Cover Story: A Fight over Liquid Gold

By Paul Gray

The Colorado River begins high above the tree lines, amid the glaciers and snowpack on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. Icy rivulets collect and drip into streams, trickling and then plunging downward. In the peaks of eastern Utah, where the Green River hurtles south from Wyoming to meet the Upper Colorado, the water starts getting serious. It wants to reach sea level -- in this case the Gulf of California, some thousand miles to the southwest -- and nothing natural has ever managed to stand in its way. In its slashing, headlong rush, the Colorado gouged out a pretty impressive piece of sculpture known as the Grand Canyon. The river has been running in this rut for 5 million or 6 million years.

In the past half-century this mountain-moving, gorge-cutting force of nature has been tamed by a spectacular system of dams and reservoirs. Today the domesticated Colorado dispenses water for 20 million people in seven states and for 2 million acres of farmland. The river's urgent yen for the sea, held in check by 10 major dams, generates 12 million kW of electricity a year. Stretches of the river remain as they once were and provide habitats for fish, birds and wildlife, including a number of endangered species. People come here to play. Six national parks and recreation areas along the Colorado's shores support a multimillion-dollar recreation industry of boating, hiking, fishing and whitewater rafting.

Life in much of the American West would be unimaginable in its present form without the Colorado. Those cascading fountains adorning Las Vegas casinos? Take away the river's largesse, and there would be tumbleweed blowing along an abandoned Strip. San Diego could turn into a very thirsty place should something go wrong with the river: almost 70% of the water its citizens use every day is piped in from the Colorado. And what of California's Imperial Valley, which grows a major portion of the nation's vegetables? Goodbye Colorado River, hello cactus and mesquite.

But while the West has bloomed on the river's bounty, exploding populations and a prolonged drought have had an ominous effect on the Colorado itself. The river that used to surge into the Gulf of California, depositing ruddy-colored silt that fanned out into a broad delta of new land at its mouth, hardly ever makes it to the sea anymore. The once mighty Colorado fizzles into a trickle, its last traces evaporating in the heat of the Mexican desert.

"The Colorado is not in good shape," says Norris Hundley Jr., a historian at UCLA. "It essentially exists in a straitjacket." Last April the Arizona stretch of the Colorado was named "the most endangered river of 1991" by American Rivers, a Washington-based conservation group. A prolonged drought in the U.S. Southwest, now in its fifth year, has dealt the Colorado a double whammy. Less snow to melt at its sources means less water coursing downriver; reduced rainfall elsewhere means even greater demands on the diminished flow.

The recognition that the river is a finite resource has been slow to dawn in the West, where rugged individualists have traditionally cocked a snoot at natural restrictions, rolled up their sleeves and hacked or drilled the world of their dreams out of the wilderness. Something in the Western temperament strives mightily to deny that much of the region is a desert -- witness the tropical extravagance of Beverly Hills, the emerald golf courses of Palm Springs, the ubiquitous swimming pools throughout the West.

The Colorado has always been a source of contention, but the current problems surrounding it are prompting more alarm than ever before. Plans are being made for an unprecedented summit conference in November of the Governors from the seven states served by the Colorado. And almost certain to come up, whether or not it is on the official agenda, is the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the agreement that divvied up the water among the Upper Basin states -- Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico -- and those in the Lower Basin -- California, Nevada and Arizona.

This crucial document facilitated both the astonishing development of the West and the problems that followed as a result. Originally the compact looked like simplicity itself. The Upper and Lower Basins would each receive 7.5 million acre-feet annually. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land to a depth of 12 in., approximately 325,000 gal. That is enough to fulfill the needs of a family of four or five people for one year.) A 1944 treaty guaranteed an additional 1.5 million acre-feet to Mexico. All fine and dandy, except for one thing: the Colorado's output was grossly overestimated. Instead of the 16.9 million acre-feet estimated to be there for the dividing, the river has been flowing at a rate of only 14.9 million; during the present drought, that figure has dropped to about 9 million acre- feet a year.

Even the possibility that the 1922 compact might be revised raises hackles in all seven states. Already, fierce controversies over the Colorado are swirling in courts and legislatures. When there is no longer enough of a vital resource to go around, who is entitled to what portion and why? Says California Congressman George Miller: "The heart of the West is water. It's about winners and losers, the future and the past. It's about economics. It will be the most important commodity in dictating the future. It's the most serious confrontation that the West has engaged in in 100 years."

