John Deere will let US farmers repair their own equipment
The deal comes amid political pressure over right to repair measures.
Jon Fingas, Reporter – January 9, 2023
Jon G. Fuller/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
John Deere has been one of the stauncher opponents of right to repair regulation, but it’s now willing to make some concessions. Deere & Company has signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) that lets US farmers and independent repair shops fix equipment, rather than requiring the use of authorized parts and service centers. Users will have access to official diagnostics, manuals, tools and training. Deere will let owners disable electronic locks, and won’t bar people from legally obtaining repair resources even if the company no longer offers them.
The agreement includes some protections for the equipment maker. John Deere won’t be required to “divulge trade secrets,” or to allow repairs that might disable emissions controls, remove safety features or modify power levels. Unsurprisingly, fixes also can’t violate the law.
The memorandum is effective as of January 8th, although John Deere didn’t detail exactly how or when it would alter its practices. We’ve asked the company for comment. In a statement, senior VP Dave Gilmore said the company was looking forward to working with customers and the ABFB in the “months and years ahead” to provide repair facilities.
The pact is characterized as a “voluntary” private arrangement. However, it comes alongside mounting political pressure that effectively gave John Deere little choice but to improve repairability. President Biden ordered the Federal Trade Commission to draft right to repair regulation in 2021, while states like New York have passed their own (sometimes weakened) legislation. If Deere doesn’t act, it risks legal battles that could limit where and how it does business in the country.
As it stands, the farm equipment maker isn’t alone in responding to government action. Apple, Google, Samsung and other tech brands now have do-it-yourself repair programs in place. Microsoft will offer Surface parts to users later this year.
US Department of Agriculture approves first-ever vaccine for honeybees
The drug could protect bees from American foulbrood, a bacteria that can devastate entire colonies.
Igor Bonifacic, Weekend Editor – January 8, 2023
NurPhoto via Getty Images
The humble honeybee hasn’t had an easy go of things recently. Between climate change, habitat destruction, pesticide use and attrition from diseases, one of the planet’s most important pollinators has seen its numbers decline dramatically in recent years. All of that bodes poorly for us humans. In the US, honeybees are essential to about one-third of the fruit and produce Americans eat. But the good news is that a solution to one of the problems affecting honeybees is making its way to farmers.
This week, for the first time, the US Department of Agriculture granted conditional approval for an insect vaccine. A biotech firm named Dalan Animal Health recently developed a prophylactic vaccine to protect honeybees from American foulbrood disease. The drug contains dead Paenibacillus larvae, the bacteria that causes the illness.
Thankfully, the vaccine won’t require beekeepers to jab entire colonies of individual insects with the world’s smallest syringe. Instead, administering the drug involves mixing it in with the queen feed worker bees eat. The vaccine then makes its way into the “royal jelly” the drones to feed their queen. Her offspring will then be born with some immunity against the harmful bacteria.
The treatment represents a breakthrough for a few reasons. As The New York Times explains, scientists previously thought it was impossible for insects to obtain immunity to diseases because they don’t produce antibodies like humans and animals. However, after identifying the protein that prompts an immune response in bees, researchers realized they could protect an entire hive through a single queen. The vaccine is also a far more humane treatment for American foulbrood. The disease can easily wipe out colonies of 60,000 bees at once, and it often leaves beekeepers with one choice: burn the infected hives to save what they can.
Dr. Annette Kleiser, the CEO of Dalan, told The Times the company hopes to use the vaccine as a blueprint for other treatments to protect honeybees. “Bees are livestock and should have the same modern tools to care for them and protect them that we have for our chickens, cats, dogs and so on,” she said. “We’re really hoping we’re going to change the industry now.”
Great Salt Lake on track to disappear in five years, scientists warn
Sarah Kaplan and Brady Dennis, Washington Post – January 6, 2023
MAGNA, UTAH – AUGUST 02: Park visitors walk along a section of the Great Salt Lake that used to be underwater at the Great Salt Lake State Park on August 02, 2021 near Magna, Utah. As severe drought continues to take hold in the western United States, water levels at the Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, have dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. The lake fell below 4194.4 feet in the past week after years of decline from its highest level recorded in 1986 with 4211.65 feet. Further decline of the lake’s water levels could result in an increase in water salinity and could generate dust from the exposed lakebed that could impact air quality in the area. The lake does not supply water or generate electricity for nearby communities but it does provide a natural habitat for migrating birds and other wildlife. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 99 percent of Utah is experiencing extreme drought conditions. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) (Justin Sullivan via Getty Images)
Without dramatic cuts to water consumption, Utah’s Great Salt Lake is on track to disappear within five years, a dire new report warns, imperiling ecosystems and exposing millions of people to toxic dust from the drying lake bed.
The report, led by researchers at Brigham Young University and published this week, found that unsustainable water use has shrunk the lake to just 37 percent of its former volume. The West’s ongoing mega-drought – a crisis made worse by climate change – has accelerated its decline to rates far faster than scientists had predicted.
But current conservation measures are critically insufficient to replace the roughly 40 billion gallons of water the lake has lost annually since 2020, the scientists said.
The report calls on Utah and nearby states to curb water consumption by a third to a half, allowing 2.5 million acre feet of water to flow from streams and rivers directly into the lake for the next couple of years. Otherwise, it said, the Great Salt Lake is headed for irreversible collapse.
“This is a crisis,” said Brigham Young University ecologist Ben Abbott, a lead author of the report. “The ecosystem is on life support, [and] we need to have this emergency intervention to make sure it doesn’t disappear.”
Scientists and officials have long recognized that water in the Great Salt Lake watershed is overallocated, – more water has been guaranteed to people and businesses than falls as rain and snow each year.
Agriculture accounts for more than 70 percent of the state’s water use – much of it going to grow hay and alfalfa to feed livestock. Another 9 percent is taken up by mineral extraction. Cities use another 9 percent to run power plants and irrigate lawns.
There are so many claims on the state’s rivers and streams that, by the time they reach the Great Salt Lake, there’s very little water left.
Over the last three years, the report says, the lake has received less than a third of its normal stream flow because so much water has been diverted for other purposes. In 2022, its surface sank to a record low, 10 feet below what is considered a minimum healthy level.
With less freshwater flowing in, the lake has grown so salty that it’s becoming toxic even to the native brine shrimp and flies that evolved to live there, Abbott said. This in turn endangers the 10 million birds that rely on the lake for a rest stop as they migrate across the continent each year.
The vanishing lake may short-circuit the weather system that cycles rain and snow from the lake to the mountains and back again, depriving Utah’s storied ski slopes. It threatens a billion-dollar industry extracting magnesium, lithium and other critical minerals from the brine.
It has also exposed more than 800 square miles of sediments laced with arsenic, mercury and other dangerous substances, which can be picked up by wind and blown into the lungs of some 2.5 million people living near the lakeshore.
