Seven States Deadline Tuesday

J

Jr B

Active Member
Jr B said:
Interesting read on the continued negotiations across the states on the river basin which looks like this will end up in the courts deciding the water management of Lake Powel:

www.denverpost.com

Amid ‘a transparency desert,’ states look likely to blow past Colorado River deadline. What’s next?

“It’s easy to weigh in from the sidelines,” a legal observer says. “But I think what’s not being talked about is the real lives that are going to be implicated — you’r…
www.denverpost.com www.denverpost.com
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Looks like an advertisement for a Denver Post subscription. That's all my browser will open.
 
Sadly, it looks like with no agreement the laws will likely end up with California being given the full allocation of their water rights and that means the upstream states will lose. It is very unlikely that the feds and Supreme Court will upend the historical water rights. At least that is my take on how things are going. We hope for something different, but we're not seeing that at the moment. We also hope for change coming that improves things for everyone or at least a large majority of concerned peoples (of all types) and also the wildlife and plantlife and scenery and ...
 
Dr. Love said:
Looks like an advertisement for a Denver Post subscription. That's all my browser will open.
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Tried to save as PDF but these newspapers make it difficult to cut and paste or print in PDF in smaller file format to upload... Hopefully you can google other sources and get the update..
 
flowerbug said:
Sadly, it looks like with no agreement the laws will likely end up with California being given the full allocation of their water rights and that means the upstream states will lose. It is very unlikely that the feds and Supreme Court will upend the historical water rights. At least that is my take on how things are going. We hope for something different, but we're not seeing that at the moment. We also hope for change coming that improves things for everyone or at least a large majority of concerned peoples (of all types) and also the wildlife and plantlife and scenery and ...
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Hopefully we start to get some snow or nobody is getting their full allocation soon. The current situation is bleak. I read somewhere that we are very close to the lowest snowpack ever recorded for this time of year. At least its early but we really need some storms.

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flowerbug said:
It is very unlikely that the feds and Supreme Court will upend the historical water rights. At least that is my take on how things are going.
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Why do you feel that way? My understanding is that the current administration does not like California and wouldn't mind hurting California if given the opportunity.
 
Ryan said:
The way I read it, the one time the feds got involved before (2002) it still ended up in court.
View attachment 34417
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Note that that deal was rather horrible for the Salton Sea (as no promised water to make up for what has been lost has ever arrived).


The lack of any progress on that issue is putting the various parties to that area on the hook for potentially billions of dollars in remediation costs (see what they've had to pay for Owens Lake).
 
It really does seem like the only way we're going to learn our lesson about carefully managing and conserving our limited water resources (if we learn that lesson at all instead of continuing to shove our heads deeper in the sand to avoid uncomfortable truths) will be the hard, painful way.

I'm personally not looking forward to my seat on this wild ride, but here we are.
 
Cheef Baconator said:
It really does seem like the only way we're going to learn our lesson about carefully managing and conserving our limited water resources (if we learn that lesson at all instead of continuing to shove our heads deeper in the sand to avoid uncomfortable truths) will be the hard, painful way.

I'm personally not looking forward to my seat on this wild ride, but here we are.
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I couldn’t agree more. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”

The river is now and has always been over allocated. BOR can’t give more than they have. It’s going to get real now that these shortages against promised deliveries are seemingly the new reality which should force some type of reallocation. (maybe partially based on actual inflow) But it’s going to be a knife fight between the states and it could take years. Lake Powell may not have that long

I think that if it really comes down to it that until laws change or the government takes over under emergency powers of some kind that BOR would have no choice but to send every drop they can down to Mead. Mead can’t deliver water downstream other than through its turbines. (It does not have internal bypass tunnels like GCD) So it must be kept above dead-pool or nobody gets any water down stream. If ever we are releasing water through our internal bypass tunnels here at Powell with the lake below dead power pool that would be a hard new reality to get used to, a nightmare scenario. Of course a couple of years of good inflow would be a game changer but then that just allows everyone to keep kicking the can down the road and gives the states time to litigate for years more.

I was at Lake Powell in June of 1983 and stood in the visitors center where they had roped off 10 feet back from the windows. I think they were afraid they might explode, you could see them flexing a bit. The spillways and bypass tunnels were wide open. The floor of the building was vibrabriting and you could feel it in your knees, there was a resonance, a dull roar you could feel. The power of all that excess water dropping was truly awesome to see, I will never forget it! I was 15 years old and It’s hard to imagine that some 40 years on we have the exact opposite problem, not enough water behind the dam. It’s hard to get my mind around just how different things are now.


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Marina Bum said:
I couldn’t agree more. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”

The river is now and has always been over allocated. BOR can’t give more than they have. It’s going to get real now that these shortages against promised deliveries is the new reality which should force some type of reallocation (maybe partially based on actual inflow) but it’s going to be a knife fight between the states and it could take years. Lake Powell may not have that long.

I think that if it really comes down to it that until laws change or the government takes over under emergency powers of some kind that BOR would have no choice but to send every drop they can down to Mead. Mead can’t deliver water downstream other than through its turbines. (It does not have internal bypass tunnels like GCD) So it must be kept above dead-pool or nobody gets any water down stream. If ever we are releasing water through our internal bypass tunnels here at Powell with the lake below dead power pool that would be a hard new reality to get used to, a nightmare scenario. Of course a couple of years of good inflow would be a game changer but then that just allows everyone to keep kicking the can down the road and gives the states time to litigate for years more.

I was at Lake Powell in June of 1983 and stood in the visitors center where they had roped off 10 feet back from the windows. The spillways and bypass tunnels were wide open. The floor of the building was vibrabriting and you could feel it in your knees, there was a resonance, a dull roar you could feel. The power of all that excess water dropping was truly awesome to see, I will never forget it! I was 15 years old and It’s hard to imagine the some 40 years on we have the exact opposite problem, not enough water behind the dam. It’s hard to get my mind around just how different things are
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Marina Bum, you are making me feel old I was at the Visitors Center and feeling the floor vibrate. I was 32 then. What a change from today.
 
Marina Bum said:
Of course a couple of years of good inflow would be a game changer but then that just allows everyone to keep kicking the can down the road and gives the states time to litigate for years more.
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This in particular is what keeps driving me up the wall.

"We had a not as far below average water year, let's build 5 more golf courses and export 3 million more units of alfalfa to celebrate!"

It makes part of me wish for bad water years, as terrible as that sounds, to push things along to the part where the kid touches the stove, gets burned, and learns their lesson.
 
It's like they don't even care...

Read a snippet about a change the Indian nation made to make the rive an individual person or something.
 
Phillbo said:
It's like they don't even care...

Read a snippet about a change the Indian nation made to make the rive an individual person or something.
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Allocation of water in the west is fraught with all sorts of twists and turns. The city of Rio Rancho in New Mexico purchased Rio Grande surface water rights that they would retire and transfer into ground water. In New Mexico, if you purchase 1000 acre feet of surface water, that translates into 500 acre feet of ground water. But Sandia Pueblo sued. Why? The water rights Rio Rancho purchased were south of the city and the Pueblo. The city wells are north of the Pueblo. Sandia claimed that the increased pumping would perturb their ceremonial flows in the Rio Grande. And they won. The ruling may have implications for water rights across the west. There is no certain amount of water claimed. And they did not have to show how much the river might be reduced by the increased groundwater usage. These are not “normal” Winter’s Doctrine rights - this is something entirely new. Judge rules against Rio Rancho in Pueblo of Sandia water rights case
 
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