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Cliven Bundy, the rancher who refuses to recognize the federal government, held a rally near his land in Nevada in April. The three-day rally drew about 150 people and celebrated last April's "stand-down," when armed militia and protesters halted a Bureau of Land Management effort to round up Bundy's trespassing cattle. Bundy has since become a celebrity for extremists. At his rally, we met ex-cops, ex-firefighters, ex-military, a roofer, a tattoo artist, a mom-turned-Constitutionalist. Joe O'Shaughnessy, the leader of an Arizona militia who was part of a "security detail" to protect Bundy last year, told HCN that his Facebook group membership has skyrocketed over the last 12 months. "It's out of control," he said. As for Bundy, he told HCN he is unsure the government will ever take action against him: "The question is, who's the criminal? Is Cliven Bundy the criminal, or is the federal government and their bureaucrats the criminal?"
-Tay Wiles
24 million acres covered in the original Northwest Forest Plan, in Washington, Oregon and California.
2.5 million acres in western Oregon covered in new BLM plans expected to allow more logging.
The Northwest Forest Plan was supposed to mark an end to the timber wars that crippled the region's economy in the 1990s. Now, the plan might be unraveling. This spring, the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service will revisit the plan, with an aim to replace it by 2019. At a Forest Service "listening session" in Portland in March, activists complained too many trees are already allowed to be cut. Industry advocates, meanwhile, say they've never gotten to harvest all the board-feet promised under the original plan. A new plan seems as unlikely as the old to settle the long-simmering conflict over Pacific Northwest forests.
-Paul Koberstein
A team of economists at the University of Wyoming has released a study that shows how much Wyoming depends on coal. The industry accounts for 14 percent of the state's economy and 6 percent of its employment. And it's in decline. Natural gas and renewables are taking a bite, as are the increased costs of deeper mining in the Powder River Basin. That could add up to a 20 percent cut in production by 2030. And while some scenarios are grimmer than others, Wyoming will have to look to other sectors, like agriculture and tourism, to make up the loss.
-Kindra McQuillan
The EPA's Clean Power Plan proposal would mandate a 30 percent reduction in CO2 from 2005 levels. Simulations were run without energy efficiency measures by users, where the coal industry would carry the costs, or with energy efficiency measures, which would effectively distribute costs more broadly across the economy. Simulations were mixed with potential in national markets only and in regional markets for coal, where more demand exists but where export is proving difficult.
The EIA simulations are based on greenhouse gas taxes of different levels, each with an annual 5 percent increase, with anticipated natural gas production and with lower natural gas prices, which would come from higher production. All of these scenarios make coal more expensive and natural gas more attractive.
The percent decline expected in the Custer County, Idaho, budget if Congress lets the Secure Rural Schools Act, which compensates counties for federal land ownership, expire in October.
-Sarah Tory
The short answer: not yet. But we should be thinking about long-term drought and how to use water more wisely. HCN recently sat down with four experts in water, climate and the economy, for an hour-long Soundtable livestream. In the future, dry regions will be drier, and that means a lot of the arid West will have to rethink how it manages water.
-Brian Calvert
The Forest Service says it will try to reinstate an exemption to Colorado's roadless rule, to allow coal mines to build roads in a protected area. The exemption was struck down last year by a federal judge, who said the government failed to assess the impact of future coal mining on the climate. Agency officials will now try to calculate greenhouse gas impacts from extracting coal and using it to generate electricity. But they aren't sure how to do so. Jim Bedwell, the agency's Rocky Mountain region director of recreation, lands and minerals, tells HCN: "That's all very much evolving."
-Elizabeth Shogren
You say:
Dina Roberts:
"Leave the coal in the ground and let the forests soak up the carbon we are already emitting. The Forest Service should recognize its mission is changing."
John Wrede:
"Not only no, but heck no. Leave our elk pastures alone!"
Nancy Lee Kaminski:
"Roads are the beginning of the end for our majestic wildlands! If the GOP ever really created 'jobs, jobs, jobs,' the extractive industries would not be able to destroy our natural world with claims of 'jobs, jobs, jobs.' "
The desert community of Borrego Springs, California, was established many decades ago on the assumption that its underground aquifer would never run dry. The town has been overdrafting for decades, and has no other sources to tap. Now, local stakeholders are coming to terms with their water problem and have vowed to stop overdrafting within 20 years. In this video, get an inside look at how locals are responding.
For more videos in this series, see Worth of Water.]]>
When Trotter began documenting the Colorado River 13 years ago, he was still recovering from a 1997 traumatic brain injury, which continues to affect his life today. That recovery became part of the inspiration for photographing the Delta. We spoke with Trotter about his impressions of the recent water releases and what the ongoing story of the Colorado River Delta means to him.
I kind of wanted to do something that was bigger than my own experience. I read a High Country News article (on the Delta) by Michelle Nijhuis in 2000. I knew about Colorado River politics, I'd read Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desert, but that HCN story humanized it for me. The Colorado River is so important to the whole equation of civilization. I taught Spanish to myself on some CDs and I got it together to go down to Mexico. I thought, 'However I want to figure out this river, it seems like the best place to go is down there where it stops.'
It wasn't a real conscious plan. But the very first day of the project in 2001 was on the four-year anniversary of my attack. I just felt like every year (after the 1997 incident) was traumatic whenever that day would come around. I felt like the best thing I could do would be to be photographing.
I didn't have an assignment. I knew this thing was going to happen and suddenly the next thing I know, the pulse release is going to be within a matter of weeks. I said, 'God, this may be a once in a lifetime thing.' You can't really know yet.
I think the science about it is pretty interesting – trying to figure out just how wide the water was going to spread through the channel, how deep, and the rate. That's interesting, but to me it's also about these people who live down there. I've always thought the experience of the river down there is so different from how people experience it in Las Vegas (and other places in the U.S.). Here's this dry river channel that is just sort of there; the younger people had never seen water go through there.
There were pretty unpopulated areas where the river was going. It wasn't easy to get there. Sometimes, I'd get the best information I could and then I'd go out looking for the river. No one really knew how fast it was going to be moving. I remember going to one place for three days in a row, and there was just no river. But on the third day, I saw three SUVs and a National Geographic film crew and all these local people out to see the (flooded) road.
The biggest town on the river, San Luis Río Colorado – here's this town where Río Colorado is half the name of the town, and there wasn't a river there most of the time. Suddenly the river was there and everyone came out. There were big crowds of people, kids splashing around. Guys were racing around with ATV's, being crazy and drinking beer; it was like a carnival. People were just ecstatic to see it.
They were asking me because I'm an American, because the river comes from up where I'm from, whether this is going to be permanent: 'How long's it going to stay like this?' I told them, 'It's, like, two months of this.' And we'll see whether it will it happen again.
From 2009 on, I decided I was going to photograph from my folding bicycle. I pulled a suitcase with stroller wheels on the sides, so it became a trailer behind my bike around Las Vegas, in western Colorado, through Moab, in the Imperial Valley, from Palm Springs to Yuma.
I found that (being) on my bicycle changed my photography. That country out there (in the West) invites you to photograph in big sweeping ways and you miss details. Slowing down the pace of passing through the territory, vast as it is, you get to see more of it and notice it.
I've been looking over pictures from years ago and seeing how they relate to (new) photos from a different part of the river, seeing how they actually work together. When you're down in the Delta and see all the sand and dust, you know it's all from up the river somewhere ages and ages ago. The more I see that, I think of how it's symbolic of the way the whole watershed is so inter-related.
When they opened those gates on (Morelos) dam and let water back into the main channel on the river, it kind of engaged those people. It brought them back into the mainstream of all the other people who are living along it in Moab or Grand Junction or Needles or Tucson. All these people are party to this very over-allocated river.
I came to realize that people, especially here in the East, they don't even know that it's the same river that I'm talking about. That the one going through the Grand Canyon is the same one that goes to the Delta in Mexico.
I don't really know that anybody can say what this is going to mean in the long term for the river. There's a lot of negotiation and science that's still ahead of us. I'm still getting my mind around it just looking at the photos.
Every time I go, I think this is the last time. But this last time, I just let go of that and thought, 'I may come back.' This is part of my life now. I've never really been anywhere else in Mexico. I always end up in the same spot.
I think people in general, no matter what their political stripe, believe we can actually undo some of this stuff we've messed up. (As Michelle's 2000 story explained,) La Cienaga was a dried out former wetland. I guess the Bureau of Reclamation built a dam and flooded farmland and now it's the best remaining wetland in the lower Colorado. There was something hopeful about that.
Looking back, I kind of needed something like that at that point in my life (when I started photographing the Colorado). Here's something where there was potential for redemption. It's something I think that still appeals to people in general – that we can redeem ourselves and life can get better. And it's still a redemption story. All these people have been working so hard to make this happen – this pulse release and putting water back in the river that doesn't go to the ocean any more and seeing what'll happen.
This is still a work in progress.
Words as told to and edited by Tay Wiles, the online editor of High Country News. Photographs edited by John Trotter and Andrew Cullen, associate designer of High Country News. Trotter's Instagram username is unamericain. Correction: The original version of this story indicated that water recently released had already reached the ocean, when in fact, that water continues to make its way through the delta toward the ocean, as of April 15.]]>
On November 19, Colorado's first state water plan will arrive on Governor John Hickenlooper's desk. The final document is the product of discussions that began more than a decade ago in every corner of the state about how to use — and protect — Colorado's rivers, lakes and aquifers.
The plan is significant in other ways as well. Colorado is among the last Western states to develop a comprehensive water plan, a sign that the realities of drought, climate change and growing populations are creating a new urgency for state-level planning.
In the West, water is a private commodity so the tendency used to be to "let things happen as they happen," says Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder law school and former assistant secretary for water and energy at the Department of the Interior. Rights-holders could do whatever they wanted with their water, municipalities could go dig a tunnel or buy up farmland to serve their customers and, by and large, states didn't interfere.
