont Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts. The state has roughly 600 dairy farms, a $2-billion-per-year industry. Like Adams, Tebbetts said inflation is driving up prices, which will hurt the farmers who will have to buy feed.

Kemp, the president of the Champlain Valley Farmer Coalition, is thankful to have supplemental feed from last year, but he knows other farmers who don’t have land to put together a reserve and aren’t well-stocked. The coalition is trying to help farmers evolve and learn new practices. They added “climate-smart farming” to their mission statement in the spring.

“Farming is challenging,” Kemp said, “and it’s becoming even more challenging as climate change takes place.”

Los Angeles Times

Tensions grow over lack of a water deal for the shrinking Colorado River

Ian James – August 15, 2022

Two months ago, federal officials took the unprecedented step of telling the seven states that depend on Colorado River water to prepare for emergency cuts next year to prevent reservoirs from dropping to dangerously low levels.

The states and managers of affected water agencies were told to come up with plans to reduce water use drastically, by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet, by mid-August. After weeks of negotiations, which some participants say have at times grown tense and acrimonious, the parties have yet to reach an agreement.

The absence of a deal now raises the risk that the Colorado River crisis — brought on by chronic overuse and the West’s drying climate — could spiral into a legal morass.

Interior Department officials have warned they are prepared to impose cuts if necessary to protect reservoir levels. Managers of water agencies say they have been discussing proposals and will continue to negotiate in hopes of securing enough reductions to meet the Biden administration’s demands, which would mean decreasing the total amount of water diverted by roughly 15% to 30%.

But some observers worry the talks could fail, saying they see growing potential for federal intervention, lawsuits and court battles.

“There are a lot of different interests at loggerheads. And there’s a lot to overcome, and there’s a lot of animosity,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network.

The latest round of closed-door talks occurred Thursday in Denver. Participants said they wouldn’t publicly discuss the offers of water reductions made, but they acknowledged those offers have amounted to far less than 2 million acre-feet. For comparison, the total annual water use of Los Angeles is nearly 500,000 acre-feet.

Those involved in the negotiations say there have been difficult discussions among the states, and among urban and agricultural water districts. There have also been growing tensions between the states of the river’s Lower Basin — California, Arizona and Nevada — and those of the Upper Basin — Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah.

Roerink said that if the regional tensions and dividing lines continue and deepen alongside more dry winters, the Colorado River Basin seems headed for conflicts.

“It’s going to be a mess,” Roerink said. “I don’t see how we ever get over some of what I believe are irreconcilable differences among the states.”

The federal Bureau of Reclamation is scheduled to hold a news conference Tuesday to present the government’s latest projections of reservoir levels, which will dictate water cuts for the Lower Basin states under a previous 2019 deal. Lake Mead and Lake Powell have fallen to record-low levels, now nearly three-fourths empty, and are projected to continue dropping.

Reclamation officials are expected to give an update on the proposals for water cuts that have been discussed. They haven’t said how they will respond to the lack of an agreement among the states.

The federal government’s call for urgent action came in a congressional hearing on June 14, when Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton announced that cuts of 2 million to 4 million acre-feet will be needed in 2023 to address declining reservoir levels. She warned that the bureau has the authority to “act unilaterally to protect the system.”

Touton called for negotiating a plan for the reductions within 60 days, a schedule that hasn’t been achieved.

The Upper Basin states have looked to the Lower Basin states, which use more water, to contribute much of the reductions. In a July 18 letter to Touton, Charles Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said the four upper states have “limited” options available to protect reservoir levels.

Cullom wrote that “previous drought response actions are depleting upstream storage by 661,000 acre-feet,” and that the four states’ water users “already suffer chronic shortages under current conditions.”

Cullom offered a plan with various steps in the Upper Basin but said “additional efforts to protect critical reservoir elevations must include significant actions focused downstream.”

One of the entities that many water managers are looking to for major contributions is the Imperial Irrigation District, which supplies farmlands in California’s Imperial Valley and controls the single largest share of Colorado River water.

IID board member J.B. Hamby said California’s water districts have made significant proposals laying out “where we think we can be in a very short period of time.” He declined to discuss how much water those proposals would conserve and leave in Lake Mead.

“We’re seeing different approaches from other states,” Hamby said. “The Upper Basin is not contributing anything firm whatsoever at this point, and things are still in flux with Arizona and Nevada.”

Even as the river is in a crisis that demands contributions from across the region, Hamby said, it remains “a ways from any agreements being inked.”

