Ebb and Flow
Matthew King, a communications consultant for the Chief Sustainability Office, takes us on a guided tour of greater L.A.’s water future. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a detailed look at where our drinking water comes from and how we can secure more reliable, resilient supplies in the face of climate change.
Frank Crowe a century ago figured out the seemingly impossible – how to tame the wild Colorado River.
His team of engineers wedged 6.6 million tons of concrete into an enormous gorge that separates Nevada from Arizona, creating the Hoover Dam. At its base, the 726-foot dam is as thick as two football fields measured end-to-end. But you still feel slightly uneasy standing on the canyon floor. The concrete is the only thing holding back Lake Mead and its 9 trillion gallons of Colorado River water perched ridiculously above your head. You hope Crowe got his numbers right.
Seventeen hydroelectric generators (painted in a soothing celadon green) rattle and hum nearby. If you pay close attention, you sense the entire valley floor vibrating slightly.
But it’s only when you stand atop the Hoover Dam and look closely at Lake Mead that you feel the weight of the engineering challenge facing the Crowes of our day: The Colorado River is drying up.
After a 20-year drought period, the reservoir sits well below historic levels. The so-called “bathtub rings” – white-colored bands in the mountain that surround the reservoir -- show where the water level used to be. It’s a stark reminder that the Colorado is overdrawn and overtaxed. A very wet winter last year in the West helped fill Lake Mead, but it’s still only 33% full as of this writing.
And that’s not good news for the 19 million Southern Californians who depend on the Colorado for drinking water. Colorado River water managed at Hoover Dam eventually makes its way downstream to Lake Havasu, which is actually a reservoir, on the California-Arizona border. That impounded water forms the lifeblood of the Colorado River Aqueduct – a 242-mile conveyance system that pumps fresh water and abundance to Southern California.
The Colorado River Aqueduct, owned and operated by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, relies on two reservoirs, five pumping stations, 63 miles of canals, 92 miles of tunnels, and 84 miles of buried conduit and siphons. At maximum capacity it can deliver about 1 billion gallons of water each day to 26 public water agencies in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.
We’ve built the pipes and pumps, but there’s an uneasy truth to be reckoned with – there’s too many people chasing after a dwindling supply of Colorado River water. And climate change is only going to make it worse.
That hard, cold fact became crystal clear to me on a weekend bus tour of Lake Mead and the Colorado Aqueduct’s various components organized last month by MWD for about 20 government and nonprofit leaders.
Tracy Quinn, Heal the Bay’s president and CEO, serves on the MWD board of directors. She invited me to the tour, hoping it would inform my current communications work with L.A. County’s Chief Sustainability Office.
A new generation of Mulhollands
Intensifying drought has created a risky game of musical chairs for all those who have legal claims to the Colorado -- seven U.S. states, Native tribes and Mexico. Water rights historically has been a zero-sum game in the West. If one party wins, then another loses.
A warming climate will dramatically shrink snowpack in the West, putting more pressure on an already oversubscribed system. In 2100, California’s biggest reservoirs will hold a third less water than they do today, according to the latest estimates.
The reality is that Southern California can’t unilaterally build our way out of this problem; we can’t import our way out of it either. We have to reduce demand. And we have to invest more in locally driven infrastructure like wastewater recycling and stormwater capture.
California has always been built on resource extraction, a sort of Manifest Destiny powered by water. Think of engineer William Mulholland’s deliciously short speech at the unveiling of his Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. “There it is. Take it,” he said in his Irish brogue as enormous outfalls spewed water into the San Fernando Valley, liquid gold sourced from the Owens Valley hundreds of miles away.
Today’s water gurus have to reverse-engineer their way out of this mindset of perpetual abundance. But there’s one problem no hydraulic experts can solve: how to reduce demand for the very resource they have coaxed from the Earth.
How do you convince Southern Californians to make the hard choices and invest even more in water conservation?
Drought-prone cities around the world grapple with the same problem, largely employing a carrot-and-stick approach. Homeowner and business rebates for cutting water use are the carrots; government-mandated supply cutbacks are the sticks.
In Sydney, strict conservation efforts have found success, with daily per-capita use now at about 52 gallons. Angelenos also have done a commendable job of reducing urban water consumption over the past decade. We’ve reduced use by 24% by ripping out grass lawns, taking shorter showers, skipping car washes and what not. But residential users still tap about 67 gallons indoors and outside per day, according to LADWP estimated averages.
Part of the challenge is that even water pumped hundreds of miles away from other states remains relatively cheap here. Israelis pay three times as much for water than Californians and consume 30% less water per capita than Californians do.
MWD officials admit that rates are going to have to go up as supply shrinks. State regulators recently proposed conservation cuts of roughly 20% to the 400 agencies that supply nearly 95% of the residential water used in the state.
Which means that the MWD now faces an odd conundrum. It spends millions on conservation ad campaigns that will reduce consumer demand for the very product it was formed to supply. How many companies have to build a business model around that?
Next: How we can get smarter about sourcing more of our water locally
Working with Mother Nature
So what does a future of more locally sourced water actually look like? How do we get there?
The source of tap water in L.A. County residents’ homes at any given moment varies greatly depending on the community and which water agency serves it. Each utility is constantly shifting its portfolio of water sources based on economic and environmental swings, much in the same way that a mutual fund manager might rebalance holdings on a weekly basis.
Right now, roughly 85% of greater L.A.’s waters supply comes from imported sources, mainly the Sacramento Delta, the Eastern Sierras and the Colorado River.
