Hello, and happy new water year to all! 💧
Trying something new and making this post mostly a news wrap-up with articles, reports, etc… that I found interesting. If you find this Substack interesting, please consider sharing this post and passing it along to friends or colleagues who might be interested! I don’t have cool perks to offer, but you will have my gratitude and thanks if you can get a friend to subscribe.
Hope everyone has a restful weekend! -Daniel
A record-breaking, drought-relieving 2022-2023 water year comes to an end. Bleak is the word I would have used to describe the situation at the start of last year’s water year - Oct. 1, 2022. The Colorado River, stretched thin by repeated years of drought and continued overuse, was facing a historic shortage crisis. Negotiators who rely on the river were anticipating steep, painful cuts, facing a math problem with a solution that seemed to unavoidably point to the agricultural sector, which uses a majority of the river’s water. In late December, Colorado River managers were working in a crisis mode. In an article for The Nevada Independent, I described the theme of an annual Colorado River conference as “everything all at once, yesterday.” A giant scramble to reach consensus on large-scale cuts, set against the complicated laws of the river. This was not just happening on the Colorado. Similar discussions were taking place across the West as water officials were preparing themselves for further deepening drought.
Then the winter of 2023 hit. I remember one of the early atmospheric rivers here in Reno. The weather forecast for rain quickly yielded to snow. It was the day of New Year’s Eve. I had gone to the movies, and when I came out theater three hours later, my car was buried. It was a harbinger of what this unexpected water year would be.
Records were broken across the West and it provided drought relief to many. On Oct. 4, 2022, about 73% of the West was in some form of moderate to exceptional drought. One year later, on Oct. 3, 2023, only 31% of the West was experiencing drought, with nearly all of California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado facing little to none.
But drought relief also came as pain and challenge. Flood damage. Electric outages. Mudslides and critical road closures. For ranchers in the Great Basin, this year was devastating, one of the worse many can remember. There were calls for federal help.
In California, the reemergence of Tulare Lake provided the most prominent example of large-scale flooding, and the inequities and slanted power structures that seem to always exist around water, in a drought or even in the wake of disastrous flooding. The L.A. Times published an in-depth investigation into how this played out at Tulare Lake.
Instead of drought, many people were dealing with too much water by the spring of this year. Irrigators turned into de facto flood managers. In one Nevada irrigation district, water officials prepared to fill, empty and refill a single reservoir three times.
Many lessons to be learned, with questions about if we’re learning from them.
Oct. 1, 2023 started the new water year. Many reservoirs are fuller than they were last year. And there are predictions that this could again be a wet winter. But most people I’ve interviewed, while grateful for the boost in precipitation, recognize that the long-term, systemic river deficits still must be dealt with. We continue to take more water than is there — in many places. A group of experts from the Nature Conservancy and Trout Unlimited put it well at the start of a recent post for the California WaterBlog:
Is California still experiencing drought? Even after a winter of record rainfall and snowpack, followed by a tropical storm, this is still an important question. And if you read the headlines, the answer is…yes and no. Although drought has been declared officially over, unsustainable groundwater pumping and overallocation of surface water leads to water deficits that persist, stressing rural communities, urban water supplies, and ecosystems. So even in this year of abundant rainfall and snowpack, water managers and river ecologists are still thinking about drought. In fact, drought conditions can be thought of as the base case, or the more common of two extremes that tend to drive management action in California.
A few weeks ago, I went to the groundbreaking for a fish passage at Numana Dam about 15 miles upstream from Pyramid Lake. The $8.3 million fish passage project is aimed at reconnecting habitat on the Truckee River for the first time, critical reaches for the endangered cui-ui and threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout, two fish species that are important to the culture of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. My full story here.
KUNR’s Kaleb Roedel published an in-depth piece on the project, noting such fish passages are being pursued across the Mountain West. They “include efforts to recover Yellowstone Cutthroat in Idaho; Rio Grande Cutthroat in New Mexico; Bear River Cutthroat in Wyoming and Utah; and Flannelmouth Sucker in Utah.”
Meanwhile, in California, dams are coming down on the Klamath River with hopes of restoring salmon. It marks the largest dam removal project in the United States. As the Los Angeles Times’ Ian James writes: “For members of the Yurok, Karuk and other tribes who have been immersed in the struggle for much of their lives, the undamming of the Klamath represents an opportunity to heal the ecosystem and help fish populations recover by opening up hundreds of miles of spawning habitat.
More coverage of the Klamath from Oregon Public Broadcasting.
In the Columbia River watershed, the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth explored what taking down dams could mean for a transition away from fossil fuels, the very difficult conversations that have to be had and how those questions scramble the political map.
Could the city of San Diego make some money off its water? This caught my eye from an excellent piece by Voice of San Diego’s MacKenzie Elmer. “…in fact, San Diego now has plenty of water – enough that they think investors from across the American West could help ease the burden on San Diegan pocketbooks.”
Arizona is cracking down on a Saudi Arabian company that has sucked water from a limited underground supply amid an ongoing drought and underneath state land. Here’s more on what the state is doing from The Arizona Republic, which broke the story about the company and has been doggedly reporting on this issue for years.
Federal water managers and state officials have proposed paying farmers to fallow or conserve water. But how big of an issue is trust? KUNC’s Alex Hager looks at a new report surveying farmers on what conservation might look like. “About 70% said they are already responding to water shortages but many identified a trust gap with state and federal agencies that are trying to incentivize further water savings.”
Nevada is looking at a program to buyback water rights (I’ll be writing more about this soon). It comes after a similar legislative effort failed to advance earlier this year.
Speaking of groundwater, Oregon is looking at tighter rules for managing aquifers, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. And the state is facing pushback. An interesting thing to note is the state wants to look at how groundwater use affects surface flows.
Found this writeup of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)’s water legacy to be fascinating: POLITICO’s Blanca Begert and Wes Venteicher write about Feinstein as one of the last water buffaloes in California. A quote that stuck out to me is this one from UC Davis’ Jay Lund. He says “it really marks the end of that intellectual era of big infrastructure, which had to end anyway.” I’m curious what comes in its place…