In Colorado, that attitude comes as no surprise. The state aborted its first attempt at a water plan back in early 1980s, a time when Denver Water, the largest – and most powerful – water provider in the state, was pushing to build the massive Two Forks Reservoir. The project would have diverted more water to dry, east-side cities from the wetter, western side of the state and its proponents feared a state water plan would have gotten in the way.
"They wanted to control their own destiny," says Eric Kuhn, the general manager of the Colorado River District, which tries to protect Western Slope water.
The hands-off approach meant there was no overarching vision for how water development occurred in the region. But leaving everyone to their own devices only works for a while, says Castle. "It doesn't work when your supplies are getting tighter and particularly when you're projecting a gap in supply and demand."
Colorado finally began planning efforts in 2013, after 14 years of drought and new forecasts that predicted as many as 2.5 million Coloradans could be without sufficient water supplies by 2050. So Governor Hickenlooper directed the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) to oversee the first statewide water plan.
At the time, other Western states were taking similar steps: Idaho and Oregon published state plans in 2012. California, whose plan dates back to 1957, released an updated version last year. But where other states did things top-down, Colorado took a more grassroots approach, asking committees in each of the state's eight river basins, plus the Denver metropolitan area, to assess their needs, their gaps, and propose solutions. Colorado also opted for extensive public participation – soliciting tens of thousands of comments from across the state.
For Castle, that fact alone makes Colorado's water plan stand out. In the old days, discussions about water took place in smoke-filled backroom meetings without public input. "The public process has been an important and unique part of it - messy though it is," she says.
Still, public participation didn't erase old conflicts. The divide between urban and rural remains deep, and those on the western side of the Rockies still worry about the possibility of new transmountain diversions to send water east. And the new 400,000 acre-feet conservation goal has pitted cities against rural farmers and ranchers. "Several urban water providers are wondering why the 400,000 acre-feet conservation goal applies only to municipal and industrial water use and not agriculture when cities only use 10 percent of the state's water supply," says Drew Beckwith of the Western Resource Advocates.
Those tensions weren't fully resolved in the final plan, says Beckwith. But he added, "none are so large than any one group will say the plan is totally worthless and most recognize we're better off with it than without it."
That's partly because there's something for everybody. The plan emphasizes conservation and re-use, but also recognizes the need to "develop additional storage," preserve agricultural water, improve recreation and boost environmental flows – all with less water.
To help clarify how all those priorities will be met, the CWCB added a section outlining critical steps to take, along with better ways to measure success. But big questions remain: Will the other state agencies cooperate? Will the hundreds of water districts and city councils continue to grab whatever water they can with the attitude that they can always conserve water later or will they abide by the new agreement? Without some real teeth behind the conservation goal, how will the state ensure its success?
So, even as the announcement of the new plan looms, Kuhn, who began working at the Colorado River District in 1981, remains hesitant. He's seen attitudes shift but he still considers himself a bit of a skeptic when it comes to state water plans. They tend to be a little too much of "all things for all people," he says, and thus not especially helpful in forcing decision makers to make politically difficult decisions.
Still, just the fact a plan exists means Colorado is finally grappling with something that until recently was unthinkable: the water supply is not limitless. Now, the question is whether the state can change course quickly enough.
Sarah Tory is an editorial fellow at HCN. Follow @tory_sarah]]>
As of Wednesday afternoon, some 80,000 people had been reported evacuated from their homes in Cajon Pass, California, as a result of a wildfire that started Tuesday and has burned 31,600 acres. The Southern California blaze comes during the state's fifth year of drought, which has parched landscapes and made them particularly prone to wildfire.
By the first week of June, almost 28,000 acres had burned in California since the beginning of the year — more than double the area in the same time period of 2015. In addition to the prolonged drought, part of the reason for the intense fire season in California is that the state saw higher-than-normal rainfall in the winter and spring, which then dried up over the summer and created a build-up of wildfire fuel.
The National Interagency Fire Center says much of coastal California, including San Bernardino County, where the Blue Cut Fire ignited, and the Central Valley will continue to see above-normal fire potential through September or even as late as November. The Great Basin ecosystem, which includes parts of Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, is expected to return to more normal fire potential by October.
In recent years, Western states have seen longer fire seasons than previously recorded, establishing what some experts call a "new normal." University of Idaho fire science professor Crystal Kolden recently told High Country News that regional fire seasons between the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest have begun to overlap.
Richard Halsey, a fire ecologist with the California Chaparral Institute, says the chaparral ecoregion of Southern California, where Blue Cut is raging, naturally sees high-intensity fires return every 30 to 150 years, but the increasing frequency of fires is of great concern. Cajon Pass is "arguably one of the most vulnerable spots in Southern California, if not the entire state in terms of crippling the economy," Halsey told HCN on Wednesday. "It has a major highway route; and not just that, but rails go through, pipelines, wires. It's huge."
The terrain of the Cajon Pass area is essentially a geographic wind tunnel that fosters increased wind speeds and can spread fire particularly quickly. As of Thursday morning, firefighting agencies had reportedly contained 4 percent of the fire.
At the time of publication, no deaths had been reported. On Tuesday, the federal Incident Information System reported the cause of the fire was unknown.
#BlueCutFire is picking up again along the 15 freeway pic.twitter.com/yfDPec7OLr— Watchara Phomicinda (@watcharaphotog) August 17, 2016
This is one of at least 75 cots here at the evacuation center in Hesperia. #BlueCutFire pic.twitter.com/oghNC3ibrs— Shane Newell (@journoshane) August 17, 2016
Vehicles and structures left in the wake of the destructive #BlueCutFire @latimesphotos @latimes pic.twitter.com/XRRJwsF2dm— Francine Orr/LATimes (@francineorr) August 17, 2016
This story was updated with new information Thursday morning. Tay Wiles is the deputy editor - digital of High Country News and is based in Paonia, Colorado.
Follow @taywiles]]>
$35 BILLION: what it would cost to reclaim the half-million-plus abandoned mines in the U.S.
40 percent of headwaters in the West are contaminated by mining
Hundreds of state and federal employees, students, advocates, volunteers and contractors have spent over a decade planning, litigating and working on Montana's Upper Clark Fork Superfund cleanup. There has been a lot of successful restoration, but it has a long way to go. Still, the Superfund project, which is projected to take another several years, legally can't do anything to address the contaminants from hundreds of abandoned mines upstream. Federal and state agencies lack the necessary funding to deal with them. And federal money doesn't touch the hundreds of thousands of sites on private and state lands.
-Kindra McQuillan
$5K: The fine cliff-jumpers could face for trespassing in Los Padres National Forest's Tar Creek, where endangered California condors live.
-Kit Stolz
While the total prison population in the U.S. grew 16 percent between 2000 and 2011, the number of inmates housed in for-profit prisons grew 106 percent. Western states have some of the highest rates of private prison incarceration. The problem is the business model of incarceration. Companies promise to save states money, but they also need to make a profit. To do that, they often cut corners. A 2012 report by the Sentencing Project found that on average, private prison employees earn about $15,000 less per year than their state-employed counterparts and have 58 fewer hours of training.
-Sarah Tory
In "How the California drought exacerbates water contamination," videographer Zoë Meyers explores East Orosi, California, a rural community that couldn't drink its water, even if they had it.
"If we want to take that glass of water and fill it up out of our faucet, we should be able to."—Elvira Camacho, East Orosi, California, resident
The Forest Service has approved a mining company's request to build a four-mile road and make as many as 571 trips a year with bulldozers, dump trucks and drill rigs into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. Thanks to the 1872 Mining Act, which predates the 1964 Wilderness Act, mining claims made prior to wilderness designation can continue to have validity. The Golden Hand deposit was discovered in 1889, and the courts have determined that its latest owner has the right to prove whether the long-dormant claim is still valid. But how? With pack animals and pickaxes, or with bulldozers and jackhammers?
-Krista Langlois
You say
Joshua Serfass: "I understand that the mining company has the right to prospect the area, but the USFS should not be allowing them to do so with trucks, bulldozers, or other modern means."
Chris Link: "It's not much of a 'wilderness' by conventional standards. This doesn't change the future of wilderness."
Mark Lewis: "What sort of idiotic ruling is this? Gotta love the duplicity. If mountain biking made as much money as mining, there wouldn't be a problem."
Jim Anderson: "Only when the last tree is cut, the last of land pillaged and the last of the water polluted, will the greedy be happy."
Wild Science is a High Country News original video series produced by filmmaker Dakin Henderson. The series explores current wildlife research by taking us into the outdoors and behind the scenes with field biologists. In Wild Science, HCN looks at the scientific processes that inform decisions about how to manage public lands and wildlife — decisions that shape the West today.]]>
Whitewater parks have been popping up all over the West since the 1980s, engineered with low water levels in mind. The projects typically involve a redesign of riverbeds, often with the help of concrete, boulders, sand and rocks to create bottlenecks, which create rushes of water, and "plunge pools," which add depth. All of these additions, strategically placed to encourage recreation, make not only for more exciting whitewater but also for stabilized flows, which can squeeze a little more use out of water when levels are low.
In Reno, Nevada, the river recreation economy has suffered this year. The flow of the Truckee River through downtown in mid-July was 26 cubic feet per second, which is just a step up from stagnant, thanks to this year's abysmal snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas. Private rafting companies haven't toured that section of the river, which features a whitewater park built in 2004, for more than six weeks. James Bell, owner and operator of a private rafting company, Wild Sierra Adventures, says he will likely need to cancel trips on other stretches of the Truckee soon. "This has been the worst year ever," Bell says; normally raft trips account for 60 percent of his business.
