The War for the Colorado
From the West Texas Caprock to Matagorda Bay, a drought-prone river triggers animosities and provokes battles over its life-sustaining waters. Downstream and upstream interests loathe each other, farmers fear losing out to cities, and everyone is united against raiders from faraway San Antonio and Corpus Christi.
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Despite the effort the water district has put forth to capture the Colorado, its victories do not quite amount to the unquestionable triumph over nature that the men in the Settles Hotel had dreamed of: The district hasn’t been able to reap nearly as much water as it had hoped, and much of the water it does get is too salty. The CRMWD’s first reservoir, fewer than fifty miles from the little spring near Lamesa, is Lake J. B. Thomas, which was completed in 1952. Lake Thomas hasn’t been full now for three and a half decades. “The drainage area that feeds Thomas consists mainly of Borden County, and we’ve had no significant rain there in the last five years,” said Grant. “Right now, Thomas is five percent full.” The CRMWD attempts to increase the amount of rain to be collected by its watershed through a weather-modification program—scattering pellets of silver iodide into any storm clouds that come by—but lately there haven’t been clouds to seed. What little water Thomas contains is there only because of the CRMWD’s assistance: By last December the lake had dropped so low that it threatened to fall below the intake pipes that supply the city of Snyder, which can’t be served by any other reservoir. Grant’s solution was to make the Colorado flow backward. For several months now the CRMWD has been pumping water from Ivie, which lies downstream, back up to Thomas. In the meantime, farmers have been planting crops in parts of the lake bottom that have been dry for several years.
The second lake that the CRMWD built, E. V. Spence, has been more prolific, largely because it captures water from both the Colorado and one of its major tributaries, Beals Creek. But the water Spence captures is unusually salty, even by West Texas standards. At the moment, Spence water is unfit for human consumption. The primary cause of the salinity is natural salt deposits, and the secondary cause is pollution from the oil industry, both of which stem from the mistake the river made in crossing the Permian Basin. Once the floor of an inland sea, the basin is a geological feature lying mostly underground, but just south of Colorado City, the river flows over exposed Permian rocks—a source of halite, otherwise known as rock salt.
Commercial production of oil in the Permian Basin began in 1920 with an oil well known as the Westbrook Field Top No. 1, just west of the Coleman Ranch in Mitchell County near Westbrook. The Colorado runs right through the Coleman Ranch. Today derricks and oil pumps crowd the fields beside the river like steel trees. As any wildcatter can sadly attest, a rig is as likely to strike salt water as it is oil, and even productive wells yield brine along with oil. Over the years oil-field workers in the Permian have let untold quantities of oil-field brine flow onto the surrounding land, turning patches of it into poison ground where nothing at all will grow. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there are more than 20,000 abandoned wells in the Colorado river basin that may still be flowing salt water today, and while the Texas Railroad Commission is attempting to take care of the problem, it has been plugging only 1,500 wells a year in the entire state. One of the worst offenders was a company called Atlas, which owned the wells on a section of the Coleman Ranch until the Railroad Commission shut the company down.
The CRMWD built its last reservoir, Ivie, at the confluence of the Concho and the Colorado, thereby obtaining much more water than was available anywhere upstream. Ivie has proved to be the district’s most reliable reservoir; it filled to capacity two years after construction was complete—eight years ahead of schedule. Even now, coming out of an extended drought, the lake is 86 percent full. And Ivie’s water is of good quality. But the LCRA opposed the construction of Ivie, saying that the CRMWD was robbing them of all of the water in the Concho—an estimated 100,000 acre-feet per year (an acre-foot is the amount of water that will cover an acre of ground to a depth of one foot). The LCRA convinced the state supreme court that being deprived of that water would make it difficult for the LCRA to meet its obligations downstream. But then state leaders including then-governor Mark White brokered a deal between the feuding organizations: The CRMWD was allowed to build Ivie after it agreed to release water if the LCRA’s lakes fell below certain levels.
