History > 2006 > USA > Environnement > Water

The Delta-Mendota Canal in California

supplies water to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Some may be able to make money reselling it.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times        March 2, 2006

For Thirsty Farmers, Old Friends at Interior Dept.        NYT        3.3.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/national/03water.html

As Aquifer Runs Dry,

L.I. Water Debate Ensues

December 2, 2006
The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT

Thousands of years ago, rain fell on Long Island and seeped hundreds of feet through the sandy soil, coming to rest on bedrock. It formed what geologists call the Lloyd aquifer, the island’s oldest, deepest, purest — and scarcest — groundwater.

Now, after 60 years of virtually unchecked suburban growth and consumption of the island’s most precious resource, public officials and civic groups are fighting over control of the remaining water supply. It is as if these were the island’s last drops to drink, which is precisely what environmentalists insist the aquifer should be reserved for.

The battle over the aquifer underscores the broader debate over Long Island’s entire water supply for its nearly three million residents and future development. Preservationists warn that if the island continues on its present path, it will run out of clean water, while other experts are equally insistent that there is enough to last for generations.

“We’re using up the last, best water, and we’re not making any new pure water,” said Sarah J. Meyland, who teaches hydrology at the New York Institute of Technology.

While the notion of an island lacking water may seem incongruous, the problem is that the surrounding ocean keeps out most conventional sources of fresh water. Unlike New York City, Long Island has no reservoirs, dams, great lakes or mighty rivers to tap.

“A lot of people on Long Island have no idea where they get their water, but everyone there drinks from the ground,” unless they use bottled water, said Walter T. Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a company that compiles data and maps on contamination sites across the state.

On an average day, wells pump 450 million gallons of water to slake the island’s thirst. Consumption often doubles or triples in the summer, when sprinklers are working overtime to keep lawns green in America’s first modern swath of suburbia. Residents use a daily average of 150 gallons per person, many luxuriating with massaging shower heads, hot tubs, backyard pools and even water parks.

The biggest local supplier — it claims to be the nation’s top provider of underground water — is the Suffolk County Water Authority, serving 1.1 million people.

That agency’s current campaign to dig a well at Northport into the Lloyd — which is protected by a 1986 moratorium on drilling — has provoked opposition and highlighted the fundamental issue of the island’s endangered water supply, which is drawn from a network of 1,300 major wells and thousands of smaller private ones.

The planned well is opposed by groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Women Voters, as well as communities dozens of miles away in neighboring Nassau County that rely on the aquifer. These opponents say the Suffolk authority has other options, like removing contaminants from existing wells in Northport or even piping in water, but the authority says the cost of those solutions would present a “hardship.”

Ultimately, the commissioner of the State Department of Environmental Conservation will decide whether to allow the digging.

To environmentalists, the issue is clear: the supply will be exhausted unless changes are made. They warn that as contamination moves below the surface, water suppliers have to remove more pollutants or drill farther to reach clean sources. And they contend that pumping depletes that reserve, speeds the spread of tainted pockets, sucks in saltwater along the coast and lowers the water table.

“Across the island we are depleting our best water very rapidly,” said Ms. Meyland, a leader in the coalition against the Northport well. “The solution is not to simply drill deeper. That’s a losing proposition.”

Mr. Hang said: “There are thousands of known contamination sites on Long Island and many more potential ones. The brew includes cesspool and sewage treatment effluent, fuel tank leaks, fertilizers, pesticides, dry cleaning solvent, motor oil, industrial waste, road runoff and leaching from garbage dumps. The latest testing even finds traces of caffeine and Prozac.”

But other experts insist the island’s water is safe and ample.

Paddy South, a spokesman for the Suffolk water authority, said that rain replenished far more than his agency pumped, leaving a reserve of up to 120 trillion gallons. “Basically,” he said, “we could last for 70 years using the water we have now, even if it never rained again.”

In addition, the authority says it has the biggest laboratory in the nation for testing groundwater, examining as many as 100,000 samples a year for about 300 compounds.

When contamination is detected, the water is filtered or blended with cleaner water, or the well is closed. Defenders of the system say water quality is improving with expanded sewage treatment, cleanup of toxic sites, filtering and preserved open space like the Long Island Pine Barrens for collecting fresh rain.

“Water quality on Long Island is among the best in the United States,” said Lee E. Koppelman, director of the Center for Regional Policy Studies at Stony Brook University.

Stephen M. Jones, the water authority’s chief executive, said, “Arguments are being made on a political and emotional level that really don’t have anything to do with the science.”

Environmentalists concerned about an end of the clean water supply do not specify when this will happen.

“It will happen at different times in different places,” Ms. Meyland said, “and in fact it has already happened in some places.”

On the western end of Long Island, the urbanization of Brooklyn and Queens left the aquifers contaminated and depleted by the late 1940s, forcing the two boroughs to turn to the Catskills and the Hudson River for water. Pollution and saltwater have also closed wells in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, Ms. Meyland said, noting that the number of wells in Nassau with detectible contamination grew to 50 percent in 2000 from 15 percent in 1980.

In June, about 33,000 residents in the West Hempstead area were warned not to drink the water because of contamination from a potentially carcinogenic gasoline additive. The affected pumps were closed and service resumed, but Mr. Hang, whose company compiles data on contamination sites, said, “West Hempstead focused attention in a dramatic way.”

As intensive development has worked its way through Nassau and marched into Suffolk, water pumping, contamination and salt intrusion have followed. The Lloyd aquifer supplies only 9 percent of the island’s water, with bigger reserves in higher layers in the east, far from the population centers.

Much of the stream for which Valley Stream was named has disappeared because sewering — which stops contamination from septic tanks — has gradually lowered the water table on the South Shore of Nassau.

Nowhere is the situation more sharply drawn than in Great Neck and Port Washington on Nassau’s North Shore, where closing some wells forced communities to pump water in from neighboring areas.

“It’s very analogous to the whole island, a predictive model,” said Assemblyman Steven C. Englebright, a Democrat from Suffolk and the only geologist in the State Legislature.

But experts all agree that Long Island has nowhere else to turn for water. Hooking into the city system is not an option; a pipeline to the Hudson would be prohibitively expensive; and the cost of distillation plants would be far higher.

Of course, conservation would reduce demand. “We could do a heck of a lot more,” Dr. Koppelman said

Some traditional uses of water are irrational, experts concede. They point to toilets, which flush away 28 percent of household water, as the prime culprit, using potable water to transport sewage.

Higher prices would discourage waste but would be politically unpopular. The Suffolk water authority boasts about its bargain rates, about a penny for seven gallons, or $280 annually for a typical homeowner, on the low end of the water prices on Long Island.

In the 1970s, Long Island was among the nation’s first places designated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as depending on a “sole source aquifer” requiring special protection. Yet responsibility for the water is fragmented among various federal, state and local agencies, and more than 50 water companies.

Still, Henry J. Bokuniewicz, director of Stony Brook’s Groundwater Research Institute, said that “by and large, it operates in the right manner.”

Not surprisingly, some disagree. Assemblyman Englebright called the state’s oversight a failure and denounced the Suffolk water authority as reckless.

Ms. Meyland said that the wells in Nassau have violated state pumping limits for years with impunity, and proposed a new agency modeled on multistate river basin commissions to monitor and allocate the water.

As a geologist concerned about the Lloyd, Assemblyman Englebright supports that notion. “This is an extraordinary natural gift,” he said. “It comes pure from the ground. You don’t have to filter or chlorinate it. It’s priceless. It’s ours to use wisely or to squander.”

    As Aquifer Runs Dry, L.I. Water Debate Ensues, NYT, 2.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/nyregion/02water.html

Vegas reaching for rural water

Posted 10/18/2006 11:11 PM ET
USA Today
By John Ritter

BAKER, Nev. — Rancher Dean Baker picks his way through greasewood and sedge to a shallow dirt depression that was once a small pond fed by a natural spring. Both have been dry for years, casualties, he says, of pumping that draws underground water to the surface to irrigate fields and water livestock.

Over a half-century, agriculture's needs have lowered the water table, Baker says, but it's nothing compared to what may be in store for this arid, sparsely populated, mile-high desert near the Utah border.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority wants to pump vast quantities of groundwater from rural eastern Nevada valleys and pipe it 250 miles south to Las Vegas, the nation's fastest-growing major metro area, a tourist mecca with a limited water supply strained by population and prolonged drought.

After hearings last month, a decision rests with State Engineer Tracy Taylor. More hearings on plans in other valleys are pending. The water authority aims to build a pipeline by 2015 and pump nearly 30 million gallons a year from 19 wells in Spring Valley alone.

At stake, ranchers say, are livelihoods and a delicate ecological balance on a landscape cursed with at most 8 inches of rain and snow a year.

"If they pull the water table down enough, this will be a dust bowl," says Baker, 66, whose family has raised cattle in Spring Valley since the 1950s. "It will completely change the economics of agriculture. It will also change the life of the 40 head of antelope that stay in that alfalfa field."