“Nanoparticles of dust have potential to cause just as much harm if they come from dry lake bed as from a tailpipe or a smokestack,” said Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. He called the shrinking of the lake a “bona fide, documented, unquestionable health hazard.”
Dried-up saline lakes are hot spots for dangerous air pollution. Nearly a century after Owens Lake in southern California was drained to provide water to Los Angeles County in the 1920s, it was still the largest source of hazardous dust in the country, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The pollution has been linked to high rates of asthma, heart and lung disease and early deaths.
Kevin Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah who studies pollution from the receding lake, said about 90 percent of the lake bed is protected by a thin crust of salt that keeps dust from escaping. But the longer the lake remains dry, the more that crust will erode, exposing more dangerous sediments to the air.
“You see this wall of dust coming off the lake, and it reduces horizontal visibility sometimes to less than a mile,” Perry said. The impact might only last a couple hours at a time, he said, but the consequences can be profound.
Perry and other researchers have mapped the location and elevation of the dust hot spots, he said, and the results show that the problem is unlikely to abate anytime soon. The lake would need to rise roughly 14 feet to cover 80 percent of current hot spots, Perry said, or about 10 feet to submerge half of them.
Even researchers have been taken aback by the rapid pace of the Great Salt Lake’s decline, Abbott said. Most scientific models projected that the shrinking would slow as the lake became smaller and saltier, since saltwater evaporates less readily than freshwater.
But human-caused climate change, driven mostly by burning fossil fuels, has increased average temperatures in northern Utah by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the early 1900s and made the region more prone to drought, the report said. Studies suggest this warming accounts for about 9 percent of the decline in stream flows into the lake. Satellite surveys also show significant declines in groundwater beneath the lake, as ongoing drought depletes the region’s aquifers.
If humans weren’t using so much water, the lake might be able to withstand these shifts in climate, Abbott said. But the combined pressure of drought and overconsumption is proving to be more than it can bear.
Candice Hasenyager, the director of the Utah Division of Water Resources, said Utahns are becoming increasingly aware of the urgency of the lake’s decline. Last year, the Utah legislature passed numerous bills aimed at conservation, including a $40 million trust intended to help the ailing lake. Gov. Spencer Cox (R) recently proposed another massive infusion of funding for water management and conservation.
“We don’t have the luxury to have one solution,” but curbing water demand is essential, Hasenyager said. “We live in a desert, in one of the driest states in the nation, and we need to reduce the amount of water we use.”
Yet recent efforts haven’t kept up with the accelerating crisis. Abbott and his colleagues found that Utah’s new conservation laws increased stream flow to Great Salt Lake by less than 100,000 acre feet in 2022 – a tiny fraction of the 2.5 million acre feet increase that’s needed to bring the lake back to a healthy minimum level.
“Among legislators and decision-makers there is still a very prevalent narrative of ‘let’s put in place conservation measures so over the next couple of decades the Great Salt Lake can recover,'” Abbott said. “But we don’t have that time.”
“This isn’t business as usual,” he added. “This is an emergency rescue plan.”
The new report, drafted by more than 30 scientists from 11 universities, advocacy groups and other research institutions, recommends that Cox authorize emergency releases from Utah’s reservoirs to get the lake up to a safe level over the next two years.
This would require as much as a 50 percent cut in the amount of water the state uses each year, requiring investment from federal agencies on down to local governments, church leaders and community groups.
For decades, Abbott said, officials have prioritized human uses for all the water that trickles through the Great Salt Lake watershed.
Until last year, the lake itself wasn’t even considered a legitimate recipient of any water that fell in the region. If a farmer chose not to use some of their shares, allowing that water to flow to the lake and the surrounding ecosystem, they risked losing their water rights in the future.
“We have to shift from thinking of nature as a commodity, as a natural resource, to what we’ve learned over the last 50 years in ecology, and what Indigenous cultures have always known,” Abbott said. “Humans depend on the environment. . . . We have to think about, ‘What does the lake need to be healthy?’ and manage our water use with what remains.”
The weather this year has given Utah a prime opportunity to, in Abbott’s words, “put the lake first.” After a series of December storms, the state’s snowpack is already at 170 percent of normal January levels. If that snow persists and precipitation continues through the rest of the winter, it would enable the state to set aside millions of acre feet of water for the lake without making such drastic cuts to consumption.
“I’m generally optimistic,” said Hasenyager, the water resources director. “I don’t think we are past a point of no return – yet.”
A Town-by-Town Battle to Sell Americans on Renewable Energy
David Gelles – December 30, 2022
Brendan Burton of Ospur, Ill., an ironworker and farmer, welcomes the wind farm and the jobs it would bring to the area. (Mustafa Hussain/The New York Times)
MONTICELLO, Ill. — Depressed property values. Flickering shadows. Falling ice. One by one, a real estate appraiser rattled off what he said were the deleterious effects of wind farms as a crowd in an agricultural community in central Illinois hung on his every word.
It was the 10th night of hearings by the Piatt County zoning board, as a tiny town debated the merits of a proposed industrial wind farm that would see dozens of enormous turbines rise from the nearby soybean and corn fields. There were nine more hearings scheduled.
“It’s painful,” said Kayla Gallagher, a cattle farmer who lives nearby and opposes the project. “Nobody wants to be here.”
In the fight against global warming, the federal government is pumping a record $370 billion into clean energy, President Joe Biden wants the nation’s electricity to be 100% carbon-free by 2035, and many states and utilities plan to ramp up wind and solar power.
But while policymakers may set lofty goals, the future of the American power grid is, in fact, being determined in town halls, county courthouses and community buildings across the country.
The only way Biden’s ambitious goals will be met is if rural communities, which have large tracts of land necessary for commercial wind and solar farms, can be persuaded to embrace renewable energy projects. Lots of them.
According to an analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the United States would need to construct more than 6,000 projects like the Monticello one in order to run the economy on solar, wind, nuclear or other forms of nonpolluting energy.
In Piatt County, population 16,000, the project at issue is Goose Creek Wind, which has been proposed by Apex Clean Energy, a developer of wind and solar farms based in Virginia. Apex spent years negotiating leases with 151 local landowners and trying to win over the community, donating to the 4-H Club and a mental health center.
Now, it was making its case to the zoning board, which will send a recommendation to the county board that will make a final call on whether Apex can proceed. If completed, the turbines, each of them 610 feet tall, would march across 34,000 acres of farmland.
The $500 million project is expected to generate 300 megawatts, enough to power about 100,000 homes. The renewable, carbon-free electricity would help power a grid that is fed by a mix of nuclear, natural gas, coal and some existing wind turbines.
But with more and more renewable-energy projects under construction around the country, resistance is growing, especially in rural communities in the Great Plains and Midwest.
“To meet any kind of clean energy goals which brings consumer benefits and energy independence, you’re going to see an increase in projects,” said JC Sandberg, interim CEO of the American Clean Power Association. “And with those increases in projects, we are facing more of these challenges.”
