Cadillac Desert (84 page)

The Yuma Desalination Plant, its operation chronically delayed, is an example of the tanks-and-guns approach. In the 1940s, with the Central Arizona Project deadlocked in Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation was anxious to build
something
in that state, not only to mollify its citizenry and the increasingly powerful Carl Hayden but also give its regional office, suffering existential malaise after the completion of Hoover Dam, something new to do. Along the lower Gila River were several tens of thousands of prime irrigable acres which had been irrigated off and on by Spanish, Indians, and Americans for the past three hundred years. Unfortunately, the region, named Wellton-Mohawk after two desert hamlets located there, is plagued by poor drainage. The Bureau revived the region by installing, at considerable expense, an elaborate drainage system to carry the waste-water away. Perforated tiles were laid several feet beneath the land, which led into a master drain that emptied into the Colorado River above the Mexican border. The project was completed in the early 1960s, just as the Bureau was closing the gates of Glen Canyon Dam.

The effect of those two actions—a sudden surge of water containing sixty-three hundred parts per million of salts accompanied by a drastic reduction of fresh surplus flows from above—gave the Mexicans fits. Below the border, the salinity of the Colorado River shot up from around eight hundred to more than fifteen hundred parts per million. The Mexicali region is the most productive in the entire country, which suffers not only from frightening population growth but from a woefully archaic, unbalanced, and inefficient agricultural sector. All the irrigation around Mexicali is utterly dependent on the river. Only a well-managed irrigation system, which the Mexicans did not have, could tolerate such levels of salt, and even then under some duress. Predictably, crop yields went into abject decline. The Mexicans were all the more incensed because the United States seemed so unconcerned about their plight. We had promised them 1.5 million acre-feet of water a year, which they were still getting. The Compact, U.S. officials pointed out, contained no guarantees about water quality, as long as there was enough. President Luis Echeverria campaigned heavily on the issue, and, after winning the election, threatened to keep his promise to haul the United States before the World Court at The Hague. In 1973, for reasons which are still obscure—but which might conceivably have had something to do with the fact that Mexico showed some promise of owning a great deal of oil—President Richard Nixon appointed a former U.S. Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, to work out a hasty solution. Signed six months later, in August of 1974, the agreement, known as Minute 242, calls for the United States to deliver Mexico water whose salt content is not more than 115 parts per million (plus or minus thirty ppm) higher than measured levels at Imperial Dam in 1976—a level that turned out to be 879 parts per million. As a result, salinity levels at the border of a thousand ppm or above—and they have almost reached such levels—are a violation of international law.

The simplest and cheapest way to solve Mexico’s salinity crisis would have been for the U.S. government to buy out the Wellton-Mohawk farmers and retire their lands. Even today, a generous settlement probably would not cost more than a couple of hundred million dollars, and a tremendous source of salts would be removed. Retiring some additional irrigated lands in the Grand Valley of Colorado, another prodigious source of salts, would be further insurance against the problem getting out of hand. None of this has, of course, happened. The solution of choice at Wellton-Mohawk has been the construction of a reverse-osmosis desalination plant—ten times larger than any in the world—which, while consuming enough electricity to satisfy a city of forty thousand people, will treat the wastewater running out the drain canal. The solution of choice in the Grand Valley is at least as expensive but more prosaic—lining irrigation canals to prevent seepage through subsurface salt zones is the main one. The legislation authorizing all of these works belongs in a class of Congressional sacred cows—whatever it costs to keep salinity levels down without retiring an acre of salt-ridden land is what Congress is willing to spend. The Yuma plant is now supposed to cost $293 million, a figure hardly anyone outside the Bureau believes, and the upper-basin works could cost another $600 million, perhaps much more. Energy costs could easily push the Yuma plant’s cost to $1 billion or more over fifty years.

What Congress has chosen to do, in effect, is purify water at a cost exceeding $300 an acre-foot so that upriver irrigators can continue to grow surplus crops with federally subsidized water that costs them $3.50 an acre-foot.

