Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we're just a few river rats hanging out, thinking about rivers and such.
Chapter 2: What is the Colorado River Compact and why is it important?
That's right. If you live in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, or California, this one's for you.
Yeah. Or if you're interested in water supply, this one's for you as well. If you like really difficult interstate treaties, I think you'll like this one as well.
There's one person out there that's like, oh, my God, guys, finally.
So, yes, we're talking about the Colorado River. We're talking about the compact of water sharing among those states, the basin states they call them, which is a pretty cool name, of sharing the water that comes out of the Colorado River, which is about almost a 1,500-mile-long river that winds through the southwestern U.S. all the way into Mexico. And it helps feed all of those states that
Most of which should not have the populations that they have and wouldn't otherwise were it not for their ability to tap into the water from the Colorado.
That's right. And by the way, I remembered halfway through your opening salvo that this was a listener suggestion. So I looked it up real quick. And this is from George Baumchen. Oh, nice. Thanks a lot, George. This is a good idea. Yeah, I agree. So I bet George lives in one of those states. But like you said, the Colorado River, very important.
It provides, I think Julia helped us with this, and it supports roughly 10% of Americans living And one point four trillion dollars economically. So it is a very, very important river system that starts there in the Rocky Mountains and then flows generally southwest. And there are all sorts of tributaries and things that feed into it.
As we'll see, that has become a bone of contention here and there, but a lot of it is their bones of contention because this river compact that they forged in 1922 to say, hey, how are we going to divide this water up? Everybody wants to use this stuff. It's... it's up now this year, right? In 2026. Yeah. And they're trying to figure out, you know, what to do about the next 20 years.
And there's, especially between California and Arizona, but a lot of the states have bones of contention with one another on how this water is used.
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Chapter 3: How did the Colorado River Compact come into existence?
By having access to that water, they've been able to boom like cities like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson. The list just goes on. They are able to have these huge populations in golf courses, in industry, in agriculture, in the Imperial Valley in California because of the Colorado River. So that's attracted more and more people, which means you need more and more water.
So those bones of contention have grown over the years. And now that it's 100 plus years old, yeah, there's an issue. There's a problem with this that we're going to see because this river is like, I can't take any more water.
Yeah, well, yeah, and we're going to get into that stuff too because there's not as much water as they thought there would be. And it seems like it's not coming back to the boom days for reasons that we're going to talk about. But one thing we should talk about is why water is so important out there. And obviously one of the reasons is because there's not much of it.
Highs out in the desert can reach over 125 degrees with great regularity. Annual rainfall. This is near the Hoover Dam. And, you know, we did a great episode, I think, on the Hoover Dam between Nevada and Arizona. Annual rainfall there is about four inches. So the Colorado River is the thing. It's the most key thing that we have at our disposal to keep things alive.
Yeah. It's mother, life, blood, life giver. That's what they call it there.
Yeah.
So let's talk about the Hoover Dam. Not just the Hoover Dam. That one gets all of the credit. There's also the Imperial Dam, too. Yeah. That diverts water to the All-American Canal, which is a very smart, I think, name because it's one of those things where if you dispute the water going there, they could be like, well, you don't like the All-American Canal? Do you hate America?
Yeah, sure.
So there's the Boulder Dam, now the Hoover Dam, and the Imperial Dam. And both of those help bank water for what we know as the lower basin states. And the upper basin states are the ones responsible for essentially filling those water banks.
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Chapter 4: What are the historical conflicts between upper and lower basin states?
So you're going to get some extra water. And nobody really liked it. The lower basin didn't even like this idea to begin with.
No, Julia helped us with this, and she turned up a quote from one of the men who was involved in this compact in 1922. He was the one from the representative from New Mexico. He said, I will register my vote as a yes, but I do it only because to my mind it is the least objectionable of the attempts that have been made to frame the idea expressed in it and not because I approve it.
Yeah, he held his nose and voted yes.
Yeah, and he apparently was not the only one who did that. So they met 27 times. They finally signed the Colorado River Compact. And another great Hoover quote is that this was a problem of more extreme complexity than will ever be appreciated by the outside world. And just after researching this for a little bit, I kind of understand where he's coming from. The amount of stuff...
that you would have to take into consideration to do this even remotely fairly with your eye on development is just I can't imagine keeping all that stuff together and coming up with it, let alone coming up with one that you could get seven different states to finally sign on.
There's no way. I mean, they all signed on, but like you said, no one really thought it was super fair.
Right.
So the compact, like I said, divided things up into the upper and the lower basin. And that divide actually has a place, like a physical place, which is Lee Ferry, L-E-E-F-E-R-R-Y.
Not Lee Perry.
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Chapter 5: How do drought conditions affect the Colorado River's water supply?
And what they measured was 16.4 million acre feet. splitting that up into almost 50% each, 7.5 million acre feet per basin in perpetuity, with the rest left over for Mexico. And we're going to talk about that. But just so you know, a water, a one acre foot of water is enough water to submerge an acre of land to the depth of one foot.
I came up with that one.
I knew I wasn't going to have to make the joke.
I knew that you knew I was going to make that joke.
You can't read that without thinking how Josh waters his lawn.
That's how I would farm, too. I would just submerge the acres of land in the depth of a foot and be like, wow, I'm done with irrigating for the year.
That's right. Here's your rice and cranberries. So an acre of land at the depth of one foot or 325,851 gallons of water. So they measured 16.4 million acre feet of that and split it in half with the rest going to Mexico.
Yeah. Mexico is like, hey, what about us? And they're like, you get 1.5 million acre feet just from us as friends. Mexico, we love you guys. And they're like, oh, we love you back. So I think they split Mexico's allotment between the upper and the lower basin equally.
Yeah.
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