Water and Phoenix's rebirth

Theodore Roosevelt Dam and spillway, 1915.

 

On the mountain tops we stand
All the world at our command
We have opened up the soil
With our teardrops
And our toil
--Gordon Lightfoot (Canadian Railroad Trilogy)

That people can move to the Salt River Valley turn on a reliable tap or jump in a shimmering swimming pool, never even wondering where the water originates, is testimony to the mighty acts and sacrifices of previous generations. 

Today's transplants would never know it, but they live in one of the world's great fertile river valleys. But unlike the Nile and Euphrates, the Salt is dangerously unpredictable. It floods. It dries up to nearly nothing. In the end, it destroyed the most advanced hydraulic civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas, which we call the Hohokam.

It very nearly did the same to the Americans who found the valley after the Civil War, having sat there empty for centuries as if providentially awaiting them. Even some of the Hohokam canals were intact, needing only to be cleaned out by the newcomers. But the river had its own harsh logic. The territorial "lifestyle," as related by my grandmother, was unbelievably primitive, even at the end of the 19th century — always dependent on the river's tricks. Phoenix might never have risen from the ashes.

This changed with the Newlands Act of 1902, which launched the federal government into the business of reclaiming arid Western lands. The first major enterprise was the Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River and what became the Salt River Project, with its network of dams and canals. Roosevelt Dam, especially, was built against tremendous obstacles and the technology of the 1900s essentially copied Hohokam methods, but on a vast and advanced scale. It was also made possible because the farmers in the Valley collectively pledged their properties as collateral to what seemed like a risky scheme -- taming the Salt River. (For a wonderful and all-but-forgotten memoir of these early days see The House by the Buckeye Road by Helen Seargeant.)

While the Newlands Act intended to encourage agriculture, it was also naked social engineering. In the Salt River Valley, it intended to create a Jeffersonian democracy of small farmers to relieve the demographic pressure of the gritty, crowded cities of the East. Things didn't work out that way. There were small farmers, such as my family. But loopholes allowed the gradual aggregation of large and powerful landowners, with the say on the Salt River Valley Water Users Association. As I have written before: In the desert, water is power.

Roosevelt Dam under construction.

Yet reclamation always held a largely unspoken tension. It asked the farmers of the East and Midwest to subsidize their competition (and in the decades ahead, a debate would rage — largely suppressed in Phoenix — about the economics and environmental efficacy of this). And what a competition it became: With the river under control and the snowmelt in reservoirs, the Salt River Valley became one of the nation's major agricultural centers. At its height in the early 1960s, nearly 600,000 acres were under cultivation. Mile-long trains of citrus, vegetables and feedlot grains left Phoenix for all over the country. The valley lived by the rhythm of flood irrigation.

The empire builders were not content. Seeing California grab the water of the Colorado River, the young state of Arizona began the decades-long effort to win its rights to the water and build the Central Arizona Project. Two excellent books on this come from my friend Jack August, Vision in the Desert, on the seminal role of Sen. Carl Hayden, and Dividing Western Waters, on the great lawyer Mark Wilmer. (A disclaimer: My mother, Vivian Talton, worked for the Arizona Interstate Stream Commission and was involved at the height of the titanic Arizona v. California court battle).

The logic behind the CAP (and it's pronounced C-A-P, not "cap") would not persuade today. It was partly a state water rights issue, partly an effort by the agricultural interests to extend their reach and gain what they thought was an even more reliable water supply. This was especially true for growers in Pinal and Pima counties and the Harquahala Valley, who were pumping out ground water. It was a product of the era of great dam building and its mindset. That was fading even when Arizona prevailed in the Supreme Court in 1963. Glen Canyon Dam had been a near thing -- in retrospect, it seems an ill-advised project -- and the Sierra Club led the defeat of two dams proposed virtually inside the Grand Canyon.

But by the early 1960s, the CAP developed a further impetus: to provide water for population growth. Phoenix had grown from 100,000 in 1950 to 439,170 in 1960. There was never a sense among the leadership that subdivisions would replace agriculture as the Valley's raison d'etre. As it dawned on some of them, they were profoundly torn. But the growth machine grew rapidly and became a powerful CAP advocate. The CAP was built.