On Election Day last month, Apex saw its development efforts for a wind farm in Ohio die when voters in Crawford County overwhelmingly voted to uphold a ban on such projects. On the same day, voters in Michigan rejected ordinances that would have allowed construction of another Apex wind project. This month, local officials in Monroe County, Michigan, extended a temporary moratorium on industrial solar projects, delaying plans by Apex to develop a solar farm in the area.
“Projects have been getting more contentious,” said Sarah Banas Mills, a lecturer at the school for environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan who has studied renewable development in the Midwest. “The low-hanging-fruit places have been taken.”
In Piatt County, the zoning board decided to conduct a mock trial of sorts. During the first nine hearings, Apex and its witnesses made the case that property values would not decline and that other concerns about wind farms — that they are ugly, that they kill birds or that the low frequency noise they emit can adversely affect human health — were not major issues.
They won some converts. Meg Miner, 61, a resident who was on the fence about the project, decided to support Apex after considering how the project would help fight climate change.
But others were worried about all the issues that the real estate appraiser mentioned, and more. “I moved here for nature, for trees, for crops,” said Sandy Coyle, who lives nearby and opposed the project. “I’m not interested in living near an industrial wind farm.”
Much of that skepticism appeared to be earnest concern from community members who weren’t sold on the project’s overall merits. On the fringe of the debate, however, was a digital misinformation campaign designed to distort the facts about wind energy.
The website of a group called Save Piatt County!, which opposes the project, is rife with fallacies about renewable energy and inaccuracies about climate science. On Facebook pages, residents opposed to the project shared negative stories about wind power, following a playbook that has been honed in recent years by anti-wind activists, some of whom have ties to the fossil fuel industry. The organizers of the website and Facebook groups did not reply to requests for comment.
As part of the Goose Creek Wind project, Apex has secured a commitment from Rivian, an upstart electric truck company, to buy power from the project, a development that drew skeptical replies in one Facebook group. “Scam artists in it together to fleece middle class taxpayers,” wrote one local resident in response to a news story about the deal. “Wake up.”
That milieu of misinformation appeared to sway some residents.
“These things are intrusive,” said Kelly Vetter, a retiree who opposed the project and disputed the overwhelming scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously warming the planet. “The company’s never going to have the community’s interest at heart.”
Apex declined to comment.
‘We All Want What’s Good for Society’
Smack in the middle of the area where Apex wants to erect its turbines sits the Bragg family’s farm, a roughly 1,500-acre plot that on a cold December afternoon was little more than an expanse of mud after the fall harvest and a week of rain.
Braxton Bragg, 40, who grew up on the land and returned after stints in the Peace Corps that took him to Mali and Mongolia, supports the project. He is concerned about climate change and said he already sees its effects. The rain is harder when it comes, the cold sets in later than it used to and, overall, the growing season is less predictable than it was when his grandfather worked the same land.
But his support for wind comes down to economics. Bragg has agreed to let Apex site one of its turbines on his property, and he expects to earn about $50,000 a year if it is built.
“It’s not going to save the farm or allow me to retire,” he said. “But just having that steady income every year, you know what you’re going to get.”
A few miles down the road is Gallagher Farms, another multigenerational operation. Like Bragg, Gallagher, 34, believes in climate change. She has invested in cover crops, which absorb carbon and lock it away in the soil, and other regenerative agriculture practices.
But Gallagher is opposed to the project. The aerial seeding of cover crops will cost more with wind turbines nearby and make it harder for her to sustainably farm. The use of heavy equipment to install turbines can disrupt drainage patterns in agricultural land, and Gallagher believes her farm will suffer.
Adding to her frustration is the fact that about 70% of the landowners who have agreed to let Apex put turbines on their property live outside Piatt County.
“They don’t live here, so they’re not impacted,” Gallagher said as she tended to her cattle before heading to yet another hearing.
More than anything else, Gallagher fears that the wind turbines, which she would see from her front porch, would disrupt the bucolic land she loves. In the predawn hours, she walks outside and listens to the crickets, which she worries will be drowned out by the low thrum of the turbines. At night, she watches the sun set over a grain silo in the west and doesn’t want the view marred by spinning turbines and flashing lights.
“We all want what’s good for society,” she said. “But it seems to be coming at the expense of our day-to-day lives.”
Bragg was sympathetic. “The only real argument that is valid, in my opinion, is that it’s going to change people’s sunsets and the beauty of living out in the country,” he said.
Still, he said, this was working farmland, and it was his right to put it to productive use.
“If you put your nice country house in the middle of my business, I’m sorry, there’s not much I can do about that,” Bragg said. “I think they probably would do the same thing if they were in my boat. The economics takes precedence over everything.”
Landowners such as the Braggs would receive about $210 million in lease payments over the project’s 30-year life, Apex said. And there would be other economic benefits, including $90 million in local taxes. And if the project is built, the company said it would create eight permanent jobs and employ nearly 600 people during construction, including men such as Brendan Burton.
Burton, an ironworker who has helped build several nearby wind farms, said the jobs would help fill the void created by factories that have closed or moved overseas.
“We’re not building things here like we used to,” he said. “We need the jobs.”
Burton added that he wanted to see his community contribute clean energy to the grid as well.
“We can’t keep burning coal or natural gas,” he said.
‘We’re Going to Make People Angry’
The debate in Piatt County has been remarkably civil. Similar hearings elsewhere have descended into shouting matches. In some cases, activists with ties to organizations that shield their donors have turned communities against proposed wind and solar projects.
That was the case in Michigan’s Monroe County, where local officials recently extended a moratorium that is blocking Apex from developing a solar project.
The opposition in Monroe County includes local residents, but also anti-wind activists with ties to groups backed by Koch Industries, which owns oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines. On Facebook, those skeptical of the Apex project shared negative stories about solar power, and opponents of the project went door to door distributing misinformation.
On another cold night in December, as the 11th hearing on the Goose Creek Wind project began at the Monticello community building, Phil Luetkehans, a lawyer hired by opponents of the project, called more witnesses, including an audiologist, who discussed what he said were the adverse health effects of wind turbines. A lawyer representing Apex cross-examined him, and the hearing stretched for more than four hours.
“Both sides are getting a full opportunity to portray their position and to put forth the facts, and the people who we elect will make those final decisions,” Luetkehans said. “Some communities end up saying, ‘No, we don’t want an industrial scale wind at this proximity to homes.’ Others say, ‘Yeah, we want the money.’”
Among those in the audience was Michael Beem, a newly elected member of the Piatt County board, which will ultimately decide whether Apex can build its wind farm. From the back of the room, Beem was bracing himself to make a choice that will undoubtedly leave this rural community divided.
“No matter what decision we make,” he said, “we’re going to make people angry.”