But surprisingly, people are still drawn to the slow waters downtown around the whitewater park — mostly families and children wading and swimming in the river. As drought conditions linger, "a modest splash from a man-made wave gives the river an extended life," says Bethany Drysdale, director of public relations for the Nevada Commission on Tourism. And even though raft trips are waning, the park attracts tubers who rent gear from him, says Bell, which helps his business.
On the surface, the parks might not seem like wise investments when the water gets lower. Whitewater parks are expensive to build and, though free to use, are almost always city-managed and publicly funded. Their economic impact is largely indirect.
Still, the Truckee Whitewater Park in Reno, which cost a relatively cheap $1.5 million, has become a draw for both businesses and tourists. Prior to its construction, the city's downtown section of the river had no access point, and few businesses flourished in that part of town. But the "beautification" of the river, says Ben McDonald, communications manager for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority, drew in new enterprises and created the new River Walk District. He says that area has provided a boost for Reno. "There wasn't much down there before that, but now the downtown river park is a tourist destination." According to a visitor profile study commissioned by the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority in 2007, whitewater recreation attracted 13 percent of the approximately 4.3 million people who visit Reno each year. Those visitors spend an average of $680 each. "Even though the drought has been bad this year, people have been able to get closer to the waters than they were able to before," says Peggy Nelson-Aguilar, recreation supervisor for the City of Reno.
Reno was one of the few cities in the West whose whitewater suffered from the drought this year. The "May miracle" brought a lot of rain that boosted flows in Colorado, New Mexico and much of the Midwest. (In fact, a section of the South Platte, in Colorado, was closed for part of the summer because its flows were dangerously high.) Either way, though, many cities see parks as worth the cost, one that will help out on the off-miracle years. "When it's a drought year, the park still provides a good wave," says Cathy Metz, parks and recreation director of the City of Durango. "Without a whitewater park, we would see a downfall in users."
When the Reno project was accepted in 2002, projections of the return on investment ranged from $1.9 million to $4.1 million in the first year, according to the Truckee River Recreation Plan. For comparison, Durango, Colorado, commissioned an economic impact study of its whitewater park in 2006 and found that the park and the Lower Animas River generated $18 million per year.
Beyond dollars and cents, whitewater parks offer other incentives in dry years. Around the West, engineered parks extend the paddling season, says Nathan Fey, the Colorado River stewardship director for American Whitewater. "With low flows, whitewater parks begin to address some of the demand of the varied users attracted to rivers," Fey says. The natural peaks provide recreation opportunities for seasoned paddlers, but whitewater parks keep the water exciting even as the levels dwindle. The features also attract new people to water sports. The big question, though, is how far into the future water parks can be beneficial? As of yet, there's no such thing as a drought-proof river. And, as Gary Lacy, engineer of the Truckee Whitewater Park, says: "You can't make water out of nothing."
Paige Blankenbuehler is an editorial intern at High Country News.
Follow @paigeblank]]>
Vapor pressure deficit: Ever heard of it? Didn't think so. But this wonky atmospheric term is one you might want to study up on, especially if you're a Westerner who likes trees and cares about whether they live or die.
Why? For one, it might be fun. One gardening website attests that once you understand vapor pressure deficit "you start to think and feel like a plant." Who could resist that? Also, it's actually pretty easy to understand. And it's important. High vapor pressure deficits appear to have played an instrumental role in killing off vast numbers of trees in the Southwest over the last decade and a half, whether they died by drought, beetle or wildfire. And that's a big deal because vapor pressure deficits that seem extreme now are likely to become the norm as the world heats up.
Park Williams, a bioclimatologist with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is one scientist who has helped reveal the role of vapor pressure deficit in forest mortality in the Southwest. His most recent contributions are two studies published last month considering its role in wildfire, and specifically in the big, hot fires of 2011.
But before we get to that, a bit more on vapor pressure deficit, or VPD. Essentially, it is the difference between the moisture the atmosphere is capable of holding and the moisture it is actually holding. In the Southwest, high VPD is usually a function of high temperatures. Here's why both matter to plants, as I explained in a 2013 HCN feature:
Minor temperature increases have an outsized effect on the amount of water the atmosphere can hold: When the temperature goes up, the atmosphere gets a lot spongier. The relationship is exponential. Stubbornly set on fulfilling its potential, warm air sucks water more greedily from both plants and soil. If the water supply it's drawing on becomes depleted, the tension begins to strain a tree's water columns. Picture an eager child sucking the last drops of a milkshake from a straw: The water columns, like the straw, collapse.
During the 2000 drought, when pinon died in seemingly greater numbers than they had during the 1950s drought, ecologist Dave Breshears suspected the reason was that the recent drought was warmer. He and others dubbed it a "global change type drought." VPD, he told me recently, explains why a small rise in temperature could result in a lot more dead trees. "From the plant's perspective, it's more directly experiencing that atmospheric demand (for water) than the temperature itself," Breshears said. "That really gives us insight into why a little bit of temperature goes a long way in having negative effects for a plant."
Previous work by scientists including Breshears and Williams has demonstrated how high VPD can stress trees, making them vulnerable to bark beetles, or even killing them outright. Williams' new work considers its relationship to the West's other primary tree killer: wildfire.
His big picture conclusions echo those of previous studies: High vapor pressure deficits result in more dead trees. One study showed that fluctuations in VPD year-to-year correlated very closely to fluctuations in the number of acres burned. In fact, among climate variables, VPD has been the best predictor of area burned for the last 30 years -- better than temperature or precipitation. Jim Randerson, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, reached a similar conclusion studying the factors driving growth of wildfires in Alaska's boreal forest. "VPD was more important than temperature or humidity by itself," he said.
Williams' second study considered the climate conditions and wildfires of just one year, 2011, when two of the Southwest's biggest blazes in recorded history -- the Wallow and Las Conchas fires -- scorched Arizona and New Mexico. Interestingly, 2011 was not exceptionally hot in the Southwest, but owing to an extremely unusual alignment of atmospheric anomalies, vapor pressure deficit was off the charts. The air was mind-bogglingly dry, sponging up water from trees and plants like mad.
"2011 gave us this really neat opportunity to look at how forests respond to really high VPD," Williams said. Even though the spike wasn't caused by temperature, forests responded in the same way, affirming, Williams said, the idea that the influence of VPD on fire is especially pronounced. If climate is the Oz of wildfire risk, you might say, VPD is the man behind the curtain. (Although in this version of the story, he has co-workers.)
"When we think about the future," Williams explained, "and VPD is supposed to go up as temperature goes up, this study solidifies that we should really expect burned areas to increase in step with VPD."
Another finding from the study has even more startling implications for the future. No climate models predict that the anomalies that zapped the atmosphere of water vapor over the Southwest in 2011 would ever converge. "Climate models just don't think the climate can be as extreme as it was in the Southwest in 2011," Williams said. Obviously, it can. "If a 2011 event would occur in the 2050s, the results would be very similar, except they'd all be imposed on this warmer background temperature." Which means even higher VPD.
Moreover, projections of changes in VPD based on temperature increases alone show that even in average years, extremes on par with 2011 are probable. "If we still had as much forest, we should expect 2011-like forest fires," Williams said. "But then there's a chance we have this atmospheric craziness. If that happened in the 2050s, the VPDs would be amplified into a realm that is really incomprehensible to me right now."
Williams fears that climate-driven forest loss in the Southwest will not occur gradually, but in catastrophic pulses similar to 2011, and often as a result of wildfire. "Preparing forests for climate change isn't necessarily just figuring out which forests should die and which ones shouldn't," he said. "It's protecting the ones that shouldn't from catastrophic wildfires."
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor and freelance science and environmental journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow @callycarswell]]>
Just days later, last Wednesday afternoon, three of their ranks were killed when their vehicle crashed and was overcome by the fire now raging near Twisp, Washington. One of their colleagues, a 25-year-old man, is in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Can those young people possibly remain as unbroken as they appeared in Mazama? They'll have to.
Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Washington, a career first responder, fought back emotion as he addressed a press briefing in Chelan on Thursday morning. He represents the 8th congressional district, much of which now is up in smoke, and once he lost his partner and best friend in a gunfight. "It hurts deep," he said, "but the job goes on."
The job, as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee just noted, is "unprecedented cataclysm." Some 390,000 acres are ablaze in the state, according to Inslee, already topping last summer's total, which then seemed unfathomable. At more than 256,000 acres, the Carlton Complex Fire accounted for more than three-quarters of the acreage that burned in the state last year, making it the largest wildfire in Washington's recorded state history. More than 300 homes were damaged.
The Okanogan Complex Fire, which was nearly 125,000 acres strong as of Friday morning, endangers much of the same area. The Twisp River Fire in which the firefighters perished has been merged into the Okanogan Complex. The Okanogan is feared capable of eclipsing the Carlton fire because of high winds and dry conditions.
I feel like one of those people who, upon learning of an acquaintance or loved one's demise, declares, "But I just saw her/him yesterday." As if the act of recently encountering someone cancels the fact of that person no longer existing. I was just breathing the ashy air of what seemed to be a perpetual campfire at the North Cascades Institute, which now sits vacant after Wednesday's evacuation. I was just squinting at the normally spectacularly Technicolor peaks along the North Cascades Highway, which now is closed from Rainy Pass to Newhalem. That little company town owned by Seattle City Light is where we observed plumes of smoke on our way home. Rainy Pass is the location of trailheads from which my wife and I took two hikes whose vistas often were obscured by smoke.
The whole region is an inferno? But I was just there. I'm a native Seattleite and North Cascades National Park, just 2 ½ hours away, is one of my favorite places to hike and photograph; this was my sixth visit this year.
