Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [6]
Once we agreed to give Mexico water of tolerable quality, we had to decide how to do it. Congress’s solution was to authorize a desalination plant ten times larger than any in existence that will clean up the Colorado River just as it enters Mexico. What it will cost nobody knows; the official estimate in 1985 was $300 million, not counting the 40,000 kilowatts of electricity required to run it. Having done that, Congress wrote what amounts to a blank check for a welter of engineered solutions farther upriver, whose exact nature is still under debate. Those could cost another $600 million, probably more. One could easily achieve the same results by buying out the few thousand acres of alkaline and poorly drained land that contribute most to the problem, but there, once again, one runs up against the holiness of the blooming desert. Western Congressmen, in the 1970s, were perfectly willing to watch New York City collapse when it was threatened with bankruptcy and financial ruin. After all, New York was a profligate and sinful place and probably deserved such a fate. But they were not willing to see one acre of irrigated land succumb to the forces of nature, regardless of cost. So they authorized probably $1 billion worth of engineered solutions to the Colorado salinity problem in order that a few hundred upstream farmers could go on irrigating and poisoning the river. The Yuma Plant will remove the Colorado’s salt—actually just enough of it to fulfill our treaty obligations to Mexico—at a cost of around $300 per acre-foot of water. The upriver irrigators buy the same amount from the Bureau for three dollars and fifty cents.
Nowhere is the salinity problem more serious than in the San Joaquin Valley of California, the most productive farming region in the entire world. There you have a shallow and impermeable clay layer, the residual bottom of an ancient sea, underlying a million or so acres of fabulously profitable land. During the irrigation season, temperatures in the valley fluctuate between 90 and 110 degrees; the good water evaporates as if the sky were a sponge, the junk water goes down, and the problem gets worse and worse. Very little of the water seeps through the Corcoran Clay, so it rises back up into the root zones—in places, the clay is only a few feet down—waterlogs the land, and kills the crops. A few thousand acres have already gone out of production—you can see the salt on the ground like a dusting of snow. In the next few decades, as irrigation continues, that figure is expected to increase almost exponentially. To build a drainage system for the valley—a giant network of underground pipes and surface canals that would intercept the junk water and carry it off—could cost as much as a small country’s GNP. In 1985, the Secretary of the Interior put forth a figure of $5 billion for the Westlands region, and Westlands is only half the problem. Where would the drainwater go? The Westlands’ drainwater, temporarily stored in a huge sump which was christened a wildlife preserve, has been killing thousands of migrating waterfowl; the water contains not just salts but selenium, pesticides, and God knows what else. There is one logical terminus: San Francisco Bay. As far as northern Californians are concerned, the farmers stole all this water from them; now they want to ship it back full of crud.
As is the case with most western states, California’s very existence is premised on epic liberties taken with water—mostly water that fell as rain on the north and was diverted to the south, thus precipitating the state’s longest-running