Chapter 3: Incalculable
transcript
NARRATION:
This is “The Wild West of Water.” I’m Alejandra Wilcox.
Chapter Three: Incalculable
HUMMER:
You don’t get a lot of rancher’s respects unless you show them that you know what you’re doing. And that’s just not Monday through Friday from 9 to 5.
NARRATION:
On the last crisp day of September 2019, I follow water commissioner Scott Hummer through his territory on the Yampa River Valley just outside Steamboat Springs: Water District 58.
Hummer — who’s dressed in all denim and heavy work boots — bounds down a leafy embankment towards the water below: the Bear River. The Bear is a tributary of the Yampa River, the major river that cuts through the city of Steamboat Springs, and the main water source for Routt County. It is considered one of the last free-flowing rivers in the state, with only a few small dams or reservoirs.
The Bear feeds irrigation ditches throughout the surrounding area — the part of Hummer’s territory that he says takes up approximately 80 percent of his time.
WILCOX on tape:
How many ditches on the Bear River?
HUMMER:
20. Only 20.
WILCOX on tape:
Wow.
NARRATION:
Hummer crosses the narrow wooden board that serves as his bridge quickly, grabbing the thin wire guideline for balance only when he’s halfway across.
He doesn’t so much as glance back at me. If I want to see what it’s really like, I have to keep up.
We meet a trail that takes us through dense state forest, where we have to step carefully. Fallen branches cover the worn path almost completely.
HUMMER:
Yeah, that’s all from our June snow. That was pretty weird to see a foot of snow up here. It was still winter on the 23rd of June.
NARRATION:
It takes almost ten minutes to get to the actual headgate and flume on the river — a structure that controls and measures the flow of the water.
Hummer motions me closer to the edge of the river, crouching down to get a better look.
HUMMER:
So, the staff gauge is set up in tenths of inches. So that’s one point oh right there — that's one foot of depth within that box. Okay. So I'm reading that flume…
NARRATION:
The flume is a massive metal structure not unlike a boxy funnel, with tick marks and numbers on the inside wall.
HUMMER:
Each one of those tick marks represents a number. So the top tick mark — come here, get a little closer — we read the water on the bottom or the top of the tick marks. So for example, right now I'm going to read that as running at about, and you can see it jump a little bit so we're not being perfectly accurate —
NARRATION:
Because of the river’s speed, the water keeps splashing up over the tick marks.
HUMMER:
It's not quite one-point-oh, so I'm going to call it a point-nine-eight, and I'm going to reach in my pocket and pull out my chart.
NARRATION:
Hummer grabs a small notebook out of his shirt pocket, consulting it closely.
HUMMER:
We're going to look at a 0.98 gauge height, and this is a five-foot flume. So this is running at 19.4 CFS. And visually, and from what I saw from three days ago, everything's about the same as I saw it running at two to three days ago. So everything's pretty much copacetic here.
Are you finding out what you want to know?
WILCOX on tape:
Oh, absolutely. This is great.
NARRATION:
You might think that by 2019, there’d be a quicker, more efficient method of officially measuring water than this. But Hummer has been doing things this way for more than 30 years: going out into the field, looking at the water levels himself, and checking the chart in his notebook.
And if a water user doesn’t have a flume — with those little tick marks for a gauge — the methods can get even more primitive.
LIGHT:
I mean our water commissioners still go out and look at ditches without measuring devices, and they make an estimate. And that estimate might be tossing a dandelion head in the ditch and timing it for a certain distance, and making an estimate that way….
NARRATION:
That’s Erin Light, the Water Division 6 Engineer, and Hummer’s boss. And yes, she does mean that a water commissioner would pick up a dandelion head — a weed — and toss it into the water to measure the water’s flow.
LIGHT:
Or they might not even get out of the car. They might just drive over the culvert and say, “Oh, it looks like two CFS today,” and drive on.
HUMMER:
Looks the same as it did yesterday.
LIGHT:
Yep, looks the same.
NARRATION:
CFS means cubic feet per second, which is essentially how we measure the flow of water in streams and rivers. For example, one CFS is equal to a little over 7 gallons of water flowing per second.
LIGHT:
Do you want your water right based on that? I mean, do you want the value of your water based on …
HUMMER:
On hearsay?
LIGHT:
And we take it as a record! That's fine. That’s perfectly fine with me if our commissioner drives over the culvert, looks at it, and says it looks like two CFS. That's my record for the day, and they're off to the next ditch.
NARRATION:
This is why things get tricky for officials like Hummer, who must insist upon knowing the value of water, and exactly how much has been diverted. And obviously, the methods water commissioners have at their disposal when it comes to calculating that value are not necessarily accurate.
Like most water commissioners, Hummer will be lucky to get to every single one twice in a given year. If there’s no way to measure it other than his best guess, or a dandelion head, the official record almost certainly won’t be accurate.
But what does it mean to have rights to water in Colorado? To get a better sense of that, I went to an expert.
CASTLE:
My name is Anne Castle, and I'm a senior fellow with the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and Environment at the University of Colorado.
NARRATION:
When I asked Castle if she could break down water rights in Colorado for me, she laughed. Castle told me that anyone who uses Colorado water already knows this inside and out, the way most elementary school kids in America can recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But she humored me anyway.
CASTLE:
Well, water rights in Colorado have always been administered pursuant to a prior appropriation system that we sometimes call first in time, first in right. And that's something that's enshrined in our constitution.