Now the agriculture is mostly gone and with it both a valuable export -- which will become more important as the global food supply chain comes under pressure -- and the cooling effect of half a million acres of fields and citrus groves. And central Arizona faces a profound water crisis.

There is no willingness on the part of the local elite to discuss it. And it's highly complex: It can't be boiled down to "Phoenix doesn't have enough water" or "Phoenix is running out of water." But I can tell them: You're not fooling anyone. I've heard influential national real estate people say those very things. The Great Water Coverup is not helping anyone, except the short-term profits of the Real Estate Industrial Complex and the tourism industry.

The problem is essentially this: Metro Phoenix does not have enough water to continue growing at the rate, and in the form, that it has done since 1960. This is especially true in Pinal County and west of the White Tanks. Arizona's water problems are even more dire, with wildcat subdivisions that lack reliable water, mad groundwater depletion and a grab of Verde River water that might only be stopped by the Salt River Project (very quietly, still, the kingdom and the power).

Behind the crisis is more than putting 4 million people into a place never meant to hold such a large city, more than sprawl.

First, the Colorado is oversubscribed — too many straws at this drinking hole — and its allocations were made during a period of unusually high water flows. The Upper Basin is not going to allowed itself to get screwed again by Arizona (which was reinforced to me when I lived in Denver and locals would ask where I was from). Settlement of Indian water claims makes the Gila River Pimas a powerful new player — and they're not going to subsidize sprawl. Second, the CAP canal can only hold so much water, and the taxpayers aren't going to build another ditch (even if the water existed). Third, ground-water pumping continues apace, which is both unsustainable and could turn the lush Sonoran Desert into a Mojave. Fourth, climate change is already reducing snowmelt, an ominous development — a game ender.

I have no confidence in the enforcement of ground-water regulations by the state, which is controlled by the real estate interests. (And the active water management areas are not even statewide). I have no confidence in the gamed hydrological studies that show Buckeye can have half a million people or more. The old saw about how "homes" were a more efficient use of water than agriculture now strains credulity — what about the lost cooling effect? what about the swimming pools and golf courses? Dreams of desalination plants and other technological bailouts in some unspecified future are unpersuasive, especially for a dead-broke, anti-research state and a much poorer America.

Indeed -- and it pains me to say it, being a child of Arizona v. California -- some of the arguments California made in the '50s and '60s against the CAP were correct. It's unsustainable. (Of course, pot meet kettle).

If I could wave a wand, I would have preserved a relatively contained city surrounded by agriculture and never built the CAP. Now, I would create a dense city within the footprint of the SRP and its relatively stable (we hope) renewable (we hope) water supplies. You know how awful density is -- think Paris. But I don't possess that wand, and the only thing now saving central Arizona is the real-estate depression.

But these water realities cannot be wished away. They cannot be avoided through denial and suppression. When I was a child, I was always reminded of the Hohokam and the lessons of their fall. On nights when the breeze and atmospherics were just right, I was sure I could hear their ghosts wandering the timeless river valley. They are still there.

Gallery — click on an image for a larger view:

An 1895 map of the canals, many of them Hohokam, but also the privately financed Arizona Canal. The latter failed in the financial crisis of 1896. It had to wait for the Newlands Act to be completed (Brad Hall collection).

Where Tonto Creek flowed into the Salt River amid high cliffs was the perfect site for Theodore Roosevelt Dam, first project of the Newlands Act (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Roosevelt Dam under construction in 1907. Almost all materials had to be hauled in by horses or made on-site (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Done! The world's then tallest masonry dam in 1915 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

T.R. himself at the dedication of Roosevelt Dam in 1911.

In 1922, governors of seven Upper and Lower Basin states signed the Colorado River Compact. Arizona refused to sign the "Law of the River" until 1944, angry over California's damming and diverting Colorado water and other grievances.

Horse Mesa Dam on the Salt River, 1927 (Library of Congress).

Mormon Flat Dam under construction in 1925 (Library of Congress)

Carl Pleasant Dam under construction in 1927 on the Agua Fria River. Lake Pleasant became much larger in the 1990s as a reservoir holding CAP water (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives)

Bartlett Dam, on the Verde River, built between 1936 and 1939 (Library of Congress).