That compromise was tested last year, when extended dry weather prompted the LCRA to demand water from Ivie for the first time. From a downstream vantage point, it is hard to appreciate just how obnoxious such a request seemed in the sun-scorched precincts of West Texas. As far as the CRMWD was concerned, the request was tantamount to a rich relative dunning a poor one for money. John Grant sent down some of the saltiest water he had. He opened the bottom floodgates at Spence, letting out the heaviest, most saline water, supplemented it with water from the top, and moved the mixture through Ivie and on downstream. It was diluted along the way, but not by much. That wasn’t the only time the CRMWD had sent salt water downstream; in 1989, after unusually heavy rains caused a natural salt lake near Big Spring to overflow and spill into Spence, the CRMWD simply moved the worst of that water along. “Our lakes were built for municipal water supplies,” said John Grant. “Our obligation is to deliver the best quality water we can to West Texas.”
ABOUT FORTY MILES EAST OF LAKE IVIE, the Colorado moves into San Saba and Mills counties and slips under one of the oldest suspension bridges still spanning the river. A perpetual wind makes the cables sing, and through the cracks between the bridge’s wooden beams, you can see the muddy red water below, which usually amounts to a pretty respectable flow. The river will still dry up if it fails to rain for a while, but from the bridge it is apparent that the countryside has changed from arid to merely semi-arid. Along the banks of the river, instead of desert scrub, there are elms, oaks, and most significantly, pecan trees.
Texas is the nation’s second biggest producer of pecans, and nowhere in the state are more grown than in San Saba. Not long after it slides under the suspension bridge, the Colorado comes upon property that belongs to a man named Paul Leonard, who is by far the largest pecan grower in the area. Pecan trees require the annual equivalent of sixty inches of rain (unless they grow wild along the banks of rivers and creeks, where the roots are immersed in water), but it rains only half that much in this part of Texas, so growers have to irrigate. Leonard, who has steadily expanded his pecan business, now owns five separate water rights. Together they allow him to take 5,574 acre-feet from the river every year, an amount of water equivalent to about one third of Lake Austin farther downstream. Seven large pumps lift water from the river up onto Leonard’s property, and when all seven get going, the river can run dry below his land. Used to being criticized for his large-scale consumption, he was feisty on the subject. “Water’s precious,” he said. “I cherish mine. I use it, and I conserve it. And I’m converting that water into foodstuff for the American people.”
Initially Leonard owned just the water right historically attached to his riverside property (bought by Leonard’s father, a well-known Fort Worth merchant), but over the years he acquired four additional rights. In three cases, he purchased nearby land that carried a water right with it, but Leonard’s most recent purchase was different: Three years ago he bought a water right from a party elsewhere on the Colorado without buying land and transferred the right to his own holdings. It wasn’t the first time a deal like that had occurred on the Colorado, but the marketing of water rights is far more common in other basins, such as the Rio Grande, and a lot of Colorado people didn’t like it. “I had neighbors and downstream users protesting the deal,” said Leonard, “but we had a hearing, and I got it done.”
Pecans like river water a lot but they don’t like salt. Most crops don’t. Put salt water on a pecan tree or a peanut plant and the nuts they produce will be shriveled and small. Irrigating with salt water also corrodes equipment and ruins the soil. Both times that the CRMWD sent salt water down the Colorado, Leonard realized what the water portended and quit pumping. It took several months for the river to clear up in each case, and Leonard didn’t get the full benefit of his water right those years, but he didn’t lose a crop either. Other people weren’t so fortunate. The property that Foy Gibson owns lies downstream of Leonard’s orchards. The land has been in his family for four generations, ever since Gibson’s great-great-great-uncle Billy, who was a mustanger, bought it from the original surveyor of Lampasas County. Gibson grows peanuts (which he sells to the makers of Jif peanut butter, Hershey candy bars, and Mars candy bars), pecans, wheat, corn, and hay, and he irrigates with river water. I spoke to him in mid-February at the feedstore he owns in Lometa. The store had a concrete floor, a dusty collection of hardware for sale, and a sign by the cash register that read “Impeach President Clinton and Her Husband.” One wall also featured photographs of what Gibson’s peanut plants looked like after being doused with salt water for several weeks in 1989, after the CRMWD’s first saline release. The plants were a sickly brownish-yellow, and they should have been green.
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