A hundred years ago today, a negotiation set the stage for western expansion. Six states negotiated a way to share water. The drought of 1863 decimated most of Southern California's cattle ranching but animals were one thing. Since 1900 the human population of Los Angeles had grown over 80 percent - and the LA aqueduct was maxed out.(1)

The same natural confluence that make it one of very few polluted places in America even today(2) also meant it was running up against a natural cap on population. The solution was the Colorado River Compact, 100 years old this week, which allowed the lower basin to be shared by Arizona, California and Nevada while the upper basin provided allotments for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. It was a terrific example of states working together - primarily because they worried if they did not, the federal government would come in and Washington, DC all over the place and help no one.

The big problem was the 7.5 million acre-feet allocated was based on the same kind of wishful thinking that led governments from California to Germany to believe in solar and wind power - it wasn't science, it was a high average. Some of it is understandable because the Colorado River flow can fluctuate by 500 percent from year to year but if you know the low could be 4.4 and the high 22 and the basin needs a minimum, it is trouble waiting to happen.

The future problem was not yet know because politicians had an unrealistic amount of trust, the same way California voters trusted politicians when politicians said Proposition 65 - warning labels for anything that might be correlated to cancer - would not be abused by the lawyers behind it. It was destined to be abused. And California made sure the compact did not allocate water to the states, but rather to the basins.



Smart states that don't put politics over science when it comes to water are immune. Nevada, for example, has spent $1.5 billion to get alternative water for Las Vegas. Northern California, meanwhile, has not undertaken a major water storage program since the 1960s - when the population was one-third today's. Governor Gavin Newsom is required by law to start a new infrastructure program but California today is a lot like the California of the 1930s Water Wars era - so power politics trump public interest and the Governor will stall and then declare the issue void because government did not meet its own deadlines.  

NOTES:

(1) Yet to come was the 1929 drought, which sent water levels so low trees stumps at the bottom of Lake Tahoe were visible, the 1976 and 1987 ones also had nearly all counties declare states of emergency, while the 2014 made it into the top three droughts since records have been kept.

(2)  Real pollution, not the PM2.5 'virtual' pollution invented in the 1990s, after there was very little smog left to fix, and now counts particulate matter so small you need an electron microscope to see it.