The Faucet Opens

AN INTERIM REPORT

There is little evidence of the gigantic Lake Havasu Pumping Plant at the Central Arizona Project's water sourcewhere the Buckskin Mountains meet the Colorado River. Inside the mountain rises a complex of massive pumps and siphons seven stories tall which, when running at full capacity, will pump 3000 cubic feet of water per second to the top of the mountain, into a seven-mile-long tunnel, and on its way to farms and cities in central and southern Arizona.

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Nothing much has changed. A few miles east of Big Red, the Colorado River, the bone-lean coyote still prowls the barren slopes of the Buckskin Mountains in northwest La Paz County as the chill night descends and the little scuttling desert things on which he feeds timidly venture forth.

And, a few miles to the south, where the Bill Williams River joins the Colorado, the ghost of old Francois Xavier Aubrey still prowls the long-gone riverfront docks of Aubrey Landing. Aubrey was a sheep herder, gold prospector, and, before his death in a barroom brawl in Santa Fe in the late 1850s, one of the first Arizona settlers who thought that the surly Colorado River could be brought to heel.

Over the years, a series of dams did tame the river. And in 1985, almost on top of long-forgotten Aubrey Landing at the confluence of the Colorado and Bill Williams rivers-a dock site abandoned in 1865-the mighty Big Red finally yielded to the yoke of the West's most ambitious water diversion scheme, allowing some of its flow to be siphoned off to travel 200 miles to Phoenix. There, in formal dedication ceremonies on November 15, 1985, the Central Arizona Project, an agonizingly long political and engineering effort, became a meaningful reality for the state's most heavily populated area.

And not a minute too soon for a commonwealth using its precious groundwater more than twice as fast as nature is replacing it.

Although the formal dedication actually came six months after the first irrigation water had entered canals in the Harquahala Valley, sixty-five miles west of Phonix, the ceremonial opening of the faucet was clearly the point of no return for the massive undertaking.

"The project, actually, is only about forty-four percent completed in terms of dollars at this point," explains William H. Wheeler, executive director of the Central Arizona Project Association. "The water is scheduled to reach the Tucson area in 1991, and that will mark the completion of the canal itself, as well as the pumping stations. But work on additional features will continue until about 1998. These

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(OPPOSITE PAGE) Utilizing inverted siphons to maintain the water's steady flow through mountains, the canal zigzags its way across the Harquabala Valley in western Arizona. (LEFT AND BELOW) Hydrology engineer Bob Gooch uses computer graphics to monitor the water's progress, keeping watch from Central Arizona Project's control room in north Phoenix. A huge electronic map of the aqueduct system assists two programmers entering water orders into the computer, which automatically controls the pumping plants, check gates, and turnouts along the aqueduct and delivers the water where and when it is needed.