Back in June, I also was in Queets Valley, in Olympic National Park, as the Paradise Fire that eventually erupted there was simply smoldering. Many have seized upon that fire as significant because the Queets, being a rainforest, is such a ripe symbol of the consequences of climate change. I see that, but being there amplified to me the area's remoteness. Nothing burns a hole in your heart, to paraphrase Inslee's characterization of the firefighters' deaths, like putting a face on tragedy.
We almost did not visit the Methow Valley Interpretive Center, which is squeezed into a trailer house in Twisp. It was Sunday and the downtown area was deserted, as was TwispWorks, the artist enclave that encircles the center. But it was hot and we already were disappointed that we couldn't drive down to Wenatchee since the route passed through Chelan, which was ablaze and being evacuated.
The senior woman volunteer on duty that afternoon probably hadn't been expecting visitors when we sauntered in. She was engrossed in a paperback book, but glanced up and cheerily offered to answer questions. That's how I came to know what was meant when officials issued a Level 3 evacuation in Twisp and Winthrop on Wednesday.
There was a Level 3 evacuation in Twisp last year, the nice lady said. I was thinking in Defcons, where lower numbers express higher states of readiness. I asked how high the evacuation scale went.
"Oh, three is the highest," she said. "It means get out now."
She got out; she was going to visit her daughter anyway. Hopefully, she's returned. My wife and I feel badly that we didn't learn her name.
There are more than 100 large, uncontained wildfires raging in 15 western states, according to Tom Tidwell, the U.S. Forest Service chief who Thursday called the spread and intensity of wildfires "the new normal." More than 7 million acres already have burned in the U.S. this year. Washington, my home state, had 25 active wildfires as of Friday.
A lot of people saw this coming, but that doesn't make it any easier to stomach.
Snowpack melt was up to a month earlier than 50 months ago, according to the National Wildlife Federation, and combined with warm weather extending further into fall makes for longer fire seasons. Summertime temperatures are projected to increase 3.6 to 9 degrees by midcentury, creating drier, fire-inducing conditions, the NWF said. The climate-induced changes have led to widespread insect infestation, creating wildfire fuel in the form of dead and highly combustible trees, and lightning is becoming more prevalent because of more severe thunderstorms, the NWF reported.
It's an insidious cycle with no end in sight. Scientists, to wit, point out that carbon dioxide released back into the atmosphere by wildfires worsens global warming.
The fires consume more resources. Firefighting comprised 42 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget in 2014, for example. It was 16 percent in 1995. Inslee has deployed five 20-person crews from the Washington National Guard with perhaps two more on the way soon. Washington will receive more resources via a federal emergency declaration approved by President Obama on Friday, and likely will receive international assistance from Canada and maybe even Australia.
Wildfires also cause inconvenience that must be kept in context.
The power went out in the region during our last night in the Methow. The Mazama Store remained open and the mood stayed festive. It was Brat Night at the little food booth in back, but lack of electricity meant the bratwurst could not be grilled. They kept the beer flowing, however, and sold the brats raw at a discount; we cooked ours on the gas grill at our cabin. We couldn't be bummed, especially when fire burned through the Twisp River line last Thursday afternoon and residents were warned by the Okanogan County Electric Co-Op not to expect power for "a few days."
As we were leaving the next morning, we spied a black bear on the grounds. When I reported the sighting, the front desk attendant said bears were usually not spotted there. We had been wondering, as nothing in the complex or surrounding area was bear-proofed. Later at the Interpretive Center, we viewed the skeleton of a young bear burned to death in the Carlton Fire, which had seared off its two front paws. It occurred to us that the black bear we saw might have been chased away from its natural habitat by wildfire.
I can't be certain that's true but, sorting through the haze of both memory and current developments, it seems sadly plausible.
Glenn Nelson is a Seattle-based journalist and founder of trailposse.com. He tweets @trailposse.]]>
The postcard makes me laugh because I know firsthand how worked up people can get over water. At an annual ditch meeting two years ago, my Western Colorado neighbors seemed on the verge of an insurrection when the volunteer members of the board sheepishly announced that a leak in the local reservoir had not been fixed. That meant that the reservoir, which supplies our late-season water, would not fill, and so the ditches would run dry by the end of July. Our green patches of grass, alfalfa and corn would quickly become as brown, bare and cracked as the desert lands that surround them.
In years past, my neighbors and I might have shrugged off one shortened growing season; once the reservoir was fixed, after all, the ditches would flow copiously all summer long with snowmelt from the mountains behind town. But that was then. Nowadays, something weird is going on with the weather. The snowpack -- the source of nearly all of our water -- has become unpredictable, with most years on the lean side. No matter how much snow flies in the winter, it seems to melt off earlier every spring.
Climate change scientists confirm what old-timers know by observation: The West's water supply is shrinking. A difficult period of triage lies ahead. If our cities get their way, the rural areas and the Indian tribes will end up handing over their water. It's already happening in places like Southern California and Las Vegas, where deals are being cut to pump groundwater and divert traditional agricultural waters to the urban areas.
Here in Colorado, water managers have long assumed that the state still has plenty of unused Colorado River water to accommodate future growth on both the Front Range and the Western Slope. But now, forward-looking realists like Eric Kuhn are tossing those assumptions out the window. The Colorado River's flow has always been overestimated, and it is bound to shrink even more as the climate shifts. Kuhn, the protagonist in this issue's cover story, estimates that Colorado may have legal access to just one-tenth of the water it thought it had.
That means that the Front Range, which is expecting more growth in the next couple of decades, will need to push conservation harder than ever. But even that won't be enough: It will also have to purchase senior water rights from agricultural interests on my side of the Continental Divide.
In the not-so-distant future, our small farms and ranches may dry up in order to keep the faucets running in the expanding suburbs of Denver. The great Western Pastime of arguing over water is far from over, but the players in the game are shifting. Instead of wielding shovels, they now carry the latest climate models and are accompanied by powerful lawyers.]]>
My orange rubber rain gear, usually a necessity on oceangoing canoe trips in this part of the world (like the one I'm on now), is stashed at the bottom of a dry bag. The streams where we usually collect water are no more than a tannin-colored trickle. We hear on the radio that some of our colleagues are having emergency drinking water delivered by jet boat, while in nearby Wrangell, folks "out the road" are trucking in city water to fill their rainwater catchments.
Welcome to the rainforest drought: the opposite end of the weather pattern that's brought unseasonably wet storms to Colorado and New Mexico this spring. While the parched Southwest is drinking in much-needed rain and the Rockies are reveling in new snow, we in Alaska's panhandle are basking in a huge high pressure ridge, says Tom Ainsworth, the meteorologist in charge at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Juneau office. It's all connected: part of the same weather pattern, he says, but not necessarily part of a larger climatic force.
Meanwhile, warmer-than-usual ocean water from the Gulf of Alaska — the causes of which aren't fully understood — is heating up the air, leading to warmer-than-usual temperatures: 53 degrees on average in nearby Petersburg, compared to a typical average of 48.5 degrees. Rainfall for the month of May is just 0.26 inches so far. The average is 5.92 inches.
Coupled with an abnormally low snowpack (35 inches compared to an average of 90 this past winter in Juneau), Southeast Alaska's dry spell is making city managers, foresters, fisheries biologists and others wary. "So far, we haven't had any real serious damage (to fisheries)," says Patrick Fowler, a sport fish biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Petersburg. "But it's definitely a concern as we move into summer spawning."
Restrictions on logging were put in place on May 22, and at least one logger worries that work may cease altogether if the dry weather keeps up. Fire officials, too, have been on high alert: Usually, thunder and lightning are rare in Southeast Alaska, but more than 900 lightning strikes were recorded in one recent night, resulting in several fires. Meanwhile, the town of Wrangell has declared an official water shortage and is asking residents to cut back on water usage. "It's not at a panic stage yet, but it wouldn't take too much longer," borough manager Jeff Jabusch told KSTK Public Radio.
But this is, after all, the rainforest. While a dry spell this long is rare, old-timers say it's not unheard of, and the chance of a summer-long drought is unlikely. So for now, nearly everyone — including the weather forecasters — are as grateful for the sunshine as denizens of the Southwest are for the snow and rain. "We always like to deliver good news," Ainsworth says. "And this is the third largest area in the weather service, so there's still plenty of variation to keep things interesting."]]>
That urgency brought in a flood of new money — and with it, new opportunities for graft. Prosecutors allege that Johnson and Coache received $1.3 million in kickbacks on a sale of water rights to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the powerful water supplier to the city's nearly 2 million people. The two men were hit with a 51-count indictment that includes charges of extortion, bribery, money laundering and misconduct of a public officer.
This coming April, nearly five years after their arrests, the two men will finally face a jury. But already, the details of the case — gleaned from more than 8,000 pages of legal filings — provide a detailed look into what may have been one of the biggest attempted water swindles in the West's recent history.
In the West, the world of water has long been a clannish brotherhood whose inner workings are known to few, largely hidden from public view and flush with money. Johnson worked for a relatively small water district, but Coache was in an entirely different class. A guilty verdict against him would mean that, while serving as a top-level state water regulator, he was simultaneously conspiring to speculate in water rights and profit from a devastating drought.
The Virgin River rises near Zion National Park in southwest Utah and wanders through the blazing desert of northwest Arizona and southern Nevada before draining into the Colorado River at Lake Mead. In 1987, a local businessman named John Lonetti — who ran a modest empire that included several souvenir shops, a supermarket, an Italian restaurant and a lodge near Zion — bought a small farm some 65 miles east of Las Vegas along the Virgin.
Lonetti's farm came with long-established water rights, but he wanted more. So, in 1990, he filed an application with Nevada's statewide water regulator, the office of the state engineer, for additional Virgin River water, ostensibly to expand an ostrich-farming operation. For the next 16 years, the application languished, apparently forgotten.
