Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [168]
Arizona’s solution was the same most other western states relied on; it began sucking up its groundwater, the legacy of many millennia, as if tomorrow would never come. By the 1960’s, despite the Bureau’s big Salt River Project—which captured virtually the entire flow of the Gila drainage—four out of every five acre-feet of water used in the state came out of the ground. The annual overdraft—the difference between pumping and replenishment by nature—went past 2.2 million acre-feet a year, which was more than the historic yearly runoff of all the rivers in the state. In dry years, it approached four million acre-feet. In the early days, artesian wells flowed around Phoenix. By the 1960s, some farmers could drill to two thousand feet and bring up nothing but hot brine. Parts of Maricopa County, which included metropolitan Phoenix, literally began to subside as the water below was pumped out and the aquifers collapsed. Drivers heading toward Tucson on Interstate 10 learned to watch for fissures opening in the highway as a vast block of land sank several inches and the one next to it stayed put. Arizona had reversed the pattern of some western states—it had fully developed its surface water first, and then began to overdraft its groundwater. Except for its Colorado River entitlement—whatever it was—it literally had nothing left.
Arizona’s politicians reserved their most grandiloquent and apocalyptic imagery for speeches about the state’s water dilemma. “Without more water,” Congressman John Rhodes liked to say, “we are all going to perish.” Morris Udall, Rhodes’s ideological opposite on most matters, sounded no less like John the Baptist. Arizona, he said, was “returning to desert, to dust.” As far as Senator Carl Hayden was concerned, “the survival of our dear state is at stake.”
In 1952, when Los Angeles built a second battery of pumps at the head of its aqueduct and California’s diversion climbed toward 5.3 million acre-feet—900,000 more than its entitlement—Arizona, in desperation, went to the Supreme Court a third time to try to get the issues resolved. The case, Arizona v. California, was to become one of the longest-running lawsuits in the annals of the Court, and the Justices appointed a “Special Master,” the New York lawyer Simon Rifkind, to review the case. (Rifkind found the lawsuit and the constant commuting to San Francisco, where the trial was held, so taxing that he suffered a heart attack halfway through; he was still in his early fifties.) The performance of California’s chief attorney, Northcutt Ely, is still studied by lawyers interested in the high art of dilatory obfuscation; one expert witness complained that Ely spent three days cross-examining him about a matter that could have been settled in a minute and a half. California, of course, had a vested interest in delay, since each year of irresolution meant 300 billion more gallons of water for the state.
In 1963, the Supreme Court finally ruled. To California’s astonishment, it upheld Arizona on virtually all counts. The Salt-Verde-Gila watershed was exclusively Arizona’s except for a small portion that belonged to New Mexico. Its use of that water would not be counted against its 2.8-million-acre-foot main-stem Colorado entitlement, which remained intact. That Los Angeles counted on hundreds of thousands of annual acre-feet it might never see—that a California-born Interior Secretary, Ray Lyman Wilbur, had contracted to sell it 5,362,000 acre-feet of water—mattered not in the least. The real zinger, though, came at the end of the decision, and had nothing to do with the immediate issues at hand. If, during a natural calamity or a drought, the river could not begin to satisfy all the claims on it, then, according to the Court, it was up to the Interior Secretary to decide who got how much. From that moment on, the genealogy of each Secretary became a matter of high importance to all the