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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.
]]>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
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>They were the worst fires in Australia's history, roaring across 800,000 acres of bush country near Melbourne, wiping out ranches, vineyards, churches, schools, entire towns, even fire stations. Arsonists reportedly started some of them. But the main culprit was climate change, which makes such blazes far more likely. "The Big Dry" -- the Aussies' nickname for their 12-year drought -- and temperatures up to 117 degrees had turned vegetation into tinder aching to burn.
That's a familiar scenario in our region, which is similarly racked by climate change and fires. Most relevant to Westerners, the Australian fires may have toasted a strategy that the West's fire departments have considered adopting. It's called "Leave Early or Stay and Defend."
That strategy says residents facing fires are often safer if they hunker down instead of fleeing. Australian experts devised it decades ago, because they observed that residents who didn't have time to evacuate carefully often bolted at the last second through dense smoke, crashing their vehicles and getting overtaken by the flames. With "Stay and Defend," property owners are trained to fend off flames by clearing brush and dowsing spot fires with water pumps. Until the recent conflagration, Australian families had defended their property from fires with few casualties, reducing the strain on professional firefighters and government budgets. Australian experts had come to the U.S. to spread the word. The Los Angeles Times calls it "the most talked-about strategy in the firefighting world."
But now many suspect that "Stay and Defend" may become too risky, because fires are expected to get even more hellacious. "Some (Australians) were killed while actively defending their homes" during the recent blazes, the Times reports, and "the charred shells of at least 20 cars (had) corpses inside. … Even fire officials say the proven policy can break down in the face of raw panic."
Western fire chiefs are bound to re-evaluate "Stay and Defend." It's a disappointment for those in search of better strategies for coping with wildfire, the hottest symptom of climate change.
But at least Westerners are making headway against one factor in climate change: the coal industry. NV Energy, a Nevada-based utility, said Feb. 9 that it will shelve plans to build a big carbon-spewing coal-fired power plant (the Ely Energy Center) in eastern Nevada. The company cited the national economic crisis and the possibility that Congress will impose carbon-emission regulations. If "clean-coal" technology is ever developed, the company may go ahead with a clean-coal plant in Ely. Meanwhile, it plans to develop a transmission line, natural gas plants and wind, solar and geothermal power.
Environmentalists, downwinders and Nevada Sen. Harry Reid were among those who praised the decision -- the latest in a series of vanquishments of conventional-coal-plant proposals in the West. The Las Vegas Sun headlined an editorial: "Good riddance to coal."
In Wyoming, another climate-change culprit -- the oil-and-gas industry -- faced criticism about how it treats workers. Since Jan. 1, at least three men have been killed in oil-and-gas workplace accidents in the state. With that toll in mind, worker advocates testified in a Feb. 4 hearing of the Wyoming House Judiciary Committee. They called for passage of a bill that would give relatives of the dead more right to sue companies that operate unsafe workplaces. But committee members voted 5-4 against sending the bill to the full House for consideration -- effectively killing it. As the bill's sponsor, Rep. Keith Gingery, R-Jackson, told the Casper Star-Tribune, "The oil and gas lobby is extremely powerful."
Also notable, on Feb. 17 President Barack Obama signed a $787 billion economic stimulus bill that aims to counter the slide toward economic depression. He chose to stage the ceremony in Denver, Colo. -- one more sign that he wants to nurture political support in the West. About $110 billion of the bill's total will be spent in the West (with California getting about $64 billion of it). About 10 percent will go toward environmental goals, such as developing clean energy and green jobs -- another emerging Western trend. Still, even as big as that money is, it's just a drop in the bucket for battling climate change.
]]>Outlandish as it sounds, that's what four major Western utilities and the federal government are planning to do next year through the $11 million Colorado River Conservation Partnership. Under the agreement, finalized late last week between the Department of Interior and the utilities Denver Water, the Central Arizona Project, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, farmers, cities and industries will get paid to implement two-year, voluntary conservation projects that put water back into the Colorado River. The goal is to demonstrate that so-called "demand management" can prevent water levels in lakes Powell and Mead from dropping too low for their dams to generate electricity.
"We want to demonstrate how we can live within our means on the river," said Jim Lochhead, CEO of Denver Water, whose city relies on Colorado River water piped east over the Continental Divide for about half of its water supply.
In the agricultural sphere, one candidate for funding under the partnership would be rotational fallowing agreements, where farmers band together, dry up some of their land and leave the associated water in the river in dry years. Yet after years of Western cities "buying and drying" nearby farms to lubricate their growth, agricultural groups are eager to see other non-fallowing options explored as well.
"Fallowing is really a blunt force tool that would harm agriculture," said Terry Frankhauser, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen's Association. "We want to try to explore other ways of reducing demand," like switching to less water intensive crops, watering less and accepting reduced yields, or water banking—foregoing diversions when you don't need them in exchange for the right to use more later.
In cities, projects eligible for funding could include things like water-smart landscaping, increased use of reclaimed water, or efficiency standards for appliances and new construction.
Whatever the demand-reducing mechanism, Lochhead said, "The goal is to develop a plan that we can put into place as we need to in emergency situations." And for water managers who depend on the Colorado River, losing power-generating capacity in lakes Mead and Powell would certainly qualify as an emergency. If water levels drop that low, there likely won't be enough head pressure in Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam to push through 7.5 million acre feet of water over 10 years. That's how much the upper basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—are required to deliver to the lower basin under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. If they fall short, the lower basin states—Arizona, Nevada and California—have license to place a call on the river and force their friends in the upper basin to cut consumption.