So-called “local water” accounts for the remaining 15% – primarily from groundwater aquifers within Los Angeles County and surface water that falls in the mountain and valley watersheds. Aquifers are basically huge rock caverns that lie empty underground and collect the water that infiltrates the soil above them.
The L.A. Department of Water and Power is the largest utility in the nation, serving almost 4 million customers. It’s also MWD’s biggest customer. So it’s a big deal when it moves to slash the amount of water it imports.
LADWP has implemented a bold plan to source more than 50% of its water from local sources by 2035.
To do that, it’s betting heavily on groundwater replenishment through more aggressive stormwater capture and wastewater recycling.
A major plank will be investing billions to upgrade the Hyperion Treatment Plant so it can recycle 100% of the wastewater it processes each day – about 350 million gallons a day. Instead of being discharged uselessly into the sea, that treated wastewater can be safely pumped back into local aquifers to replenish local supplies. Right now, recycling rates hover at under 5% at the plant, the largest of the city’s four treatment plants.
And LADWP Is nearing a $600 million remediation of polluted groundwater basins in the east San Fernando Valley, which were tainted by aerospace and other heavy industrial users in the post-war era. Once completed, the three treatment facilities could provide up to 28 billion gallons of water each year from Superfund sites.
Meanwhile, the MWD has partnered with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts on a wastewater recycling initiative at a to-be-built plant in Carson. The Pure Water program would provide up to 150 million gallons of water daily, enough for 1.5 million people. The water could replenish groundwater basins, be used by industries, and potentially be integrated into MWD’s existing drinking water treatment and delivery system. Construction is set to begin in 2025.
Los Angeles County engineers are beginning to approve a lattice of stormwater capture projects throughout the region funded by the Measure W ballot initiative supported by voters in 2018. Nearly $300 million in taxpayer funds are available each year to design and build local stormwater capture, treatment, and reuse projects throughout the County.
These types of projects can provide enough water to meet the needs of 1 million Angelenos each year, according to some estimates.
The nature-based projects hinge on removing thousands of acres of impermeable paved surfaces and replacing them with new green space. The idea is to turn our concrete jungle into a giant sponge. Soils will soak up and filter rainfall and urban runoff, naturally replenishing our depleted local aquifers. Local water agencies can then pump that cleansed water out of the ground and back into our homes.
An example of a large-scale project includes Tujunga Spreading Grounds near Pacoima, which helps water from the L.A. River watershed percolate into a large groundwater basin. The rehabilitation of the Dominguez Gap wetlands is another example of a nature-based expansion of our local water portfolio.
Seeds of Change
Farming remains the elephant in the room when it comes to California water use. Agriculture accounts for roughly 2% of the state economy, yet uses about 40% of our water. Yes, that water is put to excellent use to feed our nation. But about a quarter of what California produces in its fields is exported abroad, totaling nearly $23 billion each year.
On our bus tour, we visited water agencies and agricultural outfits in Riverside County’s Palo Verde Valley, where farmers pay as little as $2 per acre feet for Colorado River water. An acre feet of water is roughly 360,00 gallons of water. Two dollars might buy you a 16-ounce bottle of Arrowhead water at the local 7-Eleven.
Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the Colorado River’s diverted water each year. Farmers cultivating highly water-intensive crops like alfalfa and cotton use much of it. But some agricultural interests are getting a lot smarter about how they use water.
I’d be remiss not to celebrate our final stop on our tour – a visit to HayDay Farms in Blythe. The family run-operation is one of the largest hay producers and exporters in Southern California. HayDay works 12,000 acres of land leased on a long-term basis from MWD. Its successful transition to more regenerative farming and more thoughtful irrigation practices holds lessons for us all.
Consulting with Cal State Chico ag experts, HayDay now farms alfalfa plots on a three-year cycle instead of the traditional five. It leaves roughly 25% of its land unplanted at any given moment. Fallow ground is seeded with native cover allowed to grow wild, letting the soils regenerate naturally with helpful organic matter. Soils now sequester more carbon.
HayDay also employs no-till farming, which essentially means planting crops without turning over the soil. That allows the dirt to retain more water, which in turn means less Colorado River water has to be diverted. HayDay invested in a mobile overhead sprinkling system that allows for the targeted application of irrigation water to specific rows of cops instead of the wholesale flooding of entire plots of land over days.
All these practices have benefited the land through improved water infiltration, retention of organic matter and nutrient cycling. That may please the environmentalist in us all, but farming is first, and foremost, a business. The good news is that all these regenerative practices have provided a significant return on investment.
Energy costs are down and water use has been reduced by a third. More important, productivity and yields have increased 25%. Soil health is better than it’s ever been on the farm, meaning that the business is protecting its greatest long-term asset.
The turnabout has clearly pleased Dale Tyson, HayDay’s co-founder and chief cheerleader for less water-intensive agriculture. With his trucker hat, white snap-button workshirt and big belt buckle, he looks like a farmer. He’s sinewy, with a firm handshake and watery blue eyes. Now in his 60s, he’s seen a lot of change in the agriculture business.
“I used to be in the business of growing crops,” he told me as our visit ended. “Now I’m in the business of growing dirt.”
Tyson said a simple query from a MWD employee a few years ago changed his business, and his life.
“He just asked a question; didn’t make it a mandate,” Tyson recounted with an easy smile. “What could you do to use less water?”
It’s a question all of us in Los Angeles County would be wise to ponder.
Matthew King is the former Communications Director for Heal the Bay. He now serves as a consultant to government agencies and nonprofits through his May77 Communications company.