Dead Dry (17 page)
Authors: Sarah Andrews
Brown pumped the remote, firing rapidly through her PowerPoint presentation. “Trying to say who owns the water in the ground is unclear in most states,” she explained. “Surface water is typically governed by a system of prior claim. First in line, first in priority. The oldest claim is satisfied first, and if the stream is sucked dry before the newest claim is satisfied, that’s that person’s tough luck. Again, this is not regulation, this is apportionment. In some places we have meters on water wells, but this is not to regulate consumption but instead to create a tax revenue stream. It’s the tragedy of the commons. We degrade that which we own in common, each taking what we can before it can be taken by someone else.”
Brown went on to present some graphs that showed what happens when a community on private wells runs out of water and needs to start importing it from other areas. “We typically turn to a government agency and expect
them to ‘fix’ our problem. The government agency puts in a community-wide system that delivers water from another source—sometimes hundreds of miles distant. The agency must charge to provide O and M—operations and maintenance—and that puts them in a subtle conflict of interest. If they stop delivering water, they’re out of a job, and anything a government provides has to be paid for. It is therefore in the government’s interest that the citizens consume water. They tend not to regulate consumption even if that were the purpose of the agency. Ration, maybe; regulate, rarely.”
them to ‘fix’ our problem. The government agency puts in a community-wide system that delivers water from another source—sometimes hundreds of miles distant. The agency must charge to provide O and M—operations and maintenance—and that puts them in a subtle conflict of interest. If they stop delivering water, they’re out of a job, and anything a government provides has to be paid for. It is therefore in the government’s interest that the citizens consume water. They tend not to regulate consumption even if that were the purpose of the agency. Ration, maybe; regulate, rarely.”
The question-and-answer period after Dr. Brown’s talk was lively because, it seemed, there were a few journalists present. One asked, “What do you think of the statistics published by Senator White of the Colorado state senate subcommittee on water supplies stating that there is plenty of water to be had to support development in the south Denver metro area?” he inquired. “I refer to Arapahoe and Douglas counties, which are expected to gain 400,000 citizens by the year 2050.”
Brown replied, “Well, as you know, there are several kinds of lies. There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. I’d have to ask Senator White if these additional citizens are going to learn some extreme measures of conservation.”
Someone asked her why Senator White and the rest of the subcommittee might have conjured these numbers.
Brown replied, “Any elected official in any western state is well aware that to mention the reduction of water resources in a public forum is a sure way to avoid reelection, so having the temerity to actually do anything about it is tantamount to political hara-kiri.”
Laughter ensued. As the child of a ranching family, I rolled my eyes in agreement. In Wyoming, ranchers have been known to invite any official that foolish to a barbecue, and they wouldn’t be serving beef. In the semi-arid West, a ranch needed a certain number of irrigated acres to grow
enough alfalfa to get the herd through the winter or they’d have to cut the herd. Having to purchase feed could tip the economic scale from profit to loss.
enough alfalfa to get the herd through the winter or they’d have to cut the herd. Having to purchase feed could tip the economic scale from profit to loss.
I raised my hand and asked, “This may be off the point, but while I’ve worked in a commodities-based industry—oil and gas—I’ve never taken economics, and I’m wondering, how do you tell when an economy is in a state of decline? What are the symptoms?” I was asking for two reasons: first, to better understand what had happened to my heritage, and second, to find out whether it was happening, in perhaps a different way, to the community around Castle Rock, Colorado.
“It becomes stagnant,” Brown replied.
“You mean it quits growing?”
“Yes. Most economies are based on growth.”
“Then how can an economy stay healthy, if it’s eventually going to run up against the exhaustion of its finite resources, such as ground water?”
Brown said, “Then, as I said, they have to import the resource, and the governing limit becomes cost or the balance of trade.”
A journalist asked, “Then you’re saying that an economy is only healthy if it’s growing.”
“That is usually the case,” she replied, “at least, from a Western capitalistic viewpoint. The new thing is to try to figure out how to make economies and the resources that they rely on sustainable, but the way most economies work is that populations either grow, level off, or decline, and with them goes demand. Most often, populations grow.”
“Then is there a way for a growing population to continue to prosper if it’s dependent on a finite resource like water?” another journalist asked.
Brown replied, “Well, you can change the mix of industries or the technological base of the community, but that’s difficult to engineer. So on the whole, I have three answers for that question: yes, no, and it depends.”