If the turbines inside Glen Canyon Dam ground to a halt, it could prompt power prices in the upper basin to spike.
"If that happens, it would mean chaos in the basin among water users because everyone would be scrambling to try to shore up our water supplies," Lochhead said.
And losing power generating capacity could have other consequences: proceeds from the electricity generated at Glen Canyon Dam now fund recovery programs for four endangered species—the Kanab ambersnail, the razorback sucker, the humpback chub and the southwestern willow flycatcher—that are native to the Colorado River Basin. If enough water in Lake Powell evaporates, funding for those programs could too, allowing the federal government to intervene and curtail water use in the upper basin in the name of the Endangered Species Act.
Finally, if the turbines inside Glen Canyon Dam ground to a halt, Lochhead points out that it could prompt power prices in the upper basin to spike, since roughly 5.8 million people now depend on electricity from the dam for a portion of their power supply. Exactly how much rates would rise remains unclear.
So how real is the threat of losing power at lakes Mead and Powell? The waters of both reservoirs aren't circling the drain just yet, but the prospect of either dropping below "minimum power pool" is hardly academic: modeling completed by the Bureau of Reclamation last year suggested that if the drought and water usage trends that prevailed in the basin between 2001 and 2007 continue through the end of this decade, there's a one-in-five chance that both Mead and Powell could drop too low to generate power by 2017.
"The consequences of that are really pretty devastating," said Lochhead. "We need to be ahead of that curve instead of being reactionary."
Nelson Harvey is a freelance reporter and the editor of Edible Aspen Magazine.
]]>By the mid-1980s, though, the selenium had concentrated in toxic levels in Kesterson Reservoir, causing deformities like missing eyes and protruding brains in birds and fish. Regulations were implemented to prevent farmers from sending briny irrigation water downstream, and wildlife health gradually improved. But because farmers were forced to reuse water again and again, the toxic elements built up on their fields instead of in wetlands. As the soil became ever saltier, farmers had to take swaths of once-fertile cropland out of production.
It was about that time that an energetic young soil scientist named Gary Bañuelos arrived. An early proponent of phytoremediation – using plants to improve contaminated soil – he'd helped Chinese villagers dealing with selenium poisoning and Chilean farmers with arsenic in their irrigation water. In 1987, he was analyzing vegetables for radioactivity outside Chernobyl when the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked for his help: They wanted "the plant doctor" to figure out what could be done for the San Joaquin's swiftly deteriorating soil.
But when he arrived in his home state, Bañuelos was stumped. "The nastier the soil, the more exotic you have to go with your plant selection," he explains. "But you can't go too exotic, because if the farmer can't pronounce its name, they definitely won't grow the crop."
He considered Australian saltbush, but cattle that ate it became too thirsty and drained water supplies. Then he experimented with selenium-loving broccoli, but the hot, dry soil proved too harsh for it. Mustard seemed like an option, but as water in central California became increasingly scarce, no farmer wanted to spend precious drops on something they might not be able to sell.
It wasn't until 2005 that a graduate student working under Bañuelos suggested Opuntia ficus-indica, better known as prickly pear. The cactus requires little water, thrives in toxic conditions that kill other plants, and even improves soil by sucking selenium up through its roots and releasing it as a harmless gas, a process known as volatilization. Plus, its juicy pears are beloved by chefs around the world. A tool to fix the San Joaquin's soil problem was already there – Bañuelos just needed to fine-tune it.
"We selected the varieties most tolerant to salt and boron," he says, almost giddily, "and I subjected them to hell. And after they survived hell, I took cuttings and planted them in hell too."
Eventually, that dry, salty hell yielded four spineless varieties of prickly pear suited to the region. All that was needed was a farmer to grow them, and Bañuelos knew just the guy: John Diener, an innovative 63-year-old who farms everything from organic broccoli to cotton on his 3,000-acre Red Rock Ranch. Diener's Uncle Frank was among the first Californians to grow cotton for the pre-World War II tire industry, and Diener himself has won national awards for water conservation.
Diener readily agreed to devote 20 acres of otherwise unusable soil to prickly pears. Yet convincing other Americans to give the succulent a shot may prove more difficult. Although the cactus' pads are a $150-million-a-year crop in Mexico and the fruits are prized in Italian cuisine, the taste hasn't really caught on in the U.S. The current demand, mostly from immigrant communities, is satisfied by California's D'Arrigo Brothers and a few niche growers in the Southwest.
Yet Diener has his eye on a burgeoning new market. Instead of selling fresh fruits or pads, he plans to sell processed prickly pear for juices and nutritional supplements. Jamba Juice already sells a prickly pear smoothie, food activist Adam Brock devoted an entire TED talk to cactus as "bioregional cuisine," and a recent Modern Farmer article touts it as the next kale – a healthy new trend for Whole Foodies.
While Diener isn't betting the farm on the succulent just yet, he hopes its popularity will keep growing. If Americans are willing to buy it, the cactus has the potential to prevent thousands of acres of farmland in the western San Joaquin from going fallow, keeping farmers like Diener in business and more water in the San Joaquin River. "We have to make farmland sustainable," Diener says. "I don't want to sell the farm."