“It is virtually certain that human activities have increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,” a national panel of experts concluded in a draft of the 5th National Climate Assessment released in November. They see high confidence in forecasts for longer droughts, higher temperatures and increased flooding.
JULY 28, 2022: Aerial view of homes submerged under flood waters from the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Kentucky. Flash flooding caused by torrential rains has killed at least eight people in eastern Kentucky and left some residents stranded on rooftops and in trees, the governor of the south-central US state said.
Warming sea surface temperatures around the globe provide more fuel for tropical storms and exacerbate the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
Why is climate change important?
“Every part of the U.S. is feeling the effects of climate change in some way,” said Allison Crimmins, director of that 5th National Climate Assessment. Representing the latest in climate research by a broad array of scientists, the final version of the assessment is expected in late 2023.
Disaster costs are rising, and scientists warn the window to further curtail fossil fuel emissions and put a lid on rising temperatures is closing rapidly.
Many scientists and officials worldwide agree: Yes. By the end of this century, projections show global average surface temperatures compared to pre-industrial times could increase by as much as 5.4 degrees.
Merriam-Webster defines “crisis” as a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger. A mix of warmer temperatures, extreme rainfall and rising sea levels often make naturally occurring disasters worse, while droughts become more intense and heat waves occur more often.
“The climate crisis is not a future threat, but something we must address today,” Richard Spinrad, administrator of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in August 2022.
The term “climate crisis” has been used to describe these worsening impacts since at least 1986. Since the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was organized in 1988, its reports steadily have grown more dire.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released during the Trump administration, warned natural, built and social systems were “increasingly vulnerable to cascading impacts that are often difficult to predict, threatening essential services.”
“Every increased amount of warming will increase the risk of severe impacts, and so the more (rapidly) we can take strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the less severe the impacts will be,” Cornell University professor Rachel Bezner Kerr said after the release of one recent IPCC report.
Warmer climates put animals on the move and increases the risk they’ll spread pathogens to other animals and to humans. A group of University of Hawaii researchers looked at how 376 human diseases and allergens such as malaria and asthma are affected by climate-related weather hazards and found nearly 60% have been aggravated by hazards, such as heat and floods.
The Summer 2024 Olympics are scheduled to kick off in July in France, where the country’s meteorological officials expect 2022 to be its hottest year since records began in 1900. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee has delayed choosing the location for the 2030 winter games, in part over climate concerns.
Even fly fisherman see changes all around them. “Everyone knows if this keeps up, the places we can fish for trout are going to be limited,” said Tom Rosenbauer of Vermont, whose job title at sporting goods retailer Orvis is chief enthusiast.
How does climate change affect animals?
Warmer temperatures are forcing some animal species to move beyond their typical home ranges, increasing the risk that infectious viruses they carry could be transmitted to other species they haven’t encountered before. That poses a threat to human and animal health around the world.
A roseate spoonbill stands bright against the green of a southeast Arkansas swamp. Jami Linder, an Arkansas photographer, documented the first spoonbill nest in the state in 2020.
In the U.S., roseate spoonbills, a brilliant pink wading bird, are moving north as temperatures warm and they’re pushed out of native coastal habitats by rising sea levels.
In Arizona, Colorado River crisis stokes worry over growth and groundwater depletion
Ian James – December 26, 2022
The Central Arizona Project Canal running through the desert in Arizona. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
Kathleen Ferris stared across a desert valley dotted with creosote bushes, wondering where the water will come from to supply tens of thousands of new homes. In the distance, a construction truck rumbled along a dirt road, spewing dust.
This tract of open desert west of Phoenix is slated to be transformed into a sprawling development with up to 100,000 homes — a 37,000-acre property that the developers say will become Arizona’s largest master-planned community.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Ferris said. “I don’t think there is enough water here for all the growth that is planned.”
Water supplies are shrinking throughout the Southwest, from the Rocky Mountains to California, with the flow of the Colorado River declining and groundwater levels dropping in many areas. The mounting strains on the region’s water supplies are bringing new questions about the unrestrained growth of sprawling suburbs.
Ferris, a researcher at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, is convinced that growth is surpassing the water limits in parts of Arizona, and she worries that the development boom is on a collision course with the aridification of the Southwest and the finite supply of groundwater that can be pumped from desert aquifers.
For decades, Arizona’s cities and suburbs have been among the fastest growing in the country. In most areas, water scarcity has yet to substantially slow the march of development.
But as drought, climate change and the chronic overuse of water drain the Colorado River’s reservoirs, federal authorities are demanding the largest reduction ever in water diversions in an effort to avoid “dead pool” — the point at which reservoir levels fall so low that water stops flowing downriver.
Already, Arizona is being forced to take 21% less water from the Colorado River, and larger cuts will be needed as the crisis deepens.
To deal with those reductions and access other supplies to serve growth, the state is turning more heavily to its underground aquifers. As new subdivisions continue to spring up, workers are busy drilling new wells.
Ferris and others warn, however, that allowing development reliant solely on groundwater is unsustainable, and that the solution should be to curb growth in areas without sufficient water.
“What we’re going to see is more and more pressure on groundwater,” Ferris said. “And what will happen to our groundwater then?”
Construction workers erect new homes in a residential development called Sun City Festival in Buckeye. Dwindling Colorado River water is delivered to central Arizona, one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., via the Central Arizona Project Canal. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
One of the fastest-growing cities in the Phoenix area is Buckeye, which has plans to nearly triple its population by 2030. According to its 2020 water resources plan, 27 master-planned communities are proposed in Buckeye, which depends primarily on groundwater. If all the proposed developments are fully built, the city’s population, now 110,000, would skyrocket to about 872,000.
In the area Ferris visited, construction has begun on the giant development called Teravalis, where the developers plan to build the equivalent of a new city, complete with more than 1,200 acres of commercial development.
State water regulators have granted approvals to allow an initial portion of the project to move forward. But in other nearby areas of Buckeye, state officials have sent letters to builders putting some approvals on hold while they study whether there is enough groundwater for all the long-term demands.
The sun sets on the vast desert landscape along Sun Valley Parkway in Buckeye, Ariz. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
“It’s hard for me to imagine wall-to-wall homes out here,” Ferris said, standing on the gravel shoulder of the Sun Valley Parkway, which runs across miles of undeveloped land. “This is the epitome of irresponsible growth. It is growing on desert lands, raw desert lands, where there’s no other water supply except groundwater.”
Nearby, the Central Arizona Project snakes through the desert, filled with Colorado River water. The CAP Canal was built between 1973 and 1993, bringing water that has enabled growth. But its supply came with low-priority water rights that made it vulnerable to cuts in a shortage.
The Phoenix metropolitan area’s population has more than doubled since 1990, expanding from 2.2 million to about 4.9 million people. Subdivisions have been built on former farmlands as development has expanded across the Salt River Valley, also called the Valley of the Sun.
