Oh New Mexico this is not good. News out of last weeks The interim legislative Water and Natural Resources Committee meet in Santa Fe and heard updates on New Mexico’s water situation: Ranchers throughout the state have on average reduced the size of their herds by two-thirds, and many have sold off all their animals under duress. Farmers who have been promised three acre feet of irrigation water will have to get by this year with three inches. This means many crops will fail, and others will have lower yield. There will be little to no pecan crop this year in the Mesilla Valley. The lack of irrigation water has forced orchardists to prune their trees back to the main trunk in an effort to save them. Four lakes in this state have severely limited access. (The water level is so far below the boat ramps that they pose a genuine public safety hazard if anyone attempts a launch.) Elephant Butte, our iconic recreational reservoir, faces water levels lower than the year the dam was built over a century ago. Farmers in the Carlsbad Irrigation District are locked in conflict with other farmers upstream—not because of river flow overuse (there is no river flow), but because pumping wells north of the district has lowered the aquifer and drastically affected availability of water for Carlsbad irrigators. A similar issue has prompted a formal lawsuit against our state by Texas. It contends farmers in the Mesilla Valley, who turned to well water as compensation for the lack of ditch water, are negatively impacting El Paso-area agriculture. If we lose that court case, the State of New Mexico could be compelled to pay damages as high as a billion dollars. Tinder-dry conditions in our mountains and forests have closed most of them to visitors. The air is heavy with smoke and ash from numerous blazes already destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of vegetation. Albuquerque has seen twenty percent of its urban trees, its life-giving canopy, lost to lack of rainfall and restrictions on water use required over the last two years. And wildlife, desperate for food and water, will increasingly be forced to confront people in our foothill and suburban developments—with a resultant loss of life and limb for animals and occasionally people. All this is the product of two years of reduced rainfall. What if experts are correct and it’s decades before we achieve the 6- to 10-inch levels again? How do we adjust to that frightening reality? How will Albuquerque, which is dependent on San Juan-Chama water rights purchased years ago, deal with a scenario in which the San Juan River Basin runs dry? Photos of bone-dry Heron Lake and El Vado Reservoir circulated at the committee meeting were not comforting, to say the least. Water rights are only enforceable if there is water to own. A couple more years of thin Colorado snowpack like the last two will make our city’s vaunted rights theoretical at best. nmcompass/2013/06/14/this-is-not-a-drought/
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 02:32:10 +0000
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