]]>Thanks to the Bakken shale, the state has become the country's second-biggest oil-producer practically overnight. And while the world still runs on oil, with the rise of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, oil increasingly runs on water. Drillers inject 1 million to 3.5 million gallons of pressurized water into each well to shatter the rock and free the oil. More of the trucks you see are carrying water than anything else, some 400 to 800 truckloads per well.
In the low, early-morning light one fall day, the trucks are already lined up eight deep at a water depot outside Watford City. In the time it takes to smoke a cigarette, one trucker from Minnesota pumps 4,200 gallons from the ground into his chrome tanker. The job is good enough that, after two years of living away from home, he says his wife will soon be joining him here.
The water business is good for locals, too. Several dozen farmers and ranchers with access to water and $150,000 to spend have built water depots like this one -- trailer-sized aluminum pump-sheds with eight-inch pipes sticking out of the sides. These private water sellers pulled in $25 million to $30 million last year, according to Steve Mortenson, who heads the Independent Water Providers, a group that represents the industry in the state capital. Several local towns have built depots to sell excess municipal water, pulling in another $10 million or so last year, Mortenson estimates, a substantial sum given their average population of a few thousand people.
The sales are raising uncomfortable questions in a region where fewer than 15 inches of rain falls each year. In many places, the nearest water is 1,000 feet down in a large aquifer that flows freely to the surface in low-lying areas. But it recharges slowly, and the level at which it flows without pumping is dropping more than a foot per year from overuse. Meanwhile, most of the fracking water comes from a series of smaller, shallower aquifers, some of which are already stretched to meet drinking and irrigation needs. The Missouri River has begun to provide some relief, though federal agencies are already tussling over the possible negative effects of withdrawals. To make matters worse, the fracking water ends up contaminated and must be injected thousands of feet underground, removing it from the hydrologic cycle.
There's plenty to supply the oil companies for now, says Bob Shaver, director of the water appropriations division for the Water Commission, which monitors the state's aquifers and regulates all surface and groundwater withdrawals. The best estimate for oil-field use is about 3 billion gallons, based on last year's activity, with demand projected to double over the next decade. But it's only a matter of time before the state's water is fully appropriated, he says, and any new use will have noticeable effects. That day is nearing as the oil rush drives population growth in rural areas with little infrastructure, further straining water supplies. McKenzie County, in the heart of the boom, has grown 20 percent in two years.
Each new depot draws more opposition from neighbors and other interests, Shaver says, highlighting the resource's increasing value -- and scarcity. "To me, water is going to be the oil of the 21st century."
Nationwide, energy companies have been using more and more water for hydraulic fracturing over the past decade, spurring worries about impacts, from the arid West, where many rivers are fully appropriated, to relatively water-wealthy Pennsylvania. The EPA estimates that fracking uses between 70 billion and 140 billion gallons of water total each year. That's small compared to irrigation, which uses about 128 billion gallons every day. But much of the irrigation water runs into the ground or streams, and a lot of the rest evaporates to rain down elsewhere. In contrast, water used for oil and gas is usually disposed of or otherwise removed from the system. Even relatively small withdrawals can have local impacts.
"Will oil and gas use limit other uses?" asks Reagan Waskom, director of Colorado State University's Colorado Water Institute. In dry years such as this, he says, the answer is sometimes yes. So far, it's seldom happened. But Colorado officials project the industry's water consumption for fracking will grow 20 percent over the next three years, to more than 6 billion gallons per year.
Meanwhile, during last year's drought in Texas, drilling hardly slowed even as farmers and ranchers lost crops and cattle, and towns restricted water use. Regulators predict the annual fracking-water use there will triple over the next decade to 39 billion gallons. Environmental groups in the state have begun pushing the Legislature to enact conservation requirements for drillers and other industries.
While North Dakota has produced oil since the '50s, this boom's water use is unprecedented and cuts to an ongoing concern. Delegates writing the State Constitution in 1889 enshrined water as a public resource, held in trust by the state. But anyone with physical access to an aquifer or surface water can apply to the Water Commission for a withdrawal permit. (You don't need a permit for most domestic or livestock use.) Other than a few hundred dollars in fees, the water is free.
Between 1980 and 2007, when the current oil boom started, the state issued just 10 permits for water depots. It's awarded at least six times as many since then. The process isn't onerous so long as the new use won't "unduly" affect existing permits, which have priority. The commission has even urged farmers to temporarily convert irrigation permits to help drillers; nearly two dozen have done so. For the most part, oil companies here have not begun reusing wastewater, nor have regulators pushed them to. With the Missouri River bisecting the oil fields, the prevailing view is that nothing, least of all water, should slow drilling. That some individuals have reaped millions selling this water is simply a bonus.
Few have done as well as Mike Ames, who says he's had a hand in about two-thirds of the 70-plus depots. Ames, a burly man with a broad nose, grew up across the border in Montana and began selling irrigation equipment in Williston, northwest North Dakota's largest town, in the 1980s. Seven years ago, Ames opened his first depot, selling water for 35 cents a barrel -- equal to 42 gallons -- to farmers for mixing with pesticides. Then came oil. "I was in the right place at the right time," he says. Today, he charges 60 cents a barrel. He's also hired 20 people in the past year to look after the dozen depots he runs -- he owns three and operates the rest for other farmers.
He says he and the other water providers are helping wean the country off imported oil; thanks in part to the Bakken, U.S. oil production is rising consistently for the first time in over 25 years.
