Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 26, 2002 12:00:00

By Judd Slivka and Shaun McKinnon, The Arizona Republic

It's dry as old shoe leather outside. Biblically dry. And dusty, too, the kind of gritty dust Steinbeck described in The Grapes of Wrath, ready to lift off and blacken the sky.

Parker and Yuma haven't gotten a drop of rain since the new year. Flagstaff is 7 inches of rain below normal for the year and has instituted mandatory water restrictions. Phoenix is more than 90 percent off its annual average rainfall. Prescott, whose tinder-dry conditions were dramatized two weeks ago when 1,000 acres and four homes close to town burned, has had less than a third of its annual average rainfall. The reservoirs at Lakes Mead and Powell, designed to hold up to four years' water supply, are down to one year's supply.

"We have the genesis of the worst fire season and the worst drought in history. The grass is waiting to explode in fire. I'm not sure what it will take to break the cycle," said Ken Evans, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau and a rancher outside Payson. "I've never experienced one as bad as the one we're in right now."

The entire state was named a disaster area nine days ago by the U.S. Agriculture secretary because of dry weather. It's Arizona's worst drought since the 1950s, and although it doesn't rival the 1890s, when it was so dry and windy that a good 6 inches of the state's topsoil blew away, this state is parched.

Yet Arizona has no comprehensive plan in place to deal with the drought, a fact recognized by the governor's own Water Management Commission last December.

"To date, water resource planning has not been a coordinated effort," commission members wrote in their final report. "The current planning process does not formally recognize that the water resources of communities throughout the state are interrelated."

Water proposal

The governor's commission proposed creating a statewide water plan, one that included a formal drought element, but the Legislature shelved the report this spring.

"Currently there is no comprehensive and coordinated statewide program to develop and provide information on water conservation, assist water users in becoming more efficient or in planning for the acquisition of future supplies," the commission concluded. It recommended forming a statewide conservation commission, another proposal sidelined by the Legislature.

What Arizona is left with are bits and pieces of plans. The Division of Emergency Management has a piece. The Department of Agriculture has a piece. The loose confederation of municipal water users have a little piece. But no one can pull it all together. The governor? All she can do, legally, is declare a state of emergency.

Arizona isn't the only place in a drought. About a quarter of the country is in the scorching grip of one. It begins at Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and extends all the way to Florida. In the mid-Atlantic states, the snows that usually fall and melt into local reservoirs didn't appear this winter.

The Intermountain West is dry as old bones, too, courtesy of bad weather patterns and worse luck.

In Montana, now in its fifth year of drought, up to 400,000 acres of winter wheat, which relies on snow and rain, rather than irrigation, that were seeded last autumn were written off. National winter wheat levels are at their lowest point since 1978. In Kansas, agricultural extension agents are saying a million acres of agricultural land may have to be abandoned this year because of the drought.

But it is the West in general and Arizona, specifically, where the conditions are the worst. There's not a county in the state that is rated in less than severe drought by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Arizona is so tinder dry that three times as many acres of land already have burned this year than burned all of last year.

"We have faced droughts before," said Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz. "This is not the first nor is it the most severe. This drought is an opportunity to remind people who have recently moved here how vitally important water is in Arizona."

Some states prepare

The Western Governors Association found a need for better drought response in nearly every state, though some are better prepared than others:

• Colorado updated its comprehensive drought plan in 2001. The plan calls for constant monitoring, even during normal precipitation years, and ramps up responses as a drought worsens. It includes task forces that focus on water supply, wildfire protection, agriculture, tourism, wildlife, energy and health; and outlines trigger points at which those task forces begin their work.

• Utah's drought plan also outlines specific actions that are to occur as drought conditions deepen, including some steps that continue even when rainfall is normal. Like Arizona's plan, Utah's relies on various agency heads to lead drought relief, designating one, the director of the Natural Resources Department, the state drought coordinator.

• Montana's drought plan was blended into its statewide water resources plan, a step taken after state agencies failed to respond adequately to droughts in the 1980s. The plan outlines year-round monitoring requirements and specific responses if the early stages of a drought are detected. State officials can call a drought alert even before severe conditions set in, introducing mitigation efforts at a steady pace.

• New Mexico uses a system of alerts from "advisory," which lets people know that conditions are ripe for a drought, up through "alert," "warning" and "drought emergency." At each level, agencies take steps related to agriculture; drinking water; wildfire and wildlife; and tourism.

Arizona's Division of Emergency Management coordinates the state's drought response among the various agencies, but tends to respond mostly to specific events, such as wildfires. The Agriculture Department works with farmers and ranchers mostly to help secure federal emergency funding. The state Department of Water Resources has little or no authority over local water providers, even in times of drought.

Powell's prescience

The problems with the West's water aren't new. John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who explored the Grand Canyon, argued to establish states along water supply lines rather than political ones, and it ended up costing him his career in the budding U.S. Geological Survey. But Powell was prescient about many things, such as predicting states would in time fight over water rights.

Powell understood the cyclical nature of the Colorado River, the Interior West's primary drainage, better than the people who wrote the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which allotted water to the various states and Mexico using the flow levels from extraordinarily wet years.

It was just one symptom of a problem people in the West have had when it comes to water, said Philip Fradkin, author of A River No More: The Colorado River and the West.

"Everything that we do with the river is based on averages," he said. "And when we move away from those averages, people tend to go a little crazy. "This is a river of extremes, and somehow we need to learn to live with that."

In the meantime, conditions aren't really looking up for Arizona. Farmers and ranchers continue to haul water to their livestock, wondering how many carcasses they'll find. Five of the seven national forests in the state have closed vast swaths of land. The Prescott National Forest closed entirely on Friday. There is no rain in the forecast. The monsoon season is at least a month away.

http://www.arizonarepublic.com/news/articles/0526DROUGHTPLAN.html