17: Understanding the History Behind How We Manage the Colorado River

Eric, take us back in time to the 1950s when these projects were being contemplated and explain to our listeners what was going on hydrologically on the Colorado River that made people realize or consider the possibility that they needed a lot more storage than we had originally built with Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.

Yeah, the way I look at it is there was a hierarchy.

Let's go back to the 1922 compact.

We had an understanding of the hydrology.

It was flawed, as we point out in Science Be Damned, but that hydrology... dictated the need for a large reservoir on the lower main stem, which is now Hoover Dam.

So the hydrology led to the need for a dam.

The need for a dam led to the need for a compact because the upper basin states were opposed to a large reservoir, unless issues related to how seven states would use the water were worked out.

They were worked out in that compact.

And that compact under Articles 3C and 3D requires the states of the upper division to provide certain amounts of water at Lee Ferry, 75 million over 10 plus half of the treaty delivery to Mexico.

There was no treaty in 1922, but the commissioners all thought one would be down the road.

And so they put a provision in there that if there wasn't enough surplus water in the system, that each basin would owe half.

So theoretically, the upper division states owe up to 82.5 million acre feet every 10 years at Lee Ferry, providing there's a delivery of 1.5 million to Mexico.

Now this is the 1922 version.

Now the hydrology in 1922 looked really, wet for a variety of reasons.

It was a wet period.

They ignored the drier period in the 1880s through 1890s.

And we talk about that.

We deal with that in Science Be Damned.

Going into the 1930s, the river came back to reality.

When I say that, the 1930s drought took most of but not all of the water planners by surprise because flows went down to 12 and a half million acre feet per year and there were some really dry years 31 and 34 but the compact which provides for consumptive uses it apportioned seven and a half million acre feet to the upper basin and eight and a half million acre feet to the lower basin well the planners realized that Now that they'd gone through the 1930s drought, without a large amount of storage in the upper basin system above Lee Ferry, the upper division states would not be able to use the water that they had thought they would be able to use under the compact.

So it was what I call the 1930s drought reality.

In the 1940s, under the negotiations of the Upper Basin Compact, they estimated that to use their compact apportionment, the Upper Basin states would have to have about 30 million acre feet of storage in place, in hand, at the beginning of that 1930s drought.

So that really, the 1930s drought really crystallized the need for large upper basin storage.

Now, many of the compact commissioners in 1922 understood that that would likely happen, but this was the first time they could quantify it.

The upper basin compact signed in 1948, approved by Congress and the states in 1949, apportions water among the five upper basin states.