ERMUSR MISC ISSUES 07-06-2004 - Laserfiche WebLink

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• MEADOR from AA1 A15-year ianrights—takewhatyouwantfrom a stream along your property,as long as you don't keep your downstream drought may neighbors from meeting their needs. In the West,where water is scarce,the be optimistic governing principle is prior appropri- ation whoever grabs the water first acquires a right to grab just as much It is vindication for environmen- forever (and to sell some portion of talists who fought the dam as a sense- it to distant bidders, which is how less destruction of a place so beautiful a Colorado miner's water ends up it might have become a national mon- misting a golf course in Scottsdale). ument if not for Grand Canyon, just When there isn't enough water to go downstream. And it is sobering for around, rightsholders share the pain those who count on the dam's tur- not on the basis of need,but in reverse bines for electricity that supplies a order of seniority. million households; if the drought To waste water, in the East, is to lasts three more years,there may not let a leaky toilet run and run. In the he enough water to make watts. West, it is to leave water in a stream- Meanwhile, efforts to reverse the bed,undiverted;under the use-it-or- dam's insults to Grand Canyon are lose-it rule, water rights that aren't constrained by Lake Powell's decline. exercised can be challenged and lost. The canyon's ecosystem depended Thus the extraordinarily wasteful irri- on a Colorado River that surged in gation practices in the Central Valley the spring with boulder-flinging vio- of California,a state where 85 percent lence and then subsided to a warm, of the water goes to agriculture;thus silt-brown laziness. Now the dam the cities, like Sacramento, that ban delivers a flow that is clear, cold and water metering by city charter.Thus steady.Among the results:Four of the a"reservoir" like Lake Powell, which canyon's eight fish species have disap- evaporates more water than it deliv- peared;water-hogging tamarisk scrub ers to L.A.taps. is driving out native vegetation;bout- After the last long drought in the ders are building up in the river;sand West, in the 1980s, there were some beaches are shrinking, exposing an- minor moves toward reform.But then cient Indian structures to ruin. the clouds burst,and kept bursting for By congressional directive, the several years,and everybody could go dam's operators have been trying back to sleep. for eight years to release water in This time around, it's anybody's some semblance of a natural cycle. guess when conditions might return It hasn't worked out. The dam can't to"normal."Bennett Raley,the Interi- spill enough water to create the four- or Department's top official on water fold increases in flow that were typical policy, observed at a recent meeting on the Colorado in springtime; what of the Colorado River Compact states surges it can manage are deficient in that"we don't know whether we're in beach-replenishing silt, which stays the fifth year of a five-year drought or backed up in Glen Canyon (and, by the fifth year of a I5-year drought." some forecasts, may fill Lake Powell Both alternatives could prove op- within 100 years). timistic. Some scientists say recent Powell's current problems are dra- studies of tree rings and other cli- matic but also typical of Western ap- mate indicators suggest the West has proach to water management that has begun a dry spell that could last,say, never been sustainable, nor even es- 800 years. pecially rational. Consider:In the East,where water Ron Meador,an editorial writer,is at is plentiful, its use is subject to ripar- nneador @startrlbune.com.