Those concerns are unfounded, water authority officials say. Nevada law prohibits impinging on existing water rights, says general manager Pat Mulroy. "It's emotion," she says. "It's regionalism. It's rural vs. urban. It's fear-based. Protecting that environment will always be of tantamount importance to us.

Scarce resource

Since early settlers, water has been the West's scarcest and most valuable resource. Towns pumped water, just as ranchers did. Rivers, lakes and streams have been dammed, drained and diverted for decades and now offer little extra supply for expanding urban centers such as Salt Lake City, El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Tucson.

Now groundwater is the target, even if, as in Las Vegas' case, it'll cost $3 billion or more to get it and benefit one region at the expense of another.

"This is symptomatic of issues going on all over, particularly the Southwest," says Jeff Mount, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. "When you look at it on a bigger, multigenerational scale, we're basically mining these groundwater basins at rates that can't be sustained. When the water's gone, it's gone."

Farms and ranches consume 80% of Western water supplies yet generate less than 1% of states' gross domestic product, says Hal Rothman, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"The real question isn't whether water will be transferred from rural to urban use," he says. "The debate is over the terms of the transfer, how rural communities that cede water will derive fair and valuable benefits from it."

Opponents of the water authority plan say it's one more instance of water flowing uphill toward money, like Los Angeles' notorious "water grab" from the Owens Valley in the early 1900s. That diversion — basis of the 1974 movie Chinatown— allowed L.A. to grow but dried up a productive farm region.

"The parallels are stark," says Greg James, former director of the Inyo County, Calif., water department in the Owens Valley. "They're looking to build a pipeline, pump groundwater, and they're already acquiring ranchland."

State water laws and federal environmental regulations wouldn't permit a repeat of Owens Valley, but ranchers want a guarantee that if the land suffers, the pumps would be shut down. Otherwise, "by the time we see the effects of pumping, it will be too late," says Gary Perea, a Democratic commissioner in White Pine County.

The Mormon Church, based in Salt Lake City, owns water rights in Spring Valley and has asked the engineer to withhold approval until a U.S. Geological Survey study is finished next year.

The authority built a computer model to predict effects on the water table but didn't run it. When it was run by a National Park Service hydrologist, it showed a 150-foot drop over 75 years. Mulroy calls those results "hypothetical." John Bredehoeft, a hydrogeologist who testified for opponents, says "it would have been detrimental" to the authority's case.

Time is short, Mulroy says. The Las Vegas metro area — population 1.7 million, 20,000 new homes a year — relies on a share of Colorado River water stored in Lake Mead for 90% of its supply. Seven years of drought have lowered the lake to half its capacity. A year like 2002, when the river ran about a quarter of normal, "would invoke a crisis," Mulroy says.

Reducing demand

The water authority is spending millions of dollars to entice homeowners to replace irrigated lawns with drought-tolerant plants — 70% of water consumption goes outdoors. A system captures, treats and returns water from indoor plumbing to Lake Mead.

Opponents say tougher conservation measures, including raising water rates as cities such as Tucson have done, could save as much as the authority plans to take from Spring Valley.

"That penalizes people who can't afford it," Mulroy says.

Ranchers may think Las Vegas should slow its growth, but that's a political non-starter in go-go southern Nevada. At the area's current growth rate, rural groundwater is a stopgap measure at best, says Matt Kenna, a lawyer with the Western Environmental Law Center representing opponents.

Many people believe that if the engineer rejects a water transfer or awards an amount too small to make the pipeline economical, the authority will ask Congress for a bigger share from the Colorado River.

When the river's flow was divided among seven states in 1922, Las Vegas was little more than a crossroads. Nearly a century later, 400 farmers in California's Imperial Valley still get 10 times more Colorado River water than Las Vegas does.

    Vegas reaching for rural water, UT, 18.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-18-vegas_x.htm

After a Seven-Year Ban, Salmon Fishing Returns to Maine

September 28, 2006
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

EDDINGTON, Me. — Forget your trout, your striped bass. Wild Atlantic salmon are a fisherman’s Holy Grail.

They are fickle, finicky and feisty, and, in recent years in this country, few and far between.

So scarce that in 1999, Maine, the last American bastion of wild Atlantic salmon, closed its rivers to salmon fishing to save the salmon, whose numbers had shrunk from pollution, dams and other forces. But it dealt a blow to fishermen around the country, especially those who recall the heyday, when the first silvery salmon caught in Maine each year went to none other than the president of the United States.

Now, with salmon slowly returning, Maine has opened its first wild salmon season in seven years — a month of restricted fishing on the state’s storied Penobscot River.

It is drawing people from as far as Washington State and South Carolina, in hip-waders and in boats.

[But it took until Wednesday, nearly two weeks after opening day, for the first salmon to be caught.

[It was landed by Beau Peavey, a 22-year-old junior in college (“I took two years off to fish,” he said), who is such a devotee he has been on the river before sunrise every morning and again every evening since the season’s first day. The salmon — a frisky 32-inch 12-pounder that fought back with “four jumps and a couple of good long runs” — was caught after Mr. Peavey abandoned his own flies and used a pink fly created years ago by a now-deceased member of his salmon club.

[“From the time I was 9, I spent every waking minute up there fishing,” he said. “The river closed when I was 15, and I caught one of the last legal fish in 1999. I fish religiously — that’s my life.” Mr. Peavey is a spring chicken in the salmon game here.]

Before dawn on opening day, Bill Claus, 79, waded into the shimmering river, having thought he would not live long enough to fish for salmon here again. Also there was Ivan Mallett, 87, who caught a “presidential fish” 25 years ago and hand-carried it to the White House and into the arms of Vice President George H. W. Bush (who was on salmon duty because President Ronald Reagan had been shot and was in the hospital.)

Although most fishermen have been outfoxed by the fish so far, few seem to mind. “A salmon is called a fish of a thousand casts,” said Dick Ruhlin, president of the Eddington Salmon Club. “For most people, to catch one is the catch of a lifetime.”

The Eddington club and others were once so overflowing with anglers that a club member had to die for someone to get off the waiting list. Since the salmon ban, membership has dwindled, clubs have mostly been fishing for cribbage cards, and “we’re begging for people to come in,” said Bob Wengrzynek, president of the Maine Council of the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

“A lot of the clubs have people who don’t fish anymore because they can’t, but 20 years ago they caught a salmon,” Mr. Wengrzynek said. “It’s not about fishing, it’s about the social structure. A lot of people will fish vicariously. When there’s one person fishing, there’s 20 people watching, and, by extension, that’s 21 people fishing.”

So it was not surprising that Charlie Colburn, 84, showed up, even though arthritis keeps him from casting a line. “Holy mackerel,” he said, cane-hobbling along the riverbank. “I think it’s just great. So these people do get a chance to fish for that fish, to have the honor of hooking one of those fish, the king of all fish. There’s no fish that can touch her.”

But the king of all fish has proven vulnerable to manmade meddling. Pollution from paper mills, blasting by logging companies, and dams that impede salmon migration helped slice the Penobscot salmon population to 530 in 2000, from nearly 5,000 20 years ago, said Patrick Keliher, executive director of the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission.

Other efforts to restore salmon included restocking fish and tracking them with transponders. An environmental coalition is raising $25 million to buy three dams from a power company, tear down two of them and build a fish bypass around the third.

But while the dam project is expected to restore thousands of salmon, it will take years. And with just over 1,000 salmon currently in the Penobscot, Maine’s largest river, Mr. Keliher said, state biologists felt they could allow limited fishing, with the hope of ultimately resurrecting a sport that once drew millions of tourism dollars into Maine’s economy.

“This is a big balancing act for us,” Mr. Keliher said. “Can we continue to have positive restoration efforts at the same time we’re conducting recreational angling? We’re going to eat the elephant one bite at a time.”

Maine is starting with baby steps: fall fishing, when salmon are smaller; catch-and-release only; no barbs on fishhooks; and no fishing when the water temperature hits 70 degrees because hooked fish recover better in cooler water. Mr. Keliher said each salmon reaching the Veazie Dam, where they are temporarily trapped, will be checked to see if it was hooked and what condition it is in. If the fish seem to withstand the fall season, Maine may allow the more-popular spring fishing.

The restrictions satisfied most environmentalists, said Andrew Goode, board president of the Penobscot River Restoration Project, the coalition buying the dams.

“We’re about restoring the fish, but we’re also trying to get the communities to turn their attention to the river,” said Mr. Goode, who is also vice president for American programs at the Atlantic Salmon Federation, a conservation group. “We’re trying to raise so much money for this project. It’s nice for politicians to see public interest in the river.”

More than 200 fishing licenses have been sold. At the Eddington salmon pool, where a path to the water was freshly graveled to ease the strains on arthritic knees and replacement hips, many anglers arrived in predawn blackness.

Some sailed small boats called peapods, while those on the shore followed the age-old salmon-fishing formula: placing their poles in a wooden rack, waiting their turn on a tarp-shrouded bench and performing a kind of angler’s ballet, one after another.

“Take a cast, take a step and work your way up river,” said Mr. Ruhlin, 70, of the salmon club. “We’re here because we love the sport, we love the river, and we’re taking turns.”

