A Meditation on Water
Biweekly ramblings by The Motley Fool
It’s sifting out of the sky, drifting lazily groundward this time, not a stinging horizontal sandblast headed toward Nebraska, the way it often does. Although it seems like a lot, the water accumulates a little at a time. Little crystalline
Receiving less than 15 inches of water from rain and snow each year, the Laramie Plains are technically a desert.
The Indians knew enough not to settle here – nothing to feed your horses in the winter. Even the cottonwoods that grew along the watercourses were of the narrowleaf variety – can’t strip their bark to feed saddle stock. It was a no-man’s land.
And yet there is a town where the Union Pacific crosses the Big Laramie River. Water was scarce in the 1860s, and it presence with the approach of the transcontinental railroad, coupled with the ability to float railroad ties downstream from the Medicine Bow Mountains meant enough commerce to support a railroad camp. The railroad tie industry gave us our first major environmental problems: The tar from railroad tie manufacturing leaked into the groundwater, creating a plume of pollution that ultimately would become a SuperFund cleanup site.
This dearth of winter forage is a driving force for the large-scale irrigation in the Laramie Basin: Impossible to carry cattle through the winter here without supplementary feeding with hay. And hay takes massive quantities of water, distributed through flood irrigation via a complex series of canals and water bars, overseen by ditch bosses and state agencies and irrigation districts, jealously fought over by a dedicated cadre of hydrologists and water law experts. Water rights in the West are a “first in time, first in right” proposition, and must be filed for. In a quote attributed to Mark Twain, a man of uncommon sense, “Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting over.”
And so, between parasitic Dowlin Ditch and the Pioneer Canal, the cattle barons sucked the life out of the Big Laramie River, and its flows—once broad and strong—dwindled away into the sluggish trickle that we see today.
Which brings us to our water supply, the lifeblood of every western town. The city has some water rights drawn from the Big Laramie, with a treatment plant sited out toward Woods Landing. The city bought the Monolith Ranch back in the 1990s, for its water rights, and will ultimately be able to convert about half of the agricultural water right for municipal use. Right now, the river water makes up 40 percent of our annual water use.
The other 60 percent (increasing to nearly 100 percent during the river’s low-water period of late summer) comes from groundwater – the Casper aquifer that supplies a system of city wells. The water here is of higher quality; I have heard folks say that they can tell when the water is switched from wellwater to the river. It’s a fragile resource, though. The Casper aquifer’s bedrock is exposed at the east end of Laramie, and water (and anything else) that seeps down into the rock is in the city water supply in two days’ travel.
You would think that the city would prohibit development on top of the aquifer’s bedrock exposure, but it doesn’t. You can build a subdivision there. You can site a commercial development there. You can’t have embalming fluid or paint stripper, but many other activities that threaten water quality are allowed.
That’s why it’s critically important for the city to acquire these lands so they can be managed for open space and aquifer protection. The rancorous debates in city council have yielded to unanimous support for this idea, as leaders emerged who demanded that the council follow the lead of its citizens. Who have overwhelmingly supported aquifer protection as a top priority for years. The Governor has lent his support, and there is a bipartisan push in the legislature to earmark at least $15 million to purchase 11,000 acres of the sensitive aquifer zone for parkland.
All you have to do is look south to see what can happen when a community doesn’t have a stable water supply. Denver and other Front Range cities have been stealing water from the West Slope of Colorado for decades. Even so they are drawing down their reserves in the Ogallala Aquifer, with “help” from irrigators watering dryland farms for wheat and barley on lands that were rightly recognized as the “Great American Desert” as early as the 1800s. It’s an object lesson in geographic unsustainability.
Now there’s a proposal to build a massive pipeline for an unprecedented raid on Colorado River water to water all those suburban lawns in the greater Denver metroplex. It’s a big idea with big numbers: It’s leader is Aaron Million, its estimated cost is $4 billion, and the water it will suck out of the Colorado Basin each year in gallons is 81 billion. It has big enemies: the Governor of Wyoming, environmental groups with their crack teams of lawyers, and local governments in Sweetwater County are all on the warpath. With all that opposition, its odds of reaching completion are vanishingly small.
By comparison, Laramie is sitting pretty. We have the water to sustain ourselves, even grow, in the face of predicted water losses resulting from climate change. But in order to come out ahead, we have to protect the water we have.
