As we ricochet from headline to headline, we may miss the threats not screaming for attention. It’s easy to spot a cracked window after a storm, but it’s harder to catch the slow trickle of a leaking pipe. And speaking of perilous trickles, at a recent Santa Monica Sustainability Commission meeting, Mark Gold, was sounding Cassandra-like warnings about the Colorado River.
For those who don’t know Gold, he’s the razor-sharp former (and founding) chair of the commission (for 28 years) and now the Santa Monica representative on the Metropolitan Water District for Southern California Board of Directors. And for those who don’t know about the Colorado River crisis, seven Western states are battling over their rightful share of the dwindling supply of water.
“It’s not a matter of if there’s a disaster,” said Gold, who has a doctorate in environmental sciences and engineering from UCLA. “It’s the scope and scale of the disaster that’s the question.”
More than sixty million people rely on water from the Colorado, stored mostly in the Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs. Gold spoke ominously about the prospect of “deadpool.” and he wasn’t referring to a comic-book mutant.
It turns out that deadpool is the term for when the level of water in reservoirs is too low to provide water to cities. If there were a Hollywood take on the precarious situation, it would be more “Chinatown” than the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
There’s also something called “power pool,” which is slightly better than deadpool, because there’s still enough supply to distribute water but not enough to generate electricity. In March, Lake Powell water levels were four feet from power pool—and dropping a foot a week.
In April, the federal government stepped in to shore up the reservoir by utilizing some of the nation’s reserves and also by reducing the amount of water flowing from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. Gold estimates this will only buy Lake Powell about another year before it’s back in the same situation. It also means that the deterioration of Lake Mead has been accelerated, and Lake Mead is where Californians get their water.
“This isn’t what’s going to happen in 2050,” Gold said of the potential catastrophe. “This is what will happen in one to two years without dramatic changes.” But those changes require compromises by the seven states involved, and so far they’re refusing. “Everyone’s acting in their own self-interest.”
The water rights are based on the 1922 Colorado River Compact, a century-old agreement between California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The agreement was based on “first in time, first in right,” meaning the first entity to use the water for a “beneficial” use gets priority rights to it, and their rights are guaranteed.
Fortunately for California, large-scale farming was already thriving by 1922, so California was granted the most senior rights and has used much more water than the other six states over the past hundred years. But California’s also now engaging in more conservation and insists it’s someone else’s turn. However, states that squandered less water in the first place feel they’re entitled to continue doing so.
“Their argument is you got yours, and we should be allowed to screw up the environment too,” Gold said with disgust. “As someone who’s dealt with this my whole life, I’ve always wondered where the threshold is, and there’s no threshold on stupidity.”
But it’s not just political leaders who deserve the blame. Seventy-five percent of the river’s water is used for agriculture, so no matter how much California residents conserve through low-flow toilets and drought-tolerant plants, there’s limited impact when there are farmers using flood irrigation methods on desert land.
The problem is the price for that water was also established about a century ago at roughly 25 cents per acre foot—and the price hasn’t changed. In today’s economy the water is basically free.
“If the cost of the resource is zero, there’s no reason to use it wisely,” Gold said.
He has proposed placing a modest surcharge on the water to pay for operations and system maintenance, as well as for efforts at water recycling and storm water capture. However, there’s little appetite for such action by the state or federal administration.
“We should just call it a tariff,” Gold quipped.
The good news is that in Southern California we have record levels of water reserves this year as well as access to multiple sources of electricity, which should protect us from supply shock, if not sticker shock, and in Santa Monica we're working towards water self-sufficiency. So that gives us a little breathing room.
But before we get too comfortable, Gold sounded one last alarm: the physical infrastructure for our water supply traverses multiple times across the San Andreas Fault.
Devan Sipher can be reached at Devan@smdp.com.