Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, or Here Comes the Rain Again…

The World of Wet

You are now water blogged : )

California is the Golden State – now it is Green; 12 Atmospheric Rivers have flowed though since January 1, 2023 - after an historic drought.

Months of precipitation have not only thoroughly saturated soils, the once mighty Colorado River - it carved the Grand Canyon – is now stabilized as a result of a gargantuan volume of rain and snow. But, several high-precipitation years in a row are necessary to start refilling California’s reservoirs to any consequential level.

This is important, there are more than 40 million people throughout the southwestern United States and northern Mexico depending on the Colorado’s water. The 15 dams on the river have capacity to hold four to five times the river’s annual flow, generating hydroelectricity and supplying irrigation for America’s multi-billion dollar agricultural breadbasket – which uses more than 70% of the Colorado’s water - and municipal water for large cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver and Phoenix, as well as many more small cities.

And in 30 years, the number of people is projected to have almost doubled.

A century of water management policies and practices promoting wasteful water use have put the Colorado River, no longer even a shadow of itself, at a critical crossroads. The days of dam and aqueduct building are done, there is simply no more water left – the Colorado River has become endangered.

From a water user’s perspective this is the important part of story. The last 15 years of drought have virtually emptied what is in storage, reservoirs are barely higher than 50 percent empty on average; Lake Mead is at 28 percent. And the Colorado River once reached the sea. Now it does not, drying up some 75 to 100 miles short, disrupting the former riparian ecosystem of cottonwood and willows that evolved along with big spring and summer floods that were reality of the once-vast wetlands - approximately 2 million acres - in Baja California, that were a valuable carbon sink.

With climate change promising to make water an even scarcer commodity it is essential that water-management plans in the West take the health of the river and the ecosystems it supports into account.

The question is, with the Doctrine of Prior Appropriations in place how can anyone within the constraints of this system, build policies and programs, as well as investments and infrastructure, that meet 21st century needs?

The health of the Colorado river is key; water is everything to everyone who lives in the West. We are in this together; we are going to need to find ways to work through each of the challenges with a sustainable, equitable and just vision.

And we all need to keep the long-term trend toward aridification in the forefront of our minds, whether we are directly or indirectly involved in how this system is governed.

In closing, Annie Lennox closes with “Falling on my head like a memory…”

BJ Thomas gets it “The blues they send to meet me won’t defeat me…”

Sharon