Then, in 2006, Lonetti received notice that the state engineer's office intended to cancel his application. By then, Vegas' supplier, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, had received rights to the majority of the water in the Virgin River, and the state engineer believed the river to be fully appropriated — meaning that no water was available for Lonetti. That's when Lonetti turned to Michael Johnson for help.
Johnson, who sometimes goes by the nickname Boomer, was a mud-on-his-boots hydrologist with a self-described "drilling addiction." Originally from South Dakota, married and with two grown children, Johnson lived in Las Vegas but commuted to the small town of Mesquite, some 75 miles to the east on the Utah state line. His day job was as chief hydrologist of the small Virgin Valley Water District, which meant he had considerable say in the district's water rights decisions. But Johnson also moonlighted as a water consultant. And, prosecutors allege, he had important connections. "If anybody could help me get the water right," Lonetti would later tell them, "I was certain Michael Johnson could do it."
Johnson did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story. But in sworn testimony, he has acknowledged that he helped Lonetti draft a letter to the state engineer, arguing that the application should be approved. Lonetti, Johnson wrote, needed the water to irrigate 400 acres of farmland. Moreover, he continued, there was still water available in the river: the unused water allocated to Vegas.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority had tied up 190,000 acre-feet of water, roughly 62 billion gallons, Johnson wrote, "speculating as to future use and making no attempt to develop the water." On March 7, 2006, Lonetti faxed the letter to the Las Vegas branch of the state engineer's office — the office supervised by Bob Coache. Prosecutors allege that this was the beginning of a hustle that would eventually land all three men in court.
For reasons that are still unclear, and that lie at the crux of the upcoming trial, the state engineer's office quickly reversed its intent to deny Lonetti's application. More than a year would pass before the permit was formally issued, yet even before Lonetti had the water right in hand — and despite his claim that he needed it for his farm — he began looking for a buyer.
One proposed deal with a housing developer fell through. But there was another, much bigger, prospect: The Southern Nevada Water Authority. The agency faced dwindling reservoirs but, thanks to the housing bubble, it was awash in cash. The Water Authority had recently spent nearly $80 million buying big ranches with water rights in northern Nevada, and it was looking for more.
And "everybody knew," Johnson would later testify, "who had the deepest pockets in southern Nevada."
About that same time, an important change occurred on the Virgin River. For decades, arcane interstate legal disagreements had prevented the Authority from legally taking any water from the Virgin. But in late 2007, an agreement backed by then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne ended that prohibition.
Which is where Michael Johnson came in. Johnson was a familiar face to managers at the Authority; he had worked there for more than six years during the 1990s, before moving to the Virgin Valley Water District. Once the Virgin River opened up to Vegas, Johnson would later testify, he talked with Authority executives about buying Lonetti's Virgin River water rights, which had just become very valuable. In January 2008, Johnson met with top Authority managers and was soon negotiating the sale of two water rights with John Entsminger, the attorney who now runs the agency.
Water bosses tend to prize one attribute of a water right above all else: its vintage, or "priority date." Typically, the older a water right, the more coveted it is, because it takes priority over so-called junior rights during drought. And while the 2007 agreement finally allowed the Southern Nevada Water Authority to take water from the Virgin River, the Authority could still only use water with a priority date earlier than 1929.
Lonetti's older water right had originally been filed by S.W. Darling, a mine superintendent and county commissioner, back in 1914. That made it one of the oldest, and therefore most reliable and valuable, rights on the Virgin. But Lonetti's newly approved water permit — the one Johnson helped him argue for — carried a priority date of only 1990, the year Lonetti originally applied for it. To the Water Authority, a recent-vintage water right like that was basically useless.
So Johnson allegedly proposed a swap. The Authority could buy the 1990 water right but not use it. Then Johnson's employer, the Virgin Valley Water District, would take that water in exchange for some of its own higher-value, pre-1929 water. From Virgin Valley's point of view, it would essentially mean trading a smaller block of relatively more-reliable water for a bigger block of less-reliable water — and giving the Authority access to a source of water it otherwise would have been unable to touch.
Entsminger readily agreed to the proposal. But Johnson apparently neglected to mention that he was negotiating not for the Virgin Valley Water District, but rather as Lonetti's agent. "I definitely thought he was acting on behalf of the Virgin Valley Water District," Entsminger later testified.
After meeting with Entsminger, Johnson returned to Mesquite. On March 18, 2008, he and Mike Winters, Virgin Valley's general manager, convinced the district's board members to approve the trade. The heart of Johnson and Winter's pitch to the board, one board member would later say in a deposition, was that "we were going to get a whole bunch more water than what we were going to give (Southern Nevada Water Authority), I mean, a huge amount."
On May 20, the Authority wired $8.4 million to Lonetti for the water. Lonetti had hit the jackpot. The Southern Nevada Water Authority paid him $5.2 million for the older, S.W. Darling water right that had originally come with his farm. But the sale of the 1990 water permit was the real bonanza. Lonetti had paid just $2,750 in fees to the state engineer's office for that permit. Less than a year after it was finally approved, he flipped it to the Authority for more than $3.2 million.
It soon became clear that there was much more to the transaction than first appeared. Early in 2010, rumors began circulating that Johnson had a vested interest in the deal. That February, based on allegations of improper conduct related to other issues, Virgin Valley's board fired Winters, the general manager. In August, following an internal investigation, several board members confronted Johnson with similar allegations of misconduct — specifically of taking a kickback for the Lonetti water deal. Johnson resigned on the spot.
Two months later, Virgin Valley's general manager, attorney and two board members met with the Clark County district attorney. They accused Johnson of deceiving the board into trading valuable water rights to the Authority for millions of dollars less than they were worth, and tricking the board into overpaying at least $2.9 million for another water right that Lonetti sold in 2005.
Because of the statute of limitations, the district attorney's office couldn't bring criminal charges related to the 2005 deal. Instead, the DA focused on the 2008 deal — the one in which Johnson helped Lonetti sell his water to the Authority, which it then traded to Virgin Valley.
The job of investigating the case fell to Las Vegas police detective Nate Chio, a then-38-year-old Philippines-born specialist in organized crime and public corruption, and a police financial analyst named Colin Haynes. The two men soon uncovered an agreement in which Lonetti had granted a 10 percent interest in the 1914 water right and a 25 percent interest in the 1990 water right to a limited liability company called Rio Virgin — which was represented by Michael Johnson.
When Chio and Haynes subpoenaed bank records, they learned that the day after Lonetti received the $8.4 million from the Authority, he deposited more than $1.3 million into Rio Virgin's Wells Fargo account. And Johnson, it turned out, wasn't the only authorized signer on the account. The other was Bob Coache, the state water regulator.
"We were going to get a whole bunch more water than what we were going to give (Southern Nevada Water Authority), I mean, a huge amount."
Coache was a Las Vegas native who had started working for the state engineer's office in 1981. He became deputy state engineer for Southern Nevada in 2006. That made him the top regulator in the region, and gave him responsibility for recommending approval or denial of water rights applications. Coache held the position until he retired in April 2010, two-and-a-half years after Rio Virgin was formed and about a year before he was arrested.
Coache and Johnson were the sole beneficiaries of Rio Virgin, but neither man's name appears anywhere on the company's corporate filings with the Nevada secretary of State. That's because Coache enlisted a friend named Rick Templeton to act as the company's registered agent.
"Rio Virgin LLC appears that it was pretty much created as a shell company," Chio said in a deposition. "Its whole purpose was to take this money, the $1.3 million from Lonetti, and disguise that it was going to Johnson and Coache."
Chio interviewed Templeton on May 5, 2010, just days before Coache and Johnson were arrested. During that interview, Chio would later tell a grand jury, Templeton said that Rio Virgin was created "for water speculation, which is basically buying water rights and trying to flip them for a profit."
Four days later, Chio interviewed Templeton again. He learned that Templeton — despite being explicitly instructed not to do so — told Coache that the detective had come calling. And this time, Templeton told Chio a different story: Rio Virgin had been created not for water speculation but for "commercial and retail development." (When the SWAT team finally located and arrested Coache later that day, he was at Templeton's house.)
Prosecutors assert that Coache received $600,000 of the alleged kickback, while Johnson took the remaining $727,500. The two men subsequently used most of the money to purchase three houses in Las Vegas and invest in a Texas oil and gas company. Coache allegedly gave $48,000 to his sister. Johnson also wrote a $15,000 check to Mike Winters, his boss, allegedly as compensation for his help in convincing the board to agree to swap water with the Authority. (Johnson says it was a loan to Winters.) Prosecutors also allege that Johnson and Coache used roughly $202,000 to pay federal taxes, in an attempt to launder the kickback by disguising it as a real estate transaction.
Johnson has admitted that when he recommended that Virgin Valley approve the swap with the Authority, he did not disclose his personal financial interest in the deal. When he was asked, under oath, why not, Johnson simply replied: "Nobody asked."
In an effort to recover the money Virgin Valley claims it lost through the swap, as well as through its 2005 purchase of groundwater from Lonetti, the district filed a separate civil lawsuit against Johnson, Winters, Coache and Lonetti in 2011. The criminal case was put on hold until the civil case was resolved. (The DA had elected not to bring charges against Lonetti in the criminal case, and while Winters was initially named in that case, the DA later dropped its criminal charges against him.)
Last year, the four defendants agreed to settle the civil case, though neither Coache nor Winters admitted guilt. Johnson agreed to pay back the money he made from the transactions. Lonetti agreed to buy back most of his water rights. And Winters paid the Virgin Valley Water District the $15,000 he received from Johnson. If the DA's office wins its criminal case against Coache, Virgin Valley will receive the $600,000 in assets Coache purchased with his alleged cut from the deal.
