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It seems it would have to return to the Rio Grande Valley to reduce the drought effect. Presumably evaporation returns somewhere else.
The only way to solve the drought is for more precipitation to fall; that will depend little on how the water demand changes, though water demand will vary with an end or intensifying of the drought.
Certainly a significant amount of water that is "used" in NM actually finds it's way back to an aquifer. Opposing that is a huge amount of evaporation from applications onto the earth and transpiration from vast fields of crops and other plant life.
Just past the boundary line of my private property here in the Mesilla Valley is a strip of federally controled land, a deep, empty ditch, the Mesilla Drain. It stretches for miles, and everywhere that an irrigation ditch bringing water from the Rio "Chico" crosses the Drain there is a gate or valve that will channel ditch water into that deep, long, dry trench. Its total function is/was to return water to the aquifer. Construction of this thing was due to the water table in the Mesilla Valley being raised so much when irrigation was brought to the valley, courtesy of EBID. Then, the problem was too much water being flooded onto farmland, and this 20+ foot deep trench was there to drain off water from acequias and fields, and, hopefully, allow it to seep into the aquifer. In 9 years I've never seen a drop of water in this thing, and, barring an enormous monsoon season someday, I probably never will. There are scrub trees, brush and grasses in this low depression because there is a huge Pecan grove on the west side of it. My side is cacti and other low water native plants which don't really participate much in aquifer nourishment.
Whenever I walk the paths alongside the Mesilla Drain, most every day, I think about all that river water that used to be channeled onto this rich farmland and contemplate how nature really doesn't give a s**t what we humans want or need at any particular time. We can't rule it, we can only adapt to IT"S rules, if we can only figure out what those are.
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Originally Posted by Zoidberg
The entire notion of "use" is really misleading.
Water either gets returned to the system as sewage, seepage, deep injection, crop mass, natural biomass, industrial products, or evaporation. In nearly every case, water is conserved (except certain biological and industrial processes where it becomes plant sugars or chemicals, most of which end up reversing to water anyway). Until you rank individual uses of water, you can hardly set farmers against suburbanites against power plants against fracking.
Those African families use a lot of rain to take care of their food needs that is not included in their total. We are not so lucky in most of the U.S. to have rains that give us food in the same manner. We also waste less food thanks to refrigeration.
On my walk by the river today I wondered what that sound was. Oh, the sound of running water. Not sure how we can be in the worst drought and they release water into the river.
We need a lot more than a little water conservation. The link is from today's newspaper.
A lot of water conservation would help though, and be easy. We've established that NM citizens use 4 to 6 times the water they need. We've established that NM farmers are planting crops worth less than the water used to grow them. The drought may continue to exist by definition, there may be more fires, but at a higher price there needn't be a lack of water for users.
We've established that NM farmers are planting crops worth less than the water used to grow them.
No, You have established that. I have not seen verifiable numbers. Some some/many of those "NM farmers" have legal rights to that water. Have you ever talked to some of those farmers? Have you ever talked to of those farmers who have lived off the land their entire life. And their families have lived off that land for years before that? No. It is not as simple as you seem to keep trying to make it.
It is not as simple as you seem to keep trying to make it.
Point is, there is not a lack of water. Rather people are using more than they need because it's cheap. Water rights are irrelevant to that. It's not simple politically, but logically it is. As drought worsens or population grows, water becomes more valuable despite its price. That is how crops can be worth less than the water used to grow them.
It's a safe bet that NM farmers will be legally stripped of some part of their water rights. A fast growing population (if not drought) ensures that. The NM population isn't going to plateau just because NM farmers have lived off the land their entire lives. That's not to say I don't wish better for them. I'd rather see a declining population.
Good to know. I checked my water bill. In the last two months the two of us here used 25 gal/day each. We both like long showers, so it's hard to imagine using even 1/3 of what the average Albuquerque citizen uses.
It is a bit mystifying to some of us how anybody could use up 150 or more gal of water a day. The number may be misleading to some extent since it is probably just the gross Water Authority usage divided by the total population. And we don't know exactly how the Authority measures its gross usage. Presumably, it includes all industrial and business use. There are a lot of restaurants washing a lot of dishes and other business cleaning activities, to go along with landscaping sprinklers. Of course, there are probably some wealthy residences dependent on lawn/garden watering, clothes washing, frequent showering, toilet flushes, dish washing, auto washing (out of sight), swimming pools and such, probably over 150 gal, necessary to maintain a luxury lifestyle and expensive property values. Many of us may have ambitions to join that luxury group. How many millionaires would voluntarily conserve to less than 150 gal/day per person in their household and business?
On top of that, the Water Authority has little political motivation to charge heavy water users the true cost of the excess water. However, if the overall usage falls dramatically enough to reduce Authority income, then rates will rise to restore the income. An argument could be made that it is our civic responsibility to use as much water as possible to keep rates low and money flowing into the Authority so water infrastructure can be fully managed, maintained and improved. I think a better argument could be made for quadrupling the cost of water over and above simple survival usage.
"An Albuquerque supply well that long pumped water up from underground will reverse direction next week in an experiment to pump some of the metro area’s water supply underground for later use."
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NM aquifer used for storage?
