Word: arizona
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ongoing $1.2 billion reclamation project in Utah that would involve the Colorado's water. Since the river's harvest is fixed, and already overal-located, experts warn that the only way to accommodate these and other projects is through planning and austerity. In dry days to come, Arizona's new canals may prove to be the Colorado River basin's last big splurge. --By William R. Doerner. Reported by Richard Woodbury/Phoenix and Robert C. Wurmstedt/Denver
...most complex public works projects. It carries a price tag of $1.3 billion and has been a building for twelve years--so far. It will not be fully operational until the early 1990s, probably at the cost of another $2.3 billion. But when Interior Secretary Donald Hodel and Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt switched on the huge pump of the Hassayampa water plant last Friday, dedicating the mammoth Central Arizona Project, they signaled the opening of a new and possibly contentious era throughout much of the West. Within the next few months, the maze of aqueducts, pumping stations, tunnels, siphons...
...Arizona, CAP provides an alternative to a well that is steadily going dry. Long dependent on aquifers for most of its water, the rapidly growing state has been depleting its underground supplies twice as fast as they can be replenished. CAP's annual gush will eventually furnish Arizona with some 1.5 million acre-feet of water (one acre-foot is the amount needed to inundate one acre to the level of a foot and is roughly the quantity used annually by a family of four). Babbitt, who is fond of calling CAP his state's "last water hole," likens...
Even with it, Arizona is hardly awash in excess water. Indeed, Babbitt sought to ensure that Arizona's liquid riches would not be squandered, by winning passage in 1980 of the nation's most stringent water-management program. The law discourages the state's farmers from using CAP water to expand production of heavily irrigated cotton and citrus crops by requiring the growers to forgo an amount of groundwater equal to their use of the new supply. The measure also provides for the sale of water rights by farmers to developers and local water systems, thus promoting growth without creating...
Draconian measures may also be in store for an area reaching well beyond Arizona. Six other states (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada and California) fall inside the Colorado River basin. Under an agreement reached in 1922, each state is entitled to a portion of the river's waters. Arizona's share was set at 2.8 million acre-feet, roughly one-fifth of the Colorado's flow. Because it lacked transporting capacity, however, the state has used less than half of its legal entitlement, allowing California to take much of the remainder. The CAP's new flow will thus...