There was sedate enthusiasm when David Horn, 65, a salmon veteran who has snagged them as far away as Russia, hooked one from his drift boat but lost it after 15 seconds. Mr. Claus saw one roll out of the water, but nowhere near his hot orange harr wing wet fly.

Mr. Mallett watched at first, his wife, Gloria, explaining that nowadays “he does most of his fishing from the couch.”

And Joel Bader, 45, who heads the bass-fishing club in Bangor, was hoping the salmon would start biting, planning to yank his 10-year-old son out of school if they did.

“I was last here when fishing ended, and I’m here today,” Mr. Bader said. “It’s amazing, really part of history. It’s what every fisherman strives to achieve — catching Atlantic salmon. It’s what I want to achieve, especially on the Penobscot River.”

    After a Seven-Year Ban, Salmon Fishing Returns to Maine, NYT, 28.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/us/28salmon.html?hp&ex=1159502400&en=1c8ef4c54ce70263&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Accord Reached on Diverting Water From Farms to Restore San Joaquin River

September 14, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 13 — For most of the last 60 years, much of the San Joaquin River has not really been a river. Dammed and drained for agricultural purposes in the arid Central Valley, the San Joaquin is dry for mile after mile, a symbol of the cost of progress and the miracles of modern irrigation.

It has also been the subject of extensive litigation.

On Wednesday, a coalition of environmental and fishing groups announced the settlement of an 18-year-old suit against the Interior Department and a group of California water users, ending one of the longest-running environmental skirmishes.

The proposal, which Congress will vote on, would create a multimillion-dollar project to restore more than 150 miles of the San Joaquin to the lush riverbed it once was.

“This is one of the most important and historic restoration efforts in the West,” said Hal Candee, a senior lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which filed the suit in the Reagan administration. “This is really bringing a dead river back to life.”

Under the plan, announced in Sacramento, billions of gallons of water would eventually be released from Friant Dam, just north of Fresno, spilling into the historic river channels. The new flow, environmentalists and fishermen hope, will create a healthy environment for Chinook salmon, which once spawned — and thrived — in the San Joaquin.

In exchange for losing 15 percent to 20 percent of their yearly water, depending on rainfall, farmers and other long-term water users would be assured of a supply.

“For the next 20 years, we know what the water commitment is going to be, and that was important to us,” said Ron Jacobsma, consulting general manager of the Friant Water Users Authority, which represents 22 water districts that span five counties.

Fed by downstream tributaries, the San Joaquin, the second-longest river in California, flows as it meets the Sacramento River east of San Francisco, forming an enormous delta that provides water to 22 million Californians. Since the 1940’s, the upper reaches of the river, from Friant Dam to its convergence with the Merced River, have been siphoned off to water a million acres of crops through a vast irrigation project that has helped turn the Central Valley into one of the most prosperous agricultural regions.

The proposed restoration would carry a hefty price, with estimates from $250 million to $800 million, a cost that the federal government and state would probably share.

Some support seems to have been mustered. Mike Chrisman, secretary for state resources, signed off on the accord on Wednesday, as did Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Representative George P. Radanovich, a Republican. Mr. Radanovich, who represents the Fresno region, said he would hold a hearing on the plan on Sept. 21.

After years of machinations and stalled negotiations, legal pressure on the government intensified in 2004, when a federal district judge in Sacramento, Lawrence K. Karlton, ruled in the environmentalists’ favor, saying the California Fish and Game Code, which guarantees water to fisheries, could be applied to the federally owned Friant Dam.

Judge Karlton had set a trial date for earlier this year to consider remedies. But as that date approached, the two sides returned to the table to find a more nuanced middle ground.

“The judge had made statements along the lines of all he had was a meat cleaver,” Mr. Jacobsma of the water users’ authority said. “And what we needed was a scalpel.”

Kirk Rodgers, a regional director for the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, said the project would “probably be unprecedented in terms of its magnitude and challenges.”

“In some cases,’’ Mr. Rodgers said, “you’re going to have to define a channel through mechanical means. In some cases, you’re going to have to build structures to put the water that’s being diverted back in the channel. It’s a very complicated and very ambitious project.” Some water spilled into the riverbed would also be recirculated to farmers, he said.

A tentative timetable calls for water to be diverted to the river by 2009 or 2010. Fish would be introduced two or three years later, with most construction and physical restoration finished by 2016. The project, if approved, would run through 2026.

    Accord Reached on Diverting Water From Farms to Restore San Joaquin River, NYT, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/us/14river.html

In the West, a Water Fight Over Quality, Not Quantity

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM ROBBINS

MILES CITY, Mont. — It is a strange fight, Montana ranchers say. Raising cattle here in the parched American outback of eastern Montana and Wyoming has always been a battle to find enough water.

Now there is more than enough water, but the wrong kind, they say, and they are fighting to keep it out of the river.

Mark Fix is a family rancher whose cattle operation depends on water from the Tongue River. Mr. Fix diverts about 2,000 gallons per minute of clear water in the summer to transform a dry river bottom into several emerald green fields of alfalfa, an oasis on dry rangeland. Three crops of hay each year enable him to cut it, bale it and feed it to his cattle during the long winter.

“Water means a guaranteed hay crop,” Mr. Fix said.

But the search for a type of natural gas called coal bed methane has come to this part of the world in a big way. The gas is found in subterranean coal, and companies are pumping water out of the coal and stripping the gas mixed with it. Once the gas is out, the huge volumes of water become waste in a region that gets less than 12 inches of rain a year.

In some cases, the water has benefited ranchers, who use it to water their livestock. But there is far more than cows can drink, and it needs to be dumped.

The companies have been pumping the wastewater into drainages that flow into the Tongue River, as well as two other small rivers that flow north into Montana, the Powder and Little Powder Rivers. Ranchers say the water contains high levels of sodium and if it is spread on a field, it can destroy the ability to grow anything.

“It makes the soil impervious,” said Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who is a soil scientist. “It changes it from a living, breathing thing into concrete.”

Ranchers like Mr. Fix say sodium in the water could render their hayfields unusable and drive them out of business.

The companies say that sodium is not the problem ranchers have made it out to be and that the Montana environmental standards cannot be met without great difficulty. They have filed suit in federal and Montana court to overturn the regulations.

The fight pits Montana against Wyoming. Wyoming has thrown the door open to coal bed methane producers, with 20,000 wells in the basin. Wyoming says its water quality standards, while different from those in Montana, are more reasonable and still protect water quality.

“Montana doesn’t need to be concerned,” said John Wagner, administrator of the Wyoming Water Quality Division. “We have real tough limits put on these discharges.”

The energy companies agree with Wyoming.

“There has been no documented impact to these drainages,” said David Searle, manager of governmental affairs for Marathon Oil, one of the companies that has methane wells in the region and is a party to the lawsuit. Montana’s regulations “are an overreaction and they are unnecessary,” Mr. Searle said. In some cases, he said, the standards are lower than background, or natural levels.

But Jill Morrison, a community organizer for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a coalition of ranchers and environmentalists that has battled coal bed methane in Wyoming and has entered the lawsuit on Montana’s side, said ranchers should be worried.

“Wyoming wants to think it is doing a good job, but that’s laughable,” Ms. Morrison said. “You can see the changes in the vegetation and the salt deposits in the soil,” when ranchers try to use wastewater.

She also said that the huge volume of water alone could be a problem. Some riparian areas have adapted to natural ephemeral flows. But coal bed methane discharges flood the normally dry streambeds year round, and have eliminated native grasses. Too much water, she said, has killed 100-year-old cottonwood and box elder trees.

The problem has led to tension between two Democratic governors who are usually on friendlier terms. Last spring Gov. Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming asked the federal environmental protection administrator to appoint a mediator to settle the dispute. Governor Schweitzer chastised him, saying “nobody likes a tattletale to the teacher.”

But producers in Wyoming are clearly worried new wells will stymie a growth industry.

“It will have an impact on some projects, there’s no doubt,” Mr. Searle said.

Governor Freudenthal said the impact on development in his state could be serious.

The problem, Governor Schweitzer said, is aggravated by Wyoming’s refusal to release water into Montana to water rights holders that are senior to some in Wyoming, because that state interprets a 1950 water compact differently.

Governor Schweitzer vowed to defend vigorously the state’s right to set environmental standards. Coal bed methane water needs to be treated before it is released, or reinjected into the ground in Wyoming, he said, something producers say is too expensive. He is not persuaded.

“The country needs coal bed methane,” he said. “But they can’t come in and destroy an industry, the cattle industry, that’s been in the family for 100 years. These people aren’t getting rich, they’re just making a living.”

    In the West, a Water Fight Over Quality, Not Quantity, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/us/10river.html


 

NYT        August 28, 2006

Blistering Drought Ravages Farmland on Plains        NYT

29.8.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/us/29drought.html

Blistering Drought Ravages Farmland on Plains

August 29, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

MITCHELL, S.D. — With parts of South Dakota at its epicenter, a severe drought has slowly sizzled a large swath of the Plains States, leaving farmers and ranchers with conditions that they compare to those of the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.