But private sellers face growing competition. Oil and oil-field services companies are applying for their own permits as they settle into the state. One Texas-based company, Select Energy, acquired permits to draw nearly 6 billion gallons annually from Lake Sakakawea, a giant reservoir on the Missouri.
The other new competitor is public. Because quality drinking water is scarce in western North Dakota, the state has worked for decades to build pipelines to deliver river water to residents. A system in the southwest, begun in 1977, still isn't complete; projects in the northwest have not materialized. Pushed to the limits of their existing water supplies by oil-driven population growth, the area's towns recently established the Western Area Water Supply Authority to build their own project. To lower the construction time to just a few years, they're borrowing $110 million from the state -- and plan to ask for another $40 million -- to be paid back by selling water to oil companies. They already have four depots running, with plans for eight more.
From the air, the need for water-supply projects is clear. Amid the prairie hills, new developments sprawl everywhere: water depots and drilling rigs like playing pieces in an elaborate game, a yard full of drill pipe here, a field full of campers there, new motels.
In Watford City, the largest town in McKenzie County, the population leapt from 1,744 in 2010 to an estimated 6,500 today, and city officials are planning for 15,000 over the next decade. Just behind Water Supply Authority Executive Director Jaret Wirtz's office, a local trucking company has cut several acres out of the surrounding prairie to build housing for 1,000 people. "Everybody wants to do 500 homes here, 300 homes there," Wirtz says. "Well, those all take water."
The drillers may soon be able to get more water from Lake Sakakawea, relieving some stress on groundwater. The Army Corps of Engineers opened the lake to oil-field use this spring after determining there would be little environmental effect, though it could be a year before planned projects are complete. In written comments, the Environmental Protection Agency said the Corps presented limited evidence to support its conclusion, failed to examine the impacts of withdrawals on downstream areas and as a result, "may not fully recognize potential direct, indirect, or cumulative impacts."
The Missouri River -- the country's longest -- supplies drinking water to 3 million people, irrigates 550,000 acres and cools 25 power plants. The utilities want more water released from dams for increased power production. Downstream states want more for barge traffic. Meanwhile, back in the oil fields, one utility has begun building two 45-megawatt natural gas plants that will require up to 75 gallons per minute. Fargo, North Dakota's biggest city, is still pushing for completion of a Sisyphean engineering feat begun in the 1950s to reroute water from the Missouri across the state to supplement its water supply. "Eventually, that river is going to get tied up," Wirtz says.
Lee and LaShell Tjelde live near the Montana border, where the land begins to undulate, exposing bare hillsides of striped earth. Lee is tall and strong, with a red face and wire-rimmed glasses. His family has ranched here for three generations.
On a drive through the couple's pastures, he points out stock dams nearly dry in mid-May. When they run out, Tjelde pumps groundwater for his cattle. He holds one permit to irrigate from the same groundwater, and he applied for a second nearly two years ago. Such requests once took months to process, but since drilling began, the Water Commission has been overwhelmed. The aquifer here is among those showing signs of stress, and hydrologist Alan Wanek says he will be cautious about issuing new permits. Even as the Tjeldes and several neighbors wait, five other neighbors have temporarily converted existing irrigation permits to sell to the drillers. "To my eyes," Tjelde says, "that's just not right."
Water is already hard to find. When the Tjeldes built their home, they drilled fruitlessly and eventually resorted to a "water witch," who divined a narrow seam of water in the ground. The well only pumps about four gallons per minute, and it's too salty for the garden. So LaShell collects rainwater in two 500-gallon barrels, one of which is nearly empty. Some neighbors must haul water from town. "If these aquifers are dried up through industrial use, what's left for us?" Lee says. "This is our life out here."
]]>Ray Ring's January essay told the tale of one Texas billionaire you shouldn't trust. Well, here's another to watch out for. His name is Billy Joe "Red" McCombs, and he might try to develop a place that's near and dear to you!
McCombs is the founder of one of the world's largest auto conglomerates, the co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, and also the former owner of multiple pro sports teams. He's got his hands in a lot of places.
Most recently, McCombs has been trying to bring hotshot resorts to a couple places in the West: one on the shores of Lake Powell, that huge reservoir that sits on the border between Utah and Arizona, and the other a ski resort in Southwest Colorado's Wolf Creek. But thanks to ongoing drought in the West and the economic downturn everywhere in the world, it's possible that both of these plans will be nixed.
In 2007, McCombs gave 10 Texas longhorn cattle (valued at $10,000) to the Navajo Nation, whose land he hoped would be leased for his proposed 50,000-acre development. Critics questioned why the gift never made headlines. Directed toward the central government of the Navajo Nation, the LeChee Chapter approved a resolution stating that further discussions of development must include them. "We will resist any move to take our land," they added. Currently, development plans are still at the "conversation over coffee" stage, says Navajo Nation Resources Chairman George Arthur.
It's not the first time McCombs has tried the ol' "gift" tactic. In 2005, the Village at Wolf Creek, McCombs' proposed ski resort, donated over $5,000 to the construction fund for a medical facility in nearby Creede, Colo., according to Janelle Kukuk, who led the facility's fundraising efforts. Kukuk denies any notion that the contribution was a bribe, but says, "Was it a good PR move on his part? Yeah maybe, but he wasn't the only one."