Stewart Mountain Dam, impounding Saguaro Lake, in 1936.

Horseshoe Dam on the Verde, completed in 1946.

The Central Arizona Project Canal, completed in 1993 to Tucson at a cost of $4 billion.

Another view of the CAP canal (Central Arizona Project)

RELATED: When the river ran free.

Canals.

The dam problem.

The Groundwater Act.

The Central Arizona Project.

 

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My book, A Brief History of Phoenix, is available to buy or order at your local independent bookstore, or from Amazon.

Read more Phoenix history in Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.

 

 

 

Comments

[soleri]

There is a congruence between the national economy of the past 10 years or so and the Arizona growth machine. We saw consumer spending and housing replace productive endeavor as the primary economic engine in our lives. And much of that was predicated on a kind of hysteria, one compounded of millenialism and positive thinking. No limits here except for the sky.

But there are, of course, limits. Water is the most obvious one but there's also Peak Oil. A place that exults in unsustainable development is not just mocking the gods, it's setting itself up for a sudden and cruel fall.

We would have told ourselves a story regardless of the circumstances. It's our nature to believe. So, given the circumstances, it's probably understandable that we'd do what we could to perpetuate an inherently fraudulent scheme. You can look at people like Bob Rubin and Larry Summers and realize if the elite thinks like that, so will less gifted movers and shakers.

It's all good, as Kunstler likes to say. The story may be dark but at least it's interesting.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Actually, U.S. water use seems to have been stable since 1985, despite population increases.

http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/water/a_wateruse.html#seven

Of course, that data is for 1950 through 2000, and here we are nearly ten years later, but I'd be surprised if the use trend had changed significantly for the worse.

Incidentally, golf courses, at least here in Phoenix, almost all use effluent these days. I'm not sure how sanitary that is (all you nail-biters better watch it on the back nine), but it's sustainable.

Of course, Mr. Talton is talking about a regional problem, and Phoenix's share of regional resources in particular. And recent trends in global warming (which have just been estimated, using a new model, to be twice as bad as earlier estimated) bode ill for a resource that depends on snowfall and gradually melting runoff for the bulk of the river water he's referring to; potential problems may include decreased precipitation, early melt-off (which is a problem for a steady source of water, since existing aquifers can only hold so much), and increased evaporation loss.

Incidentally, I had a (probably dumb) idea while thinking about Mr. Talton's blog item: since gaseous hydrogen and oxygen can be produced from water (H2O) by the addition of energy to overcome activation barriers, I wondered if water and energy could be produced by combining gaseous hydrogen and oxygen under pressure. I don't have time to research this now, so if anyone knows anything about this, please post a comment. Later, I'll see what I can find.

[Buford]

I worked on 4 of the 12 sections of canal that take the CAP from the Colorado River to Fountain Hills. Even though it was designed in the 50's and fought its legal battles in the 60's, it didn't start construction until the middle 70's and didn't finish until the early 90's.

The popular sentiments that Jon speaks of continued to change during all that time. There were more and more questions about whether this was a good thing to do.

Due to the goverment's concern over growing dis-satisfaction, they chose to build it piecemeal, scattering dis-connected projects over the entire length of the canal, specifically so they could say in court- "If we stop now, everything we've done will be useless. You have to let us fill in the missing pieces."

To illustrate what I mean, the canal was divided into segments called "Reaches" and numbered sequentially from the Colorado to Phoenix, 1 through 12. The pumping station that would take water out of the Colorado was one of the first projects, since it entailed a long tunnel through the mountains. But Reach 1 was one of the last pieces to be built. My first project was Reach 2, and though other jobs had been out to bid, and my company got some of them, we got Reach 3 also and did them as a single project. That is the only time that was possible during the entire project.

After finishing Reaches 2 & 3, I went to a related project in California for a year and then came back to Reach 12- the opposite end of that section! Another contrator got Reach 5b at about the same time. Afterwards I went back to do Reach 4. While my company also was working on Reach 9. Reach 5B was not bid for some time and I left Arizona before Reaches 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11 were started. The primary reason for this sequencing was to defuse public resentment and make winning legal challenges easier. I know because the Bureau of Land Management brass told me so.

