With low water levels and water temperatures consistently rising above 71 degrees, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) enacted a voluntary afternoon fishing closure beginning July 21 for the San Juan River through Pagosa Springs, the Animas River through Durango and the Dolores River below McPhee Reservoir…
— from the Pagosa Springs SUN, July 28, an article from Colorado Parks & Wildlife with the headline, “Through use of voluntary closures, CPW asks anglers not to fish after noon on San Juan River”.
One problem with ‘climate change’ is… it’s always changing. When CPW submitted their advisory information to the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN newspaper, the water levels were indeed low in the San Juan River, and the resulting warmer water temperatures would have been causing stress for the fish in the river.
The fish didn’t need the added stress of the somewhat cruel form of recreational angling known as ‘catch and release’.
But the day that article came out in the SUN — July 28 — the San Juan River was actually running at normal levels, thanks to a steady pattern of ‘monsoon’ weather.
The following day, July 29, the river hit almost record flows through downtown Pagosa, and the high water levels have continued… as shown in the following logarithmic chart published by the U.S. Geological Survey yesterday. The river is currently discharging about 700 CFS (cubic feet per second) which is nearly five times the amount of water normally flowing in the San Juan this time of year. (The ‘average’ daily flows are shown by the little yellow triangles.)
A temporary blip on the radar? Could be. But really… isn’t everything temporary? And changing?
The U.S. might be in a recession, for example, depending on your definition. In the U.K. and several other European countries, a ‘recession’ is defined as ‘two consecutive quarters of declining economic activity.’
The U.S. has just experienced two consecutive quarters of declining GDP.
But the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.”
The U.S. unemployment rate is rather low… because a large number of people have given up on finding a job, or have decided not to look for a job, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t count them as ‘unemployed.”
So maybe we’re not in a recession?
And maybe Pagosa Springs is not in a ‘drought’?
As the Town of Pagosa Springs and the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) consider applications coming from the Village Care Partnership LLC, asking permission to build out a new 80-acre subdivision in downtown Pagosa, a question naturally arises about whether Pagosa has enough water to keep growing its population — especially, in the event of a future ‘drought’.
Disclosure: I currently serve on the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) board of directors, but this editorial reflects only my own personal opinions, and not necessarily those the PAWSD board as a whole.
Here’s a quote from the 2020 Drought Management Plan developed by PAWSD staff.
For the purpose of this plan, drought is defined and understood to be an extended period of time (months/years/decades) when a region is deficient in the delivery of its natural water supply. Generally this occurs when a region receives consistently below average precipitation for a given period of time; thus, resulting in a strain on the existing water supplies to meet the external demands placed upon it. Drought is a combination of naturally dry conditions that stress human water needs and result in water supply shortages.
Reading this paragraph carefully, we can discern a couple of assumptions that most folks take for granted.
Assumption Number One: When Nature doesn’t deliver the “average precipitation” to which a region has grown accustomed, the result is “water shortages”. We are then in a period of “drought”, and we’d better find a way to manage the problem.
On the face of it, that assumption seems quite accurate.
Assumption Number Two: Human water needs, stressed by drought, are more important than non-human needs.
That kind of assumption went without saying, here in America… up until about 1970, when the first Earth Day was celebrated, and we started to accept the fact that we’re all — all of us, human and non-human — we’re all in this together.
The belief that all life is a connected web, is not a new idea, but it conflicts with another idea popular in America: that we ought to feel fine about degrading the environment so long as business profits can be increased and ‘jobs’ can be created.
When the Town of Pagosa Springs was incorporated in 1891, the American West was just entering a devastating drought. The drought was not devastating to all life forms, but to human life forms in particular. In fact, certain life forms were thriving.
From Wikipedia:
The 1870–1877 drought brought with it a major swarm of Rocky Mountain Locusts, as droughts benefit locusts, making plants more nutritious and edible to locusts and reducing diseases that harm locusts. Locusts also grow more quickly during a drought and gather in small spots of lush vegetation, enabling them to swarm, facts which contributed to the ruin of much of the farmland in the American West…
The 1890s drought, between 1890 and 1896, was the first to be widely and adequately recorded by rain gauges, with much of the American West having been settled. Railroads promised land to people willing to settle it, and the period between 1877 and 1890 was wetter than usual, leading to unrealistic expectations of land productivity. The amount of land required to support a family in more arid regions was already larger than the amount that could realistically be irrigated by a family, but this fact was made more obvious by the drought, leading to emigration from recently settled lands.
The population of Pagosa Springs, in 1891, was about 250 people. In spite of the developing drought, the San Juan River and its tributaries provided plenty of water, including water for irrigating the larger farms and ranches that were making an appearance.
Of course, no one back then had a washing machine, or automatic dishwasher. No one had running water at all, I assume, and a typical house had no ‘bathroom’, and certainly no flush toilet. Household use might have been in the range of 10 gallons per day, per person?
These days, PAWSD sells about 440 million gallons of treated water per year to a population of around 11,000 customers. That includes sales to businesses. Dividing by 365 days, that’s about 1.2 million gallon a day. So, about 110 gallons per day, per District resident?
But back in 1891, Pagosa was growing, and the construction of irrigation ditches leading to the various farms and ranches in the county increased the water diversions enormously.