Luckily for the Wolf Creek residents, McCombs' development is stalled, because the proposed road to his "Village" goes through Forest Service land. And an approved Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is a prerequisite for building on Forest Service land. But McCombs missed his EIS deadline last year. If the Village plans ever go through (with this economy? Yeah right!), those reintroduced Canada lynx will have a steady flow of luxury SUV traffic to deal with.
]]>Before you write me off as someone you'd never want to have a beer with, in my defense, long-lasting puddles are rare natural phenomena in arid New Mexico, especially on sun-baked asphalt in the summer. Evaporation is such a powerful force here that sidewalks are often dry less than an hour after it rains. The first time I noticed a puddle in that spot across the street last for more than a day, it gave me a small thrill. Now, though, the puddle's novelty is starting to wane. Since at least July, it's materialized a couple of times a week. The puddle has become a feature of the neighborhood nearly as reliable as the four chihuahuas down the street who do their best to terrify my much larger mutt every time we pass their fence.
This monsoon season has been generous to New Mexico, with blessedly above average precipitation falling over most of the state since mid-June (see first map to the right). In early August, one of the more dramatic storms unleashed nearly 3 inches of rain on downtown Albuquerque, turning Central Avenue into a rushing river, and making my neighborhood puddle look pitiful by comparison.
Arizona hasn't been nearly as wet, but the rains have made a decent showing there, too (see second map to the right).
The monsoons have, undoubtedly, given the residents of drought-plagued New Mexico and Arizona some measure of emotional relief. But how much real drought relief have they delivered?
The quick answer: Some, but not enough. And, it depends, on where you are and what drought impacts you're worried about.
"The tricky thing about summer precipitation and drought," says Mike Crimmins, a climatologist at the University of Arizona, "is that drought is contextual. It depends on who you're talking to what the impact is." To feed their cows, ranchers in the Southwest, for instance, depend heavily on grasses that grow during the warm season with the help of the monsoons. When the rains don't materialize, they immediately feel the impact. When the monsoons do produce, it can give ranchers a big boost.
If you are, instead, an irrigator, an urban water user, or a fish, who depends on water stored in reservoirs or healthy streamflows, summer rain provides more marginal drought relief. Winter storms are often giant walls of precipitation that shed moisture over large areas. Monsoon rains, on the other hand, are spotty and inconsistent. I've had deluges at my apartment while, a couple miles away, my parents' house has stayed completely dry, and vice versa. From a distance, in New Mexico's wide open spaces, one can often see exactly where a rain begins and ends. Monsoons also "happen in a season when evapotranspiration is so high," says Crimmins, "that it very rarely turns into deep soil recharge, and very rarely ends up in streamflow in any meaningful way. It's hot, and it's very high intensity, localized rain."
Andrew Church, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque agrees. Some areas in central New Mexico that were classified as being in severe or extreme drought at the start of this year, are now considered only "abnormally dry" or in "moderate drought" by the U.S. Drought Monitor, a significant improvement. But if this winter is as snow-free as last winter was, they'll likely quickly sink right back into those deeper states of drought. With the monsoons, explains Church, "you don't get the overall basin wide recharge as you would with above-average snowfall, which is a gradual melting and a gradual recharge that takes place over several months." And even with the gangbuster monsoon season, he says, "most locations in the state are still 8 to 12 inches below the average (for overall precipitation) since January of 2010. So there's still a lot of catch-up to do." Adds Crimmins: "We need to have a good monsoon season, followed by a good winter, followed by good monsoons. The winters have been so bad that you could have good monsoons, followed by terrible winters, and still see trees die and streamflows down."
It takes a lot more water to fill a reservoir or stream than a puddle. Still, I plan to admire the beauty of every piddling puddle to come this summer. For each accumulation of water, however small, this arid-state dweller is grateful.
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor. She is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow @callycarswell.
The day after the quake, inspectors from the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation and local reclamation districts examined dams, canals and levees scattered across the area that experienced the heaviest shaking. They found no structural damage in the agency's facilities near the quake's epicenter, including the Coyote Valley Dam at Lake Mendocino and the Warm Springs Dam at Lake Sonoma. Inspections of a flood wall in Napa, which hems in the Napa River as it snakes through downtown, however, have revealed signs of cracking.
In spite of the dozens of injuries and extensive damage to homes, historic buildings and roadways – estimated to exceed $1 billion – things could have been much worse. Consider a scenario that has been imagined by experts for years: If Sunday's earthquake had occurred further to the east – nearer the tangled tidal channels in the heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta – the resulting damage could compound tremendously the severity of the drought's effects.
That's because engineers and geologists say the more than 1,000 miles of earthen levees that interlace the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – source of irrigation water for millions of acres of Central Valley farmland and drinking water for more than 24 million Californians – are highly vulnerable to an earthquake.
In a 2006 report, University of California Davis geology professor Jeff Mount put the probability of massive levee failure from an earthquake within the next 50 years at 64 percent. The next year, a report from the now defunct state-federal water management partnership CALFED, predicted that a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in the region could result in $40 billion in damage. A 2012 report from the National Academy of Sciences stated that a breach in the levees could result in massive flooding and saltwater intrusion from the bay to the Delta's water infrastructure, tainting the state's most important source of freshwater with salt. "Depending on the severity of the damage and other factors, water deliveries could be disrupted for months, or even years," according to one particularly nightmarish scenario, meaning that farmers, ranchers and municipalities already facing major water cuts would see even greater curtailments.
