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Farmers fear dry future Arizona officials say that water could be kept in Mead by restarting the mothballed desalter. That proposal is weighed down by river politics and the objections of environmental groups, which say operating the plant would destroy a wildlife refuge in Mexico 90 miles to the south. Many of those same groups argue that the states should let even more water run past the border to help restore the river's delta. Drought factor Almost any decision about the river now or in the near future will be colored by the drought, which scientists now say rivals any dry period in the past 500 years. Much of Arizona is in its ninth year of drought. Reservoirs struggle year to year and some, like San Carlos, 15 miles east of Globe, have emptied more than once in recent years. The drought has devastated the forests in Arizona and neighboring states, allowing a scourge of bark beetles to spread and destroy millions of trees. Some research even suggests the West's climate is shifting toward drier conditions for the long term. It's possible that the unusual periods of time during the past century were the wet years and not the dry ones. "I'm not saying it's a permanent shift," said Charlie Ester, manager of water resource operations for Salt River Project in Phoenix, "but it's possible for maybe the next 15 or 20 years we'll see more dry years than wet. We're getting a sobering sense of reality about the drought." Ester is a meteorologist by training, which is an essential skill for a water manager in the West. He works out of SRP headquarters north of the Salt River and is in demand on the speaking circuit these days. His PowerPoint presentations paint a succinct and almost unnerving picture of an event not seen since Arizona was settled. Ester's time is more focused on interior Arizona and the watersheds that feed the Salt and Verde rivers, key water sources for Phoenix. But SRP's fortunes are now tied almost as closely to the Colorado. Since 1996, SRP has purchased or borrowed more than 600,000 acre -feet of Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project. That water helped protect SRP's reservoirs, which fell to less than one -third full in 2002. If the drought persisted and the CAP lost any of its allocation on the river, SRP would be among the first users cut, which would put new pressure on the in -state reservoirs. That's why SRP teamed with the University of Arizona's tree ring lab to study drought not just on the Salt and Verde rivers but regionwide. What researchers are finding, Ester said, is that it's not uncommon for a drought to stretch across the entire West, just as this one has. "Every 50 years or so, you go through a complete cycle," he said. "When you're on the dry side, it's very common to have clusters of years when Colorado and central Arizona are in severe drought at the same time. It is not what we were hoping to hear, but it is not outside what a lot of us thought might be the result." As part of their work on shortage criteria, the seven states and the Bureau of Reclamation are running new models of the river based on the assumption that the drought will continue. They're fearful of predictions that Lake Powell could lose its ability to generate electricity within two years or that it could drop to "dead pool" two years later, essentially turning the water off below Glen Canyon Dam. Bennett Raley, the assistant Interior secretary, noted one study describing the drought as more severe than the one that created the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, calling it "pretty arresting." The image made for alarming headlines and nervous chatter among water managers, but Raley tried to turn it around. Page 4 of 6 http:// Www. azccntral .comispecialslspecia1061 articles /0722colorado- fature.html 7/27/2004