Still struggling with drought on the Colorado River despite a winter of bountiful storms in the Southwest, water managers are dusting off provocative ideas for filling the river -- among them, logging mountainsides to wring more runoff out of national forests and seeding clouds to pull more snow out of the sky.
"A lot of things that are controversial will be looked at," said Central Arizona Project general manager Sid Wilson. "We can't do things the way we've always done them. We have to find ways that are creative to address tomorrow's problems."
Officials are also talking of reactivating a much criticized desalting plant near Yuma and building new storage basins along a Southern California canal that draws from the Colorado, one of the West's main water supplies.
"You just run into a myriad of ideas," said Wilson, whose agency supplies Colorado River water to Phoenix and would suffer some of the first cuts if a shortage were declared in the lower basin. "There's been a lot of work done on weather modification, vegetation management ... just pull together all the information and see what we've got."
About 25 million people from Colorado to Southern California depend on the river for at least some of their water, and although a slew of winter storms loosened the grip of a historic drought this year, the basin's epic dry spell is far from over. Even without a drought, the time is approaching when use along the 1,400-mile river system will exceed the Colorado's average annual flow.
Environmentalists say the answer to growing demand is more conservation and more efficient allocation of existing supplies, not efforts to squeeze more water out of the ecosystem.
"Those are ludicrous," said Jennifer Pitt of Environmental Defense's Colorado office. "We're going to cut down our national forests so we can water our lawns on the front range? Give me a break. There's no way people are going to accept that."
The idea of opening up the forest to generate more runoff in mountain watersheds is not a new one. Experiments date from the early 1900s, and many have been conducted in Colorado, the main source of snowmelt for the Colorado River.
"People have talked about it literally for over 100 years, and the reality is it becomes very hard to implement," said Lee H. MacDonald, a Colorado State University natural resources professor who co-wrote an extensive 2003 review of experiments to increase forest water yield. "Socially it's not particularly acceptable.... It's hard to cut enough trees to really make a substantial difference to the flow in the Colorado River."