But this is California, and where water is involved, politics inevitably rush in. For several years, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Department of Water Resources have used the specter of a massive earthquake to support a highly controversial re-engineering of the state's plumbing. The project, known as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP, would include two 35-mile long tunnels that would shunt water from the Sacramento River, fast-tracking it under the Delta to pumping plants many miles south.
Boosters of the estimated $25 billion tunnel project say it would make the system more earthquake-resistant by moving the intake point for water upstream and away from the Delta's levee-laden heart. Ted Thomas, a Department of Water Resources spokesman, points to a report his agency published in 2009 that says there's a one percent annual probability that ground shaking capable of damaging levees will occur along the western edge of the Delta. "This level of ground motion could induce liquefaction in Delta levees, thereby causing a breach," wrote Thomas in an email. "Not knowing when or where an earthquake will strike does not justify inaction."
Yet tunnel critics, including Restore the Delta, a Stockton, California-based group opposed to the project, say the seismic threat to the Delta levees has been hyped by powerful agricultural and municipal interests in Southern California in order to secure more northern water – and that excavation of the giant boreholes would result in the ruination of the Delta itself.
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Restore the Delta's executive director, says the Delta and, by extension, the state's water resources, would be far better protected by bolstering the levees. "Fat, robust levees protect the delta," she said in 2012. "Large engineered projects are more vulnerable to earthquakes than the levees."
It's not just an earthquake that has the potential to exacerbate the drought's impact, however. A recent report from researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno in the journal Nature suggests that the drought could, in turn, be enhancing quake activity.
As farmers continue to rapidly draw down Central Valley aquifers, soils in the valley floor have subsided, in some places as much as 30 feet. But the Nevada researchers have found that the reduction in water weight from aquifers – estimated at around 176 billion tons – may be causing deeper crustal layers to "rebound" upward, thereby increasing seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault.
Of course, no one knows when the next earthquake will strike. Could last weekend's event have relieved tectonic stresses building up in the region, thus reducing the likelihood of a major earthquake in the near future? Or was it a mere prelude to an even larger tremor – perhaps along the Hayward Fault, which runs beneath several East Bay communities, and is projected to be due for an even larger quake?
For now, we Californians are left merely to hope that the drought and a major future earthquake don't come into a doubly disastrous alignment.
Jeremy Miller is a contributing editor for High Country News. He tweets @JeremyJ_Miller and writes from Northern California.
]]>This is just one of the hundreds of personal visits that watermasters are paying to ranchers and hay farmers who draw from the headwaters of the Klamath River, which runs 250 miles from southern Oregon's high desert to the fog-shrouded redwoods of the California Coast. The crews, working in pairs, offer a sympathetic ear to frustrated ranchers, but carry radios and file itineraries with state police for their own safety as they step through wire fences and straddle ditches to measure stream flows, close headgates and turn off pumps. Anywhere else in Oregon, officials would simply phone people to tell them to turn off their own irrigation systems, says White, a 35-year-old who wears waterproof hiking boots and covers his bald head with a baseball cap on parched summer days. "But this is a first in this basin."
After a 38-year process, this March the state of Oregon recognized the 3,700-member Klamath Tribes -- the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin people -- as the most senior water-rights holders in the Upper Klamath Basin. In June, fearing the drought would decimate their traditional fishery of endangered Lost River and shortnose suckers, the tribes exercised their rights to keep water in the lake and upper tributaries that feed into the Klamath River. The federal government joined the tribes, using its senior rights to ensure the flow of water to 1,400 other farms on the Klamath Project on the California-Oregon border. Hundreds of Upper Basin ranchers and other junior water users, including federal wildlife refuges, were cut off; even Crater Lake National Park has had to truck in drinking water for campers.
"People are hurt, they are angry, and I think there's grieving," says Roger Nicholson, who raises cattle in the Wood River Valley near Fort Klamath. He received a card ordering him to shut off in July. "To lose the productive ability of our land is almost like the loss of a family member. It's deep down."
The tribes agonized over the decision, says Tribal Council Member Jeff Mitchell, knowing it would fan the flames of one of the West's most intractable resource conflicts. People here have fought for generations over water and the fish, farms and hydroelectric dams it supplies, and the consequences have been widespread, including massive fish die-offs, toxic algae blooms in reservoirs and salmon declines that have closed 700 miles of coastline to fishing, from the Columbia River to Monterey, Calif.
Some have worried that this summer's drought might also kill the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, which was supposed to resolve those water-distribution conflicts while restoring habitat throughout the 15,000-square-mile Basin. Partly because many Upper Basin irrigators and others never signed on, the settlement has languished in Congress for over three years. But the latest crisis may actually provide the push needed to finally move the complex and fragile détente. The shut-offs have brought Nicholson and other holdouts to the table to join tribes and government officials for an urgent round of talks aimed at finding a swift resolution. "This is our one chance to fix the Klamath system," says Mitchell. "And it's fixable."
Struggles over water in the Klamath famously boiled over in 2001, when the federal government halted water deliveries to Klamath Project farmers to protect endangered suckers and salmon. U.S. marshals were called in to protect irrigation headgates from angry demonstrators, who formed a "bucket brigade" to manually divert water to irrigation canals in an act of civil disobedience. The Bush administration resumed water deliveries the following year, but that left river flows so low during the fall chinook salmon run that thousands of fish died, devastating downstream fisheries.
