by John Fleck
With the groundwater storage and other innovations developed as part of the 1996 Integrated Resources Plan as backup, Southern California weathered the 2003 cuts without significant impact on its customers. Bill Hasencamp, Met’s Colorado River Resources Program Manager, likes to point out that not only did the problem of a massive cut in Met’s supplies not make the front page of the New York Times, it did not even make the front page of the Los Angeles Times.15 Far from being the sort of existential crisis that in earlier days might have triggered dire headlines, the shortfall had become a manageable problem.
CHAPTER 9
The Great Fallowing
THE 2003 DECISION TO SLASH Southern California’s Colorado River allotment forced an unprecedented and often uncomfortable partnership between farmers and cities, as the region attempted water conservation and agriculture-to-urban transfers on a scale never before seen in the United States. The urban water agencies of Southern California and the rural Imperial Irrigation District had been trying for decades to jointly manage the region’s Colorado River supply, but the relationship had never been an easy one.
The Southern California Metropolitan Water District (Met) represents the rich city relatives and the Imperial Irrigation District the poor country cousins. Per capita income in Met’s service territory of San Diego, Orange, and Los Angeles counties is nearly double that in Imperial County. But Imperial County has always been rich in water, to which the community’s leaders cling tightly.
For shear audacity in our confrontation with North America’s arid West, it is hard to top the Imperial Valley in California’s southeastern corner, near the bottom of the Colorado River system. Driving west on Interstate 8 from Yuma toward San Diego, you pass through high desert dunes and then scraggly scrubland before descending a small hill and across an artificial river known as the East Highline Canal. The canal marks the sharp dividing line between desert and a blanket of green—a frenzy of lettuce and carrot harvest in winter, vast acres of durum wheat, kleingrass, sudan grass, and leafy green alfalfa in spring and summer—draped across the heart of what was once a desolate, nearly impassable tract of dry land.1
The All-American Canal, carrying water to the Imperial Valley (© John Fleck).
It is Colorado River water working its greatest magic, diverted at Imperial Dam on the Arizona-California border, shunted from its natural channel into a canal that by itself is larger than Arizona’s largest rivers, the Salt and the Gila, or New Mexico’s Rio Grande. That big artificial river, the All-American Canal, distributes water to a spiderweb of some 1,600 miles of irrigation ditches to deliver water and drains to take excess away from farmers’ fields, creating one of the largest irrigation districts in the nation.
History and law give the Imperial Irrigation District—known as “IID”—title to more Colorado River water than any other region or entity—more than Los Angeles, far more than Las Vegas, more at the Imperial Irrigation District’s water-usage peak than the entire state of Arizona. In 2013, the valley’s farmers used that water to grow $2.3 billion worth of agricultural products, including a piece of the vegetable market that, with Imperial County’s neighbors across the river in Yuma, provides nearly all of the winter greens eaten in the United States and Canada. If you eat salad in the United States or Canada in January, you are almost certainly consuming Colorado River water.
The Imperial Valley has all of that water, and is therefore able to grow all of that lettuce, wheat, and hay, because of the legal and political structures built around “prior appropriation.” The valley’s farmers were among the first to put the Colorado River’s water to “beneficial use,” and that position has carried great weight in the decisions that have followed. The water-management struggles that have resulted represent a collision of two of the great western water-management myths—that water flows uphill toward money, and that prior appropriation stands in the way of a solution to our water-allocation problems.
In both cases, the relationship between the Imperial Valley and urban Southern California show the fallacy of the myths. The coastal cities may be far richer, but even after decades of wrangling, the Imperial Valley still has most of the water. But neither have the Imperial Irrigation District’s senior water rights prevented mutually beneficial deals. Urban Southern California and IID have been able to work together to move some of the agricultural district’s water to the cities while still preserving the farm communities in places like El Centro and Brawley that depend on it.
The enormous size of IID’s supply has made the valley’s water users central players in the search for a way to reallocate Colorado River water as supplies grow scarce. Critics argue that Imperial Valley agriculture is wasteful and makes no sense,2 but the valley’s farm community has hung on, defending water rights carved out of the Colorado River a century ago, while simultaneously adjusting to an era of scarcity.
There has always been a gun-to-the-head element in the relationship between IID and the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. It is not uncommon for the district’s representatives to arrive at gatherings of the Colorado River Basin network of managers and deal makers only to find that the discussion is already well under way without them. “IID’s always had this ‘island nation’ status,” said Tina Shields, an engineer who manages the district’s Colorado River water.3
The tension arises in part because IID, more than any other big water user, operates in a local political climate that is sometimes openly hostile to the deals that the irrigation district’s leadership has tried to craft. It is a common response in farm country. “Water carries a lot of emotional value to farmers,” said Bart Fisher, a prominent farmer and Colorado River water user in nearby Blythe, California.4 The Imperial Irrigation District’s board is democratically elected, so community sentiment matters more to its water-management decisions than in many more technocratically managed Colorado River Basin regions.