The combatants in this latest version of the West's long tug-of-war over water are more numerous and clamorous than ever. The four Upper Basin states have always regarded the three in the Lower Basin with a gimlet eye. The upper states have never used all the water allotted to them; the surplus could be, and often was, picked up by the lower states -- mostly California. No one minded as long as the river seemed inexhaustible; now the upper states fret that the lower states have grown accustomed to -- and have prospered on -- more than their fair share. Across the region and within each state, powerful interests have staked out claims to the river's overallocated waters:

FARMERS. Agriculture has traditionally been the biggest beneficiary of the Colorado's water, receiving some 80% of the river's allocated yield. This is chiefly because the farmers and ranchers got there first. A central tenet of Western water law -- a fiendishly complex body of statutes and precedents -- is the concept of "first in time, first in right." Whoever was initially granted a legal claim to water tended to keep it and, all other things being equal, to pass it down to descendants.

Furthermore, farmers have been favored not only in how much water they get but also in how much they pay for it. Much of the water available from the Colorado has been produced by federal reclamation projects such as the Hoover Dam, and the government, to encourage agricultural development, has made this supply available to farmers at low cost. This practice has led to wild pricing disparities; some farmers in Colorado get their water for $400 an acre-foot, one-twentieth the amount it costs neighboring municipalities.

This generosity in a time of shortage is now under attack. On the one hand, critics are pointing out the often wasteful uses of water employed by Western farmers: the practice of irrigating fields by flooding them, thus allowing much of the water to run off the fields or bake off in the heat; the production of "thirsty" crops like rice and cotton in areas only inches of water away from being desert.

On the other hand, some farmers, especially in the Upper Basin, and some ranchers have succumbed to the repeated temptations to sell some or all of their water rights to parched urban areas. Whether similar water marketing should be permitted across state lines is a matter of fierce debate. Some experts estimate that Colorado could reap $140 million in new revenues if the deal goes through. But the sale of agricultural water rights could cause many farming communities to dry up and vanish.

If large-scale transfers of Colorado River water rights become a reality, the experience of Crowley County in eastern Colorado could become a somber indicator of the future. Starting in the 1970s, farmers along the Arkansas River, a separate system from the Colorado, began selling their water rights to the mushrooming cities of Colorado Springs and Aurora. Prices soon soared to more than $700 an acre-foot. Now what used to be 70,000 acres of irrigated land has shrunk to 5,000 acres, and the closing of dozens of farms has wrecked the local tax base. "We're drifting back to dry-land desert," says farmer Orville Tomky, who has farmed in the county for 40 years. "Everything is slowly drying up. The cities have bought nearly all the water in the county. Maybe we'll just default and be taken over by the state."

CITIES. Like the rest of the nation, the Southwest has been growing increasingly urban. What were only recently one-horse outposts now exfoliate for miles into the blazing environs, their citizens housed in air-conditioned comfort and assuming plentiful water as a God-given right. Among the seven states served by the Colorado River, California has become the 800-lb. gorilla at all negotiations, its cities expanding, their thirst apparently unquenchable. The Old West here comes into direct conflict with the New: the leathery rancher in Wyoming with his herd to water vs. the condo-dwelling Sybarite in Laguna Beach with a Porsche to wash and two hot tubs to keep filled. The Metropolitan Water District, responsible for finding water for the cities of Southern California, is widely regarded by competing parties with fear and suspicion. Says Jerry Zimmerman, executive director of the Colorado River Board of California: "California is being accused of utilizing other states' water and attempting to continue to use water that other states may need at some future time."

The battle over the Colorado's waters has grown even more frenzied because of the five-year drought. So far, California has been able to cope with water % shortages, which have been exacerbated even further by its booming population, by siphoning off the unused portion of the Upper Basin states' allocation from the river and encouraging conservation.

But the time when such halfway measures will no longer suffice is rapidly approaching. For the first time last year, Arizona started taking much of its share of river water for fast-growing Phoenix and Tucson, leaving its larger neighbor to face the possibility of a short supply. Within California, farmers have become alarmed at the possibility that the water they need for irrigation may be diverted to the cities. Says John Pierre Menvielle, a third-generation farmer in Calexico, on the southern edge of the Imperial Valley: "People in Los Angeles and the coastal plain say, 'You guys are wasting water. We ought to get it from you.' They're overbuilding, they're out of control. They want us to put limits on what we're doing. Where's their limits?"