Three years ago, a coalition of dozens of onetime adversaries -- including farmers, fishermen, tribes and environmentalists -- signed a widely lauded truce. Under the agreement, the Klamath Tribes would not use their water rights to cut off the farmers who are part of the Klamath Project, a 1905 federal irrigation project that transformed an arid stretch of the California-Oregon border into productive farmland. The farmers agreed to accept less water during dry periods in exchange for greater certainty of deliveries from year to year.
The tribes, meanwhile, would benefit from restoration projects and receive 92,000 acres of forest, a small portion of the 1.8 million acres they lost when the U.S. government dissolved their reservation in 1954. In a companion deal, the electric utility PacifiCorp agreed to remove four hydroelectric dams on the river, allowing salmon to return to parts of the Klamath and its tributaries that have been blocked for nearly a century.
The settlement's architects have warned that the longer it sits, the more likely it is to unravel. The legislation has stalled in part because key groups still oppose it. Several environmental organizations and the Hoopa Valley Tribe say the settlement gives too much water to irrigators and doesn't reserve enough for fish. Meanwhile, Tea Party-backed ranchers who are not part of the federal irrigation project oppose dam removal and continuing Endangered Species Act protections for fish. At a committee hearing in June, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the deal had to bring those critics into the tent and cut the bill's $800 million price tag in order to win congressional support.
The power dynamic in the Basin changed significantly when the state officially recognized the Klamath Tribes' "time immemorial" water rights. Under the West's "first in time, first in right" water doctrine, senior water-rights holders can make a "call" when supply falls short, forcing their juniors to stop using water until their needs are satisfied. "It's a blunt tool, but this was the only path available to us," says Mitchell.
The recent call has hit the Upper Basin's off-project ranchers hardest; many of them refused to sign the Klamath deal because they felt it put tribes and fish ahead of their pastures. Now they're wondering how long they can stay in business without water. Many have had to decide whether to cut the size of their herds or try to move their cattle elsewhere. As their losses mount, they've begun to demand relief.
In July, Upper Basin ranchers drove a convoy of semi trucks, hay trailers and tractors to a rally in downtown Klamath Falls. They hoisted American flags and signs reading, "No water, no job," and "Empty ditch = Empty tummy." Over the blare of truck horns, hundreds called for quick action to return water to their fields. On display at the county building where they gathered is a huge metal bucket that was put up after drought triggered irrigation cutoffs in 2001: a symbol of how much remains unresolved and a reminder of how easy it is for history to repeat itself. Yet compromise, not conflict, is now in the works.
A task force charged with reaching a new water agreement in the Upper Basin began meeting in July under the supervision of Gov. Kitzhaber's office. It aims to ensure a more reliable water supply for farmers, stabilize power rates for irrigators and trim the settlement's cost.
The ranchers, environmentalists, government agencies, tribes and utilities have just two months to reach consensus because of the drought's severity. "The current crises in the Basin require the immediate attention, leadership and constructive efforts of us all," members of Oregon's congressional delegation wrote in the July 3 letter that convened the talks. "It is clear that now is the time to move for a comprehensive and lasting solution." The lawmakers will use the resulting recommendations to craft new legislation that could push parts of the original settlement forward as early as this fall.
The meetings could break the gridlock because they include some of that deal's most strident critics, including Nicholson, who heads a group of ranchers that has sued, so far unsuccessfully, to block the state from cutting off their irrigation water. He now says that reaching a new settlement is the best hope for the region's water woes. Many provisions of the 2010 deal would have to be re-worked to win his support, he says, but a new agreement with assurances that their water supply would not be cut off could be enough to convince him and hundreds of other rebellious ranchers to join. "Our people are out of water," he says. "There isn't anyone who could survive 10 years of fighting it out in court."
The Klamath Tribes are willing to sacrifice to bring the off-project ranchers on board, says Mitchell, their lead negotiator on water issues, but they will not back a major rewrite of the agreement if it diminishes benefits to tribes and wildlife. Still, the tribes share the ranchers' sense of urgency. "We want to develop a settlement with the community out there," Mitchell says, "but it takes two parties to be able to do that."
This story was made possible with support from the Kenney Brothers Foundation.
]]>Three years into a severe drought, hundreds of residential wells in an unincorporated area of Porterville, California, have gone dry, leaving many families without running water. The wait list to drill deeper wells in the area is at least six months. In September, photographer and multimedia storyteller Zoë Meyers visited Porterville, which sits in the San Joaquin Valley within the Central Valley. In this film, two women reflect on how their families and their community have been affected.
]]>Still, weather fluctuations can generate as many winners as losers. Past El Niños have nudged the jet stream – the river of air that typically conveys wet weather over Washington and Oregon – south across California, spilling precipitation on the arid Southwest and leaving the Northwest dry. Here's what El Niño might mean for your state.


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Seeking Small Business Relief? Get Ready To Wait
Expectations are low. The year-end survey of owners by the National Small Business Association found that 38 percent anticipate growth opportunities for their companies this year. That's down from the 47 percent who predicted growth in 2012, the trade group says. Sixty percent expected to keep their staffing levels stable this year.
"I'm right in there with other small business owners â¿¿ I have no intention of hiring," says Mark Hagar, owner of Specialized Printed Products in Fort Wayne, Ind.
Hagar is cautious because his customers, who are also small business owners, aren't ordering as many printed brochures or running as many direct mail marketing campaigns as they did before the recession.
"There's this great big circle of gridlock," he says. "They're not going to buy anymore because they're uncertain about what their customers are going to do."
