Imperial (128 page)

I
n 1952, the lawsuit
Arizona v. California
was initiated over Colorado River water. By pure coincidence, it was that very same year when, picking up a pamphlet by the Colorado River Association, which just happened to be located in Los Angeles, we learned that Los Angeles was now buying forty percent of all power produced by Hoover Dam, and that
OFFICIAL FIGURES SHOW NO COLORADO RIVER WATER AVAILABLE FOR CENTRAL ARIZONA PROJECT
. Poor Arizona! It’s not our fault that we’ll be taking all that water;
OFFICIAL FIGURES
prove that we just have to.
²³⁹

(By the way, in 1951 Los Angeles had finally annexed Riverside’s Eastern Municipal Water District. I’ll bet that
OFFICIAL FIGURES
demonstrated that it was for the best. All the same, a historian writing in 1971 will conclude that Santa Ana River water rights have been litigated
almost continuously since the 1950s,
the adversaries being Riverside and San Bernardino. If only Los Angeles would swallow up San Bernardino, too! Then the Inland Empire would achieve a state of perfect peace.—Well, my kindred water-drinkers, that day just may come.)

In 1959, California assured the world that
the upper limit of safe annual yield
from the Colorado, excluding the Gila branch, was 5,850,000 acre-feet, although
the safe annual yield may be as little as 5,400,000 acre-feet.
In any case,
we reserve the right to claim more water against the states of the upper division.
Did we have enough water now?

In the 1960s, the water level dropped by three feet per year in Palm Springs, ten feet per year in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Fortunately, those areas lie outside the entity I refer to as Imperial; why worry? As the 1970s neared, California’s low-land cities which used to depend largely on pumping were commanded by the state to begin conserving underground water, relying instead on the Colorado and Feather rivers.

In 1965, James J. Doody, the Director of the Southern District of the California Department of Water Resources, gave a speech in San Diego reassuring us all that
the 2,580,200 acre-feet of Northern California water and 4,400,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water would be sufficient to meet the projected net water requirements of Southern California up to about 1990. An additional 1,930,000 acre-feet of supplemental water would be needed to meet projected total net water requirements in 2020.
What to do? Desalinization could be done at three hundred and twenty-five dollars per acre-foot—one dollar per thousand gallons. And praise the Lord, that very year President Johnson had signed a bill
authorizing the Department of the Interior to further investigate the feasibility of saline water conversion. This bill will have its effect on California.

Forty-one years later, I read in the newspaper that astonishing progress had indeed been made:
LAGUNA BEACH
—From where Mike Dunbar stands . . . [in] the South Coast Water District, he sees an agency at the end of the line for water shipped to this arid region from Northern California and the Colorado River . . . That’s why Dunbar, like so many coastal water managers before him, dreams that someday his agency’s customers will be served in part by desalinated seawater. I can’t help believing in people.
²⁴⁰

In short, it was simply needless to question the supply of water, even though California’s rivals did. For the questioners, a solution was found in 1965—an eternal solution. The Grand Canyon Workshop of the Colorado Open Space Council reported:
After fighting for twenty years to take Colorado River water from one another, Arizona, California, and other Colorado Basin states have agreed to share the river if they can take enough water from elsewhere to make argument unnecessary . . .

Well, whom might we take it from? Any guesses, my fellow Northsiders? We’ve sworn to squirt one point five million acre-feet down to Mexico,
subject to increase or reduction in certain contingencies. No assumption is made here as to the magnitude of such variations in the guaranteed delivery.
However,
there is evidence of underflow of the Colorado River to Mexico which is not measured and hence not credited against the Mexican Treaty obligation.
Well, let’s measure and credit it, by God! Someday, we might just line the All-American Canal and save the seepage for
us.
THE DESERT REAPPEARS
.

When I was in the Imperial Valley, said Edith Karpen, nobody started lining ditches. They started only in the seventies. It keeps the water level up in the wells when you don’t line them.

