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By Root 1542 0

an augmentation project would be built were already dim in the mid-1960s, before double-digit inflation, before double-digit interest rates, before environmentalism, before federal deficits four times larger than the federal budget was then. Meanwhile, northern Californians have grown so jealous of their “underused” rivers that in a 1982 referendum they emphatically refused to release more water even to the desperate supplicants in the southern half of their own state. The Klamath River alone has nearly as much water in it as the Colorado, and flows to the ocean almost entirely unused, and one could build a reservoir on it two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, but the odds of the Klamath River being rerouted to southern California so the Colorado Basin states can have more water are about the same as the odds of being bitten by a rattlesnake while crossing the street in Washington, D.C. If that is unthinkable, then the odds that Oregon’s rivers will be turned southward are even less so. As for the Columbia River diversion, it still has at least one champion, a Los Angeles supervisor named Kenneth Hahn who introduces a resolution calling for it every year, but his resolution cannot even make it past the board of supervisors of one of the most water-starved cities in the world, and that, with luck, is about as far as it will get.

The Colorado Basin, then, is a few years away from permanent drought, and it will have to make do with whatever nature decrees the flow shall be. If the shortages were to be shared equally among the basin states, then things might not be so bad for Arizona. But this will obviously not be the case; there is that fateful clause stipulating that California shall always receive its full 4.4-million-acre-foot entitlement before Phoenix and Tucson receive a single drop. What began as an Olympian division of one river’s waters emerged, after fifty years of brokering, tinkering, and fine-tuning according to the dictates of political reality, as an ultimate testament to the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.

Despite one of the most spellbinding and expensive waterworks of all time, Arizonans from now until eternity will be forced to do what their Hohokam ancestors did: pray for rain. During wet cycles, when Lake Mead and Lake Powell are sending water down the spillways as they were in 1983, the Granite Reef Aqueduct may be delivering something close to peak yield. During drought cycles, the aqueduct may run half empty, if that, and the odds are extremely high that it will run progressively more empty as the years go by. It would be foolish, at this stage, to surmise that all or even most of the upper-basin projects are going to be built, but a few of them are likely to be, and each one will cut into the CAP’s supply. The Colorado River, to which Arizona decided to marry its future hopes, will prove no more trustworthy than a capricious mistress, delivering a million acre-feet one year, 400,000 the next.

And this, in turn, raises a bizarre possibility, as unthinkable to modern Arizona as it was to the planners of the CAP: the people of Arizona may not even want the modest amount of precious water this $3 billion project is able to deliver.

In early 1980, Phoenix experienced a series of damaging winter floods. The Salt River goes through the center of town and is usually an utterly dry bed of pebbles and rocks; therefore, city streets are laid right across the river, as if it had long since gone extinct. In 1980, however, it rolled cars like boulders—cars whose owners were so used to driving through the riverbed that, despite repeated warnings on the radio, they didn’t bother to detour and cross on a bridge as the waters began to rise. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have done them much good. Only two of Phoenix’s bridges were designed to withstand a flood flow greater than twenty-five thousand cubic feet per second. In February of 1980, the Salt River peaked at 180,000 cfs.

Phoenix owes its existence to this ephemeral desert river, but even so it doesn’t seem to hold the Salt in