Hagar's sales were up about 2.5 percent last year, and he doesn't expect to do better this year. He doesn't need new equipment, so he has no plans to borrow money. "We're not going to have any real growth," he says. Owners are reluctant to hire or expand because their revenue is down, says Susan Woodward, an economist at Sand Hill Econometrics in Palo Alto, Calif., who tracks small business revenue for Intuit. "They were all recovering for a while. Then in early 2012, their revenue began to flatten," she says. The picture isn't completely dark. The housing market is recovering and the stock market is rallying. If that gets consumers to spend more, small businesses may pull out of their funk. There are two key positive signs, according to Martin Regalia, chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million businesses: â¿¿ The housing market is improving: Sales of new homes hit their highest level in four and a-half years during January, according to government figures. And previously occupied homes sold at their second-best level in three years, the National Association of Realtors reported. Sellers are getting higher prices for their homes, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index.Check Out Our Best Services for Investors
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Thu., January 17, 2013 10:23am
Road Crews Prep For Ice, Snow
State road crews are preparing for a long, cold night in north Georgia. Continued rain and falling temperatures will mean snow for areas north of Atlanta and Athens. Freezing temperatures will extend south to the Macon area. Forecasters and the state transportation department are warning drivers to watch out for black ice Thursday night and early Friday morning.
Full Story
Thu., January 17, 2013 7:00am
N. Ga. Under Winter Storm Warning
Forecasters at the National Weather Service have issued a winter storm warning for 12 Georgia counties in the northwest and northern parts of the state. The winter storm warning will be in effect from 10 a.m. Thursday until 7 a.m. Friday. It includes the cities of Rome, Calhoun, Chatsworth, Dalton and Blairsville.
Wed., January 19, 2011 8:44am
DOT Chief: "We Did A Pretty Good Job"
State Department of Transportation officials met the assembled media in Atlanta Wednesday to address its response and work during the crippling snow and ice storm that hit the state last week. DOT Commissioner Vance Smith said the agency as a whole "did a pretty good job" in treating and clearing interstates and roads during a multi-day stretch.
Fri., January 14, 2011 5:08am
Many Schools Remain Closed, Monday Re-open Plan Draws Anger
Some school districts plan to make up for missed school days on Monday's federal holiday. They claim not to have much choice in the matter, but civil rights leaders are angry.
Tue., January 11, 2011 2:25am
Icy Roads Continue to Challenge North Georgia
The winter storm continues to impact Georgia. Many roads are still trecherous, and several school systems remain closed.
Mon., January 10, 2011 12:20pm
Icy Roads The Worry For Overnight
Forecasters say there's still plenty of concern with this winter storm for overnight into tomorrow morning. While snowfall has tapered-off across much of north and middle Georgia, the worry is for freezing rain to cause problems.
Sun., January 9, 2011 1:16pm
Gov. Perdue Issues State Of Emergency
Governor Sonny Perdue Sunday night issued a state of emergency as the front-end of a severe winter storm began to move into Georgia. Some parts of the state could see up to 6 inches of snow by the time the storm rolls through. Forecasters however, are concerned about the effects of freezing rain and sleet across north and middle Georgia.
Sun., January 9, 2011 11:32am
Deal Cancels Inaugural Ball
Winter storm warnings in the South are causing flight cancellations and longer lines at grocery stores in the Atlanta area. Several inches of snow forecast to fall overnight are also affecting plans for the Inauguration of Georgia's new governor.
Sat., February 13, 2010 2:53am
DOT Chief: Stay Off Roads
The snow and ice have closed several roads across the state and created haz


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Call it Oscar "Argo"-nautics. Propelled by dramatic victories at the Producers' and Screen Actors' Guilds, "Argo" just zoomed far ahead of "Lincoln" in the race for Best Picture, according to the predictions of 25 top Oscarologists polled by Gold Derby.
Just a few days ago, 13 experts backed "Lincoln," 11 picked "Argo" and one held out hope for "Silver Linings Playbook." Now the score stands: 22 for "Argo" and three stalwarts for "Lincoln." "Argo" reaps 12-to-5 odds; "Lincoln" snags 11-to-2. See all category odds here.
Last week Jennifer Lawrence ("Silver Linings Playbook") held just a narrow edge over Jessica Chastain ("Zero Dark Thirty") in the Best Actress contest. Now she's backed by 20 pundits, who give her 9-to-5 odds. Emmanuelle Riva ("Amour") is in second place with 3 votes and 4-to-1 odds, followed by Chastain chosen by two experts giving her 10-to-3 odds.
Tommy Lee Jones ("Lincoln") was ahead for Best Supporting Actor by only a slim margin recently, but he's pulled far ahead after prevailing at SAG. Twenty Oscarologists pick him to win (8 to 5 odds), compared to four for Robert De Niro ("Silver Linings Playbook") and one for Christoph Waltz ("Django Unchained").
All 25 gurus choose Daniel Day-Lewis ("Lincoln") for Best Actor (6/5) and Anne Hathaway ("Les Miserables") is the runaway pick of 24 pundits for Best Supporting Actress (11/8).
See the experts' latest predictions - click here.
Oscars Predictions by Top Experts
See the latest Oscar predictions of our famous pundits — Click Here. See the category rankings when their predictions are combined - Click Here. Sample below. Make your early picks now -- click here -- and change them later as the derby heats up.