With the civil case finished, the DA's office can finally move forward in its bid for criminal convictions of Coache and Johnson. Hearings against them are scheduled to begin on April 18 in Clark County District Court in downtown Las Vegas. Marc DiGiacomo, the chief deputy district attorney in charge of the case, won't comment before it goes to trial. But given Coache's high-level position, the trial is likely to center on one key question: What role — if any — did Coache have in ensuring that Lonetti's 1990 water application was approved?
The permit wasn't issued until the summer of 2007. But it was apparently approved sometime between March 7, 2006, when Johnson and Lonetti sent their appeal to the state engineer, and July 21 of that year, when the state engineer's office billed Lonetti for permitting fees. Illuminating what happened within the state engineer's Carson City and Las Vegas offices during that four-and-a-half month period will be the key challenge for prosecutors.
They have a big job on their hands. Several former and current officials in the state engineer's office have testified that they were swamped with a backlog of as many as 4,000 water right applications at the time and have little recollection about any particular permit. Several also testified that, because Southern Nevada Water Authority's junior applications on the Virgin River had been approved back in 1994, the state engineer's office — regardless of who was actually involved — was legally bound to approve Lonetti's senior application.
In addition, key documents are missing from the state engineer's official file for Lonetti's application, further complicating the effort to reconstruct exactly what happened. (Some have hinted, privately, that this is further evidence of Coache's hidden hand.) But probably the most exasperating problem facing prosecutors is that no one in the state engineer's office has testified that Coache improperly influenced the approval of Lonetti's permit.
In a deposition taken in late 2013, Detective Chio admitted that the case against Coache is far from airtight. "There's no direct evidence," he said. "It's all circumstantial."
Still, Coache will have to refute three big pieces of evidence. The first is Lonetti's contract with Rio Virgin, and the fact that Coache was one of two people who controlled the company's bank account. Second is the $1.3 million deposit that Lonetti made into that account the day after the Authority paid him for the water. Finally, detectives discovered a copy of the state engineer's file for the 1990 water right in Coache's basement home office. It was the only permit file from the state engineer's office that was found in Coache's house, Chio told the grand jury.
Coache, meanwhile, says that Chio simply botched his detective work. "I think everything he did in the investigation was wrong," Coache said during his deposition. "He had no understanding of water rights … and he fabricated testimony to the grand jury."
Coache is adamant that he had nothing to do with the water deal. He called Chio's testimony about the permit file "an outright bullshit lie," and says he had thousands of pages of state engineer's files in his home office. Coache also maintains that he was only ever involved in approving groundwater rights, not surface water rights like the Virgin River permit that Johnson helped Lonetti argue for.
Coache's defense will likely hinge on an assertion that the $600,000 he allegedly received from the water deal was actually a buyout from Johnson for a jointly owned parcel of desert some 50 miles outside Las Vegas, at a place called Halfway Wash. Yet Coache's explanation, at least as conveyed through court documents, is founded upon one extremely questionable premise. Coache paid $70,000 for that land when he originally purchased it, in 2004. Yet he claims that when he subsequently sold his share to Johnson, just four years later, the two men based the sale price on a mutually agreed property value of $1 million.
So far, the case has received little publicity outside Mesquite, though Coache and Johnson's arrests merited a smattering of coverage in the Vegas papers. But if the charges are proven true, the case could be a bigger harbinger of things to come.
It has become academically fashionable to attempt to sort the winners of climate change from the losers. When it comes to water, that cast has usually been very traditionally defined: large urban water agencies and powerful irrigation districts versus Indian tribes, poor farming communities and the environment. But the scarcity that will come with climate change could shake things up in unexpected ways. And it may well draw another player into the fray: a new breed of speculator and profiteer that smells profit in crisis.
As the case finally nears trial, Coache spends his days running a one-man consulting business from the basement of his home. Johnson has survived by doing odd jobs, like yard work and changing locks at foreclosed houses in Las Vegas. The legal cases against him, he said in a deposition, have made him "politically somewhat sensitive" as a hydrologist, and he apparently hasn't been anywhere near a drill rig since he resigned in 2010.
There is one undisputed winner in the saga: Vegas. The Southern Nevada Water Authority won't attempt to recover the $1.3 million worth of homes, oil leases and cash that originated with the alleged kickback and were seized by Las Vegas police. Those assets technically derived from money that Lonetti received from the Water Authority, but they will instead go to Virgin Valley Water District. That deal allows the Water Authority to keep what it was after from the start: Lonetti's prized 1914 Darling right, plus the high-value pre-1929 water it got in trade from Virgin Valley. In the new reality of high-stakes deals on the Colorado, $1.3 million may be just an incidental cost of doing business.
Matt Jenkins has covered water for High Country News for more than a decade. He currently writes from New Delhi.
This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.
Set against a backdrop of a few difficult drought years, reservoirs dropping and some communities overpumping aquifers, the scenario can seem a pretty compelling argument for two massive and controversial water projects that the state wants to build: A 6-foot-diameter, 140-mile-long pipeline that would allow Utah to draw its remaining share of Colorado River water from Lake Powell and pump it to Kane and Washington Counties; and a new dam on the Bear River system, which feeds into the Great Salt Lake, that would supply 220,000 acre-feet of water to surrounding communities.
Trouble is, that scenario may be flat wrong, or at the very least overstated.
On May 5, Utah's Legislative Auditor General released a damning (damming?) report revealing that the water agency's forecasts are based on unreliable data and failed to adequately account for the possible contributions of conservation and irrigation water freed up as new homes consume farmland. "By excluding this added water supply," the auditors write, "the projections accelerate the timeframes for developing costly, large-scale water projects." Zach Frankel of the Utah Rivers Council, which opposes the pipeline and stumped for the audit along with several other groups, puts it more bluntly: "We are not," he says, "running out of water."
The data problems are partly driven by inefficiency and inadequate resources. The division obtains information about water use from 468 local water providers secondhand through another agency. Just one staffer is devoted to this task, and though that person attempts to verify data by calling local officials directly every five years, errors slipped through. Sometimes, water providers made mistakes because they weren't properly trained or didn't understand the instructions or purpose of the data. One city even reported water use for 2012 by submitting data from a city in New York with an identical name.
"We agree with many of the audit conclusions and recommendations and believe that (they) will enable us to strengthen our processes," Division of Water Resources Director Eric Millis told lawmakers at a hearing the day the report was released. "We tried to do the best we could with what we had available."
The audit's conclusions about conservation are even more troubling. Despite being one of the nation's most arid states, Utah consistently tops nearly every other state in per capita water use. And yet the division assumes that conservation can only drop statewide consumption by 25 percent. Its projections have water use flatlining at 220 gallons per person, per day after 2025 – still much higher than current use in many other Western states.
"We find one regional comparison that is insightful," the auditors write. "The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves the Las Vegas region, has a goal to reduce water use to 199 (gallons per person per day) by 2035. In contrast, the communities in Southwestern Utah, which have a climate similar to that of Southern Nevada, have a goal to reduce water use to 292 by the year 2060."
That's the area that would be served by the Lake Powell Pipeline. Given the project's expected cost of $1 billion to $3.5 billion, Frankel calls southwestern Utah's conservation goals "appalling for a state that claims to value water and fiscal conservatism."
The audit identifies numerous areas for improvement, not least of which are Utah's incredibly cheap water rates, which are heavily supported by property taxes. "We subsidize water more than any other state," says Republican state Senator Howard Stephenson, president of the Utah Taxpayers Association. "When my neighbor is running his garden hose down the gutter while he's washing his car, there's no impact to his pocket book because he's socializing the waste among all of his neighbors. If people actually bear the cost of their choices, you'd assure more conservation." The state could also implement tiered rate structures in which heavy users pay more, and actually meter "secondary" — or outdoor — water systems, which, unlike several other Western states, Utah has yet to tackle.
And though much of Utah's expected residential growth will gobble up farmland on the Wasatch Front, the Division appears to vastly underestimate the amount of freed up irrigation water that would be shifted over to residential use. In the Weber River Basin, for example, the auditors found that 52,000 more acre-feet would be available than the state has projected. That's roughly equivalent to the share of water that communities there would receive from the $1.5 billion Bear River Project.
Department of Natural Resources Executive Director Mike Styler, who oversees the Division of Water Resources, told lawmakers at the May 5 hearing that the audit was "a great help" for predicting future water use and that his staff was already looking into implementing recommendations. If anyone should be nervous about the report, he added, it's "you in the Legislature. (This audit) is suggesting that you look at ways to alter water demand. That's saying, 'Folks, we want you to consider changing your way of life.' … That will take great courage."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman
Homepage image of Salt Lake City courtesy of Skyguy414, Wikimedia Commons.]]>
For 10 hours last November, the talk went on. But when the hearing was over, the decision was left in the hands of the California Coastal Commission. The group has made enemies of developers for years and built a reputation as one of the toughest environmental bodies in the country. But when it voted 9-3 to tentatively approve the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, it did so over the objections of at least a half-dozen environmental groups as well as the commission's own staff. Their concerns about potential fish kills and greenhouse gas emissions from the plant were drowned out by the vocal support of just about every politician and water district leader from Southern California.
"I hope you make your approvals so we can get on building the damn thing," said Carlsbad Mayor Claude "Bud" Lewis, in one of many hearings, summing up the general sentiment of his colleagues.
Now, after numerous hearings and a decade of planning, Lewis may get what he wants. Last November's vote cleared the way for Connecticut-based Poseidon Resources to build the $300 million plant. By this fall, the plant had secured all but one of its needed approvals. The San Diego Regional Water Quality Board still must sign off on Poseidon's plan to offset the plant's effects on fish, but that shouldn't be a problem.
Desalination was once regarded as a pipedream in the West, like towing icebergs from the Arctic or building canals to divert the Columbia River southward. But the technology has since improved, and now, with the population growing and fresh water supplies threatened by drought and global warming, all seven Colorado River Basin states are looking seriously at it. So are Florida, Texas and even the Northeast. Some officials call it the ultimate solution.
