Monday, April 13, 2015

Mighty Rio Grande Now a Trickle Under Siege

On maps, the mighty Rio Grande meanders 1,900 miles, from southern Colorado’s San Juan Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. But on the ground, farms and cities drink all but a trickle before it reaches the canal that irrigates Bobby Skov’s farm outside El Paso, hundreds of miles from the gulf. Now, shriveled by the historic drought that has consumed California and most of the Southwest, that trickle has become a moist breath. Drought’s grip on California grabs all the headlines. But from Texas to Arizona to Colorado, the entire West is under siege by changing weather patterns that have shrunk snowpacks, raised temperatures, spurred evaporation and reduced reservoirs to record lows. In a region that has replumbed entire river systems to build cities and farms where they would not otherwise flourish, the drought is a historic challenge, and perhaps an enduring one. Many scientists say this is the harbinger of the permanently drier and hotter West that global warming will deliver later this century. Drought’s grip on California grabs all the headlines. But from Texas to Arizona to Colorado, the entire West is under siege by changing weather patterns that have shrunk snowpacks, raised temperatures, spurred evaporation and reduced reservoirs to record lows. The perils of drought are on ample display along the Rio Grande, where a rising thirst has tested farmers, fueled environmental battles over vanishing fish and pushed a water-rights dispute between Texas and New Mexico to the Supreme Court. But you can also see glimmers of hope. Albuquerque, the biggest New Mexico city along the Rio Grande, has cut its water consumption by a quarter in 20 years even as its population has grown by a third. Irrigation districts and farmers — which consume perhaps seven of every 10 gallons of river water — are turning to technology and ingenuity to make use of every drop of water given them. John Fleck, a journalist and scholar at the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program who is finishing a book on the Colorado River, said no one should dismiss the gravity of the West’s plight. But neither is it necessarily ruination. “This whole running-out-of-water thing isn’t really doom,” he said. “When water gets short, farmers get very clever.”...Mr. Skov, 44, is at the very end of that pipe. The canal that supplies his farm intercepts the Rio Grande near downtown El Paso, and flows through the city zoo. From parts of his 1,500 acres where he tends pecan trees and grows onions and alfalfa, he jokes, he could hit a nine-iron across the barren Rio Grande channel into Mexico. In a perfect world, his crops could consume up to four feet of water in a growing season, and in flush times 15 years ago, the canal gave him most of that. “We’d double-crop — do onions and come back with corn after that,” he said. “We used to grow a lot of chiles, a lot of jalapeños. When water was abundant you could do a variety of things.” That is a pleasant memory. Today Mr. Skov fallows a fifth of his fields, and canal water that once flowed from March to October arrives in June and vanishes as early as August. He makes up the deficit with two inches of treated water from the city sewage plant and a deluge of salty groundwater, brought up by once-abandoned wells that his grandfather dug, and that he has brought back to life...more

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