But, reader, which wells are we talking about in the present context?—Only Mexican ones.

As a matter of fact, the water in Mexican wells did happen to be dropping.—Between 1958 and 1998, the water table three miles away from Morelos Dam sank by eighteen feet!—So what?—On the Cucapah reservation south of Mexicali, old Carlos remembered when the gringos dammed the Colorado. Well, he shrugged, it’s their water. They can do what they like with it.—I asked him what had happened exactly, and he said: The Río Hardy kept dwindling after that. The fishing got worse. Anyway, he finished, they didn’t consult me.

The gringos had done that in the 1960s; and it happened to be just then that in Señora Teresa García’s words
the land started to lose its strength
in the Mexicali Valley; that was also when the water in her family well stopped being clear.

Has the water table dropped since you were little?

Our water comes from a canal. Our well gets water from the canal.

Can you drink from that well?

No! she laughed. It’s very dirty. As a child, the water was really clear but we couldn’t drink from it. It stopped being clear many years ago, in the sixties . . .

She
bought
her drinking water nowadays, in big bottles.

What do you suppose happened to her water? I did not sample it on that day in 2004, so I cannot say, but the following prophecy, uttered by one of Northside’s hydrological savants in 1958, may not be utterly irrelevant:
Prudent planning for the future requires consideration of the probability that the water available for diversion through the Metropolitan Aqueduct to irrigated areas in Arizona and California, and for deliveries to Mexico, will contain at least 1.5 tons of dissolved solids (dry weight) per acre foot of water when the planned developments in the Upper Basin are carried out.

That’s prudent planning for the future, all right! That’s why Mr. Dunbar, like so many coastal water managers before him, dreams that someday his agency’s customers will be served in part by desalinated seawater.

HIGH-PRIORITY WATER IMPROVEMENTS

Between 1906 and 1983, the average annual virgin (unregulated) flow of the Colorado River at Colorado River Compact point was fifteen point one million acre-feet. So I would hypothesize that about fifteen point one million yearly acre-feet of Colorado River water (less of course those trifling deductions for Mexico) got withdrawn after 1961.

In 1962, the doomed newsman Ruben Salazar visited Tijuana and wrote:
In what might be described as the “wettest” town in Baja California—alcoholically speaking—most of the residents ration their household water almost by the drop.
A hundred and sixty-six thousand people lived there then; there was enough water for thirty thousand. The solution: Decreto 75, which would enact an aqueduct from the Mexicali Valley at a cost of thirty-two million U.S. dollars.
²⁴¹
The journalist Carlos Estrada Sastre wrote against it; he said that poor people would be paying the thirty-two million; and his was no solitary voice, for the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled against the constitutionality of Decreto 75. Perhaps because of Señor Sastre’s outspokenness on this subject, perhaps because he accused the Tijuana police of participating in drugs and prostitution, he got his head bashed in with—what could better make their point?—a piece of water pipe. The chief of police and three subordinates were arrested. But all this was the merest Southside peculiarity; who cared about Southside?

In American Imperial, the money for water flowed like water, since
WATER WAS
already and would remain
HERE
. How could we not make beneficial use of
the Colorado River, which makes Imperial County the fifth-ranking United States county in agricultural production?
That encomium was published in 1966, five years after the Colorado’s decreasing trickle to the Gulf finally stopped. (José Joaquín Arrillaga, 1796:
As the sun rose, I saw the poplar trees of the Colorado River.
I have stood more or less where he stood on that morning in the Mexicali Valley. There are no poplar trees anymore. There is no water there anymore.)
²⁴²

Meanwhile, the city of San Diego budgeted almost forty-two million dollars for water utilities in fiscal year 1971. For fiscal year 1972, San Diego required the following municipal capital-improvement expenditures:
PRIORITY IMPROVEMENTS: HIGH PRIORITY WATER improvements made necessary by new system

development or unanticipated operational deficiencies:
four hundred thousand dollars,
three-quarters of which was attributable to new housing.
The Mission Gorge Pump Plant near Jackson Drive cost a hundred and forty grand, seventy-five percent of that being attributable to just-arrived residents.