Nowhere is desalination more popular than in California, where nearly 20 plants are in the works. It's not hard to see why: Southern California's population has nearly tripled to 21.7 million since 1960, but its water supplies are shrinking.
Today, Southern California gets about 600,000 fewer acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year than it did a decade ago. And with the San Francisco Bay Delta's ecosystem collapsing from diversions, drought, invasive species and pollution, a federal judge has ordered cuts in water deliveries to Southern California to protect the threatened Delta smelt. Southern California farmers took a 30 percent water cut this year, and city dwellers will face reductions next year if, as expected, the judge decides to protect more imperiled fish. This spring, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R, declared a drought. By this fall, reservoirs had sunk to their lowest levels in 14 years, and officials were warning that they may have to cut statewide water deliveries from the California State Water Project by 85 percent next year.
Although desalination offers a guaranteed, drought-proof local supply, it needs more energy -- and churns out more greenhouse gases -- than virtually any other water source in the state. The pipes that suck seawater into many desal plants kill billions of fish larvae annually. And because desalinized water costs so much, some activists worry that it will put this basic necessity out of reach of the poor.
Desalination plants are fiendishly complex. Tom Pankratz, a Houston-based expert, calls desalination "the most complicated kind of infrastructure there is." The plants have to both pre-treat and treat water to render it drinkable. One Long Beach official calls the city's pilot plant "an O&M (operations and maintenance) nightmare." It took three years for Carlsbad city officials and Poseidon just to come to terms on how to run their proposed plant.
But the appeal of salt water won't go away. After all, it comprises 94 percent of the world's water supply, and it isn't running out.
Bud Lewis, the mayor of Carlsbad, is a balding, mildly blustery man who has lived in Carlsbad for more than half a century. The Korean War vet and former high school teacher once told an interviewer that his greatest passions are "the love of my wife and family, the love of Jesus Christ, and my love for the city of Carlsbad."
When Lewis moved to this placid stretch of Southern California coastline in 1954, there were 3,000 people here. He was first elected to the Carlsbad city council in 1970 and became mayor in 1986. During his tenure, Carlsbad's population has exploded; today, 103,000 people live on 42 square miles. Fifteen golf-gear manufacturing companies call Carlsbad home, along with 65 high-tech and biotech firms. There are 3,000 hotel rooms in the city, with nine new hotels on the way.
In the early 1990s, growth and drought collided in Southern California, and water use was slashed by up to 30 percent. Lewis began to think seriously about meeting his city's water needs. He was an architect of the city's growth-management plan, which caps the population at 120,000. But stopping growth alone, he says, is not enough to solve the city's water problems. In recent years, Lewis has learned a lot about water; he served on the boards of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the San Diego County Regional Water Authority. And for the last decade, he has also been one of the biggest boosters of Poseidon's desalination plant.
"I told environmentalists that if I had it my way, I would kick all of you people out. But you can't do that. You have to plan for the future. Water is planning for the future. This plant takes care of 10 percent of our water needs, and it is truly a blessing," Lewis says. "But talking about it is one thing and getting it is another."
Lewis put his political muscle behind the plant, even arranging for buses to take dozens of project supporters to public hearings. Poseidon has done its part as well. The company has spent about $595,000 on lobbyists in Sacramento since 2001. And it gave nearly $2,000 to San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders' 2006 and 2008 election and re-election campaigns. Poseidon is also tied to the San Diego mayor's office through a political consulting firm that has worked closely with both the company and Mayor Sanders.
The proposed plant -- which would pump out 50 million gallons a day, enough to quench the thirst of 300,000 people -- would lie just north of the giant Encina Power Station's dark gray stack. It would suck water from a serene-looking neighboring estuary, Aqua Hedionda ("stinky water" in Spanish) Lagoon, which hosts oyster and mussel farms.
Poseidon's plant would join some 13,000 desalination facilities worldwide, which collectively produce almost 15 billion gallons a day, a number that's growing by about 10 to 15 percent each year. There are over 2,100 such plants in the United States, but they're generally small facilities that treat brackish groundwater rather than ocean water. Together, they provide less than one-half of one percent of all U.S. water supplies.
If the Carlsbad plant is built and its operation proves financially feasible, however, it could open the door to new facilities up and down the coast. As a result, the battle over the plant has become the front line in the nationwide war over desalination.
The company chose a good location to make its stand. Not only is the region thirsty, but Carlsbad is also home to 35 desalination-related companies, employing more than 2,000 people.
"San Diego County is to desalination and reverse osmosis as Silicon Valley is to computer chips," says Peter McLaggan, Poseidon's executive vice president. The company's promotional video says the plant will boost Carlsbad's desalination economy by bringing 2,100 construction jobs, more high-tech and biotech employers and $37 million a year in revenue. It also warns that if the water shortages aren't fixed, thousands of local jobs will be lost.
Flashing back and forth from testimonials to scenes of surf, sand and sun, the video points out that half of San Diego County's residents live less than 10 miles from the ocean, making it a growing market for seawater. And it says Poseidon will dedicate nearly 15 acres around the lagoon to hiking trails, a fish hatchery and beach access.
The video also contains an assurance from Scott Jenkins of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. A marine engineer who works as a consultant to Poseidon, Jenkins says that "the environmental impacts of these plants have been studied all over the world … providing scientists with a vast body of data which has confirmed that these plants do not harm the marine environment."
Finally, the video explains that the plant's filters will remove impurities so small they can't be seen by the naked eye. "The membrane converts sea water into two streams: ultra high-quality drinking water and concentrated sea water, which is then mixed with sea water leaving the power station to the ocean. The entire process takes 20 minutes."
Perhaps. But getting a plant built and running properly -- even in Carlsbad -- will take much, much longer.
"This is good stuff," Pete McLaggan says as he downs a cupful of freshly desalinated water from his company's pilot project, a miniature version of the proposed Carlsbad plant. He hands me a cup, too, and I notice a slightly sweet taste. Between the ocean and my cup, the water had to go through a reverse osmosis system, including a series of filters to remove debris, and then 8,000 highly pressurized membranes that remove salt.
Because of such technological improvements, desalination today costs about a third of what it did 30 years ago. Poseidon is so confident about the economics of desalination that it has promised that its customers will never have to pay more for desalinated water than for imported water. As a result, Carlsbad and eight other cities and water districts have signed contracts with the company.
It's a stiff challenge. Colorado River and State Water Project water costs anywhere from $250 to $700 per acre-foot (325,851 gallons). Poseidon, meanwhile, estimates that it can produce water at $946 per acre-foot, and it will get a $250 per acre-foot subsidy from the Southern California Metropolitan Water District (ultimately paid for by water consumers in six counties). That figure is hotly disputed, however, in part because of high energy prices: The Coastal Commission's staff warns that today's desalination cost is closer to $1,400 an acre-foot. (In fact, water from a host of new desalination plants in Australia costs twice that.)
The company predicts that over time, as demand grows, the cost of imported water will ultimately surpass the cost of desalination. But environmentalists and other critics remain dubious, and warn that Poseidon could ultimately cost ratepayers much more than they bargained for.
Take the Tampa Bay region on the Gulf Coast of Florida, for example. In 1996, the court ordered a reduction in groundwater pumping by more than 30 percent by 2008, because it was drying up wetlands and allowing saltwater to invade freshwater aquifers. Three years later, Tampa Bay Water, the regional utility, opted to build a desalination plant about half the size of the proposed Carlsbad plant. It was to open in 2002 at a production cost of less than one-fourth the cost of the plants coming on line in Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean. Poseidon was put in charge of the project.
But in the next four years, three of the plant's contractors went bankrupt. Some filters lasted only four days, and membranes that should have lasted five to seven years had to be replaced after two years, recalls Ken Herd, the plant's director from 2002 to 2008. In May 2002, after the second bankruptcy, Tampa Bay Water decided to take control of the nearly half-finished plant. But the problems continued. By the time the plant was ready to operate in December 2007, the water district had sunk another $48 million into it, and the cost of the water had nearly doubled.
Who was to blame? Nobody could agree. But officials in Carlsbad say they'll insulate themselves from the kind of problems that plagued Tampa by giving the company total control. Still, that puts a crucial public resource into private hands, which critics say is dangerous. "As a utility, you can shift the financial risk to the private sector," warns Tampa Bay's Herd, "but you can't shift the responsibility of providing drinking water to your customers to the private sector."
Critics of the Carlsbad proposal, from the Sierra Club to coastal environmental groups like San Diego Coastkeeper and Surfrider, worry about a West Coast repeat of the Tampa Bay fiasco. But they have an even bigger concern: billions of dead fish.
In the early 1970s, researchers discovered millions of dead fish near power plants in the East and the Deep South. The kills were blamed on the practice of pulling power-plant cooling water out of the ocean with large intake pipes, distributing it to the plant through a condenser and discharging it back into the sea at elevated temperatures.
So California fish biologist Pete Raimondi wasn't surprised when, 15 years ago, as he started studying how marine life responded to the state's 22 coastal power plants, he saw oodles of dead fish. Some fish, birds, marine mammals and other large organisms get pinned against or otherwise caught in huge intake pipes. Others squeeze through the intakes, but die inside the facilities, from the heat or from high-speed collisions with one another or by smashing against the sides.
"Everything that goes in, dies," says Raimondi, a University of California at Santa Cruz biology professor who has reviewed Poseidon's plans for the Coastal Commission.
The San Onofre nuclear power plant north of Camp Pendleton kills an estimated 6 billion to 7 billion fish larvae annually, Raimondi says. Another 4 billion a year die at the Carlsbad power plant, as well as at the one in Huntington Beach. Desalination plants can take fish on a similarly fatal ride; in fact, many desal plants share water intake systems with neighboring power plants.