“Significant contributions are not really forthcoming at this time, which is unfortunate, because that’s really what’s needed in order to prevent the system from completely crashing,” Hamby said.

He said it’s especially critical to ensure Lake Mead doesn’t decline to “dead pool” levels, at which water would no longer pass through Hoover Dam to Arizona, California and Mexico.

“Everybody across the board needs to take a serious look at making contributions that, while not comfortable, are what’s necessary,” Hamby said. “Everybody needs to commit to a significant sacrifice in order to avoid having nothing at all.”

In a letter to Interior Department officials on Monday, John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said that “despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the last 62 days produced exactly nothing in terms of meaningful collective action to help forestall the looming crisis.”

Entsminger also lamented the “absence of political will to forge collective action,” saying that missing the federal government’s deadline is “doing a disservice” to everyone who relies on the Colorado River. He criticized some water users for focusing on the prices that would be paid for each acre-foot of conserved water to growers and other water users.

“The unreasonable expectations of water users, including the prices and drought profiteering proposals, only further divide common goals and interests,” Entsminger wrote.

The Colorado River has long been severely overallocated. For decades, so much water has been diverted to supply farms and cities that the river’s delta in Mexico has dried up, leaving only remnants of its once-vast wetlands.

Since 2000, the flow of the river has shrunk dramatically during a “megadrought” that research shows is being intensified by global warming.

Even years before the current shortage, scientists and others repeatedly alerted public officials that the overuse of the river combined with the effects of climate change would probably drain the reservoirs to perilously low levels. In recent years, researchers have warned that while dry and wet cycles will continue, the West is undergoing climate-driven aridification and will have to permanently adapt to drier conditions.

Some experts, such as former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, have said it’s time to revamp the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which divided the river among the states, because it allocated much more water than is available.

Thorny negotiations lie ahead over the next three years, when the states are due to negotiate rules for managing shortages after 2026, when the current rules expire.

For now, the immediate task facing water management officials is to find ways to rapidly reduce water use.

Congress’ newly passed Inflation Reduction Act included $4 billion to help address the Colorado River’s shortfall.

Much of that money is expected to be used to pay farmers and others to voluntarily use less water. Under one proposal offered by Arizona farmers, participating growers would forgo one acre-foot of water for each acre of farmland, generating roughly 925,000 acre-feet of savings.

Funds will also be available for environmental projects, such as controlling dust and restoring habitat around the shrinking Salton Sea, which is fed by agricultural runoff in the Imperial Valley. IID officials have pointed out that water reductions will hasten the shrinking of the Salton Sea, where the retreating shorelines are already releasing lung-damaging dust, and they have demanded protection of the lake as part of any deal.

Henry Martinez, the Imperial Irrigation District’s general manager, said the talks have gone over various proposals aimed at moving toward the Bureau of Reclamation’s targets.

“It’s going to require quite a bit of cooperation for everybody to achieve that goal,” Martinez said, describing the talks as being on “unsure ground at this point.”

“We see that California has a large contribution to make,” Martinez said, but those numbers “will have to be firmed up with all the California participants and then submitted to the bureau for consideration.”

Federal officials have also been negotiating separately with Mexico.

Another major player in the talks is the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies drinking water for 19 million people. Bill Hasencamp, the MWD’s manager of Colorado River resources, said he’s hopeful the negotiations will eventually lead to a plan that meets the federal government’s goals, “maybe not next week, but at some point later this year.”

Last week, the MWD’s board held a three-hour meeting at which the district’s staff discussed the need to reduce the region’s reliance on the Colorado River.

“We are in discussions with our board about the possibility of extending mandatory conservation throughout Southern California,” Hasencamp said. The district has already ordered restrictions on outdoor watering in areas that depend on severely limited supplies from the State Water Project, which brings water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

How soon the district might adopt these additional conservation measures has yet to be decided, Hasencamp said. And once a plan is developed, he said, each member city and local water district would determine how to achieve the necessary reductions in 2023.

The negotiations that are happening now, Hasencamp said, are one step in a multiyear process of determining how the western United States lives with less water from the Colorado River. He said he hopes the states agree on a plan because the alternative would be worse.

“If the federal government does have to take unilateral action, it will likely lead to litigation, which will make it even harder to develop new guidelines for the Colorado River. So that’s a big risk,” Hasencamp said. “I think everyone would agree that a consensus-based plan is better than either the courts or the federal government taking action to determine our future.”