Fighting to hang onto water, and a fear of richer, more powerful neighbors coming to take it away, are deeply ingrained in the community’s culture. “Water founded this county,” the Imperial Valley Press’s editors wrote in 2007, “and protecting our allotment will ensure its survival.”5
The debates have been legal and political, sometimes confrontational and sometimes collaborative. Under the agreements, the Imperial Irrigation District cut water use by 20 percent in the first decade of the 2000s, and Imperial’s farmers have adapted. Over the same period, farm incomes (adjusted for inflation) have risen more than 30 percent. Imperial Valley agriculture has demonstrated what adaptive capacity in the twenty-first century’s “age of limits” can look like. But as climate change decreases flow in the river while population across the basin rises, the pressure is unlikely to let up.
Imperial
The valley’s audacity begins with the name of the place, “Imperial,” slapped onto the desert by early boosters trying to use marketing and the promise of water to turn their vision into profit.
“No other enterprise in the Southwest has in recent years made the same rapid progress in the way of home building and general agricultural development,” the valley’s first large-scale commercial land developer wrote in a 1903 ad in the Los Angeles Times. The valley, the ad proclaimed, offered “an unlimited amount of water, fertile soil, a warm climate.”6
This has always been a tough sell. “Warm climate” is an understatement for some of North America’s hottest, driest deserts. In 1903, “unlimited water” was more hype than reality, though “desert with occasional massive floods” would probably not have made as strong a marketing pitch. “Why California should feel any desire to claim the wilderness of sand and rattlesnakes lying between Vallecito Mountain and Fort Yuma, I cannot see,” wrote Josephine Clifford of her 1870s trek through the harsh landscape. “Can anything be more hopelessly endless—more discouragingly boundless—than the sand-waste that lay before us?”7
But others saw what Clifford did not, a quirk of geography that came to domi
nate the trajectory of human use of the Colorado River. The “wilderness of sand and rattlesnakes” was, in fact, rich soil spread across the desert when the nearby Colorado River periodically spilled its banks. This rich soil was the crumbled remains of the rocks the river and its tributaries had carved from canyons upstream, dumped as the river slowed and built a floodplain across its delta.8 Crucially, a large part of the valley floor was a sink that lay below the level of the Colorado River as it traveled along the edge of the mountains to the east. Gravity was all it would take, the valley’s early boosters realized, to turn the desert green.
That insight—that the rich expanse of Colorado River Delta desert soil sat lower in elevation than the flow of the river itself—shaped everything that followed. This was before the age of the great pumps that now move rivers of water up out of the Colorado River’s main channel to Phoenix and Los Angeles. Those human-made rivers today, driven by massive pumps upstream from Parker Dam, are each similar in size to the entire flow of the Rio Grande, the river just across the Continental Divide. But in that time before pumps were large enough and economical enough, it took gravity and audacious insight to realize that the Colorado River’s waters could be moved.
The lore of the Imperial Valley credits that insight to a man named Oliver Meredith Wozencraft. A doctor from New Orleans, Wozencraft was drawn like many of his generation by the chance of riches to the goldfields of California. Traveling the southern route, Wozencraft made it as far as Yuma, Arizona, on the east bank of the Colorado River. Between him and the goldfields lay Clifford’s sand-waste. Warned about the dangers of the trek across it in the late spring heat, the lure of gold was too strong, and Wozencraft and a group of fellow travelers set out.
This was very nearly the end of his life story. As Wozencraft told the tale later, he was near death, delirious with heat and dehydration when he stumbled into an old, dry river channel and had a vision: “It was then and there that I first conceived the idea of the reclamation of the desert.”9
All that was needed, Wozencraft believed, was to divert a portion of the Colorado River’s water from its natural course into that old river channel. Instead of flowing toward the sea it would bring irrigation water to the fertile desert land. Rescued when he was near death, Wozencraft devoted the rest of his life to that dream.
There is every reason to believe Wozencraft embellished the tale, that he really came to the idea of irrigating the desert later in life, when his head was clearer. Historians think it was a young geologist named William Blake, part of an early team searching for a railroad route to the Pacific, who first snapped to the idea that the valley that would come to be known as Imperial really lay below the level of the nearby river.10 But, wherever the idea came from, there is no doubt that Wozencraft was the first to seriously pursue moving water out of the Colorado River’s natural channel to irrigate the Salton Sink, and he spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to turn the Colorado River’s water out of its banks and toward the valley to its north. He died in 1887 in Washington, DC, at age seventy-three, thirty-eight years after he first ventured from Yuma into the desert, still waiting in frustration for the federal legislation needed to bring his scheme to fruition. “His most favorite hobby,” his obituary in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin explained, “was that of converting the desert of Southern California into a productive field by flooding it from the waters of the Colorado River.”11 He was very much a man ahead of his time, trying to convince the federal authorities that “reclaiming” a desert was a task worth undertaking.
It is impossible to replay the tape of history without the happenstance of Wozencraft’s arrival to see how things might have happened differently, but it seems likely the creation of the Colorado River Basin’s greatest irrigation empire would have happened anyway, even without Wozencraft laying the groundwork. The pull of gravity downhill from the Colorado River to the rich delta lands of the Imperial Valley, combined with the inexorable pressure of immigrants moving westward trying to profit by bringing the desert lands into the nation’s agricultural economy, makes today’s Imperial Valley agricultural empire or something like it seem inevitable. Blake’s insight represented facts on the ground. Someone likely would have brought water to what remains the greatest agricultural empire in the Colorado River Basin.