Ferris, a lawyer and former director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, helped draft the state’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which was intended to address overpumping and has since regulated groundwater use in urban areas.
Water from the CAP Canal has enabled cities to pump less from wells. For years, they have banked some of the imported Colorado River water underground by routing it to basins where it percolates down to aquifers.
The Central Arizona Project Canal runs beside a community in the suburbs of North Phoenix. Development projects envisioning thousands of new homes around Phoenix now are in question because of lack of water. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The state requires that new developments around Phoenix and other urban areas have a 100-year “assured water supply,” based on a calculation that allows for groundwater to be pumped down to a level 1,000 feet underground. Changes by the Legislature and regulators in the 1990s cleared the way for subdivisions to rely on groundwater as an assured water supply.
Since then, a groundwater replenishment district has been charged with securing water and using it to recharge aquifers, creating an accounting system. The problem with this system, Ferris said, is that groundwater has been overallocated, allowing for excessive pumping in some areas.
“We’ve got to learn to live within our means. Groundwater was always supposed to be a savings account, to be used only in times of shortages. Well, now those shortages look permanent,” Ferris said. “We ought to be saying, ‘How much growth can we really sustain?’ And put limits on how much water we’re going to use.”
The desert aquifers contain “fossil” water that has been underground for thousands of years.
“That water is not replenished. And so once it’s pumped, it’s pretty much gone,” Ferris said.
In recent years, Arizona has received about 36% of its water from the Colorado River. The river has long been severely overallocated, and its flows have shrunk dramatically during 23 years of megadrought intensified by global warming.
One of a growing number of developments in Buckeye, Ariz., that depend on groundwater. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
The river’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, now sit nearly three-fourths empty. Federal officials have warned there is a real danger the reservoirs could drop so low by 2025 that water would no longer flow past Hoover Dam to Arizona, California and Mexico.
Ferris said Arizona now needs to plan for years with little or no Colorado River water. She said she feels sad and angry that federal and state water managers, despite warnings by scientists, failed to act sooner to address the shortage.
“The Colorado River is dying,” Ferris said. “It is dying from overallocation, overuse, aridification, mismanagement.”
In the same way that tough decisions about the Colorado River were neglected for years, she said, “we’re not managing our groundwater well.”
“Either we do something about this now or we pay the consequences later. And we’re paying the consequences now with the Colorado River, because we didn’t deal with those problems soon enough,” Ferris said. “If we fail to plan for the idea that our groundwater will no longer be sufficient, then shame on us.”
Alongside the river’s decline, the Southwest is undergoing a parallel crisis of groundwater depletion. Scientists found in a 2014 study, using measurements from NASA satellites, that pumping depleted more than 40 million acre-feet of groundwater in the Colorado River Basin over nine years, about 1.5 times the maximum capacity of Lake Mead.
The sun sets on the vast desert landscape along Sun Valley Parkway in Buckeye, Ariz. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
“Our research has shown that the groundwater in the lower basin has been disappearing nearly seven times faster than the combined water losses from Lakes Powell and Mead,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrology professor and executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security. “Groundwater losses of that magnitude are literally an existential threat to desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson.”
Next year, Arizona’s allocation of Colorado River water delivered through the CAP Canal will be cut by more than a third. Some Arizona farmers are losing their CAP supplies, while irrigation districts are drilling new state-funded wells.
Arizona’s cities have yet to see major reductions. But that could soon change.
Ferris said she thinks growth should happen in areas where sufficient water is available, and from multiple sources.
A workman prepares a rig to drill for water in the suburbs of Phoenix. Colorado River flows are at historic lows due to warmer and drier conditions caused by climate change. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The city of Peoria, northwest of Phoenix, is one example of an area with a variety of sources, including the Colorado River, the Salt and Verde rivers and recycled wastewater. Since 1996, the city has been banking water underground, storing treated wastewater effluent and a portion of its Colorado River water.
The city is now drilling wells to pump out some of those supplies.
“Even if the Colorado River went away completely, we expect to have enough water banked underground to last us for years,” said Cape Powers, Peoria’s water services director. “We’ll continue to prepare for whatever comes our way.”
Nearby, a drilling crew was preparing to bore one of eight new wells for the city.
“Every drill rig that my company has is spoken for until May or June of next year,” said Ralph Anderson, the owner of Arizona Beeman Drilling. “The business in the next 3 to 5 years is going to just go through the roof.”
Some cities are maneuvering in other ways, reaching outside the Phoenix area to secure water.
The growing Phoenix suburb of Queen Creek recently won approval for a controversial $22-million deal to buy water rights from an investment company that will leave farmland dry in the community of Cibola, next to the Colorado River.
Queen Creek has also signed a 100-year contract to pay landowners $30 million to leave farmland fallow in the rural Harquahala Valley west of Phoenix, allowing them to pump groundwater and ship it to the suburbs.
Other cities are also looking to pump groundwater in the Harquahala Valley and other areas where they would be allowed to transport the water by canal.
Landscaped yards and green grassy playing fields typify the suburbs of North Phoenix. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Buckeye has a substantial amount of groundwater locally and plans to seek additional water that could be brought in from other areas, said Terry Lowe, the city’s director of water resources.
“It’s a hot market, the Phoenix metro area in general, and we’ve got to be able to have that water to meet that demand,” Lowe said. “And so we’re looking at working with others outside to find sources.”
For the planned 37,000-acre community Teravalis, the developers have two existing water approvals, called certificates of assured water supply, to build about 7,000 homes, and plan to seek additional approvals to build more. The developers plan to pump groundwater from the aquifer beneath the property, which lies in the Hassayampa River watershed.
“It’s one of the most plentiful aquifer basins in the state of Arizona. So we feel pretty good about that,” said Heath Melton, regional president for The Howard Hughes Corp. “We feel like we’re in a really good place.”
Melton said the community will conserve water by having low-water-use plants and fixtures, and will use recycled wastewater for outdoor irrigation and to recharge the aquifer.
Developers are also supporting the state government’s efforts to secure additional water from new sources.
Colorado River water flows into the Agua Fria groundwater recharge basins (or groundwater recharge facilities) in Peoria, Ariz. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
Legislation signed this year by Gov. Doug Ducey established a new Water Infrastructure Finance Authority that will have about $1.4 billion for conservation projects and to secure additional supplies, including possibly bringing in water from outside the state. Arizona officials have been looking into a possible deal with Mexico to desalinate seawater at the Sea of Cortez and exchange that water for some of Mexico’s Colorado River water.
In the Hassayampa watershed in Buckeye, state water regulators have been working on an updated analysis of the groundwater basin. In letters to some other developers in the area, they have warned that although their report is not yet complete, they have “information indicating that the proposed subdivision’s estimated groundwater demand for 100 years is likely not met when considered with other existing uses and approved demands in the area.”
