WSP04958

• File Number: 8200.300.40
• Description: Colorado River Compact
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Date: 8/1/1997
• Author: Daniel Tyler
• Title: Delpheus Emory Carpenter and the Colorado River Compact of 1922
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Publication

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worry about the consumptive loss of a significant amount of water out of the
Colorado River basin.
But Arizona and California needed more assurance. At the Phoenix
hearings, interested participants from these states expressed a general concern
that transmountain diversions in the Upper Basin might be larger, resulting in
a considerable loss of power revenue to the Lower Basin. In their view, this
was "the biggest question" before the Commission. 59 Carpenter responded
with characteristic patience in a letter to Arizona Commissioner W. S.
Norviel:
No one is going to deny that California has a right to [divert the
Colorado River into the Imperial Valley and into the Salton Sea] even
though she furnishes no part of the water, so long as she does not
unreasonably call upon the territorial waters of Arizona or the other
states in order to furnish her this water which she thus devours. If
[Colorado] could take from the drainage of the Colorado River a greater
or considerable part of its flow and by tunneling apply this water upon
territory from which no water would ever return to the parent stream, we
would be in all respects similar to the Imperial Valley use in so far as
such diversions being wholly consumptive. But the peculiar part of the
whole situation is that we cannot take a considerable part of the water of
the stream away from this drainage. For us to wholly consume 5% of
the water arising in Colorado ought not to seem objectionable, yet 5%
of the water arising in Colorado [about 600,000 acre-feet] would be
ample to guarantee all possible tunneling for a half century, and, in my
own judgment, in perpetuity.60
Carpenter expressed appreciation for Arizona's concern, but the amount
of water Colorado could take out of the river was, in fact, "very insignificant