A long-simmering border dispute flared anew Tuesday when Mexican and California groups sued the U.S. government over a water conservation project that will stop billions of gallons of Colorado River water from seeping under the border every year into an aquifer that supplies the bustling Mexicali Valley.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, said the project would cause widespread economic and environmental harm by capturing water that now steadily leaks from the All-American Canal, a 65-year-old aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to farmlands in the Imperial and Coachella valleys.
The canal improvement project, authorized by Congress in 1988 and finally nearing construction, will replace a 23-mile-long section of the canal with a channel lined with concrete, plugging the leaks. Efficient as it will be, the improved canal highlights a paradox confronting water managers as they look for ways to wring waste from the irrigation systems that crisscross the West. Conservation may not be good for everybody and may come at a cost to the environment and other farmers.
In this case, the suit alleges that the canal project will dry up Mexican farms and deprive south-of-the-border wetlands of water that supports more than 100 bird species, some of them endangered.
Owned by the federal government and operated by the Imperial and other irrigation districts, the 80-mile-long canal transports most of California's share of the Colorado River, diverting it at Imperial Dam, near Yuma, Ariz.
Because it is unlined, the canal loses copious amounts of water as it snakes across the sandy desert. The conservation project is designed to capture much of that seepage -- about 68,000 acre feet a year, or enough to supply roughly half a million people. The state will pay the estimated $135.6-million cost, and as part of a complicated Colorado River deal brokered by the federal government two years ago, most of the saved water will go to the San Diego County Water Authority.
But San Diego's gain will be Mexico's loss. Water has been seeping over the border for a century from the All-American Canal and its predecessor, the Alamo, into the aquifer that supplies Mexicali Valley wells, the plaintiffs argue. "We were using this water for over 100 years and we developed the economy that depends on the seepage," said Rene Acuna, executive director of CDEM, a Mexicali Valley civic group, and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. "We pump it in Mexico. That makes it our water."
