WaterNews: December 2, 2021

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2021.12.2
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Tapped Out is produced in collaboration with the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), California Health Report, Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, Circle of Blue, Colorado Public Radio, Columbia Insight, The Counter, High Country News, New Mexico In Depth and SJV Water. The project was made possible by a grant from the Water Foundation with additional support from INN.

Utah's Water Dilemma

On a mid-October day Robert Child is at the mouth of Utah's Whites Valley, where about five families harvest dryland grain, and where he has leased grazing land for two decades.⁠
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Whites Valley, a dimple in the sage-covered hills just south of the Idaho border, might not be an ag valley much longer. Its durability as an agricultural center, though, has almost nothing to do with the finances of its few residents. It has much more to do with the valley’s bowl-shaped topography, residential development miles away, and water.⁠
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Whites Valley is the prime candidate for a 30-year-old dam and reservoir proposal to tap and store, in the words of the Utah Legislature, “one of the last major sources of developable water in the state.”⁠
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That source is the Bear River, the largest tributary of the shrinking Great Salt Lake. Whether the Bear River project makes sense, though, is a focus of intensifying discussion in a growing state contending with worsening water scarcity. State authorities want to develop new sources of water. But public interest advocates assert that spending billions of dollars to build pipelines to transport water from distant sources is foolish. Utah, they insist, can do much more to conserve its existing freshwater reserves.⁠

Read More From the Tapped Out Series:

Where Is The Water Going?
By Lois Henry, CCIJ/SJV Water

Small farmers in California's agricultural belt struggle as ag titans wheel water for profit.
Photo © Ryan Christopher Jones

How a Federal Drought Relief Program Left Southern Oregon Parched—and Contributed to the Ongoing Groundwater Crisis in the West

By Jessica Fu, The Counter
For two decades, the Bureau of Reclamation incentivized farmers to pump water faster than the resource could recover, despite warnings from its own scientists. This year, residents of Klamath County paid the price, as hundreds of household wells went dry.
Photo © Kimberley Hasselbrink

The community action group Detroit Water Brigade delivered water in August 2014 to city residents whose water had been shut off because of late payments. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Rising Cost of Water in Michigan Leads to Affordability Problems

The rising cost of water and sewer service in Michigan is consuming a larger share of household income, leading to mounting financial burdens for both families and communities, particularly those with high poverty rates, a new report finds.

The growing affordability problem spreads beyond publicized examples in Detroit and Flint, according to the assessment. Rural areas, small towns, and suburbs have also seen costs rise, though at a slower pace than their urban counterparts. As Michigan agencies prepare to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming years in federal infrastructure and pandemic relief funds, the report authors say that the time was ripe for a deeper understanding of who is hurt by unaffordable water.

The report from the University of Michigan Water Center, Michigan State University Extension, and the consulting firm Safe Water Engineering fills in some of those gaps. It found a sharp rise in the number of Michigan households paying more than 5 percent of income on water and sewer services. That number, when adjusting for inflation, grew from 1.6 percent of households in 1980 to 6.7 percent in 2018.

What’s Up With Water – November 29, 2021

For the news you need to start the week, tune into “What’s Up With Water” fresh on Monday’s on iTunes, Spotify, i Heart Radio, and SoundCloud.

Featured coverage from this week's episode of What's Up With Water looks at:

In South Africa, cities in Eastern Cape province are once again facing the threat of water shortages. In South Sudan, the coronavirus pandemic is a secondary concern these days. In the United States, a battle over renewable energy in New England has taken another turn.

From Circle of Blue's Archives:

Lake Mead sits at a record low. Federal officials are expected to declare a first-ever Tier 1 shortage, which will require water cuts that fall most heavily on Arizona. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

The Colorado River Basin’s Daunting New Math

In August, Circle of Blue reported that Lakes Mead and Powell, icons of 20th-century water engineering in the American West, were in bad shape.

The story of their decline is written into the edges of the receding siblings — it’s evident in the minerals deposited on the rock walls hundreds of feet above Lake Mead, signs of where water once stood, like a white tea stain on nature’s mug. It’s also evident in the sandbars and sandstone arches of Glen Canyon that are reemerging as Lake Powell ebbs. This story, playing out across decades, is deeply consequential for some of the most rapidly growing and intensely irrigated regions of the country; for stressed ecosystems and endangered species; for Native American tribes; for the more than 40 million people who get a portion of their drinking water from the Colorado River.

Both reservoirs, the largest by capacity in the United States, are puddles of their former selves. Each about one-third full, they sit at record lows, products of the Colorado River’s unforgiving math, in which demand exceeds supply.