UTILITIES. The era of stringing huge dams along the Colorado peaked during the '30s and '40s and is long gone. And the relatively cheap hydroelectricity -- and handsome profits -- generated by existing facilities is now being weighed, and found wanting, in the light of other concerns. One long-running dispute concerns the Western Area Power Administration's operations at the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, just above the Grand Canyon. The agency releases huge amounts of water through giant turbines to meet peak power demands in places as far away as Phoenix. These dramatic surges of water create artificial "tides" that, environmentalists complain, erode the sandy shoals along the river's banks and damage breeding grounds for fish and waterfowl.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS AND RECREATIONALISTS. Both groups were in shorter supply when the Colorado was being harnessed than they are today, and their concerns often diverge. A recreationalist's dream -- a motorboat rally on Lake Havasu, with plenty of beer -- is a nature lover's nightmare. But some vacationers come to the river merely to hike or look at wildlife, and they are as likely to be disturbed by the encroachments of civilization and mechanized control as are the environmentalists. Says Darrell Knuffke, the Central Rockies regional director of the Wilderness Society: "As the river has been divided, subdivided, ditched, dammed and diverted, everyone's interests except the land's have been considered." How can a river nourish a vast area and still remain true to its pristine past?

NATIVE AMERICANS. "The Indians are the giant 'What if?' on the river," says Boulder lawyer John Musick, who specializes in water issues. "They have time and the law on their side. They have a solid case, and they're dead serious. It's like a huge bill finally coming due." Because of treaties and agreements between their tribes and the Federal Government, Native Americans living on reservations along the Colorado River have, in many instances, claims on water that date back to the mid-1800s. Thanks to the first-in-time concept, they are often the senior owners of river rights, and they have begun making their case vigorously in courtrooms. Combined, the Native American claims amount to a sizable chunk of the Colorado's annual flow. While few observers expect all these claims to be upheld, the lengthy period during which tribal rights were conveniently bypassed or ignored by the white settlers seems over for good.

MEXICO. The Colorado has long been a prickly subject between the U.S. and its neighbor, and at the moment tempers south of the border are steaming again. The current flash point is Southern California's plan to line with concrete the All-American Canal, which carries water to the Imperial Valley, to save 106,000 acre-feet that seep uselessly into the ground beneath the canal each year. On the one hand, this is an ambitious project in water conservation; on the other, Mexican officials say the loss of seepage will deplete the underground water supply around Mexicali.

To make up for this loss, some feel a fair exchange would be to compensate Mexico for the lost share of river water. So far, the U.S. insists it is living up to its legal obligations and that no increase is called for. But this attitude could affect U.S.-Mexican relations on other matters requiring cooperation, including curbing drug smuggling and illegal immigration as well as a proposed U.S.-Mexico free-trade treaty. Warns Al Utton, director of the International Transboundary Resource Center at the University of New Mexico: "It does not make sense at this point for the U.S. to stand on the letter of the law. If we think only of ourselves on this, we may encounter Mexico thinking only of itself on other issues."

Further complicating these disputes is the changing attitude in Washington toward Western water. The federal Bureau of Reclamation was principally responsible for the development of the Colorado; it planned and engineered the % big building projects, all funded by congressional appropriations. Critics say the bureau has become an anachronism, no longer able to manage the Colorado and its myriad problems. "They're a bunch of dam builders," says former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt, "and there aren't any dams to build. They have been unable to adjust to the new reality."

In addition, legislators with an eye on the government's mounting deficit are taking stock of the huge federal subsidies -- amounting to billions of dollars -- flowing west to farmers for Colorado River water. Says California's Congressman Miller: "The drought and deficit have caused people from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York to reassess supporting a bad habit."

No longer are top seats on powerful congressional interior committees filled by "water buffaloes" -- members of the Western water establishment willing to approve and support massive development projects. They have been supplanted by lawmakers like Bill Bradley of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate's Water and Power Subcommittee, who are both cost conscious and sensitive to environmental and ecological issues. Says David Getches, a law professor at the University of Colorado: "There's a revolution in the way the U.S. Congress looks at water."

However this revolution is played out, both in Washington and along the Colorado, everyone who depends on the river is likely to feel some pain. Every adjustment made to please one group will inevitably have unpleasant consequences for the others. Farmers and city dwellers cannot possibly both be satisfied. Environmentalists and Native Americans, allies on many issues, split over the Colorado: the tribes want more development on their reservations, the environmentalists less. Water conservation that is good for California turns out to be bad for Mexico. Babbitt calls the development of the Colorado an "extraordinary achievement" but argues that the very success of this plan spawned the myth "that there is more water over the next hill. But there is no more water over the next hill."

Behind all the arguments, the claims and counterclaims, is the river itself, a glistening thread winding through some of the most spectacular and forbidding terrain in North America. Nobody ever toted a barge or lifted a bale on the Colorado; it is not that kind of river. Its gift to its surroundings has been not transportation and commerce but life itself. There is no more urgent task for the West than ensuring that the Colorado survives.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Richard Woodbury/Denver