The audience laughed, but I didn’t. No one understood
conservation of water resources better than a ranch child who had grown up helping her father cycle the same acre-foot of water downhill through three fields of alfalfa so there’d be enough left over to cycle through the bodies of their livestock. Ranchers knew to keep the water near the bottomlands, irrigating only near the creeks and saturated ground whence the water was lifted and leaving the dry lands to the short grasses of the prairie for grazing. Long gone was the era when excess people and cattle died directly of drought. Instead, the human species was now increasing its numbers and standard of living, now subdividing the ranches, building houses on the rolling prairie, and raising water from the ground to flush toilets and water lawns, always figuring we would find one more source of water, and another, and another …
conservation of water resources better than a ranch child who had grown up helping her father cycle the same acre-foot of water downhill through three fields of alfalfa so there’d be enough left over to cycle through the bodies of their livestock. Ranchers knew to keep the water near the bottomlands, irrigating only near the creeks and saturated ground whence the water was lifted and leaving the dry lands to the short grasses of the prairie for grazing. Long gone was the era when excess people and cattle died directly of drought. Instead, the human species was now increasing its numbers and standard of living, now subdividing the ranches, building houses on the rolling prairie, and raising water from the ground to flush toilets and water lawns, always figuring we would find one more source of water, and another, and another …
Brown’s lecture was followed by the announcement I knew was coming: the moderator returned to the dais with the chairman of the association that was hosting the conference, and, after the briefest of introductions, turned the microphone over to him. The chairman came to the microphone, hands trembling so strikingly that the piece of paper he held shook visibly, and said, “I am sorry to have to deliver some painful news. Afton McWain, who was going to deliver his talk on the aquifers of the Denver Basin here today, has been … we are advised by the police … that he’s been found dead.”
The room burst into a rumble of sound. Geologists are not shy about opening their mouths and making noise when something surprises them, and in three-quarters of a second at least nine-tenths of the people in that room were talking at once. I glanced around the room, looking to see who was
not
surprised. The journalists were not, and were scanning the crowd as carefully as I was. Among the others, it was hard to tell. There were a lot of poker faces.
not
surprised. The journalists were not, and were scanning the crowd as carefully as I was. Among the others, it was hard to tell. There were a lot of poker faces.
The chairman waved his hands for quiet. “I’m—I don’t have any details. This is a terrible loss to the profession. As you know, Dr. McWain has …
had
a career spanning three
decades, and his contributions to our understanding of Denver Basin stratigraphy are monumental. Would you all please join me in standing for a moment of silence?”
had
a career spanning three
decades, and his contributions to our understanding of Denver Basin stratigraphy are monumental. Would you all please join me in standing for a moment of silence?”
The audience stumbled to its feet. Isolated coughs and astonished glances among colleagues punctuated a long half minute. Awkwardly, people began to settle back into their chairs. The chairman cleared his throat again and said, “Now, Afton’s talk was important to this meeting, so we’ve, uh, asked Bob Raynolds to step in for him. Now, Bob can’t just speak from Afton’s slides, and um, we don’t have those anyway, so … this is all very shocking. We were concerned when he didn’t check in with us, and we’d heard rumors, but as you all know, he’s … was … a bit unusual in his ways of doing things, and we figured he’d show. But Bob Raynolds is here and has his slides from that wonderful talk he gave on the Denver Basin last year, and he edited that volume in
The Mountain Geologist
on the Denver Basin, so, ah, here’s Bob.”
The Mountain Geologist
on the Denver Basin, so, ah, here’s Bob.”
As Raynolds took his place on the stage, you could have heard a pin drop. He was a slender, raw-boned man with an endearing mixture of intellectuality and disarming charm, which was lucky, considering that he had to grasp and hold the audience’s attention after such an announcement. But he succeeded magnificently. Hitting the switch to kill the overhead lights, he brought up the first slide and went to town.
He spoke to us intimately, even confidentially. He got down and gritty about the rocks of the Denver Basin in general and the Arapahoe aquifer in particular. He showed evidence that the rocks had been deposited as great fans of sand by streams running onto the plains from the growing mountains. He gave examples of similar fans being deposited today along the sides of the southern Andes. It was a brilliant, classical presentation of what geologists do like few can: He took obscure and largely buried data about ancient rocks, compared it to modern deposits, and built it into a predictive model.
“And here’s why this is important,” he said. “The previous
estimates of how much water was in the Arapahoe aquifer were grossly inaccurate. They were wildly high. What happened was this: Engineers measured the porosity of the aquifer rocks—the percentage of void space—at the apex of one of the fans because that was the part of the rock that was sticking out of the ground as a hogback along the Rampart Range, where it could be easily studied. Engineers are engineers, not scientists; it’s not their job to know how rock varies. They just apply formulae to the numbers available to them and crunch them into more numbers, and where they lack numbers going in, they make assumptions. Because they could not see how the rock varied underground, they assumed that the porosity of the rock stays the same all the way down into the ground, where that layer becomes deeply buried, and continues the same as that layer extends under the eastern plains toward Kansas.
estimates of how much water was in the Arapahoe aquifer were grossly inaccurate. They were wildly high. What happened was this: Engineers measured the porosity of the aquifer rocks—the percentage of void space—at the apex of one of the fans because that was the part of the rock that was sticking out of the ground as a hogback along the Rampart Range, where it could be easily studied. Engineers are engineers, not scientists; it’s not their job to know how rock varies. They just apply formulae to the numbers available to them and crunch them into more numbers, and where they lack numbers going in, they make assumptions. Because they could not see how the rock varied underground, they assumed that the porosity of the rock stays the same all the way down into the ground, where that layer becomes deeply buried, and continues the same as that layer extends under the eastern plains toward Kansas.