The Arizona Department of Water Resources similarly announced in 2019 that projections showed insufficient groundwater available for all the planned developments in Pinal County, between Phoenix and Tucson.
“The amount of groundwater we can allocate for these purposes is finite,” said Tom Buschatzke, the department’s director. He said in the Hassayampa basin, all the proposed developments won’t be able to grow on groundwater alone.
“They’ve got to find a different way to do business than what they’ve historically done,” he said. “They’ve got to find different pathways, more likely more expensive pathways.”
Buschatzke said the area still has options, such as bringing in water from other areas or using recycled water.
Even as the supply of Colorado River water shrinks, some researchers are optimistic about the state’s ability to adapt.
“The whole state is at an inflection point where we have to take some definite actions toward making sure of water supplies to serve the populations that are here now and into the future,” said Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. “Arizona has a long history of meeting these water challenges, and I think Arizona will do that again.”
Ferris said she feels more pessimistic.
Homes are being built in a new community in Buckeye, Ariz. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
Visiting a new development in Buckeye, Ferris drove past an entrance with flowing fountains. She watched workers building homes beside a golf course with ponds.
Nearby, new homes stood beside the open desert. On empty lots, flattened patches of dirt lay ready for the foundations to be poured.
“We have to stop growing these giant developments on groundwater. It is unsustainable,” Ferris said. “We need to limit the growth.”
Colorado River Basin policymakers stand at a critical juncture. They have an opportunity to avert more severe impacts of the crisis by implementing policy and management changes that go beyond the relatively incremental steps taken thus far.
How do we find long-term sustainability?
However, negotiating such major changes is extremely challenging, especially given the basin’s complex legal structure of water rights, its users’ diverse demands and uncertainty around how much water will be available in the future.
This raises the question: How can basin policymakers create transformational change that advances the long-term sustainability of the Colorado River amid this crisis?
A buoy sits high and dry on cracked earth previously under the waters of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Boulder City, Nev., on June 28, 2022. Living with less water in the U.S. Southwest is the focus for a conference starting Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022, in Las Vegas, about the drought-stricken and overpromised Colorado River.
First, policymakers must stabilize the Colorado River system, meaning that water use does not exceed water availability. However, because streamflow is expected to continue to decline as temperatures rise, any stabilization solution must be adaptable to changes in water availability as they occur.
One way to achieve this is to change the indicators of system-wide water availability that trigger water management actions. Basin managers currently use slow-responding reservoir levels (which may also be muddled by complex water accounting) for this purpose. A more responsive indicator, such as a 5-year rolling average of inflow, could be used in the short term to minimize reliance on dwindling storage.
In the longer term, Basin managers could also consider an adaptive approach used in other areas of the West that converts fixed-quantity water rights to shares of the total quantity of available water, with the allocation of shares tailored to account for the existing water rights priority structure. The total quantity of available water could be adjusted to slowly refill reservoirs, serving to mitigate large water cuts in dry years. This additional step would help the system move beyond stabilization and into longer-term recovery.
2. Prioritize ideas to reduce uncertainty
Moving to the type of management regime described above will likely mean painful cuts for water users throughout the Colorado River Basin in the coming years. However, it could create more predictability and reliability in the long term – values that Basin managers have previously signaled agreement around.
Managing for a smaller known quantity of water is often easier than managing for the unknown. Achieving this, however, requires that all water users, including historically marginalized tribes and environmental groups, have an equitable seat at the negotiating table in order to reduce uncertainty about future water uses and needs.
3. Think beyond ‘how to share water cuts’
Finally, policymakers must expand their conception of “water sustainability” in the Colorado River Basin. For thriving communities and economies, water is a means, not an end. Beyond water use directly for human, public and ecological health, water enables food production and energy generation.
Broadening our thinking from “how to share water reductions” to “how to maintain regional food and energy security” opens new opportunities for negotiation and collaboration beyond the traditional “zero-sum” mentality.
These could include investing recently allocated federal funds for drought mitigation in improving agricultural water use efficiency, supporting the clean energy transition and conserving ecosystems to achieve more holistic sustainability goals, rather than temporarily buying more time through short-term conservation measures.
Transforming Colorado River Basin management to mitigate the current water crisis and realize long-term water sustainability requires changing not only policies but also the way we think about water use and needs.
The three suggestions presented above can help policymakers to meet this moment of historic challenge and historic opportunity by moving beyond incremental change and fostering a new era of solutions for the Colorado River.
Margaret Garcia, Ph.D, is an assistant professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. Elizabeth A. Koebele, Ph.D., is an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she researches the use and implications of collaborative approaches to governing water resources.
‘It could happen tomorrow’: Experts know disaster upon disaster looms for West Coast
Joel Shannon, USA TODAY – December 16, 2022
Brown pelicans fly in front of the San Francisco skyline Aug 17, 2018.
It’s the elevators that worry earthquake engineering expert Keith Porter the most.
Scientists say a massive quake could strike the San Francisco Bay Area at any moment. And when it does, the city can expect to be slammed with a force equal to hundreds of atomic bombs.
To escape, the survivors of the initial quake will need the help of firefighters with specialized training and tools.
But their rescuers won’t come – at least not right away. Firefighters will be battling infernos that could outnumber the region’s fire engines.
Running water will be in short supply. Cellphone service may not work at all. The aftershocks will keep coming.
And the electricity could remain off for weeks.
“That means people are dead in those elevators,” Porter said.
‘Problems on the horizon’
The situation Porter described comes from his work on the HayWired Scenario, a detailed look at the cascading calamities that will occur when a major earthquake strikes the Bay Area’s Hayward Fault, including the possibility of widespread power outages that will strand elevators.
The disaster remains theoretical for now. But the United States Geological Survey estimates a 51% chance that a quake as big as the one described in HayWired will occur in the region within three decades.
It’s one of several West Coast disasters so likely that researchers have prepared painstakingly detailed scenarios in an attempt to ready themselves.
The experts who worked on the projects are highly confident the West Coast could at any moment face disasters with the destructive power to kill hundreds or thousands of people and forever change the lives of millions more. They also say there’s more that can be done to keep individuals – and society – safer.
“We’re trying to have an earthquake without having one,” Anne Wein told USA TODAY. Wein is a USGS researcher who co-leads the HayWired earthquake scenario and has worked on several other similar projects.
Such disaster scenarios are massive undertakings that bring together experts from various fields who otherwise would have little reason to work together – seismologists, engineers, emergency responders and social scientists.
That’s important because “it’s difficult to make new relationships in a crisis,” Wein said.
Similar projects aimed at simulating a future disaster have turned out to be hauntingly accurate.
The Hurricane Pam scenario foretold many of the devastating consequences of a major hurricane striking New Orleans well before Hurricane Katrina hit the city.
More recently, in 2017, the authors of “The SPARS Pandemic” called their disaster scenario “futuristic.” But now the project now reads like a prophecy of COVID-19. Johns Hopkins University even issued a statement saying the 89-page document was not intended as a prediction of COVID-19.