include a new dam for regulatory storage (efficient use of water and energy) as well as a second new dam and modification of two existing structures with important functions related to flood control, safety, and additional water for the system from the Verde and Salt rivers." The Herculean task, from the turning of the first earth in 1973, had already consumed twenty-four million man-hours by mid-1986, according to estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. And almost that much toil still lies ahead. Water. So taken for granted by so much of the world. In its absence, so formidable a barrier. For the early settlers of Arizona's central valley seeking land free for the taking, the temptation was strong to bypass this region with its scant and erratic water supply. But the temptation was stronger to take the gamble: the land was fertile, the climate warm and favorable. True, the rainfall was niggardly about seven or eight inches a year-a trace for many of those weather-beaten farmers migrating from the Midwest where fifty inches was the norm. Still and all, there seemed to be abundant snow on the watershed of the Gila and Salt rivers and above Tonto Creek, providing runoff that could be captured and used for irrigation, they hoped. And there was prehistoric evidence to reinforce the gamble. Shallow depressions in the earth marked the course of a sophisticated 200-mile network of adobelined ditches the ancient Hohokam Indians had built as early as A.D. 900, and which by 1300 were being used to irrigate thousands of acres of beans, grains, melons, squash, and cotton. What happened to the Hohokam? No one knows with certainty, but, by the sixSixteenth century when the first Spanish explorers passed through central Arizona, the Hohokam-in the Pima Indian language "the people who are gone"-had indeed vanished. But the fact that irrigation had worked before was enough to tilt the "stay or leave" decision. In 1867 Jack Swilling created the Swilling Ditch Company and began to duplicate the Hohokam's irriga tion network. The first crop was produced in 1868, and by 1892 farmers in the Salt River Valley were irrigating about 120,000 acres of land. The English-born Darrel Duppa saw the literary allegory and christened the nearby village Phoenix, after the legendary phoenix bird that regenerated from its own ashes every 500 years. But again the eternal problem arose: too much water, too little water. Droughts in 1888, '89, and '97 underlined how fragile and inadequate mere ditches were, as choking dust billowed like a brown veil over the parched valley, and crops shriveled and died. Then drought would be followed by torrential rains and runoffs that hurled the flimsy gates and sluiceways into the desert like an angry giant sweeping the chips and cards from a poker table. As early as 1889, there was talk of storing water behind a dam that might be constructed on the Salt River just below its conflux with Tonto Creek, eighty-five miles above the valley. But only talk. If fate had so dramatically proved to the frontiersmen of Arizona Territory that they could never tame nature on their own, it also provided them with the 57th Congress-a body with the vision to see the benefits of providing federal aid in such

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(LEFT) Rob Price of the Mesa Southwest Museum explores one of the prehistoric irrigation canals that crisscrossed the Salt River Valley. The canal system, which totaled more than 200 miles, was so important to the Hohokam culture that it dictated where communities were established.

(BELOW) Clouds reflect in the placid water of today's Central Arizona Project canal. The five-inch-per-mile gradient and occasional pumping stations move the water at an average two miles per hour.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Retired trial attorney Mark Wilmer, 91, argued Arizona's case before the Supreme Court when the state sued California over Colorado River water rights. The litigation dragged on for nearly twelve years before Arizona won the decision.

matters and a President, Theodore Roosevelt, who had an overwhelming enthusiasm for the development of the West.

On June 17, 1902, the National Reclamation Act was passed, and, just a year later, work began on the epic Tonto Basin Dam which in 1911 was dedicated and renamed Roosevelt Dam.

Yet even with the completion of Roosevelt Dam and subsequent construction of a series of other storage dams on the Salt and Verde rivers, it was apparent-given the relentless growth of the state's population that a still more dramatic and complex solution to Arizona's water problems would be needed.

As the decades of this century ticked off, that population growth-at first stumbling, then galloping caused the underground water table to drop rapidly. Consumption began to outstrip nature's replenishment at an alarming rate.

"When we built our first house in Phoenix," recalls Senator Barry M. Goldwater -a child of two when Roosevelt Dam was completed-"we only had to go down thirteen feet to find water. About fifteen years later, when we sold the house, we had gone five times that deep."

In Tucson, the largest of only three cities in the United States entirely dependent on groundwater, Marybeth Carlile, executive director of the Southern Arizona Water Resources Association (SAWARA), warns that "we're taking it out like there is no tomorrow. Statewide, it's old geological water we're drinking now. We don't know how much is down there, but there are probably millions of acre feet. But it gets more expensive to pump: dry wells become more common, and it's more mineralized the deeper you go. Sand collapses as you keep removing water from it, and the earth subsides or simply caves in. In both the Eloy and Paradise Valley areas, they've already had slippage, fissures, and the breaking of gas and water lines."

In Tucson awareness of the scarcity of water was always learned early in life. As Senator Dennis DeConcini tells it today: "The house I grew up in was in one of my dad's subdivisions and, since he was involved in the water company, too, the well was right there at our house. And I remember during my high school and college days that we had to deepen that well four different times."

