TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. — Severe drought has ravaged the fabled Rio Grande, leaving expanses of muck where a 40-mile-long lake once lapped against the desert floor.
The reservoir at Elephant Butte Dam, a lifeline for large portions of New Mexico and Texas, has dropped 75 feet below the brown sandstone cliffs at its abutments. The river is so emaciated, it has even lost its way to the dam, forcing federal workers to dig a $9-million trench through the muck in hopes of capturing whatever water does flow.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday December 10, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 15 inches; 562 words Type of Material: Correction
Drought map -- A map in Section A on Monday showed Lake Powell in Colorado. Lake Powell is in Utah, on the Arizona border.
And for all the demands on the dwindling river, priority goes to an endangered silvery minnow, which has won a court order that guarantees its share of the precious water.
Conditions along the Rio Grande mirror the chaos and upheaval in virtually every major Western watershed, where key reservoirs are well below capacity and in some cases bone-dry.
"Every indication is that in large portions of the West, we are in a historic drought," said John W. Keys III, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates 348 reservoirs supplying water to the West.
"Lord only knows how long it will last. I wouldn't even hesitate a guess."
The history of the West has been punctuated by long periods of drought, and the prophecy of a water crisis is nothing new.
But increasingly, modern trends -- urban growth, environmental concerns and climate patterns -- are magnifying weather trends, placing even greater strains on the limited resources west of the 100th meridian, where the humid East meets the arid West and natural precipitation cannot support agriculture.
The future holds even more grim news: New studies by climate experts at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography predict global warming will aggravate the West's problems.
"There will be more frequent droughts and more severe droughts," said climate scientist Tim Barnett of Scripps. "It is not a good scenario. We have a lot of social decisions to make."
Making those decisions for the future, however, will require wading through policies of the past: Water use in the West is ruled by byzantine legal and political structures formed more than 100 years ago. A spaghetti bowl of local, state and federal agencies oversees the Western watersheds, and conflicts often end up in the nation's courts.
Though the bureaucratic system has difficulty coping with current conditions, the future promises even more challenges.
The Scripps Institution, in a series of 15 reports, predicts two problematic trends. Precipitation levels will drop in many areas, particularly in the Colorado River Basin where they could decrease 10% and trigger a one-third falloff in water reservoir storage.
Equally threatening is a projection that all across the region more precipitation will fall as rain, rather than snow, and that winter snowmelts will occur earlier in the season.
Wildfires will double in size, it predicts.
And with less snow stored in the mountains, hydroelectric generation in the Pacific Northwest will decrease in the summer when electricity demands are highest, said Dennis Lettenmaier, a University of Washington engineering professor who participated in the Scripps study.
Such disaster scenarios are not far off from what is already occurring in much of the West in the current drought.
Water levels this year at Lake Powell, the massive Colorado River impoundment behind the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, were the lowest since the dam was built. Hydrologists say rainfall in the river basin was the lowest since records began in 1906.
Conditions across the Northwest, from Washington to Montana, are similarly bleak. Precipitation in the vast Columbia River Basin has run 50% below normal in recent months, leaving officials worried that this winter could duplicate the dry conditions of the last two seasons.
Major rivers like the Missouri, Yellowstone, Snake, Pecos, Colorado, Sacramento and Klamath are all running low and in some cases at fractions of normal flows. The Rio Grande carried just 13% of its normal flow this year, according to Bureau of Reclamation officials.
Thousands of acres of farmland are being taken out of production in Texas, according to Texas Department of Environmental Quality water master Carlos Rubinstein.
Irrigators and some state officials want the federal government to shut off water deliveries to Mexico in retaliation for failing to make good on a half-trillion-gallon water debt owed to the U.S.
Gordon Hill, general manager of Bay View Irrigation District in Texas, says the only long-term solution is to build a canal from the Mississippi River to the dry Plains. Such an audacious plan was long considered in the era of dam building, but abandoned for its staggering costs and environmental consequences.
Sante Fe, N.M., has declared a Stage 3 water emergency, clamping tight restrictions on car washing, lawn watering and other routine activities.