“The SPARS Pandemic” imagined a future where a deadly novel coronavirus spread around the world, often without symptoms, as disinformation and vaccine hesitancy constantly confounded experts’ efforts to keep people safe.
The “SPARS scenario, which is fiction, was meant to give public health communicators a leg up … Think through problems on the horizon,” author Monica Schoch-Spana told USA TODAY.
At the time that SPARS was written, a global pandemic was thought of in much the same way experts currently describe the HayWired earthquake: an imminent catastrophe that could arrive at any time.
‘It could happen tomorrow’
Disaster scenario researchers each have their own way of describing how likely the apocalyptic futures they foresee are.
“The probability (of) this earthquake is 100%, if you give me enough time,” seismologist Lucy Jones will often say.
Earthquakes occurring along major faults are a certainty, but scientists can’t predict exactly when earthquakes will happen – the underground forces that create them are too random and chaotic. But researchers know a lot about what will happen once the earth begins to shake.
Earthquakes like HayWired are “worth planning for,” Porter said. Because “it could happen tomorrow.”
“We don’t know when,” Porter said. But “it will happen.”
Wein says we’re “overdue for preparedness.” You might say we’re also overdue for a major West Coast disaster.
The kind of earthquake described in HayWired historically occurs every 100-220 years. And it’s been more than 153 years since the last one.
Farther south in California, it’s difficult to pin down exactly how at risk Los Angeles is for The Big One – the infamous theoretical earthquake along the San Andreas fault that will devastate the city. But a massive magnitude 7.5 earthquake has about a 1 in 3 chance of striking the Los Angeles area in the next 30 years, the United States Geological Survey estimates.
Another scenario warns that a stretch of coast in Oregon and Washington state is capable of producing an earthquake much more powerful than the ones California is bracing for. Parts of coastline would suddenly drop 6 feet, shattering critical bridges, destroying undersea communication cables and producing a tsunami.
It too “could happen at any time,” the scenario says.
Earthquake scenarios often focus on major coastal cities, but West Coast residents farther inland also have yet another disaster to brace for.
“Megastorms are California’s other Big One,” the ARkStorm scenario says. It warns of a statewide flood that will cause more than a million evacuations and devastate California’s agriculture.
Massive storms that dump rain on California for weeks on end historically happen every few hundred years. The last one hit around the time of the Civil War, when weeks of rain turned portions of the state “into an inland sea.”
‘Decades to rebuild’
Whether the next disaster to strike the West Coast is a flood, an earthquake or something else, scenario experts warn that the impacts will reverberate for years or longer.
“It takes decades to rebuild,” Wein said. “You have to think about a decade at least.”
A major West Coast earthquake isn’t just damaged buildings and cracked roads.
It’s weeks or months without running water in areas with millions of people. It’s mass migrations away from ruined communities. It’s thousands of uninhabitable homes.
Depending on the scenario, thousands of people are expected to die. Hundreds of thousands more could be left without shelter. And those impacts will be a disproportionately felt.
California already has a housing and homelessness crisis, and Nnenia Campbell said the next disaster is set to magnify inequalities. Campbell is the deputy director of the William Averette Anderson Fund, which works to mitigate disasters for minority communities.
Campbell doesn’t talk about “natural disasters” because there’s nothing natural about the way a major earthquake will harm vulnerable communities more than wealthy ones.
Human decisions such as redlining have led to many of the inequities in our society, she said. But humans can make decisions that will help make the response to the next disaster more equitable.
Many of those choices need to be made by local leaders and emergency management planners. Investing in infrastructure programs that will make homes in minority communities less vulnerable to earthquakes. Understanding how important a library is to unhoused people. Making sure all schools are built to withstand a disaster. Keeping public spaces open, even during an emergency.
But individuals can make a difference as well, Campbell said. You can complete training that will prepare you to help your community in the event of an emergency. Or you can join a mutual aid network, a group where community members work together to help each other.
Community support is a common theme among disaster experts: One of the best ways to prepare is to know and care about your neighbors.
If everyone only looks out for themselves in the next disaster, “we are going to have social breakdown,” Jones said.
What you can do
Experts acknowledge you’ll want to make sure you and your family are safe before being able to help others. Fortunately, many disaster preparedness precautions are inexpensive and will help in a wide range of emergency situations.
Be prepared to have your access to electricity or water cut off for days or weeks.
For electricity, you’ll at least want a flashlight and a way to charge your phone.
While cell service will be jammed immediately after a major earthquake, communications will likely slowly come back online faster than other services, Wein said. (And when trying to use your phone, text – don’t call. In a disaster, text messages are more reliable and strain cell networks less.)
To power your phone, you can cheaply buy a combination weather radio, flashlight and hand-crank charger to keep your cell running even without power for days.
A cash reserve is good to have, too, Jones said. You’ll want to be able to buy things, even if your credit card doesn’t work for a time.
Preparing for earthquakes specifically is important along the West Coast, too, experts said. Simple things like securing bookshelves can save lives. Downloading an early warning app can give you precious moments to protect yourself in the event of a big quake. Buying earthquake insurance can protect homeowners. And taking part in a yearly drill can help remind you about other easy steps you can take to prepare.
There’s even more you could do to ready yourself for a catastrophe, but many disaster experts are hesitant to rely on individuals’ ability to prepare themselves.
Just as health experts have begged Americans to use masks and vaccines to help keep others safe during the pandemic, disaster scenario experts believe community members will need to look out for one another when the next disaster strikes.
Telling people to prepare as if “nobody is coming to help you” is a self-fulfilling prophesy, Jones said.
For now, policymakers hold the real power in how prepared society will be for the next disaster. And there are many problems to fix, according to Porter, including upgrading city plumbing, because many aging and brittle water pipes will shatter in a major earthquake, cutting off water to communities for weeks or months.
Drought emergency declared for all Southern California
Hayley Smith, Ian James – December 14, 2022
A woman waters her garden in Los Angeles in August. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
As California faces the prospect of a fourth consecutive dry year, officials with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California have declared a regional drought emergency and called on water agencies to immediately reduce their use of all imported supplies.
The decision from the MWD’s board came about eight months after officials declared a similar emergency for 7 million people who are dependent on supplies from the State Water Project, a vast network of reservoirs, canals and dams that convey water from Northern California. Residents reliant on California’s other major supply — the Colorado River — had not been included in that emergency declaration.
“Conditions on the Colorado River are growing increasingly dire,” MWD Chairwoman Gloria Gray said in a statement. “We simply cannot continue turning to that source to make up the difference in our limited state supplies. In addition, three years of California drought are drawing down our local storage.”
Officials said the call for conservation in Colorado River-dependent areas could become mandatory if drought conditions persist in the coming months, which some experts say is likely. By April, the MWD will consider allocating supplies to all of its 26 member agencies, requiring them to either cut their use of imported water or face steep additional fees. The agencies together serve about 19 million people.