Ironically, it was again a capricious Mother Nature-this time playing tricks with the Colorado River that opened the door for the massive effort called the Central Arizona Project.

"I can remember all of my life people dreaming about taking water out of the Colorado," Goldwater says, "but I guess it was the big flood on the Colorado that created the Salton Sea that started it all."

It was, indeed. Rich Johnson, executive director of the Central Arizona Project Association from 1957 until his retirement in '84, relates in his book The Central Arizona Project, 1918-1968: "The big problem with planning for use of mainstream Colorado River water was that it was a wild and erratic stream. Historically its annual flow had been as little as five million acre-feet and as great as twentyfive million [one acre-foot of water equals 325,851 gallons, or the average annual consumption for a family of five]. It refused to stay on course. In 1905, with heavy flows in both the mainstream and in the Gila [River tributary], the Colorado broke out of its course to the Gulf of California and disgorged into the Salton Sink, threatening to flood the Imperial Valley (in Southern California). When the river was finally forced back to its former course nearly two years later, it left the Salton Sea behind as a reminder of its violent force. Trouble of this kind continued for several years, and finally Congress directed the Secretary of the Interior to make a study of the river's problems. The result was a proposal to build a dam in Boulder Canyon to create a reservoir for control of the river."

But such a dam, needed for flood control, also opened the door for the water-starved western states to broaden the concept from a mere reservoir to a diversion of the river's water for agricultural and domestic uses. The political jockeying was off and running: where should subsequent dams be and, equally as important, who would get what in terms of water allocation? Wisely, perhaps, the Reclamation Act that had spawned Roosevelt Dam specified that the federal government would assist in such projects if they could meet the test of economic feasibility, but Uncle Sam would have no part of organizing the machinery for its application nor would it have a hand in arbitrating between claimants of prior rights, nor negotiate with an individual or with a group “until all local differences had been settled.” In retrospect, it may have been naive for the Arizonans who helped draft the legislation authorizing the Central Arizona Project to assume that the Colorado's physical dimensions made it convincingly an “Arizona baby.” Yet, Big Red-born in the Rocky Mountains and traveling 1450 miles southward to the Gulf of California -flows 292 miles through Arizona, then for 145 miles forms the boundary between Arizona and Nevada, then for 235 miles the boundary between Arizona and California, and finally, for sixteen miles, the boundary between Arizona and Mexico.

For nearly half of its length, then, the Colorado flows either within or along the border of Arizona, and it is the natural drainage for ninety percent of the state.

When the Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922-designed to ease the fears of the lower basin states (California, Arizona, and Nevada) and assure that the flow of the Colorado would not be depleted below an aggregate of seventy-five million acre-feet in any ten-year periodit was apparent that years of fierce political infighting lay ahead.

Because, while the lower basin states were allotted this 7.5 million acre-feet per year (as well as another million acre-feet assumed to be in the Colorado), the compact failed to spell out exactly how much of this water each individual state should get.

In 1928, California, anxious for Congressional approval of Boulder (now Hoover) Dam, agreed to limit its future claims to 4.4 million of the allocated 7.5 million acre-feet, plus not more than half of any surplus.

Its officials had been stampeded, California later claimed, into a bum deal. And the next forty years for Arizona were a textbook lesson in negotiation and compromise (with the upper basin statesColorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming-and with ecologist, conservationist, and other special interest groups), and in nose-to-nose, fist-clenching confron-tation (with California).

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"There was that long period before we finally went to court," Goldwater remembers today, "where there were really very few of us who thought we could beat California with all of her political muscle in Washington and all of her money."

The legal battle itself made Supreme Court history. The court accepted the case in 1952. Two “special masters in chancery” (one died in office) took evidence that eventually amounted to a trial record of 30,000 pages. The decision finally came in 1963-in favor of Arizona. The water allocation it decreed gave Arizona 2.8 million acre-feet a year; California, 4.4 million; Nevada, 300,000; and Mexico, 1.5 million acre-feet.