The drought has led to rare and desperate measures. Shrunken sunflower plants, normally valuable for seeds and oil, are being used as a makeshift feed for livestock. Despite soaring fuel costs, some cattle owners are hauling herds hundreds of miles to healthier feedlots. And many ranchers are pouring water into “dugouts” — natural watering holes — because so many of them (up to 90 percent in South Dakota, by one reliable estimate) have gone dry.

Gov. Michael Rounds of South Dakota, who has requested that 51 of the state’s 66 counties be designated a federal agricultural disaster area, recently sought unusual help from his constituents: he issued a proclamation declaring a week to pray for rain.

“It’s a grim situation,” said Herman Schumacher, the owner of a livestock market in Herreid, S.D., a small town near the North Dakota line where 37,000 head of cattle were sold from May through July, compared with 7,000 in the corresponding three months last year. “There’s absolutely no grass in the pastures, and the water holes are all dried up. So a lot of people have no choice but to sell off their herds and get out of the business.”

Drought experts say parts of the states most severely affected — Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming — have been left in far worse shape because of recent history: several years of dry conditions, a winter with little snow and then, with moisture reserves in the soil long gone, a wave of record heat this summer.

By late August, rain had fallen several times in some areas, but Bob Hall, an extension crops specialist at South Dakota State University, said it amounted to “a drip in a bucket.”

“The bottom line is that even if we got relief starting today, at this minute,” Dr. Hall said, “it would take a few years economically to recover.”

As if earless, shriveled cornstalks were not enough, farmers and ranchers say they carry a sense that their counterparts elsewhere seem to be doing just fine, leaving them with what feels like an invisible disaster, unnoticed by the outside world. Some farmers in Midwestern states like Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, as well as some in the eastern sections of South Dakota and Nebraska, tell of a respectable growing season.

Even here in Mitchell, about 70 miles west of Sioux Falls, some residents did not grasp the scope of the drought until the Corn Palace, this city’s tourist-luring castlelike civic center wrapped in hundreds of thousands of ears of corn, announced that because there was not enough of the crop, it would not redecorate this year for the 2007 season.

“We don’t have any record of anything like this happening before,” said Mark Schilling, the director of the Corn Palace, a campy, 114-year-old landmark promoted on highway billboards with endless corn puns.

“But if there’s not a crop, there’s not a crop,” Mr. Schilling said quietly.

After weeks and weeks with little rain and high temperatures, one farmer, Terry Goehring, watched the mercury spike to 118 degrees in his Mound City, S.D., field one day in July. That was it. Mr. Goehring, who has farmed since 1978, sold half his 250 head of Angus cattle.

“There was no corn,” he said. “There was no hay. We had nothing. And in that moment, I knew there was no choice.”

Climatologists with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said scientists deemed the weather conditions and its effects in the areas of the worst drought a once-in-50-years experience.

In some cases, it has been worse than that. On July 15, a weather station in Perkins County, S.D., near North Dakota, recorded a temperature of 120 degrees. That matched the highest ever reported in the state since the start of such record-keeping in July 1936, said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the Nebraska center.

Given such conditions, it is hardly a surprise that crop estimates are so gloomy. Steve Noyes, deputy director at the South Dakota field office of the government’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the winter wheat crop here had shrunk by 43 percent from last year’s; alfalfa hay is expected to be down by 35 percent; and 22 percent of pasture land is deemed “very short,” with 35 percent “short,” figures significantly worse than those of a year ago.

For the most part, commodity prices have not been affected, said Greg Lardy, a beef cattle specialist at North Dakota State University. While the region affected is hard hit, Dr. Lardy said, it has not been large enough to leave a mark on prices, particularly since some other regions have experienced strong seasons.

A walk through the fields of David Gillen, whose family has farmed in White Lake, 35 miles west of Mitchell, since 1897, is a tour of a drought. While some fields have survived, others are not worth harvesting. There, corn that should have been lanky by now is short and yellow, and many stalks carry no ears: the pollination, which should have occurred at the end July, never happened at all, given the extreme heat.

“This is my favorite time to be out here looking at the fields,” Mr. Gillen said. “But there’s nothing to see.”

While the soybean fields may improve with the recent rains, it is too late for this year’s corn, a circumstance that surely would have made the creators of the Corn Palace cringe.

In 1892, the Corn Belt Real Estate Association decided it made sense to nail ears of corn to the side of the palace as a salute to the bounty that the region’s soil could produce, and as a retort to those (including Lewis and Clark) who seemed to doubt that these seemingly wild lands could be farmed.

So for years (and through three different palaces in Mitchell), annual themes (like the “Space Age” in 1969 and a “Salute to Rodeo” this year) have been captured in images made all of corn here, at a cost, in today’s prices, of about $140,000 a year. But as this summer proceeded and the sun blazed on, the palace board nervously monitored the fields whose dramatically colored corn goes to the palace, waited for rain and consulted with an agronomist.

With fields of certain colors struggling, the board decided the murals it had planned for the 2007 theme, “Everyday Heroes,” could not be created, said Mr. Schilling, the palace’s director. Wade Strand, the farmer who grows all of the palace’s colored corn, took the news “pretty hard,” Mr. Schilling said.

Looking back, Mr. Strand said he had believed that he had grown enough corn. He said he had hoped the designs could be made without orange tone and shades of black and light red. “But they felt that the colors I was missing were strategic to the theme,” Mr. Strand said.

Mr. Schilling said he believed that the current murals would remain intact through a second year, though he acknowledged that they might fade a bit. The vulnerabilities now, he said, are the risks inherent in art, or anything, made of corn: the effects of birds and wind, sun and heat.

    Blistering Drought Ravages Farmland on Plains, NYT, 29.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/us/29drought.html?hp&ex=1156910400&en=a4f95604e6dbe65a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Tunnelers Hit Something Big: A Milestone

August 10, 2006
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN

It is the biggest public works project in New York City’s history: a $6 billion water tunnel that has claimed 24 lives, endured under six mayors and survived three city fiscal crises, along with the falling and rising fortunes of the metropolis above it.

Yesterday, the city’s Water Tunnel No. 3 reached a major milestone, as workers completed the excavation of an 8.5-mile section that connects Midtown and Lower Manhattan to an earlier section under Central Park. The tunnel is a multi-decade effort spanning four stages; yesterday’s announcement signifies the end of excavation for the second of those stages.

It was a major step forward for the tunnel, which was authorized in 1954, begun in 1970 and then halted several times for lack of money. The completion of the second stage will nearly double the capacity of the city’s water supply, currently 1.2 billion gallons a day, and provide a backup to two other aging water tunnels, allowing them to be closed, inspected and repaired for the first time since they opened, in 1917 and 1936.

“Future generations of New Yorkers will have the clean and reliable supply of drinking water essential for our growing city,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, before he descended 550 feet into the city’s lower bedrock and sat at the controls of a 70-foot-long tunnel-boring machine, as it excavated the last eight inches of quartz, granite and silica.

Since 2003, the giant excavating machine’s 27 rotating steel cutters, each weighing 350 pounds, have chipped through the bedrock at a rate of 55 to 100 feet a day, more than double the 25 to 40 feet that could be excavated each day under the old drill-and-blast method.

The Third Water Tunnel originates at the Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers, just across the border between the Bronx and Westchester County. The reservoir is fed by aqueducts that carry water from the Catskill and Delaware water systems, which usually provide 90 percent of the city’s water supply.

From the reservoir, the first stage of the tunnel reached south into the center of the Bronx, then west across the Harlem River into Upper Manhattan and then down the west side of Manhattan and east into Central Park, crossing under the East River and into Astoria, Queens. That 13-mile first stage cost about $1 billion. It was begun in 1970, completed in 1993 and opened in 1998.

The second stage, which extends the first stage south into Midtown and Lower Manhattan and east and south into Queens and Brooklyn, is complicated.

The Brooklyn-Queens section — actually two separate tunnels, linking Red Hook, Brooklyn, via Maspeth, Queens, to Astoria — was completed by 1999 and will open by 2009.

The new 8.5-mile Manhattan section, begun in October 2003, resembles three spokes radiating from a central point roughly below the intersection of West 30th Street and 11th Avenue. One spoke traveled north to Central Park, the second went to Lower Manhattan, and the third spoke, 2.5 miles long, traveled east to Second Avenue and then north to East 59th Street and First Avenue. That third section was the last to be fully excavated, a step completed yesterday.

The new section must be lined with concrete, tested, fitted with instruments and sterilized before water can gush through it in 2012. The city is also installing at least 10 shafts that will link the tunnel with the water-distribution grid.

Even after 2012, two more stages of the project will remain. Stage 3, a 16-mile segment called the Kensico-City Tunnel, will join the Kensico Reservoir in Westchester County with the Van Cortlandt valve chamber in the Bronx. It is in the final planning stages. A proposed Stage 4, extending south from the Hillview Reservoir, through the Bronx and under the East River into Queens, is still under review.

Although Mr. Bloomberg usually avoids direct comparisons with his predecessors, he boasted yesterday about his commitment to the Third Water Tunnel.

“Part of the reason that work on it has stretched through six administrations is that the city’s funding for this project has sometimes dropped off during tough financial times,” he said. “But not on our watch. Even in the first years of our administration, when we faced record multibillion-dollar, back-to-back budget shortfalls, we refused to shortchange this essential project.”

