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.
The Colorado river begins as a series of subtle draws that extend like fingers into the edge of the Panhandle, interrupting its flatness. The draws, formed by the relentless action of storm runoff seeking lower elevations, funnel water over the Caprock and down into the West Texas plains. In Dawson County, just north of Lamesa, one of these formations contains a small spring that has run continuously for as long as anyone can remember. This spring is usually described as the headwaters of the Colorado River. When I went to see it, I thought of Bolero, Ravel’s eighteen-minute crescendo: That piece of music starts out so softly that you can barely hear it, and the Colorado also begins as a whisper. The spring appears from behind swaths of grass in a modest little trickle about one foot wide. From there the water sets off gamely toward the east, disappearing into a long line of small mesquite trees that are the first to drink from it.
It is hard to imagine that this meek flow could ever amount to much, but like Bolero, the Colorado builds steadily in volume—and the bigger it gets, the more its waters will be coveted, schemed over, and fought for. During its journey of nearly nine hundred miles, dusty West Texas towns drink from it, pecan and peanut farmers irrigate with it, Austin’s microchip factories rely on it, and coastal rice farmers use it to flood their fields. Matagorda Bay shrimpers and sport-fishing charters catch only what the river helps sustain. Not every community is fortunate enough to be situated near a large river, however, and not every river is as productive as the Colorado. As the recent drought has made all too plain, many cities and towns in Texas have ballooned in population without assuring themselves of a future water supply. The result is a rash of deals and fights between those who have a lot of water and those who don’t have enough.
Water wars are as old as the river, but today the weapons of choice are lobbyists, lawsuits, and money. For the past three years officials of Corpus Christi have watched the levels of the city’s two reservoirs sink lower and lower, to the point where emergency rationing may be needed. They are willing to pay $15.8 million to pump from the Colorado—a sum that others who rely on the river are neither willing nor able to match. San Antonio has also inquired about Colorado water. If desperate urban areas start bidding up the price of water, will there still be pecan farmers in San Saba and rice farmers in Matagorda County?
In a mostly thirsty land, the passions that such questions stir are not reasonable ones. Water carves fantastic whorls in limestone riverbeds, but the work it does on the imaginations of people living in arid parts is even more spectacular. Now it is commonly said that water has become more precious than oil. The statement implies there are great profits to be made from water (and, indeed, rumors abound of water speculators buying up land over aquifers)—but should water be compared with oil? Water is a basic necessity of life. How open should the developing market in water rights become? The latest drought has spurred legislators to revise the state’s water laws in an effort to settle some of the looming battles before they go to court. In particular, the revisions are expected to make more explicit when it is a good idea to transfer water from one river basin to another. And so the story of the Colorado is the story of water in Texas today.
FOR THE FIRST SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES OF ITS JOURNEY, the Colorado usually looks like a series of braided puddles and may even dry up. In the river’s early stretches, it does not regularly contain enough water to satisfy the needs of irrigation or industry, although ranchers who own land beside the river have the right to let their livestock drink from it. Despite the lack of water, however, the wide scope of the river’s bed clearly indicates that from time to time a torrent of water roars through. In a dry place like West Texas (it rains thirteen inches a year in Odessa, seventeen inches a year in Big Spring, and eighteen in San Angelo), the tragedy of large amounts of water appearing all at once only to vanish again was too much to bear. In 1946, inspired by the impressive series of lakes downstream built by the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), a group of twenty West Texas power brokers met at the Settles Hotel in Big Spring. Nobody knows exactly what was said at the meeting, but it seems safe to guess that the men must have asked themselves, Why should all the water that falls onto arid West Texas soil be allowed to escape toward Austin, where it rains thirty-two inches a year, and into the hands of the LCRA? Deciding that they needed to build some dams of their own, the men formed an organization now known as the Colorado River Municipal Water District (CRMWD) and obtained a permit from the state to store water.
Texas’ Byzantine water law allows landowners the right to pump unlimited quantities of underground water for their own use under the infamous rule of capture. Once the Colorado gurgles up out of the ground, however, its water becomes the property of the state. Texas owns the water in every creek, stream, river, and lake within its boundaries. Except for landowners with property adjacent to the river, who may use small quantities of water for household purposes and for livestock, anybody who wants to use surface water must obtain a permit that is granted by the state. During the particularly fierce drought of the fifties, state officials learned that they had issued permits for more water than the Rio Grande could provide, spawning a huge, messy legal brawl. In the decades that followed, state officials sorted through the claims on all of the rivers, decided who owned what, and established a hierarchy that made clear who would be served first when there wasn’t enough water to go around. As a result, all of the water in the Colorado River is legally assigned to somebody. Today millions of people depend upon the Colorado, but only 1,266 parties hold the water rights to all of its bounty.
John Grant, the general manager of the CRMWD, oversees a water empire that is now the primary provider of water from the western stretches of the Colorado, much as its downstream counterpart, the LCRA, dominates the river below. (A third entity, the Upper Colorado River Authority, is sandwiched between the two, but it is far smaller and doesn’t play the same role as a water supplier.) He is an engineer by training. Like O. H. Ivie, the man who preceded him, Grant began his career at the Fort Worth engineering firm of Freese and Nichols—a hiring pattern that speaks to the water district’s insular nature, as well as its predilection for large-scale construction projects. Just about all of the CRMWD’s customers are municipalities, water being too precious and too expensive in this dry corner for any major agricultural or industrial concern to afford. Big Spring, Snyder, and Odessa are members of the water district, but the organization also has contracts to sell to six other cities, including Midland, San Angelo, and at some point in the future, Abilene. Last year the CRMWD provided a total of 20 billion gallons of water to its customers, of which 2 billion came from wells and 18 billion came from the Colorado. On an ordinary day the upper Colorado doesn’t look like it could volunteer so much water, but the miracle of dams in a dry land is their ability to catch the runaway torrents that appear only from time to time.
In March Grant showed me around the CRMWD’s offices in Big Spring. At the heart of the operation is a darkened control room that is manned 24 hours a day. One employee was sitting behind a large curved desk when we visited, studying the wall in front of him. The wall consisted of a floor-to-ceiling glass map of the CRMWD’s territory; a meandering blue line showed the course of the Colorado, and straight black lines showed the district’s pipelines, some of which were carrying water to places gravity never intended for it to go. The thirst of expanding oil towns like Midland and Odessa fueled the growth of the CRMWD (the Colorado flows straight across the fabled Permian Basin), and the oil industry’s faith in pipelines seems to have infected the water district: The CRMWD oversees 280 miles of river and more than 600 miles of pipeline—more than twice as much pipe as river. Its greatest engineering feat is a 157-mile-long conduit, the longest water-bearing pipeline in the state, which runs from the O. H. Ivie Reservoir to Odessa. Ivie (named for the former general manager) sits 1,551 feet above sea level, while Odessa lies at 2,891 feet, meaning that the water has to be lifted more than a quarter of a mile to get there. Twenty-three pump stations are required to move all of the water that the CRMWD delivers. The employees who man the control room spend all day answering customers’ calls, then turning pumps on and opening valves to meet the demands.
It is expensive, however, to reroute the course of water and particularly expensive to send it uphill. In a bout of self-reliance unmatched elsewhere on the Colorado, the customers of the CRMWD have chosen to pay (and are still paying) for every one of the district’s dams, pump stations, and pipelines, rather than rely on state or federal money. Consequently, even though the CRMWD runs a lean operation (it gets by with eighty employees) and generates no profits at all, the average rate that the district charges for untreated water is more than $1 per thousand gallons—one of the highest in the state.
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