Once introduced in Congress, the CAP bill was repeatedly shoved aside and “lost” in committee. Battered, outmaneuvered, and plagued by suits and countersuits, the weary Arizonans as late as 1968 -five years after the Supreme Court rebuffed California's claim-considered “going it alone” with a state-financed CAP. The high court's ruling, after all, only paved the way for Congressional action, and a determined California was still fighting a stubborn rearguard action.

"I don't really know," DeConcini speculates today, "but I'm convinced that, if the CAP had died in Congress, we would still have something like it in place today -financed privately through the bond market. Admittedly, that would have been very difficult for such a little state at the time-and it wouldn't be the mammoth project it is today. The tough battles had already been won by the time I came along; but, being around my dad all those years, I'd sort of absorbed the CAP by osmosis."

The father, the late Evo DeConcini, had picked up the Colorado River cudgel as early as the 1940s when he served as Arizona's attorney general.

But in the late '60s, and with almost dramatic abruptness, California threw in the towel and offered its own version of the CAP bill. On September 30, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law.

But “what if?” What if, either by Supreme Cout decision or Congressional inaction, Arizona's access to its remaining entitlement of Colorado River water had been denied?

Governor Bruce Babbitt shakes his head somberly. “It isn't so much what Arizona in 1986 would be like without the CAP, but what sort of an Arizona we'd be seeing in 1990 or 2000. The absence of the Central Arizona Project would be terribly evident. We'd see an Arizona where agriculture had been ruthlessly eliminated by law-all agriculture would be out of production to prevent an overdraft of the water supply. Sometime early in the twenty-first century, certainly by 2025, other things would begin to change. We'd have unacceptable water quality, earth fissuring, drastic groundwater problems. Ultimately we would have to limit, progressively, certain types of water usage and impose a dramatic limitation on growth.” After such a long period of dreaming, struggling, and planning, the actual turning of the first shovel in 1973 came almost as an anticlimax. Yet the project's magnitude as an engineering challenge, the CAP Association's Wheeler points out, “really has no comparison-certainly not in terms of the federal government's involvement and in terms of sheer size.” Designed and constructed under the

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Under supervision of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the CAP in its operational phase is gradually being turned over to the Central Arizona Water Conservation District. From its sophisticated, highly computerized headquarters in north Phoenix, the district staff opens and closes gates electronically, doling out water to irrigation districts, municipalities, and industrial users. The control center regulates the canal's flow through “check” structures located every six or seven miles, and constantly monitors the chemical composition of the water that is being sucked out of Lake Havasu at the impressive rate of 1.3 million gallons a minute.

The water passes from a 300-foot-long intake basin into the Havasu Pumping Plant. The plant, with six pumps, each driven by a 60,000-horsepower electric motor, lifts the water 824 feet inside the craggy Buckskin Mountains to a seven-mile-long, twenty-one-foot-diameter tunnel. Power for the pumps comes from Navajo Generating Station near Page.

Once beyond the Buckskin Mountain barrier, the water heads southeast on its leisurely trip by aqueduct. Carved into the earth down the middle of a 300-foot right-of-way that is fenced against deer and other wildlife, the big concrete canal is eighty feet wide at the top, twenty-four feet at the bottom. At normal operating conditions, the water depth in the first 190 miles of the canal will be at sixteen and a half feet.

A five-inch-per-mile drop in the elevation of the canal keeps the flow about ninety-five percent gravitational, according to a spokesman for the Bureau of Reclamation. But fourteen pumping stations will be required when the project is completed to give the water an occasional kick in the pants on its 337-mile-journey. As the canal crosses desert washes and rivers, it flows through huge pipes buried beneath the riverbeds to protect it whenthese normally dry waterways sporadically thunder to life with mountain runoff cas-cading down desert slopes.