“Since this drought began, we have been steadily increasing our call for conservation. If we don’t have an extremely wet winter, we will need to elevate to our highest level — a water supply allocation for all of Southern California,” said MWD General Manager Adel Hagekhalil. “Substantial and immediate conservation now and in the coming months will help lessen the potential severity of such an allocation.”
MWD member agencies, which include the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the Municipal Water District of Orange County and the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, will implement voluntary and mandatory conservation measures at the local level based on their particular circumstances, officials said. Those with local supplies or other alternative options may be able to rely on them in the interim.
The DWP, which imports state and federal water as well as water from the Owens Valley via the Los Angeles Aqueduct, has been under Level 3 of its water shortage contingency plan since June, including two-day-a-week outdoor watering limitations.
During a board meeting Tuesday, DWP senior assistant general manager Anselmo Collins said MWD’s decision was “setting the stage” for the entire region to see similar rules should the Colorado order become mandatory.
“We already have a budget that’s been given to us, so to us [in Los Angeles] it’s probably not going to be any different,” he told the board. “It is going to be for the other 20 member agencies that are currently not under a water supply allocation. … They would too be put on some kind of volumetric budget, or one-day-a-week requirement.”
About half of the MWD’s imported water comes from the State Water Project and half from the Colorado River — both of which have become “extraordinarily stressed by prolonged drought exacerbated by climate change,” the agency said.
The Colorado River has fallen to such historic lows that Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the nation’s two largest reservoirs — could reach “dead pool”, or the point at which water no longer passes downstream from a dam. California and six other states that rely on the river have been under pressure from the federal government to drastically reduce their use.
In October, some California water agencies, including the MWD, pledged usage reductions of up to 400,000 acre-feet per year, or about 9% of the state’s total 4.4 million water allotment from the river, through 2026. Still, other states are demanding that California do more to cut usage.
The drought emergency declaration came as representatives of the MWD and other water districts gathered in Las Vegas with officials from all seven states, the federal government and tribes for the annual conference of the Colorado River Water Users Assn. Attendees are discussing various issues about how the river is managed, including measures to address the severe shortage.
“It’s a good step for sure,” conference attendee Daryl Vigil, water administrator of the Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico, said of the MWD’s declaration.
The willingness of the district’s officials to “take part in mitigating the risk in terms of reduction in use is really big coming from California,” Vigil said. “And hopefully others will follow suit.”
Scott Houston, vice president of the West Basin Municipal Water District, a wholesale supplier for nearly 1 million people in 17 cities and unincorporated areas in Los Angeles County, said the move is necessary.
“We are in a critical time with the Colorado River,” Houston said. “This is a very serious situation, as we’ve seen the conditions escalate over the last few months. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment.”
The State Water Project has been under similar strain. The driest three water years on record in California resulted in record-low deliveries to Southern California, and earlier this month, state officials said they may allocate only 5% of requested supplies next year if drought conditions do not significantly improve.
Madelyn Glickfeld, co-director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, said the MWD’s decision was a “warning shot” for what could lie ahead — and a reminder of how important it is for communities to invest in alternative supplies such as recycled water and, in some cases, groundwater and desalination.
“We’ve been working hard toward this, but I don’t think anyone expected — or they didn’t look carefully enough — to expect that this was going to happen right now,” she said. “There were a lot of places where people could have taken the warning before now, but they have not.”
The MWD underscored that it has been making big investments in sustainable local supplies for the region, including the development of what could be one of the world’s largest recycled water facilities, Pure Water Southern California.
But many such projects are years if not decades away, and action is critical now, Glickfeld said. For the time being, conservation and “a complete transition in the way we do landscaping” are among the region’s best bets.
Indeed, many agencies, including the DWP and the West Basin Municipal District, have been offering rebates for residents to replace their grass with drought-resilient landscaping.
“One of the biggest areas where we use water is outdoor irrigation,” Houston said. “That’s really one of the best tools in our toolbox right now to reduce the need for some of that imported water.”
As officials continue to weigh their options for the Colorado River, the mandatory measures in State Water Project-dependent areas will continue through at least June and possibly longer, the MWD said.
“Some Southern Californians may have felt somewhat protected from these extreme conditions over the past few years,” Gray said. “They shouldn’t anymore. We are all affected.”
Nation’s largest water supplier declares drought emergency
December 14, 2022
FILE – A sprinkler waters the lawn of a home on Wednesday, May 18, 2016, in Santa Ana, Calif. T On Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022, the Metropolitan Water District declared a regional drought emergency for all of Southern California. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The nation’s largest water supplier has declared a drought emergency for all of Southern California, clearing the way for potential mandatory water restrictions early next year that could impact 19 million people.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provides water to 26 different agencies that supply major population centers like Los Angeles and San Diego counties.
It doesn’t rain much in Southern California, so the district imports about half of its water from the Colorado River and the northern Sierra Nevada via the State Water Project — a complex system of dams, canals and reservoirs that provides drinking water for much of the state.
It’s been so dry the past three years that those water deliveries have hit record lows. Earlier this year, the district declared a drought emergency for the agencies that mostly depend on the State Water Project, which covers about 7 million people.
On Tuesday, the board voted to extended that declaration to cover all Southern California water agencies. They called on agencies to immediately reduce how much water they import. By April, the board will decide whether to make those cuts mandatory if the drought continues.
“Some Southern Californians may have felt somewhat protected from these extreme conditions over the past few years. They shouldn’t anymore. We are all affected,” said Gloria D. Gray, chair of the Metropolitan Water District’s Board.
State officials recently announced that water agencies like Metropolitan will only get 5% of their requested supplies for the start of 2023 due to lower reservoir levels. Some agencies may get a little bit more if its necessary for drinking, sanitation or other health and safety concerns.
The drought declaration comes as Colorado River water managers are meeting in Las Vegas to discuss growing concerns about the river’s future after more than two decades of drought. Scientists say climate change has contributed to sustained warmer and drier weather in the West, threatening water supplies. The river’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Mead on the Nevada-Arizona state line and Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border — are each about one-quarter full.
In California, despite a recent run of storms that have dumped heavy rain and snow in the Sierra Nevada and Central Valley, reservoirs are all well below average for this time of year.
“I think Metropolitan is being very proactive in doing this,” said Dave Eggerton, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. “It’s really the right thing to do.”
Up to 75% of all water used in Southern California is for irrigating yards and gardens. Water agencies dependent upon imported water from the state have had restrictions for much of the year, including limiting outdoor watering to just one day per week.
Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for residents and businesses to cut their water use by 15%. But since then, residents have reduced water use by just 5.2%, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.
Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District is investing in what could become the world’s largest water recycling system. Known as Pure Water, the initiative would recycle wastewater instead of sending it out into the ocean.
