BABY, IT'S DRY OUT HERE

New Report Says West’s Drought Cycle Not Unusual

By Headwaters News, 2-22-07

Officials across the Rocky Mountain West gave a collective nod of agreement to the findings of a new report that said the West is dry and getting drier.

The New York Times’ article on the report, issued by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the extreme drought suffered by the region in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a return to “normal” conditions after decades of higher than normal precipitation.

The report culls information previously published in scholarly journals and presents it in a straightforward manner. And the primary understanding regional officials pulled from the report is that some of the fastest-growing regions of the country are going to have less water from historical resources.

The Colorado River Basin covers 240,000 square miles in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico, and encompasses some of the nation’s fastest-growing areas: Colorado’s Front Range, Utah’s Wasatch Range, the Phoenix metro area in Arizona and Las Vegas.

Those seven states entered into an agreement to share the Colorado River Water back in 1922 – a time when scientists say the region enjoyed some of its wettest weather.

Now that the weather is cycling back into its normal, drier climate, and with demands of the ever-growing population increasing almost daily, policy makers and scientists are calling for a wholesale retrofit of the region’s lifestyle.

Golf courses in the desert were deemed “silly,” by one scientist, who also said maybe it was time for the federal government to stop subsidizing cattle and cotton – two of the 5 “Cs” of Arizona’s economy.

The folks in Las Vegas may be hardest hit with the drier climate the report portends. The Las Vegas region receives 90 percent of its water supply from Nevada’s allocation of the Colorado River water, and that fast-growing city is scrambling to secure new resources.

The Las Vegas Review Journal reported that Pat Mulroy, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said the new report underscores the necessity of a pipeline project proposed by her agency.

Mulroy said Las Vegas isn’t the only city in the state that imports water from outside the basins in which they’re located – and said that civilization has been moving water between basins since the time of the ancient Egyptians.

The SNWA wants to pipe groundwater pumped from the Spring Valley on the Nevada-Utah border—a proposal that has drawn the ire of both Nevadans and Utahns.

Mulroy spoke to the Nevada Legislature on Wednesday and urged them to put their legislative muscle behind the proposal. But not all the lawmakers were receptive to the water authority’s plight.

In another article about the report, the Las Vegas Review-Journal quotes Assemblyman Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka, whose legislative district covers a vast area of Northern Nevada that reaches from White Pine and Eureka counties on the east through parts of Churchill, Humboldt, Lander, Lyon, Pershing and even parts of Washoe County on the west side of the state, as saying he empathized with Las Vegas’ plight, but “You protect your own turf.”

And there may be a lot of “turf” protecting going around, as policy makers and regional officials absorb this report, a summary of which can be viewed here.

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