Overshoots or culverts are placed along the canal to carry drainage water over or under it. “We don't want any gratuitous water like that getting into the system,” Bill Wheeler comments. “It's entirely too muddy-carries far too much debris.” Lucky Arizona. After a century of water uncertainty, is the problem finally solved? “Don't you believe it! Not by a long shot!” snorts Goldwater. “You ask, Is there enough water, now?' No.” “We've still got an overdraft of ground-water of about 2.5 million acre-feet a year in the state,” Wheeler adds. “The CAP doesn't get all of Arizona's 2.8 million acre-foot allocation-Yuma County takes its share, as do the Indian tribes living along the river. What we actually get is 1.5 million acre-feet-still leaving us with a million-acre-foot deficit every year. Since the priority goes to the cities and the Indians, any shortage has to come out of farming.” An irony of the CAP story has been in the rapid shift of priorities in the state. At the height of the battle to get water in the 1950s, both manufacturing and tourism ranked well below agriculture and mining in earnings, and the main thrust behind the CAP was the desire to secure an adequate water supply to preserve the state's agriculture.

But in 1986, farming accounts for only about eighteen percent of the state's economic base, while it continues to consume about eighty-nine percent of the water supply. The shift is prompting a hard look at the state's agricultural picture and its cost-effectiveness in terms of resources.

SAWARA's Carlile points out, “The average family in Arizona uses about one acre-foot of water a year. To grow an acre of cotton requires 3.5 feet, and some crops, (OPPOSITE PAGE) This green patchwork of fields in the Harquabala Valley testifies that Arizona agriculture is already benefiting from the CAP.

like pecan groves, require as much as seven feet a year per acre.” “Even now,” Wheeler says, “the farmer doesn't get a firm allocation. He gets a share of the water available after cities, industries, and Indian reservations, and he won't get all the CAP water he needs anyway. He's still going to have to use some groundwater.' “Under the groundwater code we adopted in 1980,” Governor Babbitt observes, “we have a 'planned depletion' provision that actually anticipates drawing groundwater down to depletion in some areas as a reasonable thing to do. But in Maricopa and Pima counties, the law specifies that all overdraft must be stopped by the year 2025. It's going to be a tough target to meetespecially for some farm operations.”The long range answer? Conservation and education are a major thrust of SAWARA, which points to the impact that emphasis on desert landscaping and the use of effluent for parks and golf courses has had in the Tucson area. There, per capita consumption of water has plum-meted from 205 gallons a day in 1977 to 150 in 1986-compared with 280 gallons a day in Phoenix. Firming up the erratic flow of the Colorado River with cloud seeding and vegetative management of thewatershed is another part of the answer. Other approaches envision, for agriculture, expanded use of new technologies such as drip irrigation and the laser level-ing of fields. Or, in the words of Senator Goldwater: "It's my personal feeling that, in the next fifteen years, we'll be drawing our water out of the Pacific Ocean-they're making tremendous strides with desalinization. Then there'll be plenty of water for the whole West. Take notice, too, that every time you take an acre of land out of farm-ing and put one house on it, you've cut the water needs by at least a third."

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Sixty-five miles west of Phoenix, just a couple of miles off Interstate Route 10, framed by the Eagletail Mountains to the southwest and the Big Horn Mountains on the northwest, a white concrete turn-out control building sits on the banks of the Central Arizona Project canal. It was here, a year ago last May, that the turnout gates were opened and the first waters of Big Red tumbled into the canals serving the Harquahala Valley Irrigation Districtthe first non-groundwater that the cotton, wheat, and potatoes growing there had ever experienced. In view of the long and bitter Arizona-California struggle for the right to the water, there was a wry and ironic footnote as the trickle became a torrent: one of the first thirsty farms to receive water here from the CAP was acreage owned by Cali-fornia-based Crocker National Bank. Perhaps a fitting bandage for an old wound.