Power plants have tried to mitigate kills by putting screens on intake pipes, and they've tried to offset damage by restoring wetlands elsewhere. Southern California Edison, which operates the San Onofre nuclear plant, is building a 150-acre wetland restoration project in Del Mar north of San Diego. Meanwhile, Poseidon has agreed to construct a 55-acre wetland restoration, but it has yet to specify a site, and critics are dismayed by the fact that it has up to seven years to complete it.
Then again, the San Onofre nuclear power plant didn't even start building its wetlands until 2006, decades after it started operating. Today, the company is roughly half-finished restoring a tidal wetland in and around the city of Del Mar, bringing back to life an area that has been all but destroyed by roads, freeways, an airport and subdivisions. Biologists for the Coastal Commission hope this project will serve as a model for Poseidon.
"We've had some disagreements, but all in all, I think they are doing a masterful job," Raimondi says of the San Onofre wetlands restoration. He adds that Poseidon's wetlands restoration, if it goes as planned, will compensate for the plant's effects on fish. "The wetlands along the coast are so degraded, we need to fix them. This may not be the p.c. way to do them, but it may be the only way."
A recent federal court ruling, however, says those efforts may not be enough. The 2007 Riverkeeper II ruling curbed the freewheeling use of seawater intakes to bring in power-plant cooling water, and required the "best technology available." Plants must recycle the seawater, or install a dry cooling system that runs boiler steam through radiator-like coils. The ruling also made it clear that creating wetlands or other manmade projects to offset the fish kills wasn't enough.
As a result, the Encina Power Plant, for one, plans to modify its plant with a dry cooling system in the next few years. A quarter of all coastal California plants have said they'll shift to less damaging cooling methods, says Tom Luster, a Coastal Commission staffer. Unfortunately, desalination plants will not be able to piggyback onto those systems because the dry cooling technology won't supply enough water. Instead, the new desalting plants will have to rely on the same fish-inhaling intake pipes that the old power plants did.
Whether Riverkeeper applies to desalination plants is still up in the air; the ruling doesn't specifically mention them. But an analogous state law does cover desalination plants, and it is stronger than the federal Clean Water Act. Environmentalists have sued to get Riverkeeper applied to Poseidon, and if they succeed, it will likely put the kibosh on the plant.
"There's so few fish left," says Conner Everts, a Santa Monica activist who grew up in Southern California during the 1950s and '60s. "When I was young, we were catching yellowtail, bonita, halibut and sand bass off the piers out here. You rarely see those anymore. The stuff they catch now -- Spanish mackerel, croaker, Tommy cod -- they are small fish that we would have thrown back or used for bait."
Everts is director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance and co-chair of a coalition of environmental groups that questions desalination. He works in a cubbyhole of an office space in the back of a Santa Monica storefront. He was schooled in conservation back in the 1970s, when he worked on the Maine homestead of back-to-the-land pioneers Helen and Scott Nearing. He later worked for the city of Pasadena as a consultant. While there, Everts engineered a host of conservation programs during an extended drought, bringing the city's total water use down by 27 percent from 1986 to 1991. His staff installed low-flow toilets and worked with commercial laundries, the Rose Bowl, golf courses and restaurants to get them to conserve.
Conservation, he says, is the answer to Carlsbad's water problems, not desalination. Each person in San Diego County uses between 175 to 185 gallons per day, he says, compared to 128 daily inside the city of Los Angeles. By simply cutting its water use to L.A.'s levels, Carlsbad alone could save some 5 million gallons of water each day, reducing the need to turn ocean water into drinking water.
Proponents of the plant see things differently, however. For them, every drop of ocean water that's desalted results in another drop of water that is not imported from elsewhere. Less water would need to be pumped from the north or the east, meaning reduced demand on the Colorado River and California Delta, less energy use, and a decrease in the quantities of greenhouse gases spewed into the air.
Still, the 4,000 kilowatt hours or more that it takes to desalt an acre-foot of ocean water is about twice the power it takes to get an acre-foot of Colorado River water to San Diego County, according to the Pacific Institute, an environmental and economic think tank. So to make up for the difference, Poseidon says it will also rely on solar power and invest in a variety of carbon offset projects.
Critics, however, point out that any imported water that is given up by the utilities that opt for desalination will soon be gobbled by growth here or elsewhere. After all, throwing water at Southern California and asking it not to use it to grow is akin to throwing oxygen and tinder-dry brush at a wildfire and asking it not to burn it up. So even a giant desalination plant producing at full capacity may not ultimately reduce demand on other water sources.
"We know we are at a historic drought that is the result of climate change," said San Diego Coastkeeper director Bruce Reznick at one of the Poseidon hearings. "Why in God's name would we approve the most energy-dependent and energy-intensive project to create local water and exacerbate the very problems we are trying to fix?"
Such arguments were whisked aside by the Metropolitan Water District, however. The massive utility agreed to subsidize Poseidon's plant by $14 million annually because the water agencies using the desalinated water will forgo the use of an equivalent amount of imported water. In August, the full Coastal Commission followed suit, voting overwhelmingly to side with Poseidon on that issue and on the wetlands mitigation plan.
Afterward, Everts decided to go to work with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, promoting landscaping water conservation. He was drawn to that agency because this year it dropped desalination from its long-range plans in favor of conservation and wastewater recycling. Even after getting $1.5 million in state and federal grants to design a pilot desalination facility, the department decided a plant would be too energy-intensive, and would cost several million dollars more to build and have more complex environmental issues than expected, a department spokeswoman said.
"There is enough water to be saved out there, and when you save water, you're not only saving energy, you're cutting down on runoff," Everts says. "You're fulfilling multiple objectives, and you're getting multiple benefits. When you do desal, you are creating impacts and only creating high-cost water."
Still, some desalination plants have run into less resistance. For 10 years, the city of Long Beach has worked on its own pilot plant. Since 2005, it has run 300,000 gallons a day through the plant -- enough to supply a town of about 4,000 people. Because officials are regularly varying the water's quality for testing purposes, it is not used for drinking; it's simply routed back to sea.
Long Beach doesn't expect to operate a full-scale plant until about 2015, and it will produce no more than 10 million gallons a day. But the finished plant will run on a new technology, called dual-stage nanofiltration, that's drawn a lot of interest in the water world. In research slated to be published this fall, the department, working with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, concludes that its new technology -- known as "the Long Beach Way" -- is 20 to 30 percent more energy-efficient than reverse osmosis. That's because its membranes are looser and require less pressure to push the water through.
Five miles from the plant, city officials have just started testing another new technology: underground "beach wells." The wells are actually perforated pipes, poking 15 to 20 feet underground, designed to draw in seawater without killing fish. The system is modeled on a 13.2-million-gallon a day desalination plant in Fukuoka, Japan, whose wells lie 2,000 feet out at sea underneath 7 feet of sand and graded gravel.
"We believe that desal is the future, and there's no arguing the opposite," says Ryan Alsop, government and public affairs director for the Long Beach Water Department. "But right now, a number of major issues are hindering its development. We're taking the opportunity to build one of these things in a measured, transparent way, to position ourselves for building a larger one when the time is right."
Environmentalists joined the Coastal Commission staff in urging Poseidon to follow the Long Beach Way. But Poseidon refused, saying its tests found that it would need 200 beach wells over seven miles. That would have been economically infeasible and also might damage offshore kelp beds.
Heather Cooley of the Pacific Institute agrees. Beach wells are "very, very site specific," says Cooley, a senior researcher for the Oakland-based institute. "In terms of the very large, 50-million-gallons-a-day plants, beach wells are not likely an option."
A lot depends on whether California's drought continues. Desalting facilities are the norm in places that lack other water sources, such as the Middle East and Australia. The few plants that exist in the U.S. were originally built during or right after dry spells, but were later mothballed when the need for water proved less imminent. Today, however, with water becoming more and more precious, some of those plants may come back to life.
In 1992, a $250 million plant in Yuma, Ariz., that treats brackish groundwater was shut down due to flood damage almost as soon as construction was completed. Last year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation tested the 100-million-gallon-a-day plant at 10 percent of capacity for three months. Authorities have found $15 million worth of cracks in the welds of many pipes. Nevertheless, they hope to restart the Yuma plant at about one-third of capacity next year. Poseidon has another desal plant up its sleeve, as well: a proposed plant up the coast in Huntington Beach for which the company expects to get final state approvals by next summer. Environmentalists will fight it, too, as will many Huntington Beach residents, although the city council supports it.
In El Paso, Texas, water officials opened a 27-million-gallon-a-day groundwater plant last year. It's only running at a fraction of capacity right now, but at full tilt it should end the area's long history of water shortages, and guarantee enough for a huge expansion at neighboring Fort Bliss Army Base. According to Tom Pankratz, the desalination consultant, two recently built brackish-water plants are running smoothly in central California, several new seawater plants are in the works in Florida, two plants are under construction in Massachusetts, and a wind-powered facility is under study in Texas.
Yet Pankratz agrees with other experts that all desalination plants must be handled with extreme care and constructed at deliberate speed because of their cost and complexity.
A variety of researchers have joined California officials and the Coastal Commission in endorsing desalination, at least in theory. Both the National Academy of Sciences and the Pacific Institute, an environmental think tank, say they believe it will be part of the West's water future. But they also agree that a long list of uncertainties about cost, energy and environment must be resolved.
"In the end, decisions about desalination developments will revolve around complex evaluations of local circumstances and needs, economics, financing, environmental and social impacts, and available alternatives," says the Pacific Institute in a 2006 report.
Conner Everts says that desalination is tantamount to a religion in San Diego. That may be so, but with plenty of heretics worried about fish, energy use and expensive water, it might pay to take desalination with a grain of salt.
This article was made possible with support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation and the Jay Kenney Foundation.]]>