He said his administration had committed nearly $4 billion to the project, or “doubled what’s been invested by the last five administrations combined.”

Around 10:40 a.m., after a news conference at the main construction site in western Midtown, Mr. Bloomberg went down a shaft in a narrow cage-like elevator that fits up to 26 people. He was joined by Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection; a coterie of aides and police officers; and officials from the contractor in charge of the Manhattan section, a joint venture of the Schiavone Construction Company, J. F. Shea Construction and Frontier-Kemper Constructors.

At the base of the elevator was an enormous tunnel — dark, cool and humid — with wet ground coated in a murky gray mixture of mud and sand. The group boarded a narrow railcar for the journey east and north through the tunnel.

After a smooth ride of 15 minutes, the officials left and walked alongside much of the 700 feet of equipment that trails the tunnel-boring machine. About 200 feet from the front of the machine, they entered an operating cab, where Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Lloyd sat. Vinny Crimeni, the main operator, showed them the guidance system that keeps the machine on course and keeps the tunnel straight and smooth.

“I pushed a bunch of buttons, but the real professional was sitting next to me,” the mayor said afterward.

Around 11:20 a.m., Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Lloyd left the cab. Using big black felt-tip markers, they signed their names on the tunnel wall, then posed for pictures with the sandhogs, as the tunnel diggers are called.

One sandhog, Jim O’Donnell, a brakeman on the small train, said the event filled him with pride. Many of the workers are of Irish or West Indian descent and many are carrying on a family tradition of working underground.

“At least half the guys who work down here, I’ve worked with their fathers,” said Mr. O’Donnell, 44, whose older brother, 47, also works on the tunnel.

    Tunnelers Hit Something Big: A Milestone, NYT, 10.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/nyregion/10tunnel.html

More than 60% of U.S. in drought

Updated 7/29/2006 9:36 PM ET
AP
USA Today

STEELE, N.D. (AP) — More than 60% of the United States now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

An area stretching from south central North Dakota to central South Dakota is the most drought-stricken region in the nation, Svoboda said.

"It's the epicenter," he said. "It's just like a wasteland in north central South Dakota."

Conditions aren't much better a little farther north. Paul Smokov and his wife, Betty, raise several hundred cattle on their 1,750-acre ranch north of Steele, a town of about 760 people.

Fields of wheat, durum and barley in the Dakotas this dry summer will never end up as pasta, bread or beer. What is left of the stifled crops has been salvaged to feed livestock struggling on pastures where hot winds blow clouds of dirt from dried-out ponds.

Some ranchers have been forced to sell their entire herds, and others are either moving their cattle to greener pastures or buying more already-costly feed. Hundreds of acres of grasslands have been blackened by fires sparked by lightning or farm equipment.

"These 100-degree days for weeks steady have been burning everything up," said Steele Mayor Walter Johnson, who added that he'd prefer 2 feet of snow over this weather.

Farm ponds and other small bodies of water have dried out from the heat, leaving the residual alkali dust to be whipped up by the wind. The blowing, dirt-and-salt mixture is a phenomenon that hasn't been seen in south central North Dakota since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, Johnson said.

North Dakota's all-time high temperature was set here in July 1936, at 121. Smokov, now 81, remembers that time and believes conditions this summer probably are worse.

"I could see this coming in May," Smokov said of the parched pastures and wilted crops. "That's the time the good Lord gives us our general rains. But we never got them this year."

Brad Rippey, a federal Agriculture Department meteorologist in Washington, said this year's drought is continuing one that started in the late 1990s. "The 1999 to 2006 drought ranks only behind the 1930s and the 1950s. It's the third-worst drought on record — period," Rippey said.

Svoboda was reluctant to say how bad the current drought might eventually be.

"We'll have to wait to see how it plays out — but it's definitely bad," he said. "And the drought seems to not be going anywhere soon."

Herman Schumacher, who owns Herreid Livestock Auction in north central South Dakota, said his company is handling more sales than ever because of the drought.

In May, June and July last year, his company sold 3,800 cattle. During the same months this year, more than 27,000 cattle have been sold, he said.

"I've been in the barn here for 25 years and I can't even compare this year to any other year," Schumacher said.

He said about 50 ranchers have run cows through his auction this year.

"Some of them just trimmed off their herds, but about a third of them were complete dispersions — they'll never be back," he said.

"This county is looking rough — these 100-degree days are just killing us," said Gwen Payne, a North Dakota State University extension agent in Kidder County, where Steele is located.

The Agriculture Department says North Dakota last year led the nation in production of 15 different commodity classes, including spring wheat, durum wheat, barley, oats, canola, pinto beans, dry edible peas, lentils, flaxseed, sunflower and honey.

North Dakota State University professor and researcher Larry Leistritz said it's too early to tell what effect this year's drought will have on commodity prices. Flour prices already have gone up and may rise more because of the effect of drought on wheat.

"There will be somewhat higher grain prices, no doubt about it," Leistritz said. "With livestock, the short-term effect may mean depressed meat prices, with a larger number of animals being sent to slaughter. But in the longer run it may prolong the period of relatively high meat prices."

Eventually, more than farmers could suffer.

"Agriculture is not only the biggest industry in the state, it's just about the only industry," Leistritz said. "Communities live or die with the fortunes of agriculture."

Susie White, who runs the Lone Steer motel and restaurant in Steele, along Interstate 94, said even out-of-state travelers notice the drought.

"Even I never paid attention to the crops around here. But I notice them now because they're not there," she said.

"We're all wondering how we're going to stay alive this winter if the farmers don't make any money this summer," she said.

    More than 60% of U.S. in drought, UT, 29.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-29-us-drought_x.htm


 

New York’s Water Supply May Need Filtering        NYT        20.7.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/nyregion/20water.html

New York’s Water Supply May Need Filtering

July 20, 2006
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

New Yorkers are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them bragging about the city’s water — so pure it doesn’t need to be filtered, so delicious it is better than bottled.

So it may surprise, perhaps even insult, proud residents to hear that federal officials are worried that the fabled water — coming from the largest unfiltered system in the country — is getting muddier and may have to be completely filtered, at a cost of billions of dollars, if it cannot be kept clean.

For much of the last year, the century-old water system that delivers 1.3 billion gallons a day to the city has been clouded by particles of clay, washed into upstate reservoirs by violent storms in quantities that make the water look like chocolate Yoo-hoo.

To keep the tap water running clear, the city has been dumping 16 tons of chemicals a day, on average, into the water supply as an emergency measure to meet federal water quality standards. The treatment does not change the taste of the water, but the city cannot rely on this stopgap approach forever.

Turbidity — the condition that makes water cloudy and interferes with chlorination to eliminate contaminants — appears to be getting worse because of changing weather patterns and increasing runoff from land development upstate.

If the city cannot find a permanent solution to the silt, it may not be able to avoid building a huge filtration plant that could cost about $8 billion.

Because its water has historically been so pure, New York has largely been exempt from federal rules created in the late 1980’s that require all water systems to be filtered. (A small part of the system, in Westchester, will be filtered in a few years.)

But as federal officials review the city’s five-year exemption, which expires at the end of this year, they have openly expressed concern about the water quality.

“The single most important item we’re looking at, and the one that could be a problem for the city, is turbidity,” Walter Mugdan, a local director of the Environmental Protection Agency, testified at a City Council hearing this spring. His office, the Division of Environmental Protection and Planning, will decide early next year whether the city’s water is clean and clear enough to avoid filtration for another five years. (Only four other major cities — Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore. — are also exempt.)

The city is confident that it will win renewal. Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the water system, said that the department was working on plans to reduce turbidity without chemicals, particularly in two big reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains.

Steven C. Schindler, director of the department’s division of drinking water quality control, said, “I don’t consider turbidity a serious problem as long as we are able to operate the system the way it was designed.”

The city’s early engineers designed a system that only on rare occasions would have to rely on a chemical, aluminum sulfate, to reduce turbidity. Alum, as it is called, is used in most public drinking water systems in the United States to keep water clear because it draws together small particles, causing them to clump up and settle before the water enters the distribution system.

But some people see the prolonged use of alum as a sign that turbidity has become more severe. James M. Tierney, an assistant state attorney general who has special responsibility over the city’s 2,000-square-mile upstate watershed, has criticized the city for waiting too long to correct the problem.

In a letter to state environmental officials in April, Mr. Tierney said the continued use of alum “would appear to indicate seriously deficient conditions in the Catskill portion of the New York City Watershed.”

Mr. Tierney also said in the letter that the city’s alum use violated state water quality standards and effectively turned one of its reservoirs, where the alum clumps accumulate, into “a chemical sludge settling pond” that smothered aquatic life and would at some point need to be dredged at considerable expense.

Ms. Lloyd said the city had used alum from time to time over the last century without any impact on water quality. Mr. Tierney has called on the city to limit alum use and to hasten its efforts to reduce murkiness in the upstate reservoirs.

