The western region of the United States, known as the Intermontane West, is semi-arid, and has a lack of water resources to take care of its needs. Because of this, there are water controversies and disputes over allocation of the limited water resources available, and who gets to use them. These controversies and disputes are between different states, as well as between the United States and Mexico.
The problem with the Intermontane West region is that it is quite arid, meaning that there is very little water resource available. Because of this, the few rivers that run through the region, which are few and far between, are usually dammed up in order to provide water storage, so that this water can be used for agricultural purposes, and for providing water in urbanized areas. Besides this, they also help with flood control and provide the means to produce electricity through hydroelectric dams.
The most well-known agricultural areas that utilize this water resource are: the Columbia River area including the Columbia Basin (Washington state and Oregon), the Rio Grande Valley (Texas and Mexico), the Salton Trough south of the Salton Sea in southern California, and Arizona in land covered by the Central Arizona Project. Urban areas that utilize this water include: Phoenix, Arizona; Tucson, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; El Paso, Texas; Southern California, including the Los Angeles area; as well as Salt Lake City, Utah.
When it comes to water controversies concerning this water resource, there are different battles that are going on. One of the battles concerns how much water usage both the United States and Mexico get from the harnessing of the water of the Rio Grande River which borders both countries, as well as the Colorado River which is usually empty by the time it runs into the Gulf of California in Mexico; one battle is between the farmers who utilize this valuable resource and the environmentalists who claim that the damming of rivers is hindering the natural migration and mating patterns of salmon who move upstream, as well as harming other animal and bird habitats.
U.S.-Mexican Battles over Water Allocation
One of these battles is the tug of war for water rights between the United States and Mexico. This can be divided into water rights concerning the Colorado and the Rio Grande Rivers.
The Colorado River irrigates up the 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of farmland, and provides water for upwards of 30 million people in an area that includes parts of the United States and Mexico, with a vast majority of that water being used on the U.S. side, leaving very little left for our neighbors in Mexico. One of the problems is the fact that with the increased population and agricultural needs out west, agreements between states allowed for more water to be used than was available, meaning that the river was run dry. This means that no water was left for the Mexicans who would like to have some of that water as well, since that part of northern Mexico is also quite arid, creating a need on the other side of the border for that water resource.
Water allocation that comes from the Colorado River, as well as the Rio Grande River, is still today regulated by a treaty signed by the U.S. and Mexico way back in 1944. The Americans, under this treaty, allowed for agricultural runoff, wastewater from farmland use, to be redirected into Mexico, so that they could use it. The need by Mexico to clean up this water, to make it useful again, caused them to create the Cienega de Santa Clara wetland, between the north shores of the Gulf of California and the U.S.-Mexican border. Now the U.S. wants to redirect that water, and reuse it ourselves, so that Mexico doesn’t get that either. Under present renegotiations of this 1944 treaty, the U.S. has stopped sending even that wastewater to Mexico, to the Cienega, and is sending it to a desalinizing plant in Yuma, where after being cleaned up, will be sent along with other water to be used in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and San Diego. (listen to this audio documentary)
When it comes to the Rio Grande River, a river that serves as the border between the United States and Mexico, between Texas and four Mexican states (Chihuahua, Coahuila de Zaragoza, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas), the same treaty signed in 1944 determines water rights originating from it as the Colorado. Unfortunately, there has been a long period of drought in the drainage basin for this river, so after the water from the river is harnessed to be used for agricultural and residential purposes, there is literally no water left by the time the river reaches the Gulf of Mexico just east of Brownsville, Texas. Because of this, the needs for water by farmers on both sides of the border have gotten to the point that there is no less than an international standoff by those farmers. (read this article – it’s an old article, but still gets the point across)
The reason for the creation of the 1944 treaty between the United States and Mexico concerning water allocation of both the Colorado and Rio Grande Rivers has to do with the fact that the Colorado enters Mexico from the U.S. side, whereas the Rio Grande is primarily supplied by a tributary that comes from the mountains on the Mexican side. Mexico was keeping the water from the tributary, hindering American farmers along the lower Rio Grande from getting their proper water needs met, whereas the U.S. was keeping the water from the Colorado, hindering farmers in Mexico along the northern border by the Colorado from getting their proper water needs met. The treaty requires that the U.S. send a certain amount of water across the border in the Colorado for the Mexicans to use, and in return the Mexicans assure that a certain amount of water from its primary tributary reach the Rio Grande so that farmers on the American side can be assured of having water available to irrigate their farms along the Rio Grande Valley.
Human Water Use vs. Environmental Protections
On top of the fact that humans have been building dams in order to store water for their own use, including agricultural irrigation, there are environmentalist organizations out there that believe that the current state of things is actually harming the environment; that the wildlife habitats, including those of animals, birds, and fish, are being destroyed, as are their natural reproduction cycles, and so forth.
For example, the salmon tend to flow upstream when they want to reproduce, going from sea water or brine water to a place where there is freshwater in order to spawn. The juvenile fish then migrate back to the sea to live out their adulthoods. Even with fish ladders in place next to the dams, the population of salmon has significantly declined in the past century with all of our dam construction, destruction of spawning and growing habitats, and increased temperature of the water. Unfortunately, in places where a dam has been deconstructed, so that the river can run its natural course, experts have noticed that the salmon, free to move longer distances upstream, have seemed to have lost their natural migration instincts.
The dams also create reservoirs behind them, which, when formed, inundate previous river shorelines and some surrounding land, which destroys habitats for birds and other animals along those shorelines. Of course, with proper effort this problem can be remedied by recreating new habitat domains wherever the new shoreline is to be. Besides this, there is the fact that since the water isn’t allowed to run downstream, which helps keep the water cool, but stays in the reservoir behind the dam, where there is very little movement of the water, the water temperature increases to the point where it is too hot for salmon to survive. (read more about this issue)
Now let’s take a look at two cities in the Intermontane West.