IMPERIAL POOLS

Do you remember how California’s nineteenth-century waterscapes eventually washed away the notion of riparian ownership, leaving us instead with the law of appropriation? Here comes a professional restatement of that latter principle:
The one who first appropriated water and put it to beneficial use acquired a vested right to continue to divert and use that quantity of water against all claimants junior to him in time.

In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in
Wyoming v. Colorado
that this doctrine may apply on the interstate level. Therefore, it certainly applies for water districts. The Imperial Irrigation District was a senior rightholder on the Colorado: Only Thomas Blythe’s diversion of 1877 preceded the waterworks of George Chaffey and Charles Rockwood. Hence Imperial County had nothing to fear from, for instance, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Los Angeles waits. San Diego waits.

In the course of a year, Imperial Valley alfalfa used eighty-one inches of water;
²⁴³
Imperial Valley sugar beets, forty-six; Imperial Valley cotton, forty-one; Imperial Valley barley, twenty-two.—Well, that was nothing. Why worry?
The dove abounds in the cut-over alfalfa fields and around the many miles of irrigation ditches and canals. Here they settle so thickly that a single blast from a shotgun often bags the 10-bird daily limit.

At the beginning of 1975, on the very front page, the
California Farmer
warned:
Irrigation and reclamation must take first national priority. We could be too late now.
But it is simply needless to question the supply of water, as evidenced by a certain stock photo from the Olson Collection: Unlabeled except for the word “desert” scrawled on the back in ballpoint pen and the stamp
PHOTOMAMMOTH MURALS
with an address in North Hollywood, entirely undated, it depicts a palm grove more beautiful than any I have ever seen in my own sojourns in Imperial, because the air is clear so that we can see the snow-covered mountains behind the palms; secondly, the foreground of this image, between two stately palms, is a mirror of grass-speckled water: deepish water, rich in reflections of palms and mountains; soft clouds in the air; there is so much of everything and it is so clean.
Experience in the Coachella Valley indicates that not less than 9 to 12 acre-feet per year should be applied for palms in full production.

Chapter 141

WELLTON-MOHAWK (1961)

Irrigated agriculture will always be a short-lived enterprise unless the salts accumulated in the root zone are leached out.

—National Research Council, 1989

T
he drier the climate, the less leaching takes place and hence the more serious the salt buildup. How serious might it now be in Imperial? Turning to her mother, Alice Woodside said: You remember how Dad used to dread the alkali?—But as a sort of reply, the old lady remarked: The city of Imperial was a rice-growing area, because they got so much alkali that they started raising rice there; they’d flooded it to eliminate the alkali. So they would flood the fields and wash the alkali. They fixed the problem and grew melons.—She believed, as I want to, that one really can
fix the problem.
What if one can’t?—You’ll be happy to know that experiments conducted at Imperial Valley Field Station prove that
plants can flourish when irrigated with water as high as 1,350 parts per million salt content, if the water is applied properly.
Imperial’s irrigation water is expected to reach that level by 2000. Well, 2000 remains a long safe quarter-century away.

Fourteen years go by. Salinity at the Colorado River is now up to eight hundred and seventy parts per million. Don’t worry.

When did the Mexicans first start complaining? Never mind. Back in 1925, good old Phil Swing had summed up all verities:
God in his infinite wisdom placed Mexico upon the last part of the stream of the Colorado River.

The 1944 treaty states only: Northside must provide one point five million acre-feet to Mexico. The treaty declines to mention the quality of that water. Mexican protests lead to amendments, the last of which is Minute 242: Average annual salinity of the Colorado upstream of where it enters Mexico at Morelos Dam cannot exceed that of Imperial Dam by more than a hundred and fifty parts per million.