The city’s complex system — with 19 reservoirs bringing mountain water to New York from as far as 125 miles away through a gravity-fed web of aqueducts — is divided into three separate segments. In the 1990’s, the city agreed to filter the water coming from the Croton segment, the oldest and smallest section, which sits in Westchester and Putnam Counties, because it would be impossible to meet clean-water standards there. A $1.2 billion filtration plant is under construction in the Bronx.

The second oldest is the Catskill segment. In the early years of the 20th century, the city — with the help of special state laws — condemned thousands of acres in the eastern Catskills to build two reservoirs that more than doubled the city’s capacity.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the city expanded again, tapping the east and west branches of the Delaware River and other tributaries to create the newest and largest of its three segments.

The turbidity problem stems largely from conditions that have been present in the Catskill system from the beginning. Engineering studies in 1903 recognized that the clay of the steeply sloped Eastern Catskills turned the sweet waters of the Schoharie and Esopus Creeks into mudholes after storms.

Engineers decided to go ahead anyway, devising a two-reservoir system with built-in turbidity controls. Water from the farthest of the 19 reservoirs, the Schoharie, flows 18 miles through a tunnel under a mountain into the Esopus Creek, which then winds its way into the west end of the gigantic Ashokan Reservoir, 12 miles long and up to a mile wide.

The Ashokan is actually two reservoirs, separated by a dam, or weir. The turbid water from the Schoharie enters the west basin and is kept there until, in theory, the sediments drop. Then a gate in the dividing weir is lowered, allowing the cleanest surface water to flow into the east basin, where it is kept for several weeks longer to settle before making the long trip to New York City.

The system worked well for decades, with alum being used only rarely. But over the century, development in the Catskills, the building of roads, clearing of land and paving over of ground, all increased soil erosion, contributing to more runoff, federal officials said.

Water quality standards also got tougher; scientists have found that the clay particles hampered purification by providing nutrients for microbial pathogens and shielding them from decontaminants. Weather patterns over the last decade have brought more frequent and heavier rain. And the city has been draining murky water from the Schoharie Reservoir in order to repair its dam.

In 1998, water from the Schoharie Reservoir had become so muddy that environmental and fishing groups sued the city, claiming the sediment violated the Clean Water Act and impaired trout fishing along Esopus Creek, which is famous for it. A federal court ruled against the city in 2003, and in June an appeals court upheld the decision and the $5 million fine.

Federal officials raised concerns about turbidity in granting the filtration avoidance permit in 2002.

Since then, the city has studied several engineering and operational options for restoring the city’s water supply to its former glory.

Among the most likely fixes is the construction of a multilevel intake at the Schoharie Reservoir. Like a huge straw with openings at different levels, the new intake, which would cost more than $100 million according to city officials, would allow operators to draw off the clearer surface water, while giving the turbid waters at lower depths more time to clear. Right now, the Schoharie is equipped with a single valve on the bottom of the reservoir, which acts like a bathtub drain, allowing the lowest-quality water to exit first.

Other options include raising the weir at the Ashokan dam by five feet. This would increase its capacity by five billion gallons, and give turbid water flowing into the west basin more time to decant.

Another option is to build a baffle around the intake in the east basin to slow down the water before it enters the aqueduct to New York. Ms. Lloyd said cost estimates for these projects had not yet been prepared.

To avoid being forced to build a filtration plant for the Catskill and Delaware systems — which supply up to 90 percent of the city’s water — New York will also have to undertake other projects.

As part of its latest filtration avoidance permit, it agreed to build a new plant in Westchester County that will use ultraviolet light to purify water.

The project, under construction in Mount Pleasant and Greenburgh, will be the largest in the world when completed in 2010.

However, turbidity in the water would reduce its effectiveness because sediment deflects ultraviolet rays.

The city will also have to continue protecting stream banks and controlling development, and buy additional land in the watershed.

Over the last decade, the city has bought 70,000 acres at a cost of $168 million, and it expects to match that over the next decade. The property tax bill for upstate land costs the city over $100 million a year.

Which raises the question of whether building a filtration plant is inevitable in the long run, and if so, wouldn’t it make more sense to simply go ahead and build it now?

City, state and federal officials don’t think so. Mr. Mugdan, the federal official, calculates that the city has spent about $1 billion over the last decade to protect the water supply, compared with $6 billion to $8 billion to build a plant, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in operating costs.

“Even if, 75 years from now, some accountant asks how much has it cost the city to avoid filtration versus how much we would have spent to build it,” Mr. Mugdan said, “we’ll still be ahead.”

    New York’s Water Supply May Need Filtering, NYT, 20.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/nyregion/20water.html?hp&ex=1153454400&en=2be183debc88eae7&ei=5094&partner=homepage


 

The debate over replacing a part of the All-American Canal with a concrete-lined trough
has strained the longstanding ties between Calexico, Calif., and Mexicali, Mexico, top.

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

  Border Fight Focuses on Water, Not Immigration        NYT        7.7.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/07/us/07border.html

Border Fight Focuses on Water, Not Immigration

July 7, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

CALEXICO, Calif. — For more than 100 years, as their names imply, Calexico and its much larger sister city, Mexicali, south of the border, have embraced each other with a bonhomie born of mutual need and satisfaction in the infernal desert.

The pedestrian gate into Mexico clangs ceaselessly as Mexicans lug back bulging bags from Wal-Mart and 99 Cent Stores in Calexico. The line into the United States slogs along, steady but slower, through an air-conditioned foyer as men and women trudge off to work and, during the school year, children wear the universal face that greets the coming day.

Now, the ties that bind Calexico and Mexicali are being tested as a 20-year dispute over the rights to water leaking into Mexico from a canal on the American side is reaching a peak. Though the raging debate over illegal immigration in the United States has not upset border relations here, some say the fight over water could affect the number of Mexicans who try to cross here illegally.

To slake the ever-growing thirst of San Diego, 100 miles to the west, the United States has a plan to replace a 23-mile segment of the earthen All-American Canal, which the federal government owns and the Colorado River feeds, with a concrete-lined parallel trough.

The $225 million project would send more water to San Diego, by cutting off billions of leaked gallons — enough for 112,000 households a year — that have helped irrigate Mexican farms since the 1940's.

But Mexican farmers and their advocates say the lined canal would effectively turn off the spigot for 25,000 people, including 400 farmers whose wells rely on the seepage that has helped turn the powdery fields east of Mexicali, an industrial city, into one of the biggest Mexican producers of onions, alfalfa, asparagus, squash and other crops.

The farmers and their families ask what will they do if they cannot till the fields and answer that they will cross the border, illegally if they have to, in droves.

"They can't build a fence high enough to stop us," said Gerónimo Hernández, a Mexicali farmer whose family has worked the fields for generations.

Juan Ignácio Guajardo, a lawyer in Mexicali who is helping a civic group there and two environmental groups in Southern California fight the canal, said, "You can't have it both ways," adding, "You can't take our water away and then say, 'We don't want immigration, either.' "

The dispute over the project was among the topics President Bush and President Vicente Fox of Mexico discussed in an April meeting in Mexico.

[A federal judge ruled against environmental groups in the United States and a Mexicali civic association in a lawsuit against the project, dismissing some claims on June 26 on technicalities and deciding on July 3 that many of the predicted effects on Mexico were "highly speculative" and that the federal environmental law at issue did not apply beyond the border. The groups said they were preparing an appeal. In addition, a separate lawsuit is pending in state court.]

On the American side, managers of the Imperial Irrigation District, which controls the canal and a vast water system that has turned swaths of the California desert in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys into some of the most fertile farmland anywhere, defend the plan.

They say the 1944 international treaty on the distribution of water from the Colorado River, which feeds the canal, does not prohibit the concrete lining. New agreements among the states and water utilities along the Colorado have imposed limits on how much water can be tapped from the river, making every drop count that much more.

"There is more need than water available," said the general manager of the irrigation district, Charles Hosken. "When you find a point to access water, I think it is our duty to go after it."

Mr. Hosken acknowledged that the project, which has been mired in legal challenges and planning since the 1980's, "will have impact" on Mexico, but said, "The fact is, the water belongs to the United States, and we have never been compensated for it."

He said he was particularly angry at opponents of the project who invoke the immigration debate, which while discussed here, has not set off the fiery passions found elsewhere.

The notion that cutting off the leakage would drive up illegal immigration, he said, was "quite a stretch" and a "scare tactic" intended to take advantage of the charged atmosphere surrounding the debate.

But opponents said the project was moving forward without enough consideration of its potential effects.

The federal lawsuit contended that a study in 1994 of the project's environmental consequences was outdated and should be revised to take into account changes of the last 12 years.

The groups argued in the suit that the original study did not fully take into account a projected increase in air pollution if the fields were returned to dust or the deterioration of Mexican wetlands if the leaking water were to dry up and remove the habitat of endangered birds and lizards.

In the state lawsuit, filed in April, another environmental group contends that the concrete lining and the shape of the new canal would produce swifter currents that would endanger people and animals. That group says it plans to seek a temporary restraining order against the project.