Las Vegas
Las Vegas gets almost all of its water from Lake Mead, which exists behind the Hoover Dam, thirty or so miles away. In the last decade or so, Las Vegas’ water czar (yes – they do have one of those!) has put limits into how much water can be used by people and businesses in the city of Las Vegas. Part of the reason for the need to reduce their water usage is the fact that litigation by the neighboring state of Arizona has helped to create new policies that have given themselves more water rights at the expense of water rights for Nevada and California.
Since then, residents in the city have replaced their irrigated grass lawns with zeroscape lawns, which do not need any water for irrigation purposes. The city has even paid people to remove their grass lawns, since it is cheaper than finding new water sources. Even the golf courses have cut their use in half over the last twenty years or so . They now make sure to recapture all water used, to clean it and reuse it. All this has helped them reduce their water use by more than half (click here to read article).
Of course, they have to deal with drought issues effecting water supply levels in Lake Mead, the same drought issues that affect the rest of the Intermontane West.
Salt Lake City
So, how does Salt Lake City get its water supply? Like most of the Intermontane West, it is a fairly arid place. They do get some rain, but not a whole lot. It seems that for the most part, they get their water supply from water diverted from nearby rivers and streams, where it is stored in reservoirs. So, where does this water come from? If you look at a precipitation map, you’ll notice that northern Utah, on average, gets less than 10 inches of rain per year, although there does seem to be a great deal of precipitation in the winter months on the mountain ranges that are nearby the Wasatch Valley region where Salt Lake City is located. The melting of this mountain snow in the spring provides the runoff for filling the rivers and streams in the springtime, whose water gets diverted into reservoirs. Most of the runoff is accumulated from April to July, and the water is used most heavily in the months when agriculture is most active, that is, from May to September.
Of course, the snowstorms in the winter, as well as the rain from other times of the year (still less than winter snowstorms) help to recharge underground aquifers, allowing for people to get their water from wells if need be. And, the state of the underground aquifers can also determine how much water flows through the rivers and streams whose water gets diverted. In the case of a drought, where the ground is extremely dry, snow melt may never reach the rivers and streams, and thus the reservoirs, because it quickly leaches into the ground. This can be a problem for people who rely on water rights from reservoir water for their agricultural and residential needs.
Conclusion
There are some solutions to our water problems. We can, if we used enough of our time, energy and resources, provide for all of our water needs, both here in the U.S. as well as Mexico, while doing it in a way that doesn’t infringe upon the habitats of the creatures that reside close by that also rely on that water. So, how do we do this?
For starters, we could build desalinization plants in many places along our coastline, and, just to be good neighbors, do it along Mexico’s coastline for them to have their water needs met as well. Since two-thirds of the earth is covered by water, it seems that we have more water than we could ever use, as long as we take the salt and other minerals out of it. There are, of course, some quirks to be worked out in the engineering of such facilities, since these types of plants are still very expensive to operate, and since it seems to kill fish in the intake. This problem, along with the fact that these plants can be considered eyesores on coastlines has led environmentalists to decry the construction of these facilities as well. So, here’s a solution to that problem: put the plant farther inland, have the intake come from underground and underwater pipelines that are not visible from the surface, and put some kind of screens over the intake pipes so that fish don’t go through it. Of course, couldn’t they be designed architecturally to be beautiful to the eyes?
As for the damming of rivers like the Columbia and the Rio Grande, and the fact that this damming hinders fish migration and spawning patterns, as well as destroying bird and animal habitats, there is a solution to this as well. Why not create reservoirs that are away from the actual rivers, rather than create reservoirs on the actual rivers? With proper water redirection techniques, we could, at intervals along these rivers, move a portion of the water from those rivers to reservoirs off-river. We could still allow the river to run its proper course, unhindered, at a lower volume, of course, while at the same time allowing us to take care of our agricultural and urban water needs. It may still even allow us to have flood control, although it may hinder us from using that water for hydroelectric purposes, unless planned right, which would take even more engineering. And, in the process of creating reservoirs, we can do impact studies, so that we know what habitats we are destroying, and reconstruct those habitats on the new banks of the reservoir during the inundation process; in fact, we may, in the process, be creating new habitats that attract animals and birds that were previously not present, thus improving on nature (although some would disagree with that perspective).
In fact, there is technology available to us these days that extract moisture from the air’s natural humidity, allowing us to get usable water through that means (check out Skywater here, check out this article from Triple Pundit). It works similar to the process of a dehumidifier. You may have heard about this technology on NPR, as well as heard radio commercials on other radio stations. This technology could also help to solve our water problems in the Intermontane West region. Of course, perhaps environmentalists will try to stop this technology, claiming that it will change meteorological patterns for the worse (Who knows?).
So, how can the Las Vegas and the Salt Lake City metro areas deal with future water shortages from droughts? They could build desalinization plants along the Great Salt Lake, using that water, which would probably quickly dry up, since it has been doing so for a long time now. They could build canals bringing seawater inward from the Gulf of California, or the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, to desalinization plants nearby both cities, clean that water up, and use that. Or, they could use new technology available these days that allows them to extract water from the moisture in the air. They could also approach this issue from the other perspective, and develop ways to use less water, like they have in the city of Las Vegas.
Anyways, these are some of the water controversies in the arid Intermontane West region of the United States, and the implications for both sides. Do keep in mind that there are always solutions to all of the problems that we humans face, as long as we use our minds, and then act on those solutions.
Read about a proposal for a water redistribution network that would benefit the Intermontane West.