Another reason was to prevent the incremental growth of resistance along the line of construction. We moved into an area for two years and then moved out. We (or another contractor) would come back a couple of years later to fill in the missing peices, allowing popular sentiments to lose focus.

There are other costs and affects of building a canal 25 years after designing it, but I'll leave that for another post.

[Buford]

Mr. Pulsifer:

One problem with your plan is the cost of collecting the hydrogen in sufficient concentrations to start the water manufacturing process.

High school science classes can demonstrate both reactions on small scale and even then they use bottled hydrogen. The amount of hydrogen in the atmosphere is low enough to make a large-scale operation improbable.

I don't have time to lookup whether the actual reaction you suggest is endo- or exo-thermic, but the net is almost certainly a loss.

It occurs to me that sewer gasses have signifigant methane (I have another Phoenix story about about that- 27th Ave and I-10, I believe) so it might be feasible to collect sewer gas and split it into hydrogen and carbon and use the H2 with naturally available oxygen as you suggest. (The leftover carbon could have many uses)

[Emil Pulsifer]

Buford, I found this:

"Given the energetics presented above, there is a strong thermochemical bias for the production of water over hydrogen peroxide when H2 and O2 are reacted together. For instance, when hydrogen gas is burned in the presence of oxygen, a large amount of energy is released and water is produced as the major product."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-does-combining-hydrog

Apparently, both energy production and water production are much easier in uncontrolled, large scale events, as opposed to highly controlled environments like fuel cells (where things get "complicated").

But of course, there are three major factors: volume of gas necessary (huge, to produce huge amounts of water); the source of gas; and cost of both the basic gases and of the water/energy production process.

Obviously, energy produced by the process itself will offset costs, but only to the extent that such energy is recoverable during the process. Presumably a major portion of released energy would be thermal (heating the water) which could then be used in steam turbines: once the heat had been extracted from the water to power turbines for electricity production, the cooled water could then be recycled into municipal water systems where it would be processed as needed to insure full potability.

At present, most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, so that's a non-starter.

There is a new, clean, carbon-neutral hydrogen generation process using a nanotechnology catalyst operating on ethanol. The problem there is that even though the plants grown to produce ethanol also produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide, plants require large amounts of water in the form of irrigation...doh!

http://www.physorg.com/news150472856.html

There's plenty of hydrogen in outer space. Now if we can only build a long enough straw...

Seriously though, I wonder if we can't kill several birds with one stone if various kinds of energy/water/atmospheric problems are addressed in a holistic fashion, especially with the weaknesses or cost-factors of parts of the process being offset by other parts...just an idea.

[Emil Pulsifer]

P.S. Regarding Buford's waste treatment idea for producing hydrogen gas, I found this:

"Hydrogen gas was continuously produced by treating glucose-containing synthetic wastewater with sewage digester sludge. . .The hydrogen gas content in the biogas was in the range of 40–60% and no methane was detected either case."

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6THB-4D0NJ8Y-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=862581ed291c784d2fc77054bb2a6c54

[Emil Pulsifer]

Incidentally, the cheapest method of desalinization is the natural kind, where evaporation from oceans produces fresh rainwater. Most of that rainwater goes unused, at present, being re-evaporated or rained into the oceans (which make up large portions of the earth).

The problem is that catchment systems are generally expensive. There have been some communities in India, however, which used local volunteer labor to hand-dig huge (football field sized) pools, which were then lined with plastic sheeting. The projects worked so well that even months after the monsoon season ended, there was plenty of water left, despite the fact that the locals had invited neighboring villages to drink their fill. Of course, it's a question of scale, too.

Another idea that occurs to me is the creation of artificial rivers and deltas which take oceanwater inland to lower than sealevel areas, in which soil and plant filtration provides natural desalination along the way. There may be a few choice geographical areas whose topology would lend themselves to this, but again, the expense would be enormous.

[CheneylivesinPrescott]

This piece generated interesting musings in science and public policy. In Arizona and at the Republic, Talton always raised the level of debate, whether people agreed or disagreed.

[dave weiss]

collapse--the jared diamond book speaks of unstable ecology and inability to match environment w population as the killer of civilizations...

arizona is always at risk.

[Ann B. Aycock]

Thank you for this report.