California has agreed to pay for 60 percent of the project, with the San Diego County Water Authority financing the rest. Malissa Hathaway McKeith, president of Citizens United for Resources and the Environment, a group in the federal lawsuit, said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger could halt the project by withholding the state money until the environmental effects were studied more closely.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Schwarzenegger, Margita Thompson, said such a move was far from likely because the governor thought that the water recovered from the lining would lessen the need to tap the Colorado.

"This will help provide long-term stability in water management," Ms. Thompson said.

The dispute has touched a nerve in Calexico, which, with a population of 33,000, mostly Spanish speakers of Mexican descent, functions as a virtual suburb of Mexicali, which has nearly one million residents.

The mayor and Council of Calexico have sided with the Mexicali farmers, taking pains to make clear that Mexicans are welcome here in part because they fear that economic distress in the region could damage their economy, which is buoyed by Mexican wallets.

"If we didn't have Mexico," said Mayor Alex Perrone, who like many other city residents was born in Mexicali and reared in Calexico, "we could not survive."

So intertwined are the towns that Calexico fire trucks race across the border for emergencies. Mexicali children fill private schools in Calexico. Special border-crossing cards known as laser visas make it easy for many Mexicans to go back and forth, though some sneak in, too, hiding in cars or scaling the steel-plate fence.

Ire against the new canal has grown in Mexicali, where bumper stickers opposing it are turning up.

"How can they take away the farmers' water after all these years?" asked Juan Rodolfo Rodríguez, a Mexicali shopkeeper who was buying a caffè latte at the Starbucks shop here. "Americans always want more, but we are used to this."

Farmers like the Hernández family fear they would not have the resources to find alternate water sources, like digging deeper wells to tap an underground aquifer.

"It would be costly to maintain," said Luis Hernández, Gerónimo Hernández's brother. "And who knows if it would give us the same amount of water?"

    Border Fight Focuses on Water, Not Immigration, NYT, 7.7.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/07/us/07border.html

Graphic shows North America's five Great Lakes, the world's largest supply of freshwater
and a major shipping route for Canada and the United States.
Water levels declined in 1998 and have remained low,
especially in Lakes Huron and Michigan,
forcing ships to take on lighter loads and sparking concern about shorelines and wetlands.

REUTERS/Graphic

 Low water in North America's Great Lakes causes worry        R       4.7.2006
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=
2006-07-04T053442Z_01_N19344774_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-GREATLAKES.xml

Low water in North America's Great Lakes causes worry

Tue Jul 4, 2006 1:36 AM ET
Reuters
By Jonathan Spicer

TORONTO (Reuters) - Several massive vessels have run aground on Michigan's Saginaw River this shipping season, caught in shallow waters a few miles from Lake Huron.

The river port is as shallow as 13 feet in a passage that is supposed to be 22 feet deep, a sign of low water levels in North America's five Great Lakes -- Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario.

Water levels declined in 1998 and have remained low, forcing ships to take on lighter loads and sparking concern about shorelines and wetlands in the Great Lakes, the world's largest supply of freshwater and a major commercial shipping route for Canada and the United States. Iron ore and grain are among the biggest cargoes shipped on the lakes.

"It's a pretty different mindset to come off 30 years of above-average water levels and to suddenly, since the late 1990s, have below-average levels," said Scott Thieme, chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Great Lakes Hydraulics and Hydrology Office in Detroit.

Lakes Huron and Michigan, where water levels have declined the most, are down about 3 feet (one meter) from 1997 and about 20 inches from their 140-year average, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

When homeowners on Lake Huron's Georgian Bay noticed wetlands were drying up, the Georgian Bay Association funded a $223,000 report that last year concluded shoreline alterations such as dredging and erosion in the St. Clair River, at the bottom of the lake, were responsible.

In partial response, U.S. and Canadian governments approved funding for a $14.6 million study of the upper Great Lakes by the International Joint Commission, which resolves border disputes and was denied funds for a similar study in 2002.

Depending on what it finds, the commission could recommend changes to the amount of water that flows out of Lake Superior, the first and largest in the chain of lakes.

NATURAL CAUSES?

Water levels in the Great Lakes have always fluctuated, but experts point to climate change, dredging, private shoreline alterations and even lingering effects of glaciers to explain the latest changes -- the decline of Lake Huron and slightly higher water levels in Lake Erie, into which Huron flows.

The most controversial of several dredging projects was in 1962, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deepened the St. Clair River channel by 2 feet to accommodate commercial shipping.

"When they dredge a river, it's like taking a straw and widening it," said hydrologist Cynthia Sellinger, who helped plan the upper Great Lakes study, which begins this summer.

U.S. and Canadian governments approved the 1960s dredging on condition that submerged sills be built to compensate for water lost from Lake Huron, and they started a series of studies.

But by the time the studies were completed in the 1970s, water levels in Lakes Huron and Michigan were at record highs, and no one wanted sills that would raise levels even more.

Experts are unsure why water levels in the upper lakes rose soon after the St. Clair River dredging. But they say that major climatic events usually coincide with changes in water levels.

The 1930s Dust Bowl drought coincided with then-record low levels in the Great Lakes. And the most recent decline was in 1997, when a strong El Nino brought warm, dry temperatures to North America, Sellinger said.

In addition, above-average temperatures since 1998 mean less ice forms on the Great Lakes and the rivers that flow into it, and more water evaporates away, Sellinger said.

And then there is something called post-glacial rebound, or the slow rise of the earth's crust, that could partly explain declining water levels in Lakes Huron and Michigan.

"The area around Georgian Bay (Lake Huron) is rising faster than the area around Lake Erie so it may be that the land has just tilted and more water is flowing out," Sellinger said.

DECLINING REVENUE

For every inch water levels go down, ships bound for destinations outside North America forfeit about $8,400 in freight revenue, said Dennis Mahoney, president of the United States Great Lakes Shipping Association.

Saginaw and other ports have done emergency dredging to accommodate ships and barges that can be hundreds of yards long.

But Lake Superior's largest American ships carried 3,000 fewer short tons of cargo last year than in 1997, when water levels were 12 inches higher, according to the Lake Carriers' Association.

"Obviously water levels are crucially important to this industry, and we have been in a period of decline," said Glen Nekvasil, vice president of corporate communications for the association.

"When you're not utilizing your full vessel capacity you can't give your customer the best freight rate."

    Low water in North America's Great Lakes causes worry, R, 4.7.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-07-04T053442Z_01_N19344774_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-GREATLAKES.xml

In Phoenix,

Even Cactuses Wilt

in Clutches of Record Drought

March 10, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

PHOENIX, March 9 — Thursday began like the 141 days before it, sunny and crisp, dust settling everywhere except on the record — set again — for the number of days without rain.

Phoenix knows all about dry weather. It is a place where children are drilled throughout elementary school to conserve water, where hotels boast of covered parking areas not to protect from rain, but to offer a bit of shade. Grown men spread lotion all over their bodies every morning. Noses bleed. Newcomers watch in horror as their hands seem to age right in front of them.

But even the desert suffers droughts, and this winter has brought a strong one, the fickle air currents pushing approaching storm clouds to the east. Until this year, the record for days without recorded rainfall was set in 2000, a measly 101 days. The recording instrument for rainfall is at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, referred to as "the bucket" by meteorologists, and drier than a Sunday morning during Prohibition.

"People are sort of losing their grip," said Gary Woodard, who, as associate director of the University of Arizona Center for Sustainability of Semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas, is an expert on the region's water. " 'Did you hear it's going to rain tomorrow?' Well, actually, there's an 80 percent chance it's not going to rain. People are getting very excited about very slim chances of rain."

The drought has wreaked havoc on wildlife, which depend on the scant seven inches of rain that Phoenix gets in an average year, most of it in the three or four winter months.

"We have cactus dying from lack of water," Mr. Woodard said. "We have well-established mesquite trees that are in a lot of trouble."

Small animals are too dried out to do what comes naturally.

"None of the animals, none of the birds are having offspring this spring. No baby quail, no baby bunnies," Mr. Woodard said.

An alarming result of the drought is the condition of the air. On Thursday, Arizona's Department of Environmental Quality posted its 25th pollution advisory of the winter, a remarkable number. Last winter — the opposite of this one, with abundant rainfall — there were no such days. There is no rain to knock the dust and particles out of the air and wash them away.

"We've just had this large, dry, stagnant air mass hanging over the area since November," said Steve Owens, director of the environmental agency. "It used to be, you'd come to Arizona if you had breathing problems because of the air quality. Now, I think you'd have physicians who would say, 'Don't come to Arizona.' "

The drought seems to promise a harsh fire season. Last year, relatively heavy rains fell all winter, prompting fast growth in trees and shrubs that now sit dry and cracked. "I don't think I could have planned a better fire season," said Tom Pagano, a forecaster with the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. "A lot of people in that business are quite worried."

The drought has not hurt the skin-care industry.

"You have to use lotion right when you're out of the shower, when your skin is still moist," said Mary Low, services manager at Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa. "People wear sandals, so the skin on the heels of your feet get exposed to the dry air. The skin on the feet gets dry and cracked. You have to use a pumice stone and put lotion on your feet."

