Tipping Point: Wake up, Arizona; heed the warings of a looming water crisis

Tipping point
Wake up, Arizona; heed the warnings of a looming water crisis
JonTaltonRepubliccolumnistFeb. 12, 2006 12:00 AM

When catastrophe finally arrives, suddenly one morning, or maybe overnight while most Arizonans sleep air-conditioned dreams, what will we tell the nation and the world? How did we get to the point where we need a water rescue that dwarfs in cost the savings and loan bailout and many natural disasters?We may remember reassurances as concrete as the Central Arizona Project canal, aquifers that seemed to rest comfortingly beneath every part of the parched land and copious regulations about assured water supplies for new developments. We had expert white papers and agreements with other states. Didn't our leaders tell us Arizona could hold 8 million, 16 million, 30 million people? And the wishful thinking: New technologies to re-use water, make fresh supplies from the ocean and inexpensively expand the CAP canal would somehow drop from the sky just when we needed them. The tribes would sell water to the cities if worse came to worst. Pinal County wasn't replenishing enough groundwater, but that would work out, right? We could handle 350,000 houses in Buckeye - they told us. We could settle things with other states claiming Colorado River water, couldn't we? And fanciful theories: Water could be assured by market forces, where it was commoditized and bought and sold. Surely this would work out better than the deregulation of electricity in California. Maybe some would remember the reluctance of leaders to talk about water issues. To do so might scare away growth. But at the time it seemed like confidence. They knew more than we did, after all.With few exceptions the media, sleepy in a retirement state, didn't see it coming. Most people get their news from television, and night after night they heard about car wrecks, police chases, meth busts and a bright health story. Water is complicated, and the media don't like complicated.The rest of the nation didn't pay much attention, either. Arizona is far away from the government and media capitals, both of which were increasingly distracted with world crises and the latest disappearance of an attractive blond teenager. The increasing destabilization of a world competing for oil and, yes, water resources, needed Washington's attention.Where did we reach a point of no return?We might look back to 2006, when developers proposed building 160,000 houses between Kingman and the state line, as new suburbs to Sin City. The trouble is, Mohave County isn't known for its water supplies. Some people living there must haul their water.Much of the state was not under the groundwater rules that affect Greater Phoenix and a few other areas, requiring a 100-year assured supply. Developers exploited a loophole in rural areas that allowed them to build without water. They did it throughout rural Arizona.Arizona faced a choice. The historic sanctity of property rights and local control seemed to trump all else, including the public welfare. A middle ground was possible: extending the assured water supply rules to the entire state, but giving a great deal of control to localities. Towns and counties in rural Arizona could generate their own water management goals. But the Legislature would not budge.Some said even this wouldn't have been enough. In reality, Arizona couldn't keep growing its population by 40 percent each decade, spreading out in single-family houses and hoping the infrastructure would follow. The only way Arizona could sustainably handle 8 million or more people was in compact, urban living arrangements in areas with renewable water supplies, such as the Salt River Project service area.And even then, we didn't count in the historic drought, which wrecked the assumptions about the snow runoff for the Colorado and Salt rivers, just as drought had destroyed the earlier civilization that lived in Phoenix. Did the Hohokam share our arrogance born of technological mastery? They had every right to, before the timeless, merciless logic of the desert reasserted itself.When catastrophe finally arrives, like the broken gasoline pipeline or the transformer fire only infinitely worse, what will we tell the nation and the world and ourselves?We slept most of all because too much money was being made in the great real-estate boom. It was a force too powerful, determining everything else, consuming every resource, whether the courage of elected leaders or the last phantom aquifer. And like all the booms in the West, like all the speculative manias since time began, it ended badly.