Consider this post an "interlude" on purely New Mexican affairs, as we spend some time thinking about
urban water demands in the West. That's not entirely true, really, since it was
recently announced that a desalination plant may appear on the horizon in northern Albuquerque to treat the vast reserve of brackish water lying under the surface. Who knows, Rio Rancho might be able to boast of the lowest "goiter" incidence rate in the United States if that water is salty enough (ha!).
The recent
decision by the Nevada State Supreme Court came as a shocker to Las Vegas
hydromogul Pat Mulroy. It was another reminder of how important the "urbanization of water" is across the Western United States. The setback for Las Vegas (NV) is notable; the
groundwater piping would have extended far into the basins north of the city, and the demise of this system has also set back a possible deal with the state of Utah over water resources.
What cities in the West, especially those anywhere near the Colorado River Basin, are scrambling to do: get rural water in case a re-allocation of
Colorado Compact water is impossible, or in the case of Colorado, if the compact is re-negotiated to be less favorable for the upper basin. So, with Vegas already bumping against the allocation it gets from the Colorado, about 300k afy, the groundwater pumping plan was to supplement this river water. In the latter case, Colorado,
Front Range cities were lining up behind a plan to pump some
water out of the Flaming Gorge section of the Green River and send it along a pipeline to the growing cities that face the plains. Whether my own fair city of Colorado Springs will sign on, since they haven't yet, has yet to be seen. The Springs has its own White Elephant water project to finish, the
Southern Delivery System (pdf map), before it contemplates adding yet another crazy straw across the continental divide.
It's yet another reminder that
water doesn't just flow uphill towards money, it flows uphill towards votes. But even millions of votes cannot overpower a change in the general location of the jetstream, as
this story reports is possible, cave data now adding to the vast array of other
paleoclimatological proxy data already out there; so let's hope that cities soon "choose" to adapt to such a scenario with better drought contingency plans. Certainly, the Romans figured out a
decent system (
video!) for urban water delivery, an aqueduct that didn't dry out. Food for pre-modern thought this morning...
(Thanks to EG, JF, and MC, fellow water bloggers for many of these).
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