Another high-end refuge, Spa du Soleil in suburban Scottsdale, uses "medical grade oxygen" to infuse 87 vitamins straight into a customer's face, said the spa's director, Irene Kelly. "It really does keep your skin nice and smooth and plump and supple and hydrated," Ms. Kelly said.

Tourists love the sunshine and high temperatures in the 60's and 70's. Local residents shrug, and click on the humidifier at night.

"You get used to it, and pray every day that it rains," said Justin Hoiby, 27, an event planner overseeing a Western-themed company picnic — Pennsylvania executives racing in little covered wagons — in Scottsdale. It was Wednesday, and to the north, a huge, fat, gray-black rain cloud hung over the mountains, like a blimp over a sold-out stadium.

"I think it's going to stay to the north," Mr. Hoiby said, as the executives competed in a Wild West Olympics. "I've been watching it."

And yet, closer it came, the cloud blocking the sun and kicking up a little dust, irritating some tourists like Mary Green, 67, visiting from Chicago. "Nice for them," she said, looking over her shoulder at the grayness. "Not nice for a visitor who wants sunshine. It's not going to last, that's the nice thing."

But did it ever arrive? A few raindrops hit a forehead and a windshield. A nearby gas station attendant, Robert Roe, saw it: "It came down pretty good for about two seconds."

Jeff Grenfell, 41, a sommelier and chef, was hiking at the time. "I got a few drops," he said later.

Rain!

Not quite. None hit the bucket at the airport, according to the National Weather Service. The dry streak did not end, and a record-setting 142nd day continued, with no precipitation in the 24-hour forecast.

The record number of days in Phoenix with nothing more than trace amounts of rain (defined as less than 1/100th of an inch, but more than a drop on the forehead) is 160.

Whether that record will be broken in 19 days is unclear. Forecasters are calling for a relatively high chance — 50 percent — of rain this weekend.

    In Phoenix, Even Cactuses Wilt in Clutches of Record Drought, NYT, 10.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/national/10phoenix.html?hp&ex=1141966800&en=f8b8e99cc80b0132&ei=5094&partner=homepage

For Thirsty Farmers, Old Friends at Interior Dept.

March 3, 2006
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

FRESNO, Calif. — For more than 10 years, Jason Peltier was a paid advocate for the irrigation-dependent farmers here in the Central Valley of California, several hundred landowners who each year consume more water than the city of Los Angeles does.

Now Mr. Peltier works for the Bush administration, and he helps oversee the awarding of new water contracts for the people he used to represent as head of the Central Valley Project Water Users Association. The federal contracts, tying up water for a quarter-century or more from the world's largest irrigation project, have the potential to bring the farmers a huge windfall if they turn around and sell the water on the open market.

At the same time Mr. Peltier — as the deputy assistant secretary for water and science at the Interior Department — is involved with reviewing a request by the water association to stop paying up to $11.5 million a year into an environmental restoration fund, as required by a 1992 law.

Mr. Peltier's role influencing decisions that could have a direct financial impact on his former employer is part of a pattern at the Interior Department over the last five years, critics say, with a revolving door between managers on the government side, and the people who buy or lease federal water, land or forests on the other side.

At the Interior Department, at least six high political positions have been occupied by people associated with businesses or trade associations tied to public lands or resources. One of those appointees, J. Steven Griles, a deputy secretary, continued to receive $284,000 a year from his old lobbying firm while working for the government. Mr. Griles stepped down last year, saying he had not done anything to violate ethics rules at the department.

Mr. Peltier, in an interview, said that when he first came to the Bush administration in 2001, he recused himself from some decisions involving the landowners he used to represent, but he said he was granted an exemption because of his expertise in California water issues.

"I was given dispensation early on because of my knowledge of these issues," he said.

He added, "I have not had the strict bar of separation on certain issues, but I've been very mindful of the appearance of a conflict and operated accordingly."

Interior Department officials said Mr. Peltier, who is the chief policy adviser on California water issues, had cleared his activities with the ethics office.

Mark Limbaugh, the assistant secretary for water and science and Mr. Peltier's immediate supervisor, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Peltier's role was only advisory on water issues that involve his former employer.

"He provides background, insight and advice," Mr. Limbaugh said. "He is not in a position to make the ultimate decisions."

But others say the arrangement is inappropriate, and they point to contract terms that could give farmers in the Central Valley, including the ones Mr. Peltier once represented, far more federally subsidized water under their new contracts than they could ever use. And because the water will be provided at a fraction of the price it would cost on the open market, the farmers could act as brokers to resell unneeded water at a huge markup, making them some of the most powerful players in Western water politics for well into the middle part of this century.

Some of the farmers will pay about $40 per acre foot of water (roughly 326,000 gallons) under the new contracts for water that could fetch up to $200 an acre foot on the open market in dry years, according to groups that monitor the Central Valley Project.

"They're basically locking up the last available water in California for 50 years, which they could then sell at big profit made on the back of taxpayers," said Tom Stokely, a water policy and planning official with Trinity County, in Northern California, which has been at odds with water users in the Central Valley for decades.

The biggest pool of water at stake under Mr. Peltier's watch involves the Westlands Water District, a group of San Joaquin Valley landowners and the largest and most prominent member of the trade association that Mr. Peltier used to represent.

The new contract for Westlands, stuffed with arcane and obscure language, would give the landowners water from the government-financed Central Valley Project for 25 years, with an option for another 25 years.

Asked about his role in the Westlands contract negotiations, Mr. Peltier said, "I've tried to steer away from the nuts and bolts" of the contract because of his prior job.

He also said, "There are a lot of layers of management beneath me — plenty of horsepower in there" to represent the government side.

But critics in Congress like Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California who has long advocated loosening agriculture's grip on federal water supplies, said Mr. Peltier should have nothing to do with the contract. Mr. Miller also said far too much water was being offered to the Westlands farmers, violating the spirit of the 1992 environmental restoration law that tried to give competing interests in California equal access to water.

"This is a clear conflict of interest and has been since his appointment," Mr. Miller said.

Bush administration officials, including Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, have said that top political positions in the Interior Department have always been filled by people who are more responsive to the party in power. They note that President Bill Clinton filled his Interior Department with former leaders of environmental groups that have long lobbied the government.

But the difference, critics say, is that some of the current appointees came from groups that stand to benefit financially from the decisions made at the Interior Department about how much businesses will have to pay for public water, grazing land, timber and minerals.

The appointees, both former and current, include William G. Myers III, who was the department's solicitor from 2001 through 2003 after working as a lawyer for ranching interests which rely on public grazing land; Bennett W. Raley, who was assistant secretary for water and science from 2001 to 2004 after working at a law firm whose clients had clashed with the federal government over the use of public water; Rebecca W. Watson, assistant secretary for land and minerals management, who is a lawyer who represented mining, logging, oil and gas interests; and Kit Kimball, director of external and intragovernmental affairs, who was a lobbyist on behalf of mining, oil and gas companies doing business on public lands.

"It is one thing to have someone with a certain ideological bent fill a political position, but it's another to have somebody who is so identified with a special interest that they cannot be expected to make fair decisions," said Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that monitors how money and politics intersect.

Interior Department officials say the Westlands and other contracts do not show favor to one group or the other and do not noticeably depart from the approach taken by the Clinton administration in dividing the water supplies.

John Leshy, the department's solicitor general under Mr. Clinton, disputed that, saying the Clinton administration had tried harder to balance water deliveries between environmental needs and agriculture, as required by the 1992 law.

In the case of the Westlands contract, the Bush administration officials said they had recently started to negotiate provisions so that excess water will not be hoarded to be sold by the farmers.

The terms under consideration would let Westlands receive up to 1.15 million acre-feet of water a year, about the same as it has been entitled to in the past — equivalent to the amount needed to supply roughly 2.5 million urban families for a year. But because at least 90,000 acres and maybe as much as 200,000 acres of the 580,000 acres of farmland used by Westlands may no longer be suited to growing because of its heavy mineral content, critics question why the district should continue to get such a large amount of water.

A Westlands official, Thaddeus Bettner, the deputy general manager, said the district had no intention of selling any of the water at a markup. "Everyone talks about this reselling, but it's not even discussed by us," Mr. Bettner said. "We have a real need for the water."

He said Mr. Peltier had not helped Westlands beyond his steering the contract to an orderly conclusion. He said he expected the new contract to be signed in the spring. The old one expires next year.

Separately, the water users' association wrote a letter in December to the Interior Department requesting that the financial burdens on them from the 1992 environmental restoration law be revisited. It is first time the federal government has considered a review of the payments, and environmentalists say there is no evidence that significant improvements have been made to justify reducing payments.

Mr. Peltier said, "I would not anticipate that we're going to end up reducing the amount, but we're willing to talk about it."

At the time the law passed, Mr. Peltier, then serving as a manager of the trade association, indicated that the irrigators might resist complying.

"We'll do anything and everything to keep from being harmed," he told The San Francisco Chronicle then. "If that means obstructing implementation, so be it."

Mr. Peltier says his views have changed now that he is on the other side, representing government.

"I was younger and brasher then," he said.

    For Thirsty Farmers, Old Friends at Interior Dept., NYT, 3.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/national/03water.html