“If the farmers at Wellton-Mohawk adopted efficient irrigation methods,” says Jan van Schilfgaarde, “you could solve the problem without even retiring the lands. It would be quite possible to reduce their return flows from 220,000 acre-feet a year to 45,000 acre-feet. I’m not even talking about installing drip irrigation. I’m talking about laser-leveling fields and reusing water on salt-tolerant crops and not doing stupid things like irrigating at harvest time, which our neighboring farmer in the San Joaquin Valley did one year. A lot of these guys are actually absentee owners farming by telephone from their dentists’ offices in Scottsdale. They hire some manager who may be competent or incompetent and they don’t care. They’re not in this business to farm crops, or even to make a profit. They’re farming the government. They’re growing tax shelters. But even if you do have a highly competent farmer who wouldn’t mind reducing his wastewater flows, he has no incentive to conserve. Federal water is so cheap it might as well be free. What’s the point of hiring a couple of additional irrigation managers to save free water? It’s wrong to say the farmer is the culprit. He is being
forced
to consume water.”

Van Schilfgaarde’s outspokenness on this subject may well have had something to do with his departure from the USDA laboratory in 1984. Meanwhile, as his salinity-management approach is almost universally ignored and the Bureau’s expensive solutions receive several hundred times more money than his laboratory does, salinity levels at Imperial Dam could reach 1,150 parts per million as early as the year 2000 and keep rising even if its desalination plant operates effectively—a prospect open to considerable doubt. New projects in the upper basin, oil shale development, the continued leaching of saline soil—all will contribute to salinity’s inexorable march. This is bad news for the Mexicans, but it is bad news for Los Angeles, too. Each additional part per million of salts in the city’s Colorado River supply is estimated to cause $300,000 worth of damage, basin-wide, to the things the water comes in contact with: pipes, fixtures, machinery, cars. A rise in salinity levels at Imperial Dam from 900 to 1,150 parts per million, then, will cost the citizens of southern California about $75 million a year.

The Bureau’s answer to all of this appears on a chart which it has available for distribution. The answer is simply described as “further salinity-control projects under study.” Adopting these unnamed solutions, at whatever cost, is supposed to hold salinity levels at about 1,030 parts per million at Imperial Dam,
still
too high to meet our Compact obligation to Mexico—which, since 1974, has become one of our three most important foreign suppliers of oil. The Bureau’s answer to
that
appears on the graph as “future additional measures”—whatever those are.

In the Colorado Basin, the effects of wastefully irrigating saline lands are not, for the most part, being felt by those doing the irrigating. Thanks mainly to the taxpayers, the farmers who are contributing the lion’s share of the salts to the river have had drainage facilities built which flush the problem down to someone else. In the San Joaquin Valley, it is a different story. The San Joaquin’s problem is unique—an ingenious revenge by nature, in the minds of some, on a valley whose transformation into the richest agricultural region in the world was wrought at awesome cost to rivers, fish, and wildlife. Several times in the relatively recent geologic past—within the last couple of million years—the valley was a great inland sea, thick with diatomaceous life and tiny suspended sediments which settled near the middle of the gently sloping valley floor. Compressed and compacted, the stuff formed an almost impervious layer of clay that now underlies close to two million acres of fabulously productive irrigated land. In the middle of the valley, the clay membrane is quite shallow, sometimes just a few feet beneath the surface soil. When irrigation water percolates down, it collects on the clay like bathwater in a tub. In hydrologists’ argot, it has become “perched” water. Since the perched water does not have a chance to mingle with the relatively pure aquifer beneath the clay, it may become highly saline, as in Iraq. The more the farmers irrigate, the higher it rises. In places, it has reached the surface, killing everything around. There are already thousands of acres near the southern end of the valley that look as if they had been dusted with snow; not even weeds can grow there. An identical fate will ultimately befall more than a million acres in the valley unless something is done.

For many years, the planners in the state and federal water bureaucracies talked about the need for a “master drain” to carry the perched water out of the San Joaquin Valley. It is more accurate to say that their
reports
have talked about it, while the officials, whose main concern was building more dams to satisfy the demands of the irrigators, ignored the need for drainage because neither they nor (they guessed) the public and the farmers could face the cost. “In the early and mid-1970’s,” says van Schilfgaarde, “the state’s position was that no drainage problem exists. The early reports all said that the State Water Project makes no sense without a drain, because it would add inevitably to the perched water problem. But the public doesn’t read reports, so no one mentioned them. Then, a few years ago, when the problem began threatening to become critical, there was suddenly an awful drainage problem that threatened the future of agriculture in California.”

Today, three decades after the first reports spoke of the need for a huge, valley-wide drainage system, no such system exists. A modest-sized spur, called the San Luis Drain, was partially completed as a part of the Westlands Water District, which, by introducing a prodigious amount of new surface water into a relatively small area, threatened to waterlog the lands downslope. But the water carried off by the San Luis drain has nowhere to go until a master drain is built. For a while, it was dumped into a man-made swamp called Kesterson Reservoir, near the town of Los Banos, which slowly filled and evaporated according to the intensity of the valley heat and the irrigation cycle. From the air, the reservoir, when it was full, was an attractive sight to migrating waterfowl, which descended on it by the tens of thousands as their ancestors once descended by the many millions on the valley’s primordial marshes and shallow lakes. The presence of all of those coots, geese, and ducks at Kesterson Reservoir gave the Bureau an idea about how to solve one of the most daunting problems associated with the master drain: its enormous cost. By the time the San Luis Drain, a modest portion of the proposed master drain, is completed, its price tag will be more than $500 million. In 1984, Interior Secretary William Clark made an offhand projection that solving the drainage problem valley-wide could end up costing $4 to $5 billion. That comes to about $5,000 an acre to rescue the affected lands, which is more than any of the land is worth. The farmers, a number of whom are corporations or millionaires, are understandably loath to pay the bill. If one wrote off a third of the cost as a wildlife and recreational benefit, however, it would be easier to swallow. That is exactly what the Bureau and California’s Department of Water Resources, in a 1979 interagency study entitled “Agricultural Drainage and Salt Management in the San Joaquin Valley,” proposed to do in the case of the master drain, which, in that report, was projected to cost $1.26 billion in 1979 dollars. Ascribing annual benefits of $92 million to the master drain, the Bureau and the state’s Department of Water Resources elected to write off about a third of that total, or $31.7 million, as a nonreimbursable benefit, payable by the taxpayers, for the creation of artificial marshes. If one were to divide the number of ducks which might be expected to use those man-made wetlands into $31.7 million, they would become very expensive ducks indeed. When the Bureau’s dams went up, regulating the rivers and allowing the marshlands to be dried up—about 93 percent of the Central Valley’s original wetlands are gone—it conveniently ignored the economic value of the millions of ducks whose habitat would be ruined. But later, when it became convenient to overvalue their worth, economic alchemy turned them into gold.

Due to a distressing twist of fate, however, the Bureau and California may consider themselves lucky if they succeed in writing off
any
part of the master drain to wildlife benefits. Sometime in 1982, hunters and biologists around Kesterson Reservoir began to observe that many overwintering birds seemed lethargic and sick—so ravaged by some strange malady that they could not even float on the water, and often drowned. At first, duck hunters and conservationists put forth an explanation that the farm lobby had always pooh-poohed—that pesticides and other chemical wastes in the sumpwater were making the birds die. By 1984, however, biologists were quite certain that the main cause of the ducks’ awful fate was selenium, a rare mineral, toxic in small doses, that occurs in high concentrations in southern Coast Range soils—exactly those soils which, washing down from the mountains over aeons, formed the Westlands Water District. The San Francisco
Chronicle,
which has carried on a long, bitter battle against water exports to the valley and southern California, has played the story for all it is worth. But none of its news stories and editorials had quite the impact of a poignant front-page photograph of a gorgeous dying male pintail duck at Kesterson Reservoir, a duck about to sink like a doomed boat to the bottom of the poisoned man-made marsh its presence is to subsidize.