And it resulted from the fact that even back in the early days of European settlement in Colorado, water could be very tight, and there wasn't enough water to go around. So they needed a system that would allocate water in times or in places of scarcity. And the way they did that was by the priority of appropriation. So, the people who got there first and appropriated the water by diverting it and putting it to beneficial use, they established their priority.
And the more senior the priority, the earlier the date of that first diversion and use that establishes the better right.
So in times of shortage, in times of scarcity where there's not enough water to go around, the state administration officials — the division engineers or the water commissioners — will start shutting down headgates in reverse order of priority.
So the juniors have to stop diverting entirely if necessary to allow the more senior water right priorities to take their full amount. So it's not a share-and-share-alike system. It's all done in order of priority.
NARRATION:
That’s what happened to the Yampa River in September of 2018, when it went on call for the first time ever.
The call happened for many reasons — a warmer winter, lower water flow in general — and a trending history of snowpack well below average over nearly two decades. While the winter of 2018 was especially dry, it was not an anomaly. Climate change is making it more difficult to predict when droughts will hit and how intense they’ll be.
In fact, there are scientists who believe Colorado isn’t becoming more dry — it’s becoming more arid. That’s important because drought is a temporary state. Aridity, however, is permanent.
So in 2018, instead of the usual plentiful water folks in Yampa were accustomed to, the river was running low. That’s why the state had to intervene to make sure senior water rights were met.
WILCOX on tape:
I mean, what are the ramifications if they say, there is no administration on the Yampa? What is an example of something that we could be looking at?
HUMMER:
Well, you know, if there was no one, if there was no call and no administration, it allows folks to divert over and above their decreed water right, for example. And some folks have gotten so used to doing that that they think they can't grow a crop without it now. There's, there's some of that kind of attitude: “Grandpa always got that extra water. I want that extra water. So that's just the way we want to do it.”
.…When you've lived in a place for generations...they've just become accustomed to doing things their own way — like Erin said, because there was nobody to call them on it, and no reason to call them on it. But times have changed and that's the biggest thing that they don't understand: that times have changed.
NARRATION:
People like Hummer and Light know intimately that the value of water in Yampa — and really, all of Colorado — is incalculable. It’s incalculable in that you can’t put a price on water in such a dry place, but also in that so many users don’t calculate the water they use.
Not only that, but the infrastructure in Yampa, which has developed significantly more slowly than the rest of the state, is still stuck in the 1940s. Hummer took me up to view a measuring station on the Bear River that hasn’t changed in over 70 years. It was built during the Works Progress Administration — a World War II-era program. The funding for stations like that come from the water users.
And while many water users’ families have been in the Yampa River Valley for hundreds of years, Hummer says that there’s an entirely new group of people using the Yampa’s water…in entirely different ways.
HUMMER:
They're second-home owners who have an old ditch that's tied to a 10-acre parcel that grandpa did irrigate. But now, you know, that pasture is like a lawn. So they come up and they sit on the porch and they look at it, they want to keep it green, or they've created a little pond for an aesthetic purpose.
Believe me, the aesthetic value of water is incredible. There is a decree on Boulder Creek in Summit County for an acoustical water right. Literally, literally, literally: the guy took the old ditch, diverted it underneath his deck so he could hear it.
And a judge signed it! So the dichotomy of value…”I want to sit on my porch —” Can you imagine a rancher in South Routt County sitting on his porch and listening to the water?
LIGHT:
[laughing] Yeah, right.
HUMMER:
He wants to figure out where that water needs to be. He doesn’t want to hear it there. He wants to hear it somewhere else!
And that’s also one of the biggest elephants in the room: the growth in our state's population by individuals who come from places that aren't like Colorado, who don't have an elementary knowledge that we live in a desert.
NARRATION:
Colorado’s population is increasing rapidly, with a report from the World Population Review noting 80,000 new residents in the past year alone. That same report estimates Colorado’s population might increase from just over 5 and a half million residents to 8 million by the year 2050.
HUMMER:
Even though there's that white, snow-capped mountain, it's an illusion. Snowpack is an illusion that we live in a wet place, period. It's not real. It's false. So, not only do we have the challenge of educating our generational water users, but we have a burden to try to get newcomers to understand why we do things the way we do. Our law.
The Colorado doctrine is a doctrine of scarcity. We haven't gained any more water since, you know, the water commissioner position was created in 1870 — 140 years ago! The volumes of water are still pretty much the same.
NARRATION:
The people of Colorado live in a desert that spans throughout the West — a place where water is not plentiful. So what happens when that water becomes even less plentiful than it ever has been, as climate change takes a toll and population continues to rise?
HUMMER:
You can’t have a second home on the West slope and expect to go up there, and see the river full of water every time you do, or you go to your favorite little lake and see water in it. That expectation is a false one. It’s no longer realistic or germane — because use has a consequence.
[wind rushing]
NARRATION:
Next time: the consequences — not just for the Yampa River or Colorado, but for the West itself.
[faucet running; faucet turns off]
You’ve been listening to “The Wild West of Water.”
The production of “The Wild West of Water” was supported in part by Connecting the Drops.
This episode was reported and produced by me, Alejandra Wilcox. Editorial and production support from Emilie Johnson, Jared Browsh, Patrick Clark and Maeve Conran.
The music featured in this episode is “You Don’t Miss Your Water” by William Bell. Liz Greeen created stunning artwork for each episode of “The Wild West of Water.” To view her art, map out the Yampa River, listen to the full podcast and learn more about this project, please visit thewildwestofwater.com.