Drought & Water Management

• Title: What the Current Drought Means for the Future of Water Management in Colorado
• Date: 1/1/2003
• Description: 2002 Drought Impact Report
• Basin: Statewide
• Drought Mitigation - Doc Type: Reports

economically. Only losses because of shortages of irrigation water could be avoided.
Those cost avoidances would require cheap additional water in the right places. It seems
unlikely that any realistic water storage or flow enhancement will prevent more than ten
percent of the losses, or $50 million.
The tourism losses that can be identified could be limited if streamflow were increased,
but most of them are similarly inevitable. According to the rafting industry, the need for
more water for rafting on the Arkansas was most acute at the end of the season.
Programs that increase runoff in the early summer would create high peak flows that
make rivers too dangerous for many customers. More water in new reservoirs would not
prevent the boating losses on existing reservoirs. If new storage or flow enhancement is
trapped in existing reservoirs, then some additional boating is possible. Perhaps one -third
of the non - rafting boating losses could be prevented, about $50 million.
The fire fighting losses could be stemmed either by wetting or cutting the forests only.
No amount of storage or of water in the streams would have prevented this year's fires.
The municipal costs are the only ones that would yield substantially to additional water
supplies in a way that could conceivably pay for the cost of producing some supplies. If
municipal suppliers had more water in storage, then they might have set fewer restrictions
on use of that water and there would have been less loss in this sector. Still, it is
unrealistic to suppose that even a majority of the cost and restrictions could be avoided.
Mitigating landscaper losses would have required fewer restrictions. Most of the districts
that imposed restrictions in 2002 did have enough water for the year; the restrictions were
imposed because they feared that the drought would continue into 2003 and beyond.
Having more water in storage would have reduced the restrictions, but not eliminated
them. Slightly less than half of the municipal and landscaper costs would be about $150
million.
Adding up the avoidable vs. non - avoidable losses, we find that only $250 million of the
economic impact loss could be prevented by water projects that provide reliable yield
during droughts as severe as the 2002 drought in Colorado. The remaining $0.9 to $1.1
billion is simply there and not avoidable. Even these figures assume ideal conditions.
The new water project would have to produce new water yield in the water short areas,
sufficient to eliminate most restrictions. Any new storage reservoirs would have to be
full from prior years' precipitation. More likely, the benefits of any water projects would
be substantially lower than this estimate for a record setting drought year.
Given that the drought is an infrequent phenomenon, there is a limit to what we should
spend to avoid these losses. Expenditures have to be made well in advance of the losses
and, therefore, incur an interest cost for making the expenditure. If such a drought can be
expected only rarely, then the cost incurred to prevent the avoidable losses should not
exceed the $250 million estimated losses and probably should not exceed half that
amount. The issue could be phrased as "how much would you spend today to prevent a
$250 million loss twenty or forty years from now and once every half century
thereafter ?" The actual drought evidence suggests that this kind of drought is
considerably less frequent than even these numbers suggest.
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