“But that assumption was incorrect. They knew nothing of the architecture of the rock. At the outcrop where they measured it, at the apex of the alluvial fan, they found a high-quality aquifer, but they did not know that with every mile eastward, the quality of the rock drops precipitously. As the streams carrying the sediments that would become the sandstone of the Arapahoe aquifer burst from the steep slopes of the youthful Rocky Mountains, choked with gravel and sand and silt and clay, they hit a shallower slope and dropped the coarsest grains in their load of grit, but the smaller particles tumbled onward, and the finest sediments—the silts and clays—enjoyed the ride farther before the slope became so shallow that these least permeable also dropped to the bottom. Thus the rock has yielded copiously near the outcrop, but just a few miles downstream, it tightens down to something less productive than a brick.
“I say
has
yielded. Early wells in the area yielded abundantly for decades. Now, they decline quickly and many are going dry. Add that to the miscalculation that the engineers made. Their estimates of water available to be pumped out and run through taps in kitchens and bathrooms
and horse troughs and car washes and laundries and garden hoses in all the existing homes and businesses and ranches, and in all the homes and businesses under construction has been cut by 30 or 40 percent. Those homes and businesses and ranches were dependent on well water drawn from that aquifer. And the rate at which the water is disappearing is accelerating.
has
yielded. Early wells in the area yielded abundantly for decades. Now, they decline quickly and many are going dry. Add that to the miscalculation that the engineers made. Their estimates of water available to be pumped out and run through taps in kitchens and bathrooms
and horse troughs and car washes and laundries and garden hoses in all the existing homes and businesses and ranches, and in all the homes and businesses under construction has been cut by 30 or 40 percent. Those homes and businesses and ranches were dependent on well water drawn from that aquifer. And the rate at which the water is disappearing is accelerating.
“Homeowners had been assured they had over one hundred years of water supply,” Raynolds said. “But this promised water is not really there. It is ‘paper water.’ Simply drilling more wells will not be a solution because although each new well briefly yields a small local supply, the cost per gallon produced becomes prohibitive.
“On average,” he said, “the water table in the Arapahoe aquifer is dropping one inch per day. That’s thirty feet per year, in an aquifer that is only four hundred feet thick. Where will these people get their water when it’s gone? They’ll have to import it, but from where? All the surrounding water rights are going fast, and hundreds of thousands of people are projected to move into Douglas County in the coming decades.” He looked from face to face within the audience. With evident pain he said, “Douglas County proudly advertises itself as one of the fastest-growing counties in America.”
Raynolds set down his pointer. “We have time for a few questions,” he said.
A hand shot up. “Dr. Raynolds, can you comment on the fact that Afton McWain was scheduled to testify against the proposed Wildcat Estates development? Is that lawsuit going to go forward?”
My ears pricked to attention. Wildcat Estates was the name of the project Michele had mentioned. What lawsuit? And who was involved?
The question was way off the scientific basis of Raynolds’ talk, and no scientific colleague would have addressed him as “Doctor.” By simple deduction, I guessed that the question had been asked by one of the journalists
in attendance, and not just a science journalist, but an investigative journalist, the kind that digs into malfeasance and corporate misconduct. I couldn’t believe that the Salt Lake City papers would have sent a reporter to cover a development in Colorado, so that meant it had to be someone from
The Denver Post
or the
Rocky Mountain News.
in attendance, and not just a science journalist, but an investigative journalist, the kind that digs into malfeasance and corporate misconduct. I couldn’t believe that the Salt Lake City papers would have sent a reporter to cover a development in Colorado, so that meant it had to be someone from
The Denver Post
or the
Rocky Mountain News.
In the jumble of events of the past two and a half days, this bit of information had slid past me, but now it clicked into place with the rest: Johnson had a ranch to sell, Attabury could sell or perhaps develop it, Entwhistle could handle the loans, and Upton would push the paperwork.
And Gilda? What was her part in the deal? It had to be more than a coincidence that we had found them all together.
And these high-powered journalists were circling like sharks. And that meant that there was more stuck to Afton’s murder and the Wildcat Estates project than four men and a woman sitting in a roadside bar.
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