But inevitable or not, the vast working landscape of the Imperial Irrigation District is now here, with people who have built their lives around it. Adapting Colorado River management in an age of scarcity compels us to take that reality into account.
Chaffey and Rockwood
It was left to a pair of entrepreneurs named George Chaffey and Charles Rockwood to carry out Wozencraft’s vision, digging a canal that looped south into Mexico before joining up with the north-flowing Alamo River back into the Imperial Valley. The plan for the profit-making venture was that immigrants would settle the land and buy their water from the California Development Company, keeper of the canals.
This did not go well. Perpetually undercapitalized, the company was no match for the river. In 1905, the Colorado tore out the company’s flimsy diversion gates and the river’s entire flow thundered past modest irrigation works meant to contain it. The flood destroyed farms, and it took the might of the Southern Pacific Railway (at the request of the president) until 1907 to finally close the breach and put the Colorado River back into its channel, headed properly back southward to the Sea of Cortez.
There was a national debate at the time over whether private enterprise or state and federal agencies should lead the effort to bring irrigation water to the arid landscape.12 The dramatic failure of the California Development Company helped tip the debate in the direction of federal projects, making it clear that the only entity large enough, with deep enough pockets to “tame” the Colorado River, would be the United States government.
They needed a dam, and surveyors had long known where to put it. The canyon country near present-day Las Vegas where the Colorado River sliced through a narrow gorge was perfect for the job. But the engineering undertaking required to do it was every bit as audacious as the notion of farming the desert, something only the federal government had the resources to accomplish.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact among the seven US states cleared the way for federal legislation needed to build the dam. In 1928, Congress passed the Boulder Canyon Project Act, authorizing federally funded construction of Hoover Dam, to eliminate the floods that jeopardized the lower river valleys and even out the river’s flow, making steady year-round irrigation possible. And by the 1930s, a great new canal was built entirely within the United States to bring the Imperial Valley its water—the All-American Canal.
At that point, coastal Southern California’s water needs were relatively modest, but over time, as the coastal metro areas grew, so did the tension between them and the desert agricultural regions of Imperial County and the valleys around it, Palo Verde to the northeast and Coachella to the west. In keeping with the principle of prior appropriation, the original water-allocation deal signed between California’s water users and the federal government in 1931 gave the bulk of the water to the farm districts. A long period of stability followed, as Imperial Irrigation District farmers grew into their allocation, building out communities across the desert based on farming the desert with their Colorado River water. In 1934, before the arrival of the All-American Canal, Imperial County farmers were irrigating 245,000 acres of farmland. By the time the US Census Bureau had tallied the acreage in 1978, that had risen to 442,000 acres. But as populations grew in Los Angeles, San Diego, and the other cities and suburbs along the Southern California coast, the stage was set for conflict over reallocation of California’s Colorado River supply.
The All-American Canal, larger than many of the West’s rivers (© Lissa Heineman).
Too Much Water
The modern era of legal struggle over the Imperial Irrigation District’s water use began in 1980, ironically, with concerns about there bei
ng too much water. The complaint that the Imperial Irrigation District was using water wastefully came not from another Colorado River Basin water user, but from one of Imperial’s own. John Elmore, who owned land at the edge of the Salton Sea, complained that excess runoff from wasteful farming practices in the valley were causing the sea to rise, flooding his farm.13
The Salton Sea has always been an anomaly. Before Rockwood and Chaffey diverted the Colorado River to Imperial Valley farmland beginning in 1901, the “Salton Sink” was a dry salt flat. When the river broke its banks, it created an inland lake in the two years it took for the Southern Pacific to heal the breach and redirect the Colorado River back to the ocean. The desert is so hot that those remnants would have quickly evaporated back to empty salt flat were it not for valley farming. But irrigation always involves infiltration and runoff, and all that water flows into the Salton Sea, replacing the evaporating water.
Thus by the 1970s, the basin’s unique geography, which had made it so attractive to the first generations of farmers, was coming back to haunt water managers of Elmore’s era. Because it was a closed sink, the agricultural drain water simply flowed to the “sea,” accumulating there in whatever balance existed between inflow and evaporation. The balance had always posed a tricky dilemma for the irrigation district. As early as the 1950s, it instituted conservation programs to try to keep the sea’s level stable, in part because the district itself had become a major landowner.14
Those measures, combined with drought that reduced natural inflow from regional rains, were enough to keep things in balance until the late 1970s, when a series of wet years caused the sea to begin rising again, triggering a flurry of complaints from Elmore.15
Elmore blamed the district’s water-management practices. Canals ran full whether the water could be used or not. Farmers routinely ordered more water than they needed. That resulted in excess “tailwater” that the district made little effort to recover and divert to other farms, Elmore charged. As the sea rose, Elmore had to build dikes to protect his farmland, and install pumps to get rid of his own